Babes Spill The Beans...LisaMy first mission to Herland was to buy text books for a class I was taking with Angela Davis @ UCSC. Walking across the threshold for the first time was like coming home. Everything was new and fantastic, yet entirely familiar. I remember peering inside the jewelry case and small fairy gasps escaped my mouth- oooh!
oooh! oooh! Shortly after I discovered the café, the killer vegetarian menu, the awesome staff, the goddess.
About three or four months later in December 1996 I noticed a sign taped to cooler of the café that said something like- “Affirmative Action is Alive and Well at Herland. Looking for woman of color for café position. No experience necessary.” Being mixed heritage (My mother is from the Philippines and my biological dad is white) combined with growing up in my queer, urban, multiculti, hometown safe haven of San Francisco created a strange state of race understanding. Until I moved to Santa Cruz, where I noticed people made my color a difference, where I took Angela Davis’s Culture and Ideology class and went onto have some painful and very revealing racist experiences with a new political awareness, race for me was an elusive and very abstract concept. It had been a recent personal revelation that I was a woman of color. So when I read that sign, immediately I believed “Oh, they must mean me!” then I had second thoughts, “Nah, I don’t need the job.” But I did, so I dropped off my resume. Then I had an interview and went through the training period and was hired a month later. Thank Goddess.
