[Sounds of getting in the car and driving]
Chad 0:13
So you excited for the conference?
Shawna 0:18
Absolutely. There’s people I’ve been waiting to meet.
[Airport and airplane takeoff audio]
Shawna 0:31
I’ve been waiting for this conference for years, reading the scholarship and citing the scholars, following the conversations, watching from a distance, and now I was finally on my way to the 2026 Critical Mixed Race Studies Association Conference at UCLA. The theme this year was Critical Healing, and I was about to learn what that actually meant.
Shawna 1:10
I arrived Thursday afternoon before the official programming began and also before my jet lag kicked in. Three hours difference between Washington, DC and Los Angeles, not a huge time difference, but enough to matter. I wandered the campus imagining myself being a student there. UCLA has this Mediterranean feel, palm trees, olive trees, cypress trees, completely reminded me of living in Italy. I found the Bruin Store, which is basically a department store clothed in hoodies and accompanied by a marketplace, coffee shops, food courts, and a beautiful campus bookstore. I found the arena where the UCLA women’s basketball team plays, currently ranked number two in the country. There is nothing subtle about Bruin pride. And then I saw the statue, 42, Jackie Robinson.
Shawna 2:16
Before he broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball, he played here at UCLA, not one sport, but four. Football, basketball, track, baseball. Four arenas, one body. He carried pressure before the world even knew what it was asking of him. UCLA honors him with bronze. But what I kept thinking about was fire, because integration isn’t gentle. It burns, it exposes, it forces systems to either change or harden. And Jackie Robinson walked into that fire anyway. But the real grounding for me didn’t happen in a stadium. It happened inside a museum.
Shawna 2:55
The first official gathering of the conference was hosted by Multiracial Americans of Southern California, also known as MASC, and it was held at the Fowler Museum on the campus at UCLA. The exhibit was called Fire Kinship: Southern California Native Ecology and Art. For the past few months, I’ve been planning a new tattoo, a phoenix. Fire as renewal, fire as rebirth, fire as healing. And two days before the conference began, the Year of the Fire Horse started. So walking into an exhibit centered on fire felt like the universe was being a little heavy-handed.
Shawna 3:35
At first, I thought it was coincidence. But then I continued into the gallery. There were several exhibits worth mentioning, but there are some that I really wanted to highlight for this particular episode of the show. The first one is called The Sun is on the Ground by Leah Mata Fragua.
Shawna 4:07
At the center of the room was a circular bench representing the sun. One can sit on this bench and look up above it. Hundreds of suspended poppies, handmade paper dyed with natural plants, are reaching downward toward that glowing center. The sun is fire, but here, fire wasn’t chaos. It was relationship. It was stewardship, and it was renewal. The installation references Indigenous prescribed burns, intentional fire used to clear underbrush, to restore ecosystems, and to prevent catastrophe. And I stood there thinking, maybe healing works the same way. Maybe avoiding the burn isn’t the answer. Maybe it’s about knowing when to lean in and how to light it.
Shawna 5:04
The exhibit doesn’t romanticize fire, though. There is another section with World War II fire suppression posters. They say things like “Forest defense is national defense” and “Prevent fires.” And of course, there’s Smokey Bear reminding us that only you can prevent forest fires. Fire became seen as dangerous and careless and indeed unpatriotic, and in the process Indigenous fire practices were stigmatized and suppressed.
Shawna 5:46
But the land tells a different story. In a section titled Dendrochronology Evidence on the Land, tree rings reveal centuries of low, frequent burns. The trees remember. They show that when fire is suppressed, the result isn’t safety, it’s severity. The lesson that was becoming clear to me was that healing is not the absence of fire, it’s the relationship to it.
Shawna 6:23
In another gallery hung a series by Weshoyot Alvitre. The series is called Dormidera: Dormidera Number One, Language. Dormidera Number Two, Land. Dormidera Number Three, Law. Dormidera means sleepy flower. Dormant, not extinct, just waiting. And these portraits represent Indigenous women whose lives were altered by colonization and policy. Language being lost, land being taken, and law being weaponized. But the poppy blooms again brightly behind these women on the wall.
Shawna 7:02
Fire here isn’t erasure, it’s resilience. And directly across from these portraits was the poetry by Emily Clarke of the Cahuilla Band of Indians. And right there in her poem was the word phoenix. Burning, transforming, rising. I had to stop pretending this was random. I was getting the message. But the universe wasn’t done with me yet.
Shawna 7:22
There’s one more exhibit that I wanted to bring to your attention, and this one was in a darkened room. Nearby, there was an installation by Gerald Clarke Jr., father of the poet Emily Clarke.
