For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts

by Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez

  I realize that there are ways that my intersections function to oppress me, and that simultaneously these intersections function to privilege me—depending on whatever circle I am in. This white woman, for some reason, had picked me as someone she wanted to align herself with, and she had also picked our Black professor as someone she wanted to vilify. I could not stand aside while she asked me to choose between the white students in my program and this cherished Black female professor.

  I had finally understood that anti-Black racism meant that this professor’s ability to be where she was in her career was and is a feat, and there was no way in hell I was going to participate in her demise in any way, shape, or form. So, I told our professor everything, and this moment was important for me because it was the first time I had chosen to defy whiteness. Before this moment, I was a passive and therefore a complicit participant in the oppression of Black, undocumented, and LGBTQIA+ people as a way of self-preserving—or so I thought. This moment was the beginning of me becoming who I am today, and while this small act of telling my professor about the email may seem unimportant, for me it carried a lifetime of aligning myself with whiteness and finally saying, No more and never again!

  After I told this professor about the email, she brought it up in front of the entire class and explained the racism implied in the note, and she made a lesson out of this incident. I learned a lot about what it meant to be Black in academia in that class, and what it could mean for me if I decided to stay in academia. I learned that there would be ways in which my Brownness would be weaponized against me, and there would be ways in which my Brownness would be weaponized by white people against other BIPOC, and I needed to decide where I was going to align myself and who I was going to stand alongside. This was my moment of reckoning with whiteness, and it changed everything for me. Anti-Blackness is a worldwide phenomenon. And no matter what my intersections are, the fact that I am not Black means that I am an outsider who can choose to stand alongside Black people and fight for their liberation. Or, like many non-Black Latinas, I can allow my voice to be used against Black communities. Non-Black Latinxs may align themselves with whiteness for any number of reasons; to feel less oppressed, to be liked by white people, or to hope for safety within white supremacy. Because I am not Black, my “mediating color” can be used for good, or it can be used for the advancement of whiteness.

  I call this my moment of reckoning with whiteness because I have idly stood by and not done enough for our gente in the past; I have also not done enough even for my own family. I was finally beginning to accept the nuances of race and ethnicity, and I could see the various ways that I benefited from my intersections, depending on the context.

  I had idly stood by when mi papi had begged me to translate things growing up. I resented my parents’ lack of English proficiency because I thought our moral goodness was measured by our ability to assimilate. I had idly stood by when the undocumented immigrants in my school were teased for their accents. Up to this point, I had done nothing but try to focus on my own education and emancipation. But now, while still fighting for all those things I wanted for myself, I knew that I also had to fight for others.

  I had become so fixated on getting a seat at their metaphorical table of insiders that I never stopped to think that maybe what I needed, and what other BIPOC needed, was to create a whole other table. We needed a space where we did not have to change parts of ourselves to become insiders. Put another way: fuck their table, we are going to make our own.

  As a non-Black women of color, it is up to me to reject anti-Blackness even when I can stand to benefit from it. I remind myself constantly that no matter how enticing whiteness can seem, and how much safety can be promised through proximity to whiteness, those allures are all an illusion, and history has shown that time and time again.

  To protect myself from whiteness, I decided to change the name that white people could use when referring to me.

  In graduate school, I began to go by another name, a name other than my birth name. In many Latinx households, there is this inclination to find white/American names more attractive, so a lot of people in our communities will be named Zoe, America, Cindy, and my legal name, Priscila. Often, these American-sounding names will be spelled differently, for a few reasons including lack of English proficiency.

  So, while mi papi is named Ricardo Enrique Mojica Fonseca and mi mami is named Blanca Azucena Rodríguez Jarquin, my siblings and I all have these more white/American names. I am named Priscila, my brother is named Richard, and my little sister’s name is Linda. In our communities, none of that is seen as odd; it is a common practice of what I call a fascination with whiteness. I come from a family of Rosa, Candida, Ilse, Carolina, Lesbia, Álvaro, Jesarela, Arelis, Alcira, Nicolás, Dara, Jemima—I come from names that do not sit well in an English vernacular. These names demand attention. They perk up muscles in your tongue that otherwise go unused and require more effort to pronounce.

  My name was something of a challenge for me growing up, because while I can say my name in Spanish perfectly, I struggle with pronouncing the Americanized version of it. And so, when I moved to Nashville, all the white students could say my name “better” than I could in its English, Americanized version, and it felt like my name was taken from me. So much was taken from me in white spaces—like my pride and my ability to believe that I was valuable—that I decided to take my name back from white people and only allow people I love to call me by my legal name.

  In the middle of my master’s degree, I requested that everyone call me by my chosen name of Prisca. Because I felt like the white gaze had consumed me, I decided to take the parts of me that felt more sacred and protect them from it.

  I told white people to say my name. My full name. I told them to let my name weigh heavily in their mouths and let it tangle their tongues. I told them to say: PRISCA DORCAS MOJICA RODRÍGUEZ.

