Marie “Keta” Miranda was born in Los Angeles, California during a time of— in her words — “urban removal,” not “urban renewal.” Her mother was very involved in church organizing activities, from charities to fiestas. It is through her mother that Keta understood the church to be a place for women where they can “laugh out loud and have a good time with each other.” Her mother was a housewife putting in a lot of labor and love raising eight children, six girls and two boys. Her father worked first as a general laborer, then a postal carrier, and then a tile-setter. Keta’s father was atheist and she grew up being told by her mother to pray for her father’s conversion as the Catholic Church recited a prayer for the conversion of Russia at the end of every mass during the Cold War. To her father’s satisfaction, Keta too became atheist.

According to her father, “Catholic schools produce the best atheists,” so Keta grew up attending Catholic schools. She became very radicalized by the nuns at her Catholic high school, who created a space for discussing politics, such as the ongoing Vietnam War. During one class, while a nun expressed favoring the war, Keta and two other African American girls argued against the Vietnam War and they found solidarity with one another. Those girls later invited her to a Black nationalist rally, which she attended and did not feel excluded from because there were other Chicana/o and Brown Beret members at the rally. Keta became very politically aware and involved, attending conferences that taught her how to organize walkouts. During her time in high school, the 1968 “walkouts” took place, in which thousands of Chicana/o middle- and high school students walked out of their classrooms in protest of poor educational conditions — especially the death of college prep courses and many of the teachers’ racism and lack of training. As a senior, Keta’s school was rumored to be closing down, so the young girls organized a demonstration outside the archdiocese office, arguing that he would not have closed a “white school,” and was only closing their school because it was filled with working-class Mexican Americans.

Keta’s organizing continued into college where she received a scholarship to attend Los Angeles Community College (LACC). She became heavily involved in Chicana/o organizations and Students for Democratic Society (SDS). She was active on campus with her social justice activism and would miss class to attend protests and demonstrations. During a rally for Black studies at Carver middle school, police were called in and beat the students. Keta and other students then worked to shut down LACC for a week in protest of the police assault on children. Keta’s activism made others recognize her as “down for the cause” and she was encouraged to run for chair of the United Mexican American Students (UMAS), especially after Chicana faculty member Anna Nietogomez’s victory at Long Beach State University. However, after hearing rumors that Anna was being harassed and attacked, Keta stepped down from running because she was concerned about her physical safety. However, she still continued her activism and continued bringing the “woman question” to the Chicana/o movement and then later to Chicana/o studies.

A major event for Keta was the national 1971 Houston Conferencia de Mujeres Por La Raza Chicana conference. A walkout happened at the conference because some mujeres understood the conference’s sponsoring organization, the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), to have a history of oppressing the Chicana/o community. Some participants also did not understand why they were having separate meetings and conferences from Chicanos and men. They argued that they should be organizing as collective Chicana/os, and not just sitting around and talking. Marie did not know how to respond at the time, but later on, she and others developed a new approach by reaching out to women of color. They approached Asian, African, Puerto Rican, and Native American women. It is the identity of women of color and Third World women that Keta felt would bring unity to the Chicano community.