Shawna 7:28
This piece is titled The Heart is Fire. At its center, a glowing heart. It projected light, and above were twinkling stars on the ceiling around us, with the sound of gathering, and then in comes a steady heartbeat.
Museum Audio (installation voice) 7:45
Put your hand over your heart, and as we listen to the heartbeat, hopefully it’ll naturally…
Shawna 8:11
Fire in Cahuilla cosmology marks transition, not destruction. Standing there listening to that heartbeat, I realized something. This conference was indeed about critical healing. After the museum visit, I was listening differently, because now I was tuned for fire, not the dramatic kind, the subtle kind, the kind that smolders under inheritance. And before a single keynote had begun, the metaphor had already found me.
Shawna 8:52
The next morning programming began, and by mid-morning I was setting up my workshop, Resonant Voices. In this exhibit, I had four stations. Read it, where one could examine the data that I brought with me from my studies on mixed race experiences in the workplace. Write it, where folks could read Mixed Messages quotes from people I’d interviewed, whether on this show, Our True Colors, or in interviews with my study. Then there was the Watch It station, where I’d put together kiosks where folks could watch clips of the show. And there was the Speak It station, where I was conducting short interviews, providing the opportunity of healing through storytelling.
Shawna 9:31
Four people sat down with me to share their stories. What they shared wasn’t polished. It was about their lineage. It was heat passed down.
Hedy Tripp 9:42
My name is Hedy Tripp. I am a Singapore Eurasian. When I came to this country 47 years ago, I was 30 and said, you know, to the often asked question, what are you? I said, I’m Singapore Eurasian. And nobody understood that. They thought maybe it’s Amerasian, which I’m not. And then people that said that, it’s sort of said with a kind of a smirk, because of the history of Amerasians. But I’m not Amerasian. I am from Singapore, and I still identified with that. I’m very proud of being a Singapore Eurasian American. I guess it’s a story that people don’t really know. Amerasian is usually from the Vietnam War. American GIs took wives or had relationships with Vietnamese and other Southeast Asian women and the children became Amerasian. And there’s a whole story on that. But Singapore was not affected by the Vietnam War. But the Eurasian community is centuries old. They go back to the time that the Portuguese and then the Dutch and then the English colonized Southeast Asia. So these are trading centers, and when you have trading centers and markets, this is where Indigenous women are, right? They’re very much part of the market system.
Shawna 11:09
What would you like people to know about your story?
Hedy Tripp 11:13
I would like them to know who my Asian foremothers are. So it’s my her story, not his story, but her story. Ancestors include our maternal sides. I was able to go back to my ancestral lands last summer through a scholarship, and I began researching and finding out who they are. So like in the 17th century, there was this Dutch guy who married a Siamese princess. So this is one of my foremothers, and the name is there because of him, but the name is there. And so that was fascinating. I didn’t know it before. I never knew I had ancestors and relatives in Malaysia, because I am Singapore, but they didn’t ever go back, and that was amazing and very important to what I’m doing, you know, in terms of this research and telling my story, yeah, yeah. Do you have a title? Burning Fields. In Singapore, I lived in a Malay village called Padang Kabaka, Malay for “field that is burnt.” Okay, so that’s the source of that title, but there’s other stories that go through Burning Fields.
Shawna 12:36
There it was again, fire showing up right in my face. Hedy’s memoir is titled Burning Fields. Her story isn’t about destruction. It’s about land. It’s about maternal lines. Her foremothers. About memory that survived colonization. Fire, for her, isn’t the end of something. It’s how something continues. The land remembers. So do we.
Galia Recinos 13:01
My name is Galia Recinos. It is important to, like, understand more about, like, mixed races and all about different cultures and all that type of stuff. I am from Guatemala, China, and I also have Spanish roots. I have Mayan roots, and I also have German roots. So it’s like, no one can really put me in a box and say, oh, you’re fully Latina. I’m also Asian. I’m also considered a little white, and I’m also considered all these other like little things. My family’s really mixed… (continues)
Shawna 16:11
Galia, different generation, different geography, same tension between safety and loss. Her grandparents chose assimilation. They chose English, they chose business. That choice protected them and it burned something else. Language. Ritual. Texture. Sometimes fire is imposed. Sometimes it’s chosen. Sometimes healing is grieving what didn’t survive the burn.
Jessica 16:36
My name is Jessica. I’m actually originally from Minnesota, and I moved to Northridge for pursuing my master’s in psychology. I am mixed race. Actually, both my parents are mixed race too. I’m Filipina, Mexican, Chilean and European… (continues)
Shawna 18:57
Yeah. A teacher assumed that Jessica’s first language wasn’t English. Just a small moment, but it was a quiet singe. Now multiply that by years, multiply that by systems. That’s not a wildfire, that’s chronic heat, and chronic heat changes landscapes.