  No, I tell these white people, do not call me P, or anything other than PRISCA DORCAS MOJICA RODRÍGUEZ.

  My birth name is Priscila Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez. Priscila with one L, because in Spanish—my native tongue, my first language, the language of mi mami and her mami—I am Priscila, con una L.

  In the United States, people like to think that because you are on their conquered land, they can take your name and make it fit into their language. This is covert colonization—to take my Spanish-spelled name and claim it without any regard by turning it into Pur-si-lah instead of Piri-si-la. There is a difference. Mi mami says my name how it is meant to be said; mi papi says my name how it was always intended. I do not know who the fuck Priscilla pronounced PUR-SI-LAH is.

  In 2013, I changed my name to a name that you could not colonize as quickly, a name you had to ask twice to fully hear: PRISCA.

  And I also started to add my middle name into the mix. Not just the middle initial. And my mother’s maiden name. Because Latinxs are pressured to shed those long names in the United States, because that is what Americanos do. Americanos do not know that in Spanish, in the list of last names, the last name after the middle name is the official last name. We rank our names by order of importance. Here in the United States, if white people see a long name like ours, they will pick the very last name and decide to use that as our primarily last name.

  So I have been called “Priscila Rodríguez” often. I have been called this by employers, by journalists who have written about me and my work, by doctors, by therapists, and by my professors. And this is a common mistake that occurs, but the real injury is in the lack of inquisition that goes into the white colonial tendency of overriding people’s cultures with white people’s own. So, in 2013 I started go by Prisca, and then I added the already legally listed surname of mi mami’s family, because I wanted to be seen and not absorbed by my colonizers.

  I want you to struggle with my entire name. This is political and strategic and filled with resistance, because you have butchered my name long enough and you accepted me as a nice Latina for too lo
ng.

  So, you will say my name—my full name.

  And I will watch you struggle and not let you call me anything else, because it is the least I can do when other white people attempt to recolonize my body and my name on a daily basis.

  My name is PRISCA DORCAS MOJICA RODRÍGUEZ. I would rather hear them struggle through pronouncing that name than hear them butchering the name mi madre gave me.

  So, when I introduce myself as Prisca and white people struggle, I breathe with more ease, because they can butcher Prisca all they want but they will never have the privilege of saying my beautiful Spanish-spelled name with their tongues.

  I am

  PRISCA DORCAS MOJICA RODRÍGUEZ.

  I have chosen to not allow whiteness to erase any parts of me, especially my name.

  Give your daughters difficult names. Names that command the full use of the tongue. My name makes you want to tell me the truth. My name doesn’t allow me to trust anyone who cannot pronounce it right.

  —Warsan Shire

  Allowing myself to step into my intersections with pride is something that has had positive effects in my life, despite the constant bombardment of racism that I still experience. I feel protected by my chosen name, as I still live in Tennessee. I feel shielded from the pain that used to come whenever my name had been taken from my native tongue and shoved into the spin cycle of American English.

  Intersectionality sits in this very uncomfortable place for white people because intersectionality asserts the validity of identities, of several identities, other than whiteness. It tells white people that we are different, and that difference is good for us. Intersectionality matters because white culture is most comfortable when erasing us with colorblindness. If we don’t assert the validity of our differences, we slip into our consumption and erasure.

  Intersectional methodology seeks to create visibility where there often has not been any. Names, for BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ folks, can be life-giving. So when a BIPOC and/or LGBTQIA+ person tells a white person their chosen name, the white person must comply. What we are asking for is very basic. What we are asking for is for them to acknowledge our agency to decide how they will approach us. This is a human right that we have to demand, since they have decided to ignore it for this long.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE MALE GAZE

  I remember the day I stopped depending on the male gaze. For me, it is very specific. I clearly remember the day my friends and I performed a ritual, a celebration, a healing circle to help me transition from being a subject of the male gaze to relinquishing it.

  It occurred in 2014, after I had left my ex-husband. I was struggling, living without the security of male companionship. I felt betrayed by my fundamentalist Christian upbringing, which had instilled in me patriarchal values about marriage. I felt alone. I was devastated. Although if you saw me around campus—since I was still in school when my marriage dissolved—you would think I was handling it well, and possibly even happy about the change. But my good friends, mis hermanxs, knew.

  My friends would kidnap me in the middle of the night and insist that I eat, because they knew I had stopped eating. They held me while I cried. They slept over the first few days, because they knew that I couldn’t cope with sleeping alone. They helped me move into my new place and made demands of my roommates, telling them to paint my room another color. My friends weren’t successful, but it was still beautiful to see them advocate for me.

  When I divested from the male gaze, I felt horrified, even when I knew that it was for the best. When I divested from the male gaze, I felt alone, even when I was not. When I divested from the male gaze, I spiraled, and it took a strong community to gather around me and bring me back.

  So we did a ritual. In my queer Black and Brown friend group are healers, pastors, justice seekers, and activists, and they understand symbolism. Some even studied rituals for their doctorates. Our ritual was a gathering to perform an act of defiance, as a symbol of dismantling my commitment to the male gaze.

