Interview with Michael Jaime Becerra

Interview with Michael Jaime Becerra

Michael Jaime Becerra
El Monte, California
Punk Culture
Writing

Interview of Michael Jaime Becerra in which he discusses what his life was like growing up in El Monte, California.

South El Monte Arts Posse

East of East: Mapping Community Narratives in El Monte and South El Monte

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English

Romeo Guzmán

Michael Jaime Becerra

1:22:17

1:30- family history in Mexico and immigration
4:00- grandmother stresses English education and assimilation
5:30- father's various occupations and eventual position in union trade
10:00- financial situation in relation to area
11:30- the dirt road and crowded apartments
12:00- cholo threats and childhood mobility
16:00- skateboarding, music, and girls
17:00- K-Rock seen as cultural betrayal in some sense, judged for punk culture
20:00- friend who got beat up for having a mohawk
21:00- Bosco Technical Institute (private high school)
22:00- friends dying from shooting air bubbles into veins, and getting busted for weed (cannabis)
25:00- Jesse Ybarra talent and premature death by overdose
28:00- transition to richer school
29:30- punk skate culture and style, and hanging around Hollywood
35:00- family reactions to punk lifestyle
39:00- University of California, Riverside
43:00- Mecha chapter conversation and his alienation from his own culture
45:00- Chicano/a/x specturm
48:00- basketball
50:00- struggling with guidance at UCR and felling connected to rich social life back home
53:00- first in family to go to college
55:00- began to get into smaller writer workshops
57:30- why he writes
1:00:00- to write what you know and what you love
1:01:00- El Monte magic
1:04:00- new novel, his work, and its relation to his life
1:06:00- first memories
1:07:00- demographic change in El Monte and racial dynamics
1:10:00- his job/writing/trade