“I Came Here Whitewashed. I’m Leaving a Chicano.”

A letter to my readers about who I am, and why now.

By Nick Valencia

LOS ANGELES — The guy who was supposed to speak on stage got cold feet. I was 15, a teenager from Northeast LA just trying to figure out who I was, when he turned to me and said, “You do it, foo.”

I didn’t hesitate. I walked up in front of hundreds of people at Sal Castro’s Chicano Youth Leadership Conference and said something I hadn’t even fully processed until the words left my mouth:

“I came here a whitewashed pocho from Northeast LA. I’m leaving a Chicano.”

It was the first time I ever got a standing ovation. And it was the first time I felt fully seen.

That moment was a spark. The flame didn’t take off until years later, but it stayed lit.

I grew up in a house where assimilation was the survival strategy. My parents, like so many families who came up through the struggles of the ’50s and ’60s, saw whiteness — or at least the proximity to it — as a way to make it. As a way in. So I wore puka shell necklaces and Billabong tees while my Homies rocked 501 Levi’s and shirts buttoned to the top. I stopped speaking Spanish. Spoke proper. Tried to disappear into a version of America that felt safer. More promising. More… acceptable.

And then I went to college.

USC was called the “University of Spoiled Children,” and it lived up to the nickname. I was surrounded by students who had family homes in gated communities like Coto de Caza, trust funds, and international vacations I could barely imagine. I remember sitting in lecture halls looking left and right, asking myself: How the hell did I get here? And where do I fit in?

It was humbling. It was disorienting. But it was clarifying.

Because I realized: as Americanized as my family tried to make me, as much as I tried to blend in, I can never outrun who I am.

Now, I don’t want to.

I didn’t leave USC thinking it was the University of Spoiled Children. I left calling it something else: the University of Successful Chicanos. I saw people like me doing it — thriving, succeeding, taking up space. I began to believe I could too.

This moment we’re in — where birth certificates are being carried like shields, where vendors are chased off the streets, where people who look like me are told to “go back home” — it demands clarity. It demands courage.

So this is my mission. To be out there on the streets. To share the videos. To amplify the voices. To show the world what’s happening in real time — not from behind a desk, but in the neighborhoods that raised me.

And if someone like me, who has built a career, who speaks fluent English, who pays taxes and lives in good faith — if I am still seen as suspect, if I still feel the need to carry my birth certificate in my wallet every day, then this isn’t just about me. It’s about all of us.

This platform, this work — it’s not just journalism. It’s my way of saying I’m here, I belong, and I’m not going anywhere.

Just like I was meant to walk onto that stage at 15 — uncertain, nervous, not knowing exactly what I would say — I’m stepping forward again now.

Not because I have all the answers, but because I know the power of showing up.