Cindy De La Vega
Photo Credit: Joe Budd
“This is my time to rise up and help.”
I was born in 1982 at St. Luke's hospital here in San Francisco, California. It was my mom and my three older sisters, so really it was like having four mothers.
Being the baby of the family, growing up in Sunnydale at that time, it was really hard. This is where I get emotional because...it was very scary to live there. There were a lot of shootings. Once I saw a guy and his baby get shot while looking out the window in the middle of the night, so for several years I forced my mother to sleep on the floor with me in our apartment. I did not want sleep near a window because I was afraid that I was going to be shot
I was afraid all the time, but we were taught that we could never show that fear outside. And then by high school, the way they would deal with kids like me from the projects - or minorities, or troubled kids, or whatever they would call us - they would put us all in the same classrooms where we would feed off each other. We just graduated because we graduated, not because we were ready for it. Thankfully my sisters pushed me to go to a job corp program at City College which led to me working in hospitals for over a decade, which I loved, but it would have been so easy to slip through the cracks.
I feel like I didn't become an actual consumer of weed until maybe 19, 20. I would see my sisters and her friends get high and I got to see them laugh and just have fun, not bother anyone. When I smoked, I just felt happy. It helped my forget what I was going through.
But growing up in the projects, you had to watch out. I remember the police pulling up on my sisters, getting out the car, harassing them, and it's just weed. You know, there's dope, there's crack being sold right up the street. They know where it's at. But the intention was to stir some shit up. I was young, but I don't forget seeing that San Francisco police officer do that.
Now, I’m in this whole new chapter in my life. I never envisioned working in cannabis, being the owner of a store, but it feels like it was meant to be. I do it for my daughters and all the other youth and kids that were similar to me. Especially for females, we didn't have the role models, the mentors, the programs. There's just a lot of talent that gets thrown away because girls don't have the guidance or the opportunity - this is my time to rise up and help.
When you look at the people doing something, if you don't see yourself, you think, this is not for me. That’s true for people of color like me, and it’s true for women. When I walk into a room and it’s all guys, it’s so easy for me to cut myself short and think there’s no path for me here. But that’s something I have an opportunity to help change, to be one of the women letting the next generation know there is a place for them here.
I'm really passionate about cannabis equity because I feel like this is something that finally, if we do this right, we can actually give the people in our communities an opportunity to be more than the housekeepers, more than the janitorial, more than just reception. We can own our own lives.
