For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts

by Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez

  A primary text I learned extensively from is Pauline Rose Clance’s book, The Impostor Phenomenon: Overcoming the Fear That Haunts Your Success (Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 1985). Impostor syndrome was not understood to be an exclusively BIPOC experience, so I turned to its originator to find my footing. Racialized impostor syndrome is what I am talking about throughout this text, but in order to do that I needed to understand where it came from and what impostor syndrome originally meant. Some of these terms evolve from other terms; that is how language works and how we evolve as a society. I use a specific quote of Clance’s that can be found on pp. 25–26. The next direct quote I use can be found on p. 26.

  The psychology of impostor syndrome is something I write about a lot in this chapter, and it is all informed by a series of articles. One of those articles is by Jeremy Bauer-Wolf, “Feeling Like Impostors,” Inside Higher Ed, April 6, 2017, www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/04/06/study-shows-impostor-syndromes-effect-minority-students-mental-health. In terms of how hard it is to maneuver racialized impostor syndrome, I referenced Kristin Wong’s article, “Dealing with Impostor Syndrome When You’re Treated as an Impostor,” New York Times, June 12, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/06/12/smarter-living/dealing-with-impostor-syndrome-when-youre-treated-as-an-impostor.html. I quote Dawn X. Henderson from her article, “Why Do Students of Color Feel like an Imposter in School?,” Psychology Today, April 11, 2017, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-trajectory-race/201704/why-do-students-color-feel-imposter-in-school. In terms of understanding what is happening the minds of those suffering from impostor syndrome, I am informed by Sakulku and Alexander’s “The Impostor Phenomenon” (p. 77).

  Additionally, I was heavily informed by Mikaela Pitcan, Alice E. Marwick, and danah boyd’s “Performing a Vanilla Self: Respectability Politics, Social Class, and the Digital World,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 23:3 (May 2018), pp. 163–179, doi:10.1093/jcmc/zmy008. Although this article informs my respectability chapter later, a lot of this work is intersectional by default, since I embody a lot of marginalized intersections.

  I mention a series of experiences in my graduate program that made me feel inadequate. In this story, I am bringing in the pain that is mentioned in Angela P. Harris and Carmen G. González’s “Introduction,” in Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia, eds. Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs et al. (Louisville, CO: Utah State University Press, 2012), pp. 1–16. This entire anthology highlights the ways that Black, Indigenous, and women of color are made to feel inferior in academia, not because they think they are incompetent but because they are assumed to be. I highly recommend getting a copy of this book if you are a BIWOC and struggling in academia.

  When I say that perfectionism, meritocracy, and individualism are wrong, I am informed by Kenneth T. Wang et al., “Are Perfectionism, Individualism, and Racial Color-Blindness Associated with Less Cultural Sensitivity? Exploring Diversity Awareness in White Prospective Teachers,” Journal of Diversity in Higher Education 7:3 (2014), p. 213, doi:10.1037/a0037337. Racism and white supremacy are the underlying factors of these ideologies, and Tema Okun has a really accessible explainer for what white supremacy is and what it includes, titled, “White Supremacy Culture,” Dismantling Racism Works, last updated June 2020, www.dismantlingracism.org/white-supremacy-culture.html.

  When I write about the hostility of the white gaze, I am talking specifically about the ways that racism has kept Black and Latinx folks from getting loans, finding apartments in the nicer parts of town, and so on. I am informed by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic’s Critical Race Theory (p. 12). I am also informed by Cheryl E. Matias, Feeling White: Whiteness, Emotionality, and Education (Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers, 2016). Referring to makeup as war paint is not my original thought, rather one that is pervasive in queer spaces and femme spaces. Julie Bettie has an entire book talking about the aesthetics of Latinas as a means of regaining autonomy. This book is titled Women Without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).

  My liberation talk at the end of this chapter is informed by Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (pp. 48 and 58).