Alicia del Prado 19:17
My name is Alicia del Prado, and I am a counseling psychologist… (continues)
Shawna 21:03
What would you say to families or folks that you’re serving in your practice when they’re trying to find out, quote, who they are…
Alicia del Prado 21:15
Yeah, well, I would first start from a strengths-based perspective… (continues)
Shawna 22:24
There was a person I spoke with this afternoon, she really focused on curiosity… And so if there was something that you just wish that other folks who maybe weren’t holding mixed race identity… what would you want them to know about being mixed or multiracial?
Alicia del Prado 23:10
That’s a really wonderful, layered question… (continues)
Shawna 25:00
Community. Alicia, a counseling psychologist, she reframed it. Healing doesn’t mean pretending the burn didn’t happen. It means starting from wholeness. Fire can scar, but it can also fertilize. The question is, who gets to define what it means?
Shawna 25:10
Hi everybody. We’re going to go ahead and get started. Thank you so much for coming. Welcome to Fault Lines and Bridges. This is a pretty important topic to me, so I’m glad that we’re here together to talk about this and discuss this.
Shawna 25:29
The next morning, at 10:45, I facilitated my second workshop. If Resonant Voices was about listening to individual stories, Fault Lines and Bridges was about mapping the terrain underneath them… (continues through the World Café description)
Shawna 27:57
I asked people in the room, who are some other folks that hold complex identities… (continues)
Shawna 28:28
Together in this room, we recognized something. Mixed identity isn’t the exception, it’s rehearsal… (continues)
Steve Castro 29:13
…identified more with a Rockborn and Brunswick approach… (session excerpt continues)
Shawna 29:33
Across sessions, a theme kept surfacing. It wasn’t just about identity. It was about institutions… Healing within inherited systems of power.
Aeriel Ashley 29:50
What do we mean when we say critical healing? … Healing within inherited systems of power.
Shawna 30:18
That phrase stayed with me… And then I spoke with Dakota Duffy, president of the Mixed Alumni Association at UCLA, and an instrumental figure in bringing the conference here.
Shawna 30:30
What comes to mind for you when you hear that as a theme? Critical healing?
Dakota Duffy 30:48
Yeah, beforehand, I didn’t really think too deeply about it… (continues)
Shawna 36:02
Here’s what made this conference different. It wasn’t just critique, it was community, and community felt like oxygen. Chandra Waring, president of the Critical Mixed Race Studies Association, reflected on its founding.
Shawna 36:15
I’m so excited because I get to steal time from the president of the Critical Mixed Race Studies Association… I would love to hear a little bit about what your experience has been this weekend…
Chandra Waring 36:35
Thank you. It’s been phenomenal… (continues)
Shawna 41:13
Y’all just think of it. Three people with an idea. Fifteen years later, a room full of descendants. That is regeneration. Deja Goodwin… coordinated logistics… (continues)
Shawna 45:55
Kinship is how you keep fire from turning into isolation. In the hallways, I heard something over and over again…
Wendy Ashley 46:09
For me, it was not having to do all the explaining… (continues)
Nolan (last name not captured in Otter) 46:34
I would share the same thoughts… (continues)
Shawna 47:43
So Jordan, happy birthday.
Jordan A. 47:57
Being surrounded by people that I don’t know, but they feel very familiar… (continues)
Shawna 48:35
We said we were going to see each other in person, and we did it, and I’m so happy.
Joy DuVivre 48:44
I’m so happy as well… (continues)
Shawna 50:42
And then, just like that, it was over. One moment you’re surrounded by people who understand you. The next, you’re back in transit.
[in the car with the driver on the way to LAX]
Lyft Driver in LA 51:00
…I recommend the pizza… (continues)
Lyft Driver in LA 51:09
Okay, next time… come to LA… Okay, so that’s American… I’ll stop you right there… Have a nice flight.
[Sounds from the airport]
Airport Announcement (unidentified) 51:32
…for Washington… your next departure…
AA Check-In Counter 51:41
Any batteries or e-cigarettes or electronic devices?
Shawna 51:46
No, nothing.
AA Check-In Counter 51:48
Okay, one bag going to DCA. 49 Bravo, and that’s going to be upstairs one flight up.
Shawna 52:15
One bag going to Washington, DC, and something in me felt lighter… (continues)
Shawna 53:16
Until next time, stay curious, stay connected and keep embracing your true colors. Spread the love y’all. I’ll talk to you soon.
OTC Outro Voice 53:38
You’ve been listening to Our True Colors.
