And still, at some point I began to realize that white people did not want me in their elite spaces no matter what. After performing beyond what was expected of me, I began to realize that none of my sense of belonging was real or for my betterment; instead, it was all for their comfort. I was the diversity that would enhance the experience of white students on campus. I would be the Brown friend that white people could use to assure themselves that they were not racist.
Being respectable was killing me. Performing perfectly was not serving me. So I had to go through, and admit, some other firsts: I was the first in my family to attend counseling. I was the first in my family to be vocal about my suicidal ideation. I was the first in my family to leave my husband even when he did not hit me.
Being respectable was killing me, and actively attempting to disembody myself for this illusive notion of respect was getting me nowhere. So, keep your perfect. Keep your accolades.
Keep your trophies. Keep your fellowships. Keep your grant money. Keep your scholarships. Keep your degrees and your awards, if they will only be given to me when I behave well and in accordance with what you think I should do.
I am exhausted.
Oppressed peoples are always being asked to stretch a little more, to bridge the gap between blindness and humanity.
—Audre Lorde
In my experience, the politics of respectability intersect with my race, class, and gender. I will parse out the ways that I experience respectability. And I will tell you how I reject respectability through those intersections, as a reclamation practice through chonga subculture.
“Respectability politics” was coined by a Black woman, Evelyn Higginbotham, and it was intended to describe the experiences of Black women and a strategy they have adopted to subvert stereotypes. My resistance to respectability politics is not a criticism of what has a been a survival skill; rather, it is how I have chosen to move through the world, consequences and all, as a non-Black person of color.
We all adhere to a version of respectability politics—“we” being BIPOC. We all switch our speech, accents, behaviors, appearances into more palatable ones around normative culture, which I will rightfully refer to as white culture. For example, professional spaces, which were created by white cis hetero men, have only really been infiltrated by women, openly LGBTQIA+ folks, and BIPOC in very recent history. So, everyone who is outside the normal parameters learns to code-switch so as to affirm our sense of belonging—to ourselves but mostly to white middle- and upper-middle-class America.
Whenever I have explained respectability and its performance to anyone who is not a BIPOC, they have consistently perceived this act of self-preservation as disingenuous. Specifically, when I have told white men about respectability politics, the word “tease” has come into the conversation. It is an old sexist trope, that a woman who is thoughtful in how she maneuvers spaces is untrustworthy. When, rather, what is happening is our attempt to thrive in the world these men have created. The idea that women are to behave differently in different contexts for the sake of getting jobs, raises, better grades, invitations to events, married—that all seems preposterous to men. Yet so many of us do it on a daily basis.
Some of us switch to survive in white spaces, and some even attempt to thrive in the depths of that switched persona. Respectability politics also dominates the policing of women and how we define someone who is marriage material or not, always under the umbrella of a heteronormative patriarchal society. Since colonization, women have been expected to be modest and not even hint at their sexual desires.
The expectations around respectable womanhood are very much something that women experience. Then if you are a BIPOC who is also a woman, that double consciousness dominates how you move through the world. For me, that particular policing came from school dress codes, which overly policed girls and seldom boys—unless those boys were wearing what white people deemed as gang-affiliated attire, which is usually just code for anti-Blackness. This policing of my appearance also came from church and what was considered God-like modesty. Later in life, my own sorority would police how we would behave and dress when “wearing letters”—which is another shit show all on its own and could be its own book, if I am being honest. Being a girl, being a woman, in this society means contending with respectability at every event, at every institution, and in every space. Women know that, in any space, you will be judged for who you show up as and how you present yourself.
Once I understood that code-switching in white spaces meant presenting myself as civilized by white standards, I could not just continue to move in that direction. I felt the weight of everything. I could recall hearing mi mami talk about my abuelita dying too soon because she cared for everyone but could not stop to care for herself, and I knew I had to stop this generational curse of prioritizing how everyone felt about me, rather than how I felt about myself. I had this wild idea: What if I wanted to thrive, as myself? What would thriving fully as myself mean?
I remember when I intentionally began to embrace my working-class femininity in academia. I was warned against it. I was told to mute myself and I was told that because I am a woman, I am going to be considered incompetent—and that it was my job to be twice as smart and twice as witty. It was my duty to prove myself, but I did not want to live like that anymore.
I did not like being told that I had to be all those things for the comfort of men. So, slowly but surely, I began to step into my femininity. I began to get my nails done, a thing I had rejected doing since middle school because I was told only cheap women wear long acrylic nails. I began to do my hair, something I had been told would lead me to sin because women who were vain were not God-fearing. I began to wear bright colors and heels. I didn’t want to have to convince anyone that I deserved to be respected. I wanted to embrace the feminine culture I had been told explicitly to stay away from. I wanted my humanity to be valued, regardless of what I wore and how I spoke.
