Sunny Angulo, Part 2 (S9E3)

Trigger warning: Part 2 contains a story of domestic abuse.

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Sunny arrived anew in her hometown of San Francisco. After that "talk" with her dad about her tattoo, she peaced out on her parents and went to stay with a friend in El Paso ahead of her move back to SF.

Before leaving, when she went back home to get the rest of her stuff, Sunny ran into her mom, who was upset. Sunny told her, directly, that she would make mistakes in her life, and that moving away was not one of them. She reminded her mom that her dad, Sunny's grandpa, disowned her years before. She and her parents were eventually able to close that chapter of their relationship.

Now in SF and going to school at USF, it was the era of the dotcom boom (in 2000, around the time I moved here). With everything going on around tech, Sunny found community as a founding member of the SF Indie Media Collective. She aligned herself with many women around here interested in an alternative to the onslaught of tech in The City (in hindsight, I wanna say, "Just you wait …").

It was also a time of warehouse parties. People who went to Burning Man were artists, not tech douches. It was peak bike messenger days.

Toward the end of her time in college, Sunny became more and more engaged in activism. I ask whether the school (USF) had an impact on her activism, or if it was The City, or a combination of the two. She points to the time when she was 8 and wanted to design fashion that would fight deforestation in Madagascar. All to say, she's had an eye for social and environmental justice since she was a kid. USF and San Francisco served to solidify that for her as a young adult.

Sunny speaks to two times in her life that she missed out: 1) being taken away from most of her high school years, and 2) having left San Francisco when she was young, despite visiting regularly, there was a lot of The City she needed to reacquaint herself with. She reminisces about some of the spots, especially around USF, that she and her friends would frequent.

Around this time, Sunny was involved in an organization called School of the Americas Watch. The group stood against the School of the Americas in Ft. Benning, Georgia, which trained paramilitary for dictatorships. That's an easy thing to oppose theoretically. But SOAW did the work on the ground. For Sunny, that meant traveling back to Georgia.

School of the Americas had existed long before 9/11. But after that, security r