For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts Read online

  When you are prepubescent and suddenly become aware of the ways your own people think you are inferior because of the features on your face and the color of your skin, you will start to run away from yourself. You’ll want to look like someone else. You’ll want to hide your Indigenous ancestors.

  In middle school, I started receiving the attention of a cute boy in my grade. His name was Juan, and to me he was so dreamy. He was Colombian and had this beautiful caramel skin color. His eyes were hazel, and this was one of the things everyone seemed to love about him, including myself—his claim to fame, his foothold in whiteness.

  At first, I thought he was dating me as a joke. When you are made to feel like you are not beautiful, and society teaches you that the worth of girls and women lies in their beauty, then you start to feel unlovable. In tenth grade, a boy would date me as a dare, which further cemented this mentality for me. But much to my surprise, seventh-grade Prisca genuinely captured the attention of this boy, and after a few weeks I was ready for my first kiss. It was everything you could imagine: awkward. Thankfully, both our expectations were low so this did not seem to deter anything. Then he asked me to join him in the mornings before school started to hang with his friends, the cool kids. Cool by virtue of their light skin or ability to pass as white.

  I remember walking up to his group of friends while holding his hand, and the girls started to laugh, loudly. They yelled, “She looks like an india,” and continued to laugh. I remember him defending me, and I remember wanting to disappear. I did not speak up for myself because I believed what they said about me, that there was something wrong with me. He broke up with me a few days later, without any explanation.

  These experiences taught me to hate myself. I learned that I deserved to be mocked for looking like my ancestors. I had my ancestral Brownness scripted on my face and on my body, and I was taught to hate it. I was taught to hide my features. I was taught how to begin to erase parts of myself. I was taught that I could erase myself entirely.

  Mi mami tells me to get out of the sun. Mi mami tells me to put on sunblock. Mi mami tells me to not go to the beach so much.

  I realize now those were the seeds of my own anti-Indigeneity. For a long time, I felt like I had to express the same disdain for Indigenous people in order to fit in with my fellow mestizos, because that is what mestizaje is built on. I was supposed to have more in common with mestizos due to the nation-state identities that were given to us by our colonizers. Embedded in my survival instincts was this desire to distance myself from my roots, from the real and vibrant communities that still exist today despite centuries of attempted genocide. Through ridicule, I became one of them, and I felt a need to cling onto that. It was not until I read Gloria Anzaldúa, who proudly claimed her Indigeneity, that things began to shift for me. Seeing someone call out our colonizers, and take pride in her Indigenous roots, is still vastly unheard of with so many of our gente.

  I am visible—see this Indian face—yet I am invisible. I both blind them with my beak nose and am their blind spot. But I exist, we exist. They’d like to think I have melted in the pot. But I haven’t, we haven’t.

  —Gloria Anzaldúa

  I needed to read Anzaldúa to discover ways to speak up against anti-Indigeneity. I realize today that while I was directly hurt because of this embedded prejudice, there are thousands of displaced peoples in my country and here in this country who continue to be hurt by these violent acts of erasure, nation-state policies, and occupation. I was participating in the continued subjugation of Indigenous communities by not owning that side of my ancestral line with the same respect and admiration the whiter parts of my ancestry received. I was also a person, socialized within a racist structural machine that specifically sought to devalue me and people like me. While in some regards my agency was taken from me through socialization, once I became aware of this, I could finally begin the work to actively undo those teachings and counter them.

  Media does its fair share of harm by reinforcing negative stereotypes of people who are darker through colorism. Growing up, Telemundo and Univision had actresses, entertainers, and news anchors who all spoke my native tongue of Spanish—but they never looked like me. I grew up on Xuxa, Sofía Vergara, Lucero, Thalía, and Gloria Trevi, and they were all light-skinned, white-passing Latinas who were portrayed as the beauty queens of our countries. These were the women we were projected as our representation, but I did not look like them. Instead, I looked like the nameless maids who were occasionally cast in a telenovela or, worse, like la India María.

  India María was an exaggerated and ridiculously racist stereotype of Indigenous people, and she was the only person I saw on our channels who looked anything like I did. She was kind, but was presented as inferior. She stood in stark contrast to a Thalía and was always called fea and dumb by the other characters in whatever movie or show she was in. I became aware that I looked like pop culture’s idea of a joke. As a young, Brown, third-world little girl, I understood too well the message behind la India María.

  Colorism privileges white-passing and white-adjacent BIPOC. This deserves our attention, because when we eradicate colorism, when we divest from whiteness, we can hopefully find our way back to one another. Colorism divides all communities; not calling attention to it is a disservice to us all. Our darker members will resent those who do not share in such painful experiences. We are resentful of those with proximity to whiteness because we are all socialized to want that too. And Black people are justified in their anger toward non-Black POC for the violence we have been complicit in, knowingly or unknowingly, all in service of whiteness. That desire and longing for whiteness is a shared issue across communities of color; it is enforced through colorism, and our energies need to be focused on divesting from that hierarchy entirely.