I knew this was setting myself up for failure, but I wanted to try and figure out where I was actually safe and where I was not. Divesting from whiteness required me to investigate respectability. I wanted to know who I could not trust, and I wanted my body to test my surroundings. I wanted to dress as myself and see how others responded. If white people responded poorly, then I knew I needed to get away from that academic space, or that romantic relationship, or that friendship. Up to that point, I had presented myself in the most palatable, nonthreatening, decent, and modest way; up to that point, I had worked hard to put white people at ease. Now I wanted my body to work for me and not for them.
Latina bodies are read as out of control and used against the communities they “represent.”
—Jillian Hernandez
I wanted first to prove to myself that the standards for being a respectable Brown Latina were ridiculous. I wanted to dress the way I wanted, and I wanted to test my friends and colleagues to see if they would still respect and accept me. In the end, I found that being myself meant losing some friends.
And not just white friends. Even BIPOC and some queer folks kept me at arm’s length, revealing that they had bought into respectability politics and so did not want to be associated with me. People in my parents’ church began to whisper about me.
I vividly recall one visit in Miami, when my parents asked me to go to church with them. They weren’t trying to save my soul; the invitation was part of a family ritual, Sundays being family time. Growing up, we had always attended church together—first to arrive, last to leave. I had no real desire to step back into a place that brought on waves of negative memories, but that question of self-definition kept lingering: What would it mean to show up as myself in that space? So, I picked out a short, tight red dress, and I headed to church with them.
I remember walking in and being greeted by all my old acquaintances. It felt like I was the prodigal daughter coming back. Growing up, I had been the dance leader of the church’s dance team and a huge presence in that community for
years. And here I was, retuning as an entirely different person, and I was not going to allow them to define how I stepped into this space.
I sat in the pastoral seats, right in the front row—a seating arrangement I had always resented because of the hierarchy it created in this already toxic environment. And then it happened; to protect the senior pastor from my indecency—my short, tight red dress—an usher attempted to lay a white cloth over my lower body, and mi mami was not having it.
She was sitting next to me, and I remember seeing her face react before I noticed what was happening. I recall her reaching over and then past my legs, then I realized she was looking past me and her face was getting redder and redder. I saw her yank that white rag out of the hands of the usher before it even touched my legs. I never even saw who the usher was, I just saw her face: mi leóna.
Like I said, we were in the front row, and everyone could see us. Everyone did see us, and I am sure she heard whispers about her blatant defiance later, after I returned to school. But mi mami knew and knows how I feel about church, and she was not going allow my return to be tainted by the purity culture within it.
Mi mami held me on that day, and I knew mi mami understood me and understood that what I was trying to do was bigger than just that one moment. I wanted to be myself and expect more than the crumbs I would have gotten if I had adhered to respectability. Code-switching is for the benefit of white people, whether they are in the room or not, and in this Spanish-speaking, Latinx church, the demands of respectability became evident. Good Christian women are well-behaved, because God is watching. It is not a coincidence that white people benefit from our good behavior, and that their theologies are what we are taught today.
But church was not the only place where I was pressured to hide parts of myself to render my Brown female body into something more palatable. I remember hearing what other Latinas were saying about me behind my back in grad school. I recall people keeping their distance from me, seeing peers visibly roll their eyes when I entered a room, friendships that never flourished because the Latinxs in those spaces did not want to be associated with me, people in my community refusing to speak with me. And this taught me hard lessons around the fickleness of feminism within elite academic spaces.
I now dress more feminine as a daily practice, in order to embody the dual identity of being smart and feminine. I want working-class feminine Latinas to know that we do not have to shed our identities to be allowed into elite spaces. Seeing someone with tattoos, long nails, and bold clothing who is still successful—that creates a counter-narrative so that more of us can actually thrive.
I hope, through my example as a Latina who rejects the white gaze and still makes a living in elite spaces, I can make it easier for someone else to be respected without first being required to dim themselves. Not only am I a woman of color experiencing misogyny through the demands of respectability, I am also bilingual, which adds another layer. Code-switching, which is often required to gain respectability, has a deep history that includes bilingual people who have had to switch between their two languages.
I become a different person when I speak Spanglish. I slouch my shoulders, my legs part, and my hands and shoulders become a part of my language expression. My overall posturing in Spanglish feels like coming home and taking off my bra.
At my essence and at my happiest, I speak Spanglish fluently. I came to the United States when I was seven years old, and my parents never learned English. I have always spoken Spanish at home. English is the language I use in school, and I am comfortable in both languages for different reasons. While Spanish is my first language, I also speak English. American English has insider and outsider codes, and “good” English demarcates insider knowledge and access to insider privileges. Despite the United States not having an official language, there is value placed on people who speak English; the age-old Freudian slip always rings true when a xenophobe proclaims, “Speak American!”
I speak English well and can even claim some fluency, but all that drops off when I am expected to understand sarcasm and idioms. I do not always catch the minor intonations and will often take something meant ironically literally. That is how insiders can and often have noticed my outsider-looking-in position within the English language. It is my code-switching poker tell.
