My full name is Luz Victoria Simón Jasso. When I say my name out loud people, more often than not, try to find ways to change it.
Can I call you Lucy?
Luz means light, right?
Can I call you light?
Victoria is a pretty name.
These are the most common responses I hear. I don’t take offense to these comments as often as I used to, I instead try to respond with the reason why I am named Luz Victoria.
My grandmother on my mother’s side is named Luz and on my father’s side my grandmother is named Victoria. Together their names make my first name. My last names are my mother’s and father’s. When I was born, my parents made sure that my name included both sides of the family because of the love and respect they have for their parents.
For a while now I have understood that the most important thing to me is my family. There has not been a moment when I was in need of support and my family was not there to provide me with what I needed. Even when we bicker, and I swear I am eager as ever to leave San Diego to go to college, I know deep down that I will not find the same type of unconditional love that I have at home.
Along with the pride I have for my name, I have the equal of that pride for my heritage. I am a Chicana that was raised in Logan Heights, and three years ago moved to Nestor – a small community between San Ysidro and Imperial Beach in the South Bay of San Diego. To me, being a Chicana means having been born in the United States and visiting Mexico to be with the rest of my family. It also means having pride in my history, and solidarity with sisters and brothers of other cultures and backgrounds. Chicanismo is always feeling at home in California, where I remember that Aztlan was the pre-Hispanic place of origin of the Aztec people, and that San Diego is the place of origin of the Kumeyaay people.
As you may be able to tell, my immediate family has many principles that have been passed on to me, one of them being the importance of education. The lessons I enjoy covering and discussing most in the classroom involve History and the Social Sciences. I have found that my strengths involve problem solving, written reflection, and public speaking. I sometimes struggle with mathematics, but I have found ways to work on this material to get better at it with extra effort.
This year I am most excited about what projects will be presented to me as part of the HTHCV project based learning curriculum. When it comes to projects, I don’t have to be passionate about the topic in order to try my best – they just have to be relevant to the world we live in. I am especially excited to work on it with my peers and challenge myself in new ways.
