For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts Read online

  Some names and identifying details have been changed.

  Copyright © 2021 by Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez

  Cover design by Ann Kirchner

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Mojica Rodríguez, Prisca Dorcas, 1985- author.

  Title: For brown girls with sharp edges and tender hearts: a love letter to women of color / Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodriguez.

  Description: New York: Seal Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references. |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021016112 | ISBN 9781541674875 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781541674868 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Mojica Rodríguez, Prisca Dorcas, 1985- | Nicaraguan American women—Biography. | Racism—United States. | United States—Race relations | Minority women—United States—Conduct of life. | Nicaraguan Americans—Race identity. | Indigenous peoples—Ethnic identity. | Immigrant students—United States—Biography. | Christian women—United States—Biography. | Coming of age.

  Classification: LCC E184.N53 M65 2021 | DDC 305.48/8073—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021016112

  ISBNs: 978-1-5416-7487-5 (hardcover), 978-1-5416-7486-8 (ebook)

  E3-20210730-JV-NF-ORI

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER 1

  VOLUNTOURISM

  CHAPTER 2

  COLORISM

  CHAPTER 3

  IMPOSTOR SYNDROME

  CHAPTER 4

  MYTH OF MERITOCRACY

  CHAPTER 5

  POLITICS OF RESPECTABILITY

  CHAPTER 6

  TOXIC MASCULINITY

  CHAPTER 7

  INTERSECTIONALITY

  CHAPTER 8

  THE MALE GAZE

  CHAPTER 9

  WHITE FRAGILITY

  CHAPTER 10

  DECOLONIALITY

  CONCLUSION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  DISCOVER MORE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PRAISE FOR FOR BROWN GIRLS WITH SHARP EDGES AND TENDER HEARTS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  NOTES

  For the difficult daughters.

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  DEAR BROWN GIRL…

  You are eternal. You have a fire burning inside you, and it comes from your mami’s side. Protect your fire, protect that flame. You feel everything and feel nothing. You carry your pain, the pain that comes from asking too many questions, because once you’ve heard your chains rattle, you cannot unhear them. You persevere for yourself, but also for your mami and your papi, and for your little hermanita who is only now beginning to understand the limitations that our cultura has placed on her.

  You are neither here nor there, but everywhere. You carry your cultura in your veins and academia in your heart. You have not forgotten where you come from, but you have learned and earned and maybe even forced your way into spaces not meant for you. You are poderosa like that. You defy the expectations of respectability and you do not seem to care—do you, Brown girl.

  Your vocabulary is vast and your wit is sharp. You are unstoppable.

  You are going places that no one in your family has ever been and you are fearful of your fearlessness. You belong to no one but are accountable to many. We depend on you. Do not let anyone else tell you differently.

  You are groundbreaking. Your parents brag about your brilliance all while exhorting you to be more like their friends’ daughters, the good obedient daughters who did what they were told. Your parents say this because they do not know what to do with their Brown girl. They have not been able to hold your fire for some time now. But you must hold your parents in your heart as you dismantle the systems that have kept people like them down. They were kept down, but not you, Brown girl. You owe it to them to keep fighting.

  Partners have tried to pin you down, they have tried to claim you, but you have resisted because you are not meant to belong to anyone. You belong entirely to yourself.

  Your laugh carries liberation in it.

  Brown girl, do not let them take away your passion. Because they will try, without any compassion, to keep you down. But remember that without passion you will extinguish, and so to be safe, make sure that you keep others nearby who can pick you up and light you up again.

  Because, Brown girl, we need each other.

  INTRODUCTION

  This book is my way of democratizing knowledge. Those in power maintain their status by gatekeeping. The halls of power have always been intended for some and locked away from many. You cannot find most of the books that changed my life in a public library; you have to search for them in university libraries. And once you get your hands on those books, they are not meant to be understood by people without at least a college degree. The jargon and the verbosity that is admired by academics is intentionally inaccessible. That inaccessibility is gatekeeping at its finest. If academics made all their theories readily available to you, then how can they stay relevant? If they give you all the resources, they lose power. If they make their sources and vast knowledge easily available to oppressed communities, they lose power. Accessibility is about power, gatekeeping is founded on the protection of power, and to all of that I say: fuck that, because information that can change lives should never be hoarded.

  This book is a map, and it can lead to many destinations—internally, interpersonally, and far beyond. This book is my little kernel of knowledge for you. May it heal you, may it challenge you, may it make you laugh, but most importantly, may it lead you back to you.

