Gabby Rivera The story of Marvels first queer Latina superhero TED
At no point did I think superheroes
would become such a huge part of my life.
As a kid, I looked at them,
and I saw everything I wasn’t.
They had big muscles,
supermodel good looks,
and phenomenal cosmic powers.
And me?
I kind of looked like this,
except shorter and with frizzier hair,
and I never felt powerful.
I was always just one big ball
of nervous, soft energy,
and superheroes,
much like the bullies at school,
didn’t seem to have
a lot of room for that, for me.
So I stayed away.
And besides, who needs superheroes
when you’re surrounded
by Puerto Rican women from the Bronx?
(Laughter)
My tías were cops and paramedics,
my abuelas were seamstresses
and sold jewelry up the street,
and my mom got her master’s degree
in education and taught kindergarten
in New York City public schools
for over 30 years.
So my superheroes were sitting
around the dinner table with me.
And I don’t know how much time
you’ve spent with Puerto Rican
women from the Bronx,
but we’re also some
of the world’s greatest storytellers.
And I’d sit there
at my grandmother’s dining room table
and I’d listen to the women in my family
tell these wild, rambunctious tales
about navigating their lives in the Bronx.
And I wanted to be them so bad.
But I wasn’t tough like them either.
So mostly, I listened,
and I soaked it in,
and I found myself gravitating
to the soft threads in their stories,
and I wrote those down.
The funny, the goofy, the gentle –
those were my in to storytelling,
so much so that I wrote
a young-adult novel
called “Juliet Takes a Breath,”
about a chubby, queer
Puerto Rican girl from the Bronx
navigating sexuality, family and identity.
And on the strength of “Juliet,”
Marvel Comics tapped me
to write the solo series
for their first-ever
Latina lesbian superhero,
America Chavez.
Yeah!
(Cheers)
(Laughter)
Listen, OK.
Created by Joe Casey and Nick Dragotta
for the Marvel miniseries “Vengeance,”
America Chavez has been
in the Marvel Universe
for over seven years.
She’s tough, Latina,
and she’s so strong that she can punch
portals into other dimensions.
(Laughter)
I know, right?
(Laughter)
And people were so excited,
because finally, someone who shared
her identities – queer and Latina –
would be writing her story.
And I saw that, right?
And also, when I looked at America,
I saw a young Latina in survival mode.
See, because her moms
had sacrificed themselves to the universe
when she was a kid,
and she’d been on her own ever since.
No wonder she had to be tough.
And that link, that link
of having to be tough,
that rested heavy with me.
Like I said, I’m from the Bronx,
and the Bronx is tough,
tough like walking past sidewalk memorials
and dodging cop towers
on your way to the train type of tough.
When stuff happens that’s bad,
people are like,
“Yo, you gotta keep it moving.
You gotta keep trucking.
Don’t cry. Don’t let it get to you.”
And my mom and my tías and my abuelas,
I never saw them take a moment to rest
or to invest in self-care.
And their soft? It never left the house.
And so that was the first thing
that I wanted to give to America,
the thing that I wished I’d been able
to give to my abuelas and my tías,
the thing that I’m trying
to give to my mom now:
permission to be soft.
Like, it’s OK to sit in silence
and go on a journey
just to discover yourself,
and your pain will make you
crumble and you will fall
and you will need to ask people for help,
and that’s OK,
and that being vulnerable is good for us.
But see, I didn’t come to all this
compassion and healing stuff
like, you know, out of nowhere,
and so when it came to America’s story,
I wanted to give her the space
to be human, to mess up,
and to find soft on her own.
So she kind of had to quit her day job.
You know what I’m saying?
I had to give her a superhero sabbatical,
(Laughter)
and the first thing I did was enroll her
in Justice Sonia Sotomayor University.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Because where else would she feel safe
and represented and liberated
but a university dedicated
to the first Puerto Rican woman
nominated to the Supreme Court
of the United States?
And her first class is “Intergalactic
Revolutionaries and You,”
and America is so excited,
she’s ready to show off her strength,
she’s ready to show off
her portal-punching skills,
(Laughter)
and I stripped that safety net
from her right away.
And I limited her powers,
and I changed up her location
and shook up her world,
because that is what college is like,
(Laughter)
especially if you’re alone.
But I didn’t want America
to be alone for long,
and so in a homework assignment
gone totally wrong,
she lands on a battlefield with the X-Men.
(Laughter)
Because, when I was in college,
the Reverend Kelly Brown Douglas
was my mentor,
and I knew that America Chavez
needed one, too.
And who better to mentor
America Chavez than Storm,
the first black female superhero
and one of the most powerful
members of the X-Men?
Nobody, that’s who.
(Laughter)
And Storm teaches America
how to quiet her mind
inside of a star portal,
and when America quiets her mind,
she opens up the dimensions,
and in that silence,
she can listen for anything and anyone.
And no one has ever offered her
silence and deep reflection
as a way to be powerful.
And at first, she rejects it,
but with Storm’s encouragement,
it clicks,
and America quiets the world around her,
and she leans into a deep vulnerability.
I mean, her and Storm even hug.
I know.
And that’s because my mentors
loved me enough
to encourage me to investigate
myself and my ancestors,
and when you’re 19,
how do you even know what that means?
I didn’t learn about the history
of my people in college.
I learned about the history of my people
sitting on my grandmother’s lap
when she pulled out the photo album
and she named everyone that was here
and everyone still left on the island.
So obviously, I had to crash-land
a grandma on America Chavez,
and not just any grandma –
a big, strong, luchador grandma,
one that loved her enough
to take her to the ancestral plain,
where America Chavez
could see the history of her people
play out in the skies above.
And America gets to see Planeta Fuertona,
the birth planet of her grandmother,
and she sees it get invaded,
and she sees her grandmother
and her mom flee.
And she also sees the joy
that they experience
when their new homeland
accepts them openly
and offers them tremendous care.
She gets to see great pain
met with even greater compassion,
and that’s right alongside
the tremendous strength of her family.
And so everywhere that I could, right,
I wrote her little love notes
for her and for all the other
queer kids of color
trying to be magnificent.
Like, when you lose yourself,
dig deep into your ancestry,
because you will find the pieces there.
And also, reminders that soft
is not a pass to duck,
to hide, to be silent, to cower.
Soft is also a push
to hold ourselves accountable.
Kind of like when America
lands in World War II
and comes face-to-face with Hitler,
and she knocks him the hell out …
(Laughter)
just like Captain America did in 1941,
and who knew we’d need America Chavez
to punch Nazis in 2018.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
(Laughter)
And even that, that justified act
kind of wrecks her a little bit,
so I made sure that she linked up
with her best friend,
and they talk feelings
and they go on a road trip
and they sing “Just a Girl” by No Doubt
at the top of their lungs.
(Laughter)
And when Midas, a sinister corporation,
takes control of Sotomayor,
threatens to ban portals
and almost kills America …
her ancestors reach for her …
because they know that she needs to heal.
And it is that burst of care,
that healing, that gives her the fuel
to defeat Midas and reclaim herself.
See, because that myth
of having to go it alone
and having to be tough …
doesn’t serve us.
America Chavez is a whole superhero,
and she still needed a team of support
to help her find herself.
And she needed that gentleness,
the type of gentleness
that is rooted in compassion
and still very much invested
in justice and liberation.
Because it’s in that space where softness
and vulnerability meet strength
that we transcend our everyday selves,
that we become something greater,
something majestic,
maybe even something super.
Thank you.
(Applause)