Acts of rebellion are my inheritance.
When the world set limits, someone in my family redrew the line—choosing new names, new cities, new futures.
My maternal grandfather fled Mississippi for Chicago before settling in Oakland after a lynching threatened his existence.
My grandmother, a daughter of Cape Verde, was a young girl when she crossed a foreign land to build a new life in that same city.
The man who raised my mother was Japanese American—his family forcibly interned during World War II. He chose to serve a country that had stripped them of their dignity, earning his early release and the chance to begin again.
On my father’s side, my grandfather was born in the former Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia—his biracial existence the result of circumstances unspoken and unacknowledged. He was given one name and put up for adoption at birth. When he came of age, he chose another—and with it, a new lineage. That name took root in South Berkeley, and eventually became mine.
My father walked away from an inherited structure and built something of his own—an Oakland cultural institution.
My mother became the first and only in her family to graduate college, crossing the stage at University of California at Berkeley with her two young daughters watching.
rebelmade grows from a belief that identity and spaces are not inherited. They are interrogated, and made.