  Now, before we run this marathon together, let’s be sure we begin on the same starting line.

  I utilize the word Latinx, instead of Hispanic or the gendered male Latino, to talk about my communities. Hispanic does not include people without Spanish ancestry, and it does not include non-Spanish speakers. I am not utilizing the word His
panic since it does exclude so many people from Latin America and the Caribbean, including Indigenous communities and Black communities who have not mixed with others. On the other hand, Latino is a gendered term, and like many romance languages, the plural of many of our nouns defaults to a male use of that noun, which centers men. With a positioning like mine, where I am trying to explicitly denounce patriarchy, to then turn around and use a plural term that is male feels contradictory. I use Latinx to encompass the complexities of our countries, and to include women and other genders.

  I do not italicize my Spanish. Spanish is my first language, and though I am a highly proficient English speaker, to italicize Spanish would denote it as foreign, and that is simply not the case. I have been in conversations, attended classes, and read books where I was outside an assumed circle of common knowledge, and I had to go out alone to find that privileged information for myself. So, I implore my readers: for those of you who cannot grasp what I am saying, fully sit in the experience of what it might feel like to be an outsider.

  I also need to state up front that I do not believe in true objectivity. What I do believe is that that term is used by people in power, people who are usually white, to give them authority over topics they have only ever read about. Society has weaponized objectivity to silence us, to kill us, and to oppress us. So, since all perspectives are subjective, I will start by letting my readers know how this text will be informed by me and my own foundations. This is a living, breathing text that reflects my politics and my lived experiences. I will not tell you what to do, and I will not tell you how to exist in whatever reality dominates your life. Academics love to learn about cultures, people, communities they have never experienced, and then with that knowledge they love to tell people what to do. I do not want to perpetuate that harm of pathologizing you. Instead, I want to tell you what I have been through and how I did it all, and then leave it on the table for you to decide how you will apply my experiences and knowledge, or if you even will.

  I do not write for white people; there are an endless number of books written for them. I write for BIWOC, I write for immigrants, I write for those of us who have been harmed by toxic theologies, I write for those of us whose hearts were first broken by our dads, I write so that you can feel seen and held. But this book is not for everyone. No book should be, despite how much white people will advocate for their universal appeal. Every book comes from a person whose life dictated how they wrote it and why they wrote it. There is no universal perspective that can inform everything about everyone. William Shakespeare was a white British playwright, Jane Austen a white English novelist, and Sandra Cisneros a Latina storyteller. Take note of who gets to become relatable to everyone and who is niche, and then deconstruct that.

  The idea of democratizing knowledge has always felt important to me, because I do not believe that academia is an institution that can liberate BIPOC. Institutions meant for white, male intellectual elites are not places of liberation; they are places of indoctrination.

  I do not believe that everyone needs to get a college education or a subsequent graduate degree. Meritocracy is a myth, and working hard for these artificial accolades is not a predictor of success—or intelligence. At the same time, when it comes to my own story, I would not have had access to the knowledge I gained without those institutions. I was very insulated by my conservative Christian upbringing. I needed schooling to learn theory and gain a necessary perspective shift, and to meet people who were focused on this type of learning. Slowly this knowledge resonated for me, helped nourish me and helped me grow.

  Senior year in high school, I was walking through the school library and saw this tiny blue book, and I pulled it out and began reading it. I was merely intrigued by its slimness; it looked just different enough to stand out and spark my interest. That book was a collection of poems by Langston Hughes, and the first poem I read was “Let America Be America Again.” There is a specific line repeated throughout his poem that struck me: America never was America to me.

  Those lines felt different from anything I had encountered in the canon up to that point; the writing felt intimate, and I understood them not as a Black person in the United States dealing with the history of slavery, but as a Brown immigrant and a noncitizen. I felt seen through some of those lines, which were not even meant for me. But glimpses of this life-changing knowledge would otherwise elude me. I had no one around me to acknowledge my struggle with Americanness. As an immigrant, I was constantly reminded that I did not belong and I felt like I was always fighting America. America was like this abusive girlfriend: she said she was here to provide opportunities across the board, but on the ground and in my life, everything felt harder to accomplish. When I failed at becoming the American Dream, I was blamed for not working hard enough. America never was America to me, because America was never the America she said she was. I convinced mi mami to buy me that Langston Hughes poetry collection, which I still own. Each time I revisited those words, it felt like I was fanning a fire inside of me that would otherwise have faded.