  When I talk about white people’s intentions, I am referencing Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018), specifically p. 43. DiAngelo writes about “aversive racism” as the specific type of well-intentioned racism. I do not use this term in my story when I write about it, but it is what I want my readers to understand. This type of racism is not less harmful because of its intentions, and that is what I am trying to get across in this section.

  When I write about makeup and church, I am informed by my own experiences but also by a well-researched concept that links Christianity and sexism, specifically found in Marcella Althaus-Reid’s From Feminist Theology to Indecent Theology: Readings on Poverty, Sexual Identity and God (London: SCM Press, 2004), p. 7.

  Finally, the Latina myths and tropes are informed by my readings of Myra Mendible’s “Introduction: Embodying Latinidad: An Overview,” in From Bananas to Buttocks: The Latina Body in Popular Film and Culture, ed. Myra Mendible (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), pp. 1–28.

  NOTES FOR MYTH OF MERITOCRACY CHAPTER

  When I note that people seemed “American,” what I am implying is the nationally constructed identity of the United States as seen in television shows like Full House and movies like Home Alone that were popular during my childhood. When I write about American national identity, I am talking about class and race. The white middle-class identity is an American identity that is purported as the representation of us all. I have not been the originator of this idea; rather, I am just writing about it without attempting to convince my audience. But you can find more about this in Shari Roberts’s “‘The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat’: Carmen Miranda, a Spectacle of Ethnicity,” Cinema Journal 32:3 (January 1, 1993), pp. 3–23, https://doi.org/10.2307/1225876.

  In this chapter, I reference Bill Keller a lot in terms of understanding class and class differences. His book Class Matters (New York: Times Books, 2005) is foundational for this chapter. Another primary text for this chapter is David K. Shipler’s The Working Poor: Invisible in America (New York: Vintage, 2005). I read this book in my first Ethics in Society class in my master’s program. The long quote I use from Shipler is found on pp. 5–6.

  In terms of resources that helped me frame class with my own experiences, I read Julie Bettie’s Women Without Class. That sociological study transformed me and took me to my most profound aha! moments in terms of whiteness and class performance, and I highly recommend it.

  I also highly recommend the podcast by the New York Times with host Chana Joffe-Walt titled Nice White Parents. This podcast explains how school desegregation has meant segregation through gifted programs and other programs that keep the white and wealthier students in smaller classrooms with better teachers.

  NOTES FOR POLITICS OF RESPECTABILITY CHAPTER

  The quote after the story that begins this chapter is from Audre Lorde, found in “The Uses of Anger” (p. 284). What I am trying to do is bridge the exhaustion written about to the chapter theme around respectability politics. This quote explains the exhaustion and its root cause, which I explain for the remainder of this chapter.

  An interesting thing to note is that I write that I had to justify occupying my seat, ironically due to assumptions made about affirmative action. I describe this because that is what is often explicitly stated and implicitly implied in social spaces by the white students toward the students of color, yet white women are the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action, which no one is discussing. I am aggressively addressing the affirmative action implication by naming it, but I know that it is not even the case. More about this can be found in Bettina Aptheker’s “Foreword” in Presumed Incompetent (pp. xi–xiiii).

  One of the primary texts for this chapter is Mikaela
Pitcan, Alice E. Marwick, and danah boyd’s “Performing a Vanilla Self.” Through this article, I found the origins of the term “respectability politics” and use a direct quote from it toward the end of the chapter. The quote is by Evelyn Higginbotham.

  My understanding of how respectability was used as a strategy comes from Fredrick C. Harris’s article, “The Rise of Respectability Politics,” Dissent, Winter 2014, www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-rise-of-respectability-politics.

  Understanding class performances and Latina stereotypes means reading Jillian Hernandez, “‘Miss, You Look like a Bratz Doll’: On Chonga Girls and Sexual-Aesthetic Excess,” NWSA Journal 21:3 (2009), pp. 63–90, www.jstor.org/stable/20628195. In this article, Hernandez addresses the white and middle-class construction of the US identity, and with that knowledge I can name my sense of displacement that continues past my migration. I use a quote from this article within my chapter, which can be found on p. 66. Additionally, all I understand in terms of reclaiming the chonga subculture is through Hernandez. My deep understanding of this article led to me writing the chonga manifesto at the end of the chapter.

