My name is Tomás Raudales-Beleche, I am 27 years old, a proud Chicano with a BA in English Literature from San Francisco State University. Son of a strong single mother who gave brith to me at the cusps of attaining her teaching credential, I was raised in what is known as ‘deep’ East Oakland for the first nine years of my life before moving to the Fruitvale Area where we lived until I was twelve, before then moving to Alameda,CA where I would spend the latter years of my adolescence and the entirety of my high school career.
I didn’t graduate high school. I decided to test out, taking the CHSPE (California High School Proficiency Exam) at the start of my Junior year, due to a lack of academic stimulation and a desire to break-away from the persona I had been ascribed. Having long been deemed a ‘burn-out’, despite out-performing my peers when it came to writing projects in English and History, I felt as though it was in my best personal interest to distance myself from the environment that I had co-developed but was now seeming to be one I could no longer manipulate or perform out-of. Soon after testing-out, I joined the workforce and enrolled in Community College courses in hopes of finding the intellectual stimulation I yearned for. However, I would quickly figure it out, Community College was only a larger-scale embodiment of the ‘high-school’ spirit. Nonetheless, I was content with the separation made between myself as I knew and was known as.
By no means was I “smarter” than anyone else, no matter how often people brought up the idea. Furthermore, while I was able to find the space to make personal growth, I wasn’t able to make the strides I had hoped to. The freedom that came with the structure of college was something I didn’t know how to handle, thus the separation was short-lived as I had very little understanding of what I wanted to do and who I was as a person, it was painfully easier to simply pick-up and run with what ‘I knew’. So, the first couple semesters of Community College would go essentially wasted.
It would take me two years for me to become more in-tune with myself, marked by my declaration of change to my studies, from Business Administration to English Literature, in a drunken evening at the lobby of a 2 star hotel in Mexico City, after an outburst caused by an unaddressed discontent with myself and the direction my life was headed in.
One could say this is where my story begins, as it was after this night that I began to take myself more seriously as not just a writer, but an artist. I began with poetry, writing rap lyrics, before starting to touch on short narratives and prose, to then ultimately stick with short-story crafting. While continuing to work and go to school, I maintained a life-style that melded the rough, serrated edges of being loosely involved / adjacent to / with Oakland’s criminal underbelly, and that of academia, art, and the community outside of the one I had grown-up in.