  Colorism can trick you into believing that you need to change yourself. I am embarrassed and still in disbelief at how much money I spent attempting to erase myself. I am embarrassed and still in disbelief at how much money so many Black and Brown folks spend to distance ourselves from our darker features. At the lengths that many of us will go to avoid the sun, to get that skin-bleaching cream, to contour with makeup to narrow our noses. So many of us became experts in how to erase ourselves, instead of healing from it all and eradicating colorism.

  I was in high school the first time I attempted to really change my appearance to look white. In ninth grade, one of my friends, Jessica Otero, would bring to school a large plastic bag full of bootleg colored contacts. She was Cuban and white, and to me that meant she was gorgeous. She would often wear hazel-colored contacts, and I thought she looked stunning. I realize now that I had been told to think that whiteness and lightness was stunning. But at that time, I wanted to look just as stunning, just as white.

  I wanted to be like her, so I asked how much the colored contacts were, and she told me she was selling them for $20. I didn’t have an allowance, but I was able to save up money, little by little. In about a month and a half, I was victorious! There is very little that can stand in the way of someone who has been taught to hate herself, and so-called improvements become our fixation. I remember when I walked up to Jessica and asked her to show me her stash of colored contacts. She showed me every color and I picked the most natural-looking one I could see: turquoise. I realize now that was a terrible mistake, but in ninth grade you could not tell me a thing.

  Of course, I looked like I was sick, with enlarged, ill-fitted, turquoise-colored eyes. The bootleg colored contacts lasted about two weeks before they started to deteriorate. They were probably not meant to be given without an eye exam. But because whiteness is a drug that BIPOC are told we want to be addicted to, I kept saving up more money to keep buying them throughout the school year.

  Learning to love myself today meant learning to confess and denounce the alterations I had performed in the pursuit of whiteness. These alterations included wearing colored contacts, bleaching my hair, learning to contour my nose into a th
inner shape—all in an attempt to pass as white despite the futility of it. My attempt at transformation was always rooted in colorism, which was basically a learned form of self-hatred. And as an adult, I needed to eradicate all of that from my life.

  While colorism is a way for POC to enforce racism, it’s also a way for some POC to survive racism. If you are white-passing or white-adjacent, you can survive and adapt to a racist society. If you benefit from colorism, you are also rewarded for enforcing the codes within it.

  Mestizos are seen as superior to Indigenous people, and we continue to be rewarded for our proximity to whiteness. The rewards were tangible back in the day, through treaties between our Indigenous and Spanish ancestors, and through the social embrace by the ruling class, the conquistadores. Though the embrace was conditional, it was a step in the direction of having our fractured humanity recognized.

  Generation after generation, colorism results in confused, power-hungry mestizos who work tirelessly to become white at the expense of Black and Indigenous people. Colorism in my family meant that I was told that I was mestiza, when everyone knew that we have Black ancestry. Colorism meant that marriages were strategic to elevate one’s racial status, where the aspiration was to marry up the colorism scale, not down it.

  In this day and age, it is common to hear a liberal white person speak proudly about traces of diverse racial heritage, as discovered through commercial DNA tests. There is this fixation today with being more than just white. As if waves of European immigrants who were reviled as nonwhite—the Irish, the Italians, the Polish—hadn’t yearned over generations to become just white. As if their ancestors did not work tirelessly to contribute to the national identity of whiteness by erasing their cultures and differences.

  This stands in stark contrast to the genealogy searches that I am familiar with, where Latinx people attempt to find and claim their whitest European ancestors. In Miami, it was common to hear someone talk about being a mut, being mixed with Colombian, Spanish, and Italian, as if all that mixing had occurred consensually and was just a happy circumstance of their ancestors’ lives. Mestizaje routinely seek to erase everyone in the family who is Indigenous or Black, by distancing us from them.

  In fact, I had once done this myself, creating distance between myself and my Indigenous ancestors. When I was a teenager, mi abuelito, like many in his generation, became obsessed with genealogy. He retraced our paternal family line back to Spain, following our Spanish last names, selectively weeding out of the family tree any claim to Indigenous roots. He also traced us back to Egypt, looking for links to Egyptian royalty—despite the obvious fact that Egyptians are North African and racially Brown and Black. This did not seem to faze him. When he thought of Egyptian royalty, my abuelito thought of Elizabeth Taylor; somehow, to him, Egypt was a path to Europe.

  His anti-Indigenous family search allowed him to proudly claim Spanish and Egyptian heritage, and thus I did too. I was not told about our Indigenous ancestors; they were deliberately erased and forgotten. I never questioned this, and so agreed to keep them erased and forgotten. I had already internalized the benefits of this willful ignorance.

  In mestizo communities, proximity to whiteness affords people a possible reward of better jobs, better placements, and therefore better opportunities. Back in the 1800s, Nicaraguans were surveyed, and mestizos who promoted their whiteness got to keep lands; those who identified as Indigenous were removed. Claiming mestizaje is how we become whiter. It is tangibly beneficial to identify as white, even when your skin tells a different story.

  Mi mami tells me to get out of the sun. Mi mami tells me to put on sunblock. Mi mami tells me to not go to the beach so much.