  Another important text for this chapter is Cynthia Enloe’s Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). On p. 99, Enloe specifically talks about respectability in relationship to invasions, in colonial times but also in in times of war. There, she discusses colonial white women imposing Victorian codes of femininity as morally superior.

  The double consciousness reference is specifically to W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of “double consciousness.”

  I utilize terms like civilized intentionally, because as someone in the Indigenous diaspora I find good behavior to align with civility and the anti-Indigenous connotations that word carries. I am informed of this by Delores S. Williams in Sisters in the Wilderness (p. 114), where she writes that since the aim of the pioneer was to transform the wilderness into civilization, this was “the reward for his sacrifices, the definition of his achievements, and the source of his pride. He applauded his successes in terms suggestive of the high stakes he attached to the conflict.” Of course, the wildness could not be transformed from “savagery” to order without destroying its natural arrangement. Transforming the wilderness not only meant dealing with the natural environment; it also meant civilizing “savage” humans associated with the wilderness. Such as the Native Americans identified with the wilderness of America and the African people allied with the “wilds” of Africa. Slavery was rationalized and argued as the proper “civilizing process” for these “savage” people. And when slavery failed—as it did with Native Americans—women and men became, for the Euro-Americans, the proper strategy for subduing wilderness people.

  This book and this particular quote reflect a larger narrative of subjugation through civility.

  I do mention that the Bible was used to silence and shame me in significant ways. So when I write about “God-fearing women,” I am referencing that to point to a particular Bible verse that was weaponized against me to keep me in line, which is found in 1 Tim. 2:9 (KJV): “In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with braided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array.”

  I write about theologies in a singular form, since the field of theology is seldom understood as a field of plurality—when in fact the study of theologies teaches that there is not one theology but endless amounts of theologies. Yet, we are regularly taught one and that one theology is usually antiquated and European. Marcella Althaus-Reid writes about this on p. 21 of From Feminist Theology to Indecent Theology. Most liberation theologians are acutely aware of the ways that mainstream Christianity disregards liberation theologies for the whiter, more dogmatic older theologies.

  When I specifically write about bilingualism, I am utilizing the traditional definition of code-switching, which means to switch from one language to another as a fully bilingual or trilingual person, or anyone who is not monolingual. For this, I referenced Katja F. Cantone’s Code-Switching in Bilingual Children (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 2007).

  I use author Juliana Delgado Lopera’s quote from their article titled “Spanglish Isn’t a ‘Wrong’ Form of English—It’s How Great Stories Are Told,” Teen Vogue, May 1, 2020, www.teenvogue.com/story/spanglish-isnt-wrong-form-of-english. I especially loved this use of bilingualism, and Delgado Lopera is also from Miami, which feels very specific to my own experiences since Miami is a such a bilingual city.

  I write about mestizo briefly; for more information on that topic refer to the notes on the colorism chapter.

  The tropicalization of Latinas is a particular trope that binds Latinas to bodily excess. More of this can be found in Myra Mendible’s “Introduction” in From Bananas to Buttocks.

  Because a lot of these chapters intersect, race- and racism-specific text in this chapter can be found in Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. Specifically, the school-to-prison pipeline reference can be found on p. 92. Another text that supports this prison pipeline is found in Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic’s Critical Race Theory (p. 13).

  The Celine Parreñas Shimizu quote can be found in The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 5.

  NOTES FOR TOXIC MASCULINITY CHAPTER

  In this chapter, I do not mention mi mami often, yet she was a passive participant in our terrorization. This chapter is not about her, but that does not mean that her complicity is overlooked. Defending any abuser is violent, and her participation in it is not ignored—rather, it is too complex and nuanced for this particular book. I do hope to write about that entire relationship in its own full-length book.