  It was early spring 2014. The weather was still a bit chilly in the evenings. All my close friends gathered; I had summoned my greatest loves to transition with me. My friend DJ hosted us, because their home had a firepit. We needed fire for our ritual. With my friends around me—Alba, Andrea, Lis, Tatiana, Carlin, Anna, and DJ—we played drums and tambourines and burned my wedding dress.

  I brought all of my grief to that fire and asked the fire to take that from me. I wrote my grief onto a piece of paper and threw it in the fire. I did not want to grieve the thing that had controlled me my entire life up until that point. My total devotion to the male gaze had to be burned with flames.

  When I understood that, at a wedding, everyone stands up when the bride walks in because this is considered the most important day of her life, I knew that I needed another ritual to cancel out that initial wedding ritual. A transition had to be made.

  My wonderful friends danced around the fire and celebrated me. I knew that was what I needed and wanted, but I still could not completely silence what I had always been taught about needing a man in my life. My wonderful community celebrated me, held me—even when I was not sure if I could in fact be safe outside the male gaze.

  After many tears, we all walked into DJ’s home and drank hot tea to warm us up. We gathered and allowed the moment to linger. Staring at nothing, thinking about everything, I found myself experiencing immense pain, but I also felt profoundly loved.

  This ritual was a way for my friends to walk me back to earth, back to myself, and it was the most loving act I had ever experienced. My platonic friendships accompanied me through one of the scariest moments of my life. And that night, my friends helped me unload the burden of the male gaze onto that fire.

  My ex-husband was not the problem. The problem was that I believed what I had been taught: that successful womanhood meant having a successful hetero marriage. I got married precisely because of that belief. So the ritual had allowed me to release all of that.

  I had watched all my expectations of successful womanhood burn, right alongside my intricately beaded white wedding dress. I stared at the dress to confirm that it had completely disintegrated. I needed to see all those dreams destroyed, physically, to begin to heal from them.

  Functionally, oppression is domesticating.

  —Paulo Freire

  That wedding ritual, that acknowledgment of marriage being a fulfillment for the women in hetero relationships, is still felt today. Existing “successfully” as women means adhering to patriarchal structures. We risk losing a lot in our rebellion.

  I grew up attending a very conservative, nondenominational, Spanish-speaking charismatic church. If that does not already indicate the layers of misogyny that shaped me, let me elaborate the ways. The church we attended was a patriarchal fundamentalist church, which is the type of church that believes that men are the head of the household and guide the lives of everyone in their home. Men are responsible for guaranteeing that the household follows everything in the Bible, which is the word of God, in order to ensure entrance into heaven upon our deaths.

  Men decided how to interpret the Bible, and their word was the word of God and therefore indisputable. For example, according to my father, tattoos were banned because “la Biblia dice,” although sometimes this was not true at all. The same text that references tattoos also talks about kosher foods, but my father ignored the latter part. There are selective readings behind what verses were to be followed strictly and which were left open to interpretation, and men got to decide all that freely. Theological interpretations were only invited through a pastoral presence. Pastors are believed to be chosen by God, and God only chooses men.

  Congregants were kept in line in their devotion entirely through fear. I grew up constantly hearing about demonios and Satanás. I have no real memories of Walter Mercado, because that channel was quickly changed on our televisions at home. Mi mami called him endemoniado, and I believed it. I feared being exposed to demons.
In childhood, magic feels possible and imaginations run wild, so I ate it up and believed it all with conviction.

  If you were not aligned with God and what God wanted for your life, then you were aligned with Satanás. And I feared Satanás. The psychological warfare was intense, and I often had nightmares about being in hell and meeting Satanás. I experienced sleep paralysis a lot, and when I would cry to my parents about this, I was told that it was a demon trying to enter my body. I was taught how to rebuke the demons, and I did just that whenever I experienced sleep paralysis. They linked my sleep paralysis, a natural phenomenon, to my possible demonic possession, and well into adulthood I believed this to be true.

  We also grew up understanding the concept of the capital R: Rapture, or the end of times. It was common knowledge that one day soon, God was going to come and take the true believers to heaven while the pagan non-Christians were left behind and tortured by demons as punishment for their sins. Now as an adult all that sounds silly, but as a child and a teenager everything in my life was about not getting “left behind” or appearing like you would be—because that would raise some flags within this Christian community of people who took it upon themselves to police one another constantly out of “concern” for everyone’s soul. Women were policed more than men, and young women were considered to be the most susceptible to sin.

  My parents had both been raised Catholic but converted to a more charismatic Evangelical Christianity before my siblings and I were born. And we basically lived at our church. My papi was a pastor, my brother played drums in the worship band, and my sister and I were on the worship dance team. We defined ourselves by our Christianity. We defined our morals through the church. We were only allowed to befriend other God-fearing Christians. Everyone outside was aligned with Satanás.