Making Miracles With Stories

By Kathleen Pequeño, North Star Fund Comms Director

I’m a social justice communicator. To me, it means that my work is to bring attention to what matters most. I use stories and words to make sure people respect each other, especially when it’s hard to do that. It’s how I resource movements I love.

I became a social justice communicator because of the beliefs I grew up with as a working class girl from Queens.

My mom and grandparents who raised me together had lives filled with adversity. Not the, “I was late because I missed my bus” kind of adversity. More the, “oh, my gosh, we didn’t die” kinds of adversity. My family growing up was Chicana (which is one way of being Mexican-American) and Catholic. Our ancestors are both the Spaniards and Indigenous people of Mexico. My mother and grandparents grew up in Texas in a place where the Klan was active and public. They came to New York in the 1950s to find respite from that. Instead they encountered snow and new forms of discrimination.

In that context, they adopted certain beliefs to survive. The belief that there wasn’t enough [insert as appropriate] in the world. Money, time, jobs, good places to live. And it was because “they” were taking things from us.

The “they” changed depending on the day of the week. Other communities of color. Other immigrants or descendants of immigrants. Our Jewish neighbors. My grandfather read stories aloud from the New York Post that seemed to prove their point. Even at a young age, it seemed illogical to me sometimes. But they swatted down my questions about it. Literally.

One of the stories we discussed with surprising frequency was how horrible queer people were. And we didn’t say queer as a “reclaimed” word as it is often used now. When I was a girl in the 1970s, “queer” was meant to say that those people weren’t really people. They were monsters, destroying themselves and the world because they lacked decency.

Depending on when you asked my mother, it was either a shock or not a shock that at the age of 16, I realized that I was more attracted to girls than boys. I was running all the stories I had heard through my mind. Was I a monster? A child molester? Was I doomed to become an alcoholic? (The way queers were shown in films and TV back then.)

I told my best friend but few other people. I went to the library to see if there were books that could explain what was wrong with me. Instead, I found stories that were the complete opposite of the stories I heard at home.

I was fascinated that in fact, there were stories where queerness was just another way to be a human being. These stories seemed like they could be true. And they were possibly more true than the stories I grew up with.

Then a traumatic but wonderful thing happened. My mother found out that I was gay (what I called it back then). She told me I couldn’t be gay and live under her roof. But, because she was so ashamed I was gay, she didn’t want anyone to know that I was being banished.

A helpful adult ally (a word I also didn’t know back then) suggested a fantastic solution—I could go to college! He helped me enroll in a SUNY upstate. My mom could save face, and I could leave.

This horrible experience brought one important change. I got to start to experience the world outside the shadow of my family’s trauma. I was able to question these ideas about why we didn’t have enough. About whether some people were less human than others. I started to question all the stories we told ourselves about our neighbors and about New York. I started spending a lot of time in social justice spaces.

I realized that the reactionary conservative stories I grew up with held nuggets of truth held together by a larger series of lies. Lies about other people that made them the source of our troubles. Not our potential allies in fixing these problems. Lies that excused greed, capitalism and racism. I became focused on the power that words and stories had to either bring people together or drive them apart.

Even though I am no longer Catholic, my Catholic upbringing also contained another seed for my work as a social justice communicator. My favorite story from church is the Feeding of the Multitudes. I had heard the story so many times. As that story is told, a miracle happens one day. Thousands of people who have gathered to listen to Jesus are restless and hungry after hours of being together. Then Jesus says a prayer and waves his hands and suddenly there are enough “loaves and fishes” to feed a crowd of thousands.

But one priest explained it differently once. He said the miracle wasn’t that Jesus created bread and fish from nothing. The miracle was that upon hearing the words of his prayer, people realized that they wanted to share what they had. There were no bodegas back then. Families had brought food with them for a long day of traveling on foot. There had always been enough in the crowd to feed thousands of restless people. They just had to decide to share. He had performed the miracle with his words of prayer, not his hands.

To me, that is our calling as social justice communicators. To question the stories we tell ourselves and that we are told. To find the nuggets of truth within them while discarding the lies. To use our words to remind people how deeply connected we are to each other. To remind us that we can share what we have and all be better off for it.

And every time we tell a story that does that, it’s a bit of a miracle.

Author image uses a photo by Gerard Gaskin