“What’s Her @?” - Cristal Serrano
The daughter of a family rooted in Mexico and a Los Angeles Native through and through. Cristal Serrano is a first generation Chicana.
"I think a lot of people don't expect me to be Mexican," she says. "I don't know, I feel it. I proudly express it. I'm very very proud to be Mexican so it translates into everything — my work, my motherhood, everything else in between."
Her earliest memories are of parks across LA. Cousins. Birthdays. Barbecues that started at six in the morning and did not wind down until nine at night. She describes it the way people do when a childhood was actually good — not with nostalgia for something lost, but with gratitude for something that shaped her.
"I think my parents did really well with making my childhood very fun and bright," she says. "I just spent my days at the park all over LA and it was a lot of fun."
She is a mother of two, and you can hear the thread between that childhood and the one she is building. The brightness her parents gave her is something she is passing forward.
Cristal started dancing at ten. Hip-hop, ballet, contemporary, ballroom, jazz. She rattles off the styles the way someone does when the list is long and the love behind it is longer.
Cristal is also, by her own account, someone who is drawn to everyone. Bubbly personalities. Shy ones. The person in the corner who is not looking for a conversation. She wants to make them all a friend — especially the ones who are not trying to be one.
"I think I am attracted to all, honestly," she says. "I want to be friends with everyone. I like more of a bubbly personality, but I also like the shy and timid. I want to try to make them a friend, especially if they are not trying to be a friend. I don't know. I'm attracted to everyone, really."
But she has done the harder work too. The kind that does not make it into any highlight reel. When the conversation turns to love, she does not deflect or reach for the easy answer. She goes straight to the one that cost her something.
"A hard lesson learned about love would be that I've lost myself before trying to fit this image that I felt my partner at the time would have loved," she says. "It put me in a position where I just felt like I wasn't happy with where I was. That's one of the bigger lessons."
Losing yourself for someone else's version of you is one of the quietest forms of damage. It accumulates across small compromises, adjustments, the gradual dimming of things that were once entirely yours. Cristal recognized it and eventually came back to herself.
She will not tell you she has everything figured out. She is still working through some of it, the way anyone honest about their life is always still working through some of it. But there is a difference between a woman who is figuring things out and a woman who has lost the thread of herself entirely. Cristal has never lost the thread. Not really. Not for long.
The mother who is raising her children in the brightness her parents gave her. The proud Mexican-American woman who has been many things to many people and has come out of all of it knowing exactly who she is.
"I'm first generation and I'm proud to say that," she says. "So I think I will talk about it as much as I can."
