(Author’s note: In the June issue of the Community Alliance, we introduced you to Fresno’s newly appointed 2025–2027 poet laureate, the provocative local Chicana artist Aideed Medina, and her emerging struggle as a precocious young first-generation American growing up in the California public school system in the 1980s. Now, we invite you to get to know her better.)
“I was seven years old and I didn’t know, I didn’t know what racism was,” Medina recalls incredulously.
Mrs. Ashton, her second-grade teacher, had just finished ridiculing and mocking her in front of all of her classmates about her special “booklet”—some stapled sheets of paper put together as a makeshift journal, chock-full of stories, plays and poems…