Code-switching is not a benign form of respectability politics; it is not an extra set of skills that BIPOC happen to have. When you demand that BIPOC speak in a way that is palatable to white audiences, that demand supports white supremacy.
Black folks who may be more comfortable with African American Vernacular English (AAVE) are often required to change how they speak in white spaces, to seem safer and avoid making white people uncomfortable. Immigrants and bilingual folks of color who may be more comfortable in their native language are often required to speak unaccented English in white spaces, to seem safer and avoid making white people uncomfortable. Everyone has to perform for white audiences, making white, middle-class status and privilege the norm, even if that is not the lived experience of most Americans. Even when speaking English, regional accents or accents that come from speaking multiple languages get toned down for the comfort of white ears—a lot of BIPOC call this their “white voice.”
The term “white voice” seems to imply that only white people speak well, which is not the case. When I say I am using my “white voice,” it doesn’t mean that I agree with the assigned hierarchy of acceptable speech. I use my “white voice” because I have to adapt in order to exist and thrive in a white, capitalist society. I gain advantages when I sound white at school, at work, even when I visit my family. I am not saying that my “white voice” is better; in fact, I am not placing value on that skill at all. At least by calling it what it is, I can demand that listeners understand that I’m using speech that is designed to erase me.
To accept something outside of myself as superior would be to accept my inferiority—which is really what is happening when I code-switch. Over the years, I knew I needed to somehow resist those very tools that had helped me succeed in white spaces, because success should never require my own erasure. So, I decided to speak Spanglish.
I was with one of my good friends, Lis Valle. She was driving us somewhere, and her then-teenage son called. He was doing some errand and needed to use her credit card. Lis had to keep her eyes on the road, and so she asked me to take her wallet and her phone and read off the card numbers to her son. As I read them, I switched from Spanish to English without skipping a beat, as I often do with close bilingual friends.
Her son laughed on the other end of the line, and he said: “You can read them to me in one language.”
And I shouted back, “No! Spanglish is the language of my people.”
I was being somewhat tongue-in-cheek in the moment, but the more I thought about it after, the more I know this to be true. My ancestors were Indigenous, and without much consent involved, Spaniards came and created this new raza: mestizos. The mixing of Spanish and Indigenous people resulted in a large majority of the population in Latin America. The language of mestizos is primarily Spanish.
Spanish is my home language; it reminds me of tajadas con queso. Spanish reminds me of where I come from, but I also speak a slang Spanish that brings me specifically to a certain neighborhood in Managua, Nicaragua, called Chico Pelón. I construct sentences like a Nicaragüense, sentences that do not make sense to Spanish speakers from other countries, like: Te vas a joder si andas fregando con esa chavala. Were I to use a more dominant, palatable Spanish, I would say: Si sigues molestando a esa nina, vas a tener problemas. I make deliberate choices even with simple words like “sandals”; in Nicaragua we call those chinelas, but I realize that the palatable Spanish wants me to say sandalias.
Spanish is the language of mi mami and mi papi, and how they say my name in Spanish makes me feel safe: Priscila, Priscilita, Prisi, Pris.
Spanish is also the language of oppression, and I am aware of that reality constantly. Wh
en I hear other Spanish speakers express frustration toward US-born Latinx people who do not speak Spanish, that rings especially true. We forget that we were force-fed Spanish by Spanish people, Europeans. Spanish is the tangible reality of our colonization.
Conversely, Spanish is also a language of liberation, because what our countries have individually done with it is artful. Tell me you do not get goose bumps when you hear the beautiful Spanish spoken by someone in Puerto Plata, or by a Jinotegan kid, or even by a Cundinamarca-born person. We have taken this thing that was imposed on so many of us, and we have transformed it into a beautiful expression of survival.
When you learn to dream and think in both languages, when your migration has scripted two languages into your essence, you learn to feel safest with those who can speak both fluently. Those people get me. They understand what it means to translate complicated documents for their Spanish-speaking parents, abuelxs, and tixs. They understand what it means to grow up too quickly because you were reading court summons, filling out government aid documents, or just hearing an English-speaking doctor talk about your mami like she deserved whatever illness she came in with due to her lack of English comprehension. Learning to take the blows for your parents, and learning not to translate the ugliness that comes with language hierarchies, means you cannot pretend those hierarchies do not exist.
Bilingual people understand that English-only speakers never had to unlearn their native language, never had to have their cultura taken from them.
Spanglish doesn’t come with a grammar book, a class or a dictionary. It is in the air, existing only for those who have developed an ear for it.
—Juliana Delgado Lopera
Those of us who speak Spanglish fluently know that sometimes you will not know the name of something in one language or the other, which means that one side has exposed you to books while the other has exposed you to love. I can make declarations of love in Spanish that will usually make my partners swoon, because I learned to amar apasionadamente in Spanish. And I can fight with my words unlike anyone else fights in English, because I had to learn to fight and protect myself and mi gente in that language.
For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts Page 10