  In graduate school, a network of Black queer women began to recommend books to me. I think these women saw my hunger for learning, and they blessed me with more than I could ever have received outside of the ivory tower of academia. I was familiar with the term feminism, but when I was first introduced to womanism it felt more personal to me. Alice Walker has this famous line, “Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.” They’re related terms, but womanism is specific to Black women’s experiences. Same tree, different branches. My mami’s favorite movie is The Color Purple. She sees herself in these women and in their relationships to the men in their lives. I saw it too. It would be Jennifer Bailey who would inform me that my own term existed. She is an ordained reverend of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and now the executive director of Faith Matters, and she sent me to google the term mujerista. Mujerista is a Latina feminist liberation theology, and part of this theory prioritizes the poor and disenfranchised above anyone else. I remember her gentle and knowing glance at me, saying something along the lines of, Womanism is not for you, but there is something out there that is meant for you.

  I remember when Carlin Rushing, a grassroots organizer and Black Lives Matter activist in Nashville, handed me the book Indecent Theology by Marcella Althaus-Reid and said, “You need to read this.” I remember these gifts, which led me down trails of knowledge about our gente. I remember needing those guiding voices, more than I could vocalize. For a woman with my background, attending seminary was in itself an act of resistance. But learning through these books how to completely free myself from the toxic theologies that had shaped me was a revolutionary act of self-preservation.

  My graduate program taught me life-changing terminology that finally freed my worldview from internalized sexism, classism, racism, ableism, xenophobia, and so on. I needed that knowledge, but the exchange almost killed me. I suffered tremendously because I hated how I was seen and treated in those spaces.

  I do not think that we should be required to give up our dignity in order to access life-changing knowledge. No one should have to prove to the privileged that you are one of the “good” Brown people. With this book I am attempting to bring this access to you, without having to endure racist standardized testing, prohibitive tuition, the “universal” dead-white-men canon, and the dominating white gaze.

  I wanted to write a book that I could have used. I wanted to write the book that would have sparked a fire within me. With this book, I want you to then do whatever you are ready to do with the information you are given. This is your life, and self-determination is a beautiful gift that not many of us have the privilege to truly experience. So I want you to read this book and if something sticks, keep it like I kept my Langston Hughes poems—to fan the fire within you.

  My method for this type of knowledge redistribution is what Latinx critical race theorists call “counterstorytelling,” though at its core this book is an autoethnography.
That is all to say, I am pushing against “universal” white narratives by telling my own stories. I am not going to define tone policing strictly within academic jargon, instead I will share my own experiences with microaggressions. I will tell you about respectability politics through my own struggles with respectability politics. I will explain decolonization by speaking about my own liberation. These isms do not exist for philosophical salon conversations among the academic elites; these are real lived experiences and will be written about as such.

  I will warn you that this work is not pretty and that you might lose a lot of friends and even family along the way, but it is good work because it has the ability to set us free from everything that we have internalized about Blackness, Brownness, Indigeneity, hard work, respect, purity, masculinity, and femininity.

  I identify as Brown because I am racialized as Brown. This was not always how I identified, as I will explain in my colorism chapter. I was assigned Brownness every time I encountered white people. I was not read as white, and I was not given access to whiteness. When I say that I am Brown, I am referring to the color of my skin. It is a beautiful shade of caramel, it is a distant memory of my Indigenous ancestors, and it is a skin that I’ve had to learn to love. Being Brown skinned is not a metaphor; it is a tangible and visible reality. When I say that I am Brown, I am claiming myself. I am reminding myself that all the times I thought something was wrong with me were times when there was actually something wrong with them. When I say that I am Brown, I am referring to a slew of experiences that marked me, kept my head low, made me apologize, convinced me to wear colored contacts—the list goes on. When I say that I am Brown, I am standing in the pain and disowning it.

  I use the term BIPOC to mean Black, Indigenous, and people of color. This acronym replaces the POC acronym to highlight the unique histories of Black and Indigenous people. While many people of color are diminished for being immigrants, they or their ancestors still often had the privilege of choosing to come to America. In contrast, white Americans founded the nation by murdering Indigenous people and forcing survivors off their own land. White Americans built their economy and wealth by kidnapping and enslaving Black people. And white Americans violently continue these legacies today. BIPOC is not a perfect term, and it might evolve further, but for this book this particular term felt the most accurate in reflecting my own politics.