It took Mar°a Elena Fern†ndez 36 years to find her true identity and reconcile the need to please her conservative Mexican parents, embrace her sexuality and maintain a feminist outlook.
Now the L.A. native is taking her cause to a national level, bringing her honest, humorous one-woman show to the South Broadway Cultural Center this weekend and following it with a campus forum to discuss women's roles in our society.
Fern†ndez's "Confessions of a Cha Cha Feminist" chronicles the performer's life, growing up the daughter of Mexican immigrants who were not eager to push social boundaries in 1980s.
"I grew up with real cierra las piernas parents, who forced you to close your legs and be a nice Catholic school girl," she said. "We never talked about sex, and I basically learned everything from rumors and friends."
Fern†ndez, who is now working on a compilation of essays while teaching and performing her show, struggled with the double standard her parents imposed on her and her brother.
"Basically, he could do as he pleased, while I was stuck with incredibly strict rules because they feared I would get pregnant or make bad decisions that would reflect poorly on our family," she said.
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As a result, Fern†ndez looked up to "cha cha" girls, who were characterized by flashy hair, lips and hips.
"You just knew they were different when you looked at the way they dressed to go to clubs and their hair that was really teased," Fern†ndez said of the women who first inspired her. "I just really admired them as I was stuck at home and they went out to clubs. They seemed so strong and independent."
Eager to free herself of her parents' rules, Fern†ndez took advantage of the good grades she was expected to earn and headed east to Yale University, where the combination of sexual freedom and feminist theory was jarring.
"I just wasn't sure where I fit because I could finally become the cha cha girl, but then I was learning about all these ideas of women and how they had been subjected," she said.
Still following her parents' plans through graduation, Fern†ndez sought a white-collar job that paid well upon graduation rather than pursuing a secret love of literature and writing. In college she was exposed to authors who inspired her, but she never dreamt of launching a writing career.
After working for the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund and labor unions, Fern†ndez headed back to school for a doctorate in Chicano Studies from the University of California at Los Angeles but failed two major examinations and nearly flunked out of school.
"That was a real turning point for me because it forced me to break away from always being the head of the class and the smartest one the way my parents wanted me to be and look at what I wanted to do," she said. "It was a blessing because I realized that I wanted to pour my heart into my work, and there was no room for it in a stifling academic atmosphere."
At 28, Fern†ndez began writing and never looked back. Heavily influenced by authors bell hooks, Cherrie Moraga and Sandra Cisneros, Fern†ndez encourages people to embrace urges to write or express themselves through other art forms.
"We all need to pay the bills, but there should also be room to express ourselves and discover who we are," she said.
Despite being heavily criticized in her show, Fern†ndez's parents remain pleased with her work, which spawned from a series of essays she realized could work as a play.
"They are the typical parents who are proud of the success I have achieved," she said. "We've talked about the family criticism, and we both understand that they were just passing on what they were taught and thought was right."
Just as she was liberated and broke a negative cycle, Fern†ndez would like to pass the same values on to other women struggling to find their place in the world.
"I hope people - both men and women - walk away thinking about who they are and how they treat each other," she said.
"Confessions of a Cha Cha Feminist" runs Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 4 p.m. at the South Broadway Cultural Center, 1025 Broadway Blvd. SE. Tickets cost $10 for regular admission and $8 for students and senior citizens. They are available at the UNM Ticket Office, South Broadway Cultural Center and tickets.com outlets.
The event is being sponsored by UNM's Southwest Hispanic Research Institute and El Centro de la Raza. The campus talk will be in El Centro's conference room in Mesa Vista Hall Monday from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.