  We don’t just have to call out white people for their racism. We also have to dismantle internalized racism within communities of color. The politics of pigmentation cannot continue to be ignored, because denying our experiences perpetuates generations of harm. The next time your mami, tia, abuelo tells you to get out of the sun so that you do not get darker, tell them what they are actually saying. The next time you try to erase your heritage, consider what it would mean to love your Brown skin. Those who have passed as white, you need to think about your privilege and the harms you may be perpetuating on your own communities of color. We all need to start this slow, sometimes painful process of communally unlearning what we have internalized.

  And I implore you to wear your tiniest bikinis and enjoy the sun while watching your magic happen, juntxs!

  CHAPTER 3

  IMPOSTOR SYNDROME

  Many victims of racial discrimination suffer in silence or blame themselves for their predicament. Others pretend that it didn’t happen or that they ‘just let it roll off my back.’ All three groups are more silent than they need be. Stories can give them a voice and reveal that other people have similar experiences. Stories can name a type of discrimination (e.g., microaggressions, unconscious discrimination, or structural racism); once named, it can be combated.

  —Richard Delgado

  Growing up, I was pretty self-motivated. My family immigrated to Miami, Florida, when I was seven years old, and Miami, being a Latinx city, meant that English was optional. Police officers were often bilingual, teachers in school were bilingual, and Latinx judges and school principals were all bilingual. So, although a lot of the Latinx people in power in Miami were white-passing or lighter skinned, I still saw possibilities around me. I saw possibilities when I heard slang Spanish slip out of the mouths of respected Latinx people in positions that felt unreachable. What this meant for me is that I chose to ignore obvious obstacles like classism and anti-immigrant chatter; dreaming while under attack was most likely a survival skill that I picked up while I was being raised as a girl in a strict, Christian fundamentalist household.

  In order to thrive, I had to find ways to pick and choose what was for me, and what was meant to keep me down. I could generally do some sort of mental gymnastics to justify my own motivations for my future, a future that was left unscripted beyond an obedience to a future husband and God. All this is to say, yes, there were instances that hurt my pride and times when I had to change how I carried myself to avoid being teased for being too new to this country, too Nicaraguan, too Brown, too working-class, etc. But for the most part I had this raw belief in myself that went generally unimpacted by the low expectations that had been projected onto me.

  I understood in high school that other people did not see potential in me, but somehow I saw potential within me. Even when I was able to do things that were firsts for my family line and ancestors, I had little doubt internally in my own ability to do well. There was a spark within me that was probably naivete, but also some willpower that I was able to harness.

  But then in my twenties I moved to the primarily white city of Nashville, Tennessee. And in this white city, I began to see that people had different expectations for what I was capable of, and there was no one around that looked like me to prove to me and my brain that I could defy those odds. It was not until later in life that I would develop the skills to create my own spaces for representation, like Latina Rebels.

  Impostor syndrome is something that almost everyone experiences at some point in their lives. Impostor syndrome is the name for that fear that people will one day discover you to be a fraud. It is the lingering doubt that you are not worthy of your successes. This type of thinking can have negative effects on your mental health, which in turn can affect your physical health.

  Impostor syndrome is believed to affect all genders, but early on when the phrase was first coined and gaining currency, it was discussed as a common experience among women in the workplace. I will further Pauline Rose Clance’s theory that it was specifically a white woman problem, because they were among the first to infiltrate the white male corporate world. Women are socialized to be docile, appeasing, welcoming, humble, not opinionated, and deferential to men. Men are socialized to be aggressive, competitive, bold, and proud; they are groomed for power, dom
inance, and success.

  When women began to be recognized for their professional successes, impostor syndrome led them to believe what they had been socialized to believe—that any accomplishments resulted from luck, teamwork, and outside help.

  People of color and specifically BIWOC can suffer impostor syndrome in the same ways, but also differently. Society applauds whiteness for the sake of whiteness, and expects greatness from white people, though still within a two-gender hierarchy. These cultural values are affirmed through media, literature, academia, interpersonal interactions, the entertainment industry, and so on. Performing well professionally for BIPOC requires overcoming low expectations; if you do well, white peers now believe you are an exception to a cultural rule. Racial impostor syndrome comes from fears that you will be discovered as a fraud. But the racial dynamics are complex, because you are made to believe that you don’t belong—whether you succeed or fail.

  While Black and Latino students are not intellectual frauds, the education system often transmits messages that suggest the opposite. A belief that intelligence is inherited and “fixed” and using culturally incongruent measures that continue to illustrate, symbolically, a hierarchy of intelligence will only continue to reinforce cognitive misrepresentations.

  —Dawn X. Henderson

  I started to experience intense impostor syndrome in my graduate program. At my undergraduate university, Florida International University, I had graduated at the top of my class. I made the dean’s list almost every semester, and I had a side business of writing papers for people for money. I could ensure an A or B grade to all my clients. I felt pretty invincible in my Hispanic-Serving Institution; I felt seen in my undergraduate experience because I felt validated through grades and accolades. I adapted to college very well, despite being the second person in my family to attend college in the United States and having to learn to maneuver this space without much guidance. Seeing professors who spoke broken English with heavy Spanish accents meant that I saw myself through hearing the familiar.