| Living in El Salvador became too dangerous after his uncle joined the rebels and hid grenades in Yaoh�s bedroom. The family joined the immense Salvadoran migration to the United States when he was five, and relocated when he was 13 to a Costa Mesa barrio engulfed in a war between gangs and cops. It would have been tough enough for any poor kid, but Yaoh carried an unbearably light burden: he was historyless. His family refused to talk about the middle-class life they left in El Salvador. His Costa Mesa peers may have felt they had no future; Yaoh had no past, either. "I thought like any other kid that life wasn�t for me," he says. "I was a total juvenile, rebelling against everything people told me was right." But in 1995, Yaoh met Chicano activist Olin Tezcatlipoca at a powwow in East Los Angeles. He says the subsequent conversation changed his life. "He found out I was from El Salvador, so he started asking me questions about the country," Yaoh remembers. "He assumed I knew them because that was my birthplace. But I didn�t know them. I realized I didn�t know anything about myself and felt ashamed. I went home that day and asked my mother why I was never taught these things. She told me that the first time she protested against the war, she was nearly killed. After that, she vowed to never say a thing. She told me, �That�s the past. It wasn�t good. You�re in the USA. Move on.�" But Yaoh wanted answers about the never-ending Latin America tragedy. He found them with the Mexica Movement, a Chicano group that teaches pride in all things indigenous. Tezcatlipoca was the founder, and he discovered in Yaoh a passion for knowledge. They continued to nurture his inquisitiveness when Yaoh served six months in jail at 17 on a trumped-up loitering charge. "While everyone [in prison] was playing cards or watching television, I�d be reading whole books [members of the Mexica Movement] gave me, books about my heritage" he says. "I had never even finished a book cover-to-cover before. Now I was reading about two a week." One of those books was The Daily Life of the Aztecs, a 1955 book by French archaeologist Jacques Soustelle that�s admired by even the most militant Chicanos for its analysis of one of history�s most demonized cultures. In reading the book, the imprisoned youth came across the term yaoh�"warrior" in the Nahuatl tongue of the Aztecs. "The job of a warrior was to take captives," he says. "I liked that idea�only in my case, I wanted to free people from the chains of ignorance that once held me captive. But if I were to take the name [Mexica Movement members relinquish their European name in favor of an Aztec name], I�d have to carry the responsibilities that came with it." He took the name. * * * |
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