{"id":469544,"date":"2020-05-27T02:22:15","date_gmt":"2020-05-27T09:22:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/?p=469544"},"modified":"2026-02-12T17:19:28","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T01:19:28","slug":"dvp-interview-stacey-milbern-and-dolores-tejada","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/2020\/05\/27\/dvp-interview-stacey-milbern-and-dolores-tejada\/","title":{"rendered":"DVP Interview: Stacey Park Milbern and Dolores Tejada"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Dolores Tejada <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">interviewed <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Stacey Park Milbern<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> for the Disability Visibility Project in <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">San Francisco<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> on September 26, 2015. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Stacey Park Milbern and Dolores Tejada (September 26, 2015) by Disability Visibility Project\" width=\"1360\" height=\"400\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?visual=true&#038;url=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F828966481&#038;show_artwork=true&#038;maxwidth=1360&#038;maxheight=1000&#038;dnt=1\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<h3><strong>Audio Description<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In this clip, <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Stacey Park Milbern and Dolores Tejada talk about disability identity, becoming politicized as disabled people, their thoughts on the future of the disability movement, and their friendship.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><strong>Text Transcript<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>STACEY<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">: Hi, my name is Stacy Milbern. I\u2019m 28 years old. Today is September 26, 2015. We\u2019re at the San Francisco Public Library. And Dolores is my friend.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>DOLORES<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">: Hi, I\u2019m Dolores. I\u2019m 29 years old. Today is September 26, 2015. I\u2019m from Hayward, California. Or we\u2019re in Francisco. Yeah. And my relationship to Stacey is that she is my friend and partner in dismantling the crime of ableism. [laughs] Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>STACEY<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">: Cool.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>DOLORES<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">: I also feel like so much of disability identity is just shaped around disclosing or like sharing stories of triumph or something and triumph from childhood. But I kind of wanna sway away from that. And I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s because my ID came later in life. And in some ways, I feel like that\u2019s kind of invasive&#8230;But I just wanted to ask you to maybe just share an early memory that was shaped by disability still, and if you wanted to share something. Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>STACEY<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">: Cool. So, I mean, there\u2019s a lot of memories that are early. I remember I have a younger brother and sister, and so I would, we would often times do things together. And then I would have to wait for them while they went off and did things. So, those kinda memories. But the clearest memory of disability, of being different, at that time, I was walking, and I walked with a limp. And I fell down a lot, like all the time. But I didn\u2019t have any supports at school other than like the teacher kinda keeping an eye out. And so, one day, I was in the bathroom, and I fell in the bathroom. And I was sitting on the floor, and I was trying to figure out, oh, my gosh. What am I gonna do now? And I think I was in 4th grade and trying to figure out, OK, I have to get myself up here. But physically, I\u2019m not sure how that\u2019s gonna happen. And there\u2019s no one here to help me. And then a bunch of my classmates came in, and there were three girls. And they were laughing and talking, and they were talking about boys and bras and all of these girl things. And I remember just looking through the door and waiting for them to leave so I could continue figuring out how I was gonna get up and just feeling like, oh, my gosh. It\u2019s like they\u2019re from another planet. Or I\u2019m from another planet.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>DOLORES<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">: Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>STACEY<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">: We have totally different realities.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>DOLORES<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">: Yeah, totally.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>DOLORES<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">: Yeah, wow. OK. So, I also wanted to talk about&#8230;. So, we\u2019re both women of color and ID as women of color, right? Yeah?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>STACEY<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">: Right.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>BOTH:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> [laugh]<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>DOLORES<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">: So, how do you think that kind of shaped your experience as a person with a disability? Even being younger to today, how do you think that\u2019s impacted you?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>STACEY<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">: So, something I\u2019ve been thinking a lot about lately is my father was in the military, and he\u2019s white. And so, when he was overseas, it was really my mom kind of navigating the medical-industrial complex with me. And she was doing it on her own. My grandma was, grandmother was living with us too, but she doesn\u2019t speak English. And yeah. So, my mom was the leader. And just it being really, I don\u2019t know, like everything the doctors wanted to do to me felt so shaped by disability and race. Like it was about being a good Asian girl or being a good white girl. Or that\u2019s how I was interpreting it in how I interacted with doctors. And a lot of the messaging my mom got was, if you don\u2019t do this surgery or if you allow your daughter to stop therapy, then you\u2019re impacting her quality of life later, and you\u2019re not a good mom. And it was so racialized.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>DOLORES<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">: Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>STACEY<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">: So, now that I\u2019m older, I\u2019m able to be more mad at the system than necessarily with my mom.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>DOLORES<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">: Yeah.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[musical interlude, piano]<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>DOLORES<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">: So, can we talk a little bit about, you did a lot of youth organizing, and since you said you were politicized, I think pretty young around disability, can you talk a little bit about that and what your experiences were and how that? Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>STACEY<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">: Totally. So, when I went to that first NYLN [National Youth Leadership Network] conference, I was like, holy crap! I\u2019ve been working so hard my whole life to be like everyone else, and I\u2019m still different. And I can\u2019t figure out why. And now it all makes sense. I have a disability! And so, that was that. And then so, when I came back, I found other young people that wanted to do work around it, and we were really passionate. It was our whole life. And at first, it started out more mainstream. And so, we were putting together a nonprofit with a Board and all of that. But then, a lot of the disability rights movement was so racist, and we were mostly young people of color. And so, I myself started to get politicized around identifying as a radical woman of color. And my school library didn\u2019t have any, you know, feminists of color books, but I could get them on interlibrary loan. And so, that\u2019s how I was able to read Audre Lorde and many others, Barbara Smith. So then, from that point, the organizing that we did became a lot more radical, and we changed to be more of a collective where everybody had to make a vote. And we identified as working outside of the nonprofit-industrial complex. And so, we did a lot of our own fundraising and just scrapping things together to make it work. But it\u2019s really hard to do it that way because you\u2019re doing it without any resources. So, we did that for about three years. And then after that, we kinda all went our separate ways.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[musical interlude, piano]<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>DOLORES<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">: So, how do you envision the future of like, so we\u2019re here. We scheduled this today \u2018cause there\u2019s a ADA Festival happening. And we just felt like, oh, let\u2019s take advantage of this. And so, yesterday the speech that we collaborated on and I gave was really about thinking about outside of that and thinking beyond rights. And so, how do you envision the future? What do you see? What do you want from the future?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>STACEY<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">: So, I\u2019m super inspired and excited about the work that you do with young people of color with disabilities, and I think that\u2019s our future.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>DOLORES<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">: Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>STACEY<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">: And I\u2019m curious to see where people are gonna take us. I think disability history is step one. And as people move into more of their identity, I\u2019m curious where it will go. As a movement, I think it\u2019s gonna be further.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>DOLORES<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">: Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>STACEY<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">: What about you?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>DOLORES<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">: [big breath] So, one of the things that I wanted to do in the speech yesterday, which I did, was challenge the old-school folks to sit down and take a seat, basically, to the younger folks in the room. And so, I mean, obviously, I wanna respect, respect our elders and respect folks who carry a lot of the history with them. And but I just feel like, yeah, my heart is in youth work, even though I\u2019m out of that youth now. So, I\u2019m trying to figure out where my place is, like what I can do to kind of get out of it. But I just love it&#8230;.I want us to just start listening to youth and thinking about the ideas that they have and what it looks like for them and just supporting that. And&#8230;yeah. I don\u2019t know. Yeah, I think that, yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>STACEY<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">: Cool.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>DOLORES<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">: Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>STACEY<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">: The future.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>DOLORES<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">: Yeah. [laughs] Yay. <\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Support Disability Media and Culture<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/donate\/\">DONATE<\/a> to the Disability Visibility Project<\/strong><strong>!<\/strong><\/p>\n<h4><\/h4>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h4>Suggested Reference<\/h4>\n<p>Disability Visibility Project. (2020, May 27). DVP Interview: Stacey Park Milbern and Dolores Tejada. Retrieved from: <a href=\"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/2020\/05\/27\/dvp-interview-stacey-milbern-and-dolores-tejada\/\">https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/2020\/05\/27\/dvp-interview-stacey-milbern-and-dolores-tejada\/<\/a><\/p>\n<h4>Image description<\/h4>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[Left] <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Dolores is a fat brown femme with a round face. She smiles without showering teeth. Their black hair is pulled back. [Right] Stacey is <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">a mixed race Korean and white queer person wearing a blue-and white striped tank top and her trach can be seen.<\/span><\/p>\n<h4>Music<\/h4>\n<p>Music\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/freesound.org\/people\/TheAudioWay\/sounds\/494066\/\">\u201cBroken,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0by Kevin Brown, November 16, 2019<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/publicdomain\/zero\/1.0\/\">This work is licensed under the Creative Commons 0 License.<\/a><\/p>\n<h4>Credits<\/h4>\n<p>Produced for the Disability Visibility Project by Alice Wong. Interview recorded by StoryCorps, a national nonprofit whose mission to preserve and share humanity&#8217;s stories in order to build connections between people and create a more just and compassionate world. For more: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.storycorps.org\">www.storycorps.org<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.disabilityvisibilityproject.com\">www.disabilityvisibilityproject.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p>For any questions, please refer to the <a href=\"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/about\/terms-of-useprivacy\/\">Terms of Use<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dolores Tejada interviewed Stacey Park Milbern for the Disability Visibility Project in San Francisco on September 26, 2015. Audio Description &nbsp; In this clip, Stacey Park Milbern and Dolores Tejada &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/2020\/05\/27\/dvp-interview-stacey-milbern-and-dolores-tejada\/\" class=\"read-more\">Continue Reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">DVP Interview: Stacey Park Milbern and Dolores Tejada<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":469549,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[548705951],"tags":[632345,587152388,10372239,2185238,55897910,25064673,168607,498622084,587152687,125414435,4760232,587152854,1093,68683],"class_list":["post-469544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dvp-interviews","tag-community-organizing","tag-disability-activism","tag-disability-community","tag-disability-history","tag-disability-identity","tag-disability-justice","tag-disability-rights","tag-disability-too-white","tag-disabled-femmes-of-color","tag-disabled-people-of-color","tag-disabled-youth","tag-futures","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-bay-area","post-has-thumbnail"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/sfb003404_g1.jpg?fit=5184%2C3456&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4H7t1-1Y9i","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=469544"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469544\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/469549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=469544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=469544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=469544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}