  I want to contextualize my church upbringing, because framing it as conservative does not do it justice, since conservatism casts a wide net. My particular home church taught that virginity is to be protected, though only in women, and it hosted purity balls for daughters and dads. My family in Nicaragua goes to this home church also, and my uncle did not allow his daughters to cut their hair or shave unwanted body hair well into their puberty years, until they individually rebelled. Women often were discouraged from dressing in ways that would be considered sexy, so form-fitting clothing was looked down upon. We attended church four times a week, regularly. Once for Sunday, which was a daylong activity. Then Saturday for youth group, Wednesdays for small groups, and random days in the week for the worship team to practice, as well as the dance team, and any performances like plays. Men ran the church as the appointed leaders, and their wives cleaned and cooked for the congregants. When I am talking about strict binary expectations based on assumed gender, this is what I mean. There was an assumed superiority of manhood that was bred into this particular type of conservative Christian church.

  My primary texts of reference for this chapter are bell hooks’s All About Love: New Visions (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001) and The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (New York: Washington Square Press, 2004). In terms of my definition of patriarchy, I suggest hooks’s article “Understanding Patriarchy” (available online through Imagine No Borders, https://imaginenoborders.org/pdf/zines/UnderstandingPatriarchy.pdf). hooks is the most profound author, personally, for understanding what it means to deal with toxic, violent men.

  When writing about girls and dads, I am supported through hooks’s The Will to Change. Throughout the chapter, I explicitly state that being a daddy’s girl is a status that we are socialized to desire. Daddy’s girl is one of the first respectable feminine categories that girls are inducted into, if their home has a present father. When I refer to my dad as a provider, I am drawing from p. 2, where hooks writes, “Patriarchal culture has always taught girls and boys that Dad’s love is more valuable than mother love.” I do not create theories as much as I learn from them and retell theories in my own stories, explaining the theory through experienc
es.

  When I write about my father’s pride, I am informed by Elizabeth E. Brusco’s The Reformation of Machismo: Evangelical Conversion and Gender in Colombia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004). This particular text is rather helpful in terms of understanding that the term machismo is not the same as patriarchy—rather, it is closer to toxic masculinity by definition. Machismo is about the power and violence within a patriarchal society and as a result of that society. I opted to not use the word machismo intentionally, since there is an assumption that machismo is a Latin American problem, and that American men know better. To avoid that misunderstanding, I used the closest word to machismo I could find, toxic masculinity, so as to not absolve US-born men from blame. The quote I use toward the end of this chapter is from Brusco’s The Reformation of Machismo (p. 80).

  My main concentration while obtaining my master of divinity was in liberation ethics. So, when I am talking about “good” and “bad,” I am doing so with the knowledge that Americans define good within a limited, Judeo-Christian understanding, which is what I mean by a narrow definition of good and bad. Within liberation ethics, we attempt to imagine new spaces outside the Christian binaries of good and bad, which has been an overall exclusive framework rather than an inclusive and thus neutrally ethical one. What the binaries generally exclude are female autonomy and acceptance of LGBTQIA+ folks.

  There is something to be said about obtaining a theological degree from an elite institution as a Brown Latina immigrant from a fundamentalist context, and that is that while at school I spent my entire time defending my communities. Churches like the one I was raised in are considered low church, and the more progressive churches not-so-coincidentally are generally known as high churches (not counting Catholicism, which is known generally as high church). As someone from a low church, I have resented this labeling due to the hierarchy that it implies about our “uneducated” theologians and pastors—who also happen to be Black and Brown. Yet, when I returned home, I spent my time defending myself and my decision to study theology as a woman and was able to do so based on the education I had received. Knowing that I was always fighting for myself and my communities, at every juncture, is something I have not fully been able to reconcile—and you can sense that tension within this chapter. I leave that tension there, because maybe the readers will find some ways of making sense of this chaos that results simply because of all the intersections I embody.