Review: Welcome to Oxnard: Race, Place, and Chicana Adolescence in Michele Serros's Writings

We FINALLY Get To Discuss Chicana Author and Poet, Michele Serros.

Today, “Representation Matters” is an expression my daughter hears from her professors as much as from her peers, but it's not something I remember ever hearing when I was a student. It's hard to understand why something matters if you've never had it. In “Welcome To Oxnard,” Dr. Cristina Herrera examines the many facets of author and poet Michele Serros’s work and its legacy. The reader is guided throughout by someone who profoundly understands Serros’s work and its context.

Cristina Herrera’s book is available now.

I first heard about Michele Serros when I was in college in the 1990s. A friend had spotted the cover of her first book, “Chicana Falsa” and bought it for me simply because it had Oxnard in the subtitle. I am a native San Diegan, but both of my parents were from Oxnard, so we spent many weekends and every holiday of my childhood and adolescence there. To my friends in San Diego, Oxnard was a beautiful, distant land with a weird-sounding name that I talked about enough to make them want to see it for themselves. 

It’s hard to describe what I felt when I read Serros’s work for the first time. Here was someone who looked like me and used many familiar turns of phrase as she articulated deep feelings and ideas against a backdrop I knew very well. To this day, the hairs on my arms stand up when I read about her near-trip to Marie Callender’s while staying with her terminally ill mom in St. John’s Hospital. I’d been to that same Marie Callender’s after spending hours in that hospital myself. Serros’s story was a gut-punch that transported me back in time, helping me understand the powerlessness of watching someone you love slip away, when there’s nothing you can do but go to Marie Callender’s and eat some pasta primavera. When I read Serros’s account for the first time, I thought, “How could she know? How could she know how much we need to talk about these feelings?” I asked myself a similar question when reading Dr. Herrera’s book, “How could she know? How could she know how much we need to talk about Michele Serros?”

Dr. Herrera does an excellent job of sharing the impact of seeing her own experience reflected in the work of another writer in a way that helps us relate to Serros, but also helps us value her work on its own. After all, Serros’s book “How To Be A Chicana Role Model” was nothing if not a comment on how we all must be free to create even when there are no examples to prove we have the right. 

While examples aren’t absolutely necessary, they definitely help. Over the years, as I became a professional writer myself, Serros’s work was never far from my mind during vulnerable moments when I was the only “medium brown girl” in the room, or on the masthead. It was almost 30 years before I began to meet and work with other Chicana writers who’d been similarly influenced by Serros and finally got to have meaningful conversations about this groundbreaking body of work. Those conversations made me a better writer, but they also made me part of a community. That’s what representation does. I’m so grateful that today’s young writers will not have to wait as long or look as hard as I did for that. 

“Welcome To Oxnard” not only gives Serros’s work the attention and importance it has always deserved, it also validates and makes space for all of us the same way Michele Serros did, inviting us into a community that is perhaps Serros’s most enduring legacy.

Margo Porras is the co-host of the Book Versus Movie podcast and author of Growing Up in La Colonia. She still owns her signed, first-edition copy of Chicana Falsa.