I am the product of my parents’ migration and their sweat and tears, and although mi mami does not understand me, she believes in me, because she believes in herself enough to fight. And her fight is what I carry.
She has redefined what it means to raise “good” kids, because her kids defied her original definition. She has adapted and she has outsmarted the rules and the indoctrination. Mi mami, in embracing me today in all my flaws, has defied a family history of shunning kids who went against the grain. Mi mami, in embracing me today, has defied herself, and so she has reinvented herself. The mami I grew up with is different than the one I know today.
The one I know today looks at me in my eyes when she speaks to me, and she is mine as much as I am hers. The mami I know, I respect with every ounce of blood running inside of me. Decoloniality gave me that. It gave me a new appreciation for mi mami.
I am not better than mi mami, but I have opportunities at my fingertips that she could never even dream of—and I cannot forget that it is mi mami that I have to thank for my new possibilities. Because while both parents moved us here, she was the one who raised me and protected me.
When I say I am mi mami’s revolution, I mean I am who she could not become. I am because of her, and everything I do, I do for her. I no longer want the approval of whiteness, the acceptance of the male gaze, the acceptance of the church, the acceptance of coloniality.
Rejecting individualism is part of that narrative. Embracing re-existence is how I can thrive despite what is force-fed to me and to our society at large. Re-existence gives me wider perspectives of our joined humanities.
[Re-existence] is the redefining and re-signifying of life in conditions of dignity.
—Adolfo Albán Achinte
To re-exist, we have to reimagine life outside of coloniality. We have to reject our colonizer’s need to name and define us BIPOC. Decoloniality is a tool, a worldview, one that is always ready to be activated. When we divest from one colonial institution, like the assumed superiority found in elite university education, we know that there are still all the other institutions that exist right alongside it. We cannot undo centuries of colonialization, but we can resist its control over us. Recently, I was verified on Instagram. This sounds like phenomenal news through the colonial veil. Verification adds a semblance of legitimacy. A PhD also imparts legitimacy in the eyes of the empire. These may seem like accomplishments with their own color-blind merit. But status or praise or education was never the goal—legitimacy is the goal, or so we are taught.
However, legitimacy is granted by proximity to whiteness, as measured by white institutions and by white systems of power. Legitimacy means being seen by white people, being acknowledged by the white gaze.
Think of the discovery of the Americas: Even that word “discovery” implies that these lands had not already been discovered by Indigenous peoples long before colonizers came. The idea that the Americas were only discovered once whiteness arrived means centering Europeans. White people decided that their whiteness alone entitled them to the power to name and claim and discover. That is because colonizers view their reality through their eyes, and legitimacy comes with fitting ourselves within their gaze—the colonizers’ agenda. Coloniality is rooted in the colonization of the Americas and beyond. White people claimed themselves as the original legitimizers.
Colonizers are the gatekeepers of legitimacy. And this continues to be the case today online. I have seen white creators get that same legitimacy with half the effort. Meanwhile, I have traveled to more than one hundred campuses to speak on racism, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, and the complexities of Latinidad since 2014. I created one of the more radical and empowering pages online for Latinxs in 2013, when there was no real representation for the vastness of Latinidad: Latina Rebels. I have been featured in countless publications online and in print, was invited to the White House in 2016 for my work, and have written more than two hundred articles that have been published online since 2015. But my audience is Black and Brown, so I went unseen. I was not legitimized year after year. Even for that White House invitation, I had been unseen by the white gaze. It was a young Latina, Dulce Ramírez, who was interning at the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics, who sought me out. It was she who brought my name up in conversation during her first week as an intern. Somehow, while planning the first ever “Latinas in the US” summit, hosted by the Obama administration, Dulce mentioned me. But usually we Brown and Black people do not get that kind of access.
And still it took seven years of doing this exhausting work before Instagram reached out to me in 2020. They wanted to “provide support” because they had just discovered me. The idea that people’s work is not worth respect because it fails to cater to whiteness is rooted in colonialism. They will claim they discovered you—and delegitimize the years of work and blood, sweat, and tears spent on centering Brown experiences—because they have a different threshold of accomplishment for Brown folks. The problem is not that my work is not legitimate; it always has been and always will be. Understanding decoloniality is understanding that whiteness is not the ultimate source of validation, no matter how much they have screamed in our faces that we must give them that power.
Decoloniality is about taking back the power that was stolen from us. The problem is that there are not enough of us in the rooms that make these decisions about legitimacy. Additionally, the problem is in the word itself, and to re-exist means to redefine it. So, I do not feel elated or grateful that I am now “legit” through the white gaze, which in this instance is Instagram. Rather, I am happy that I have never catered to the white gaze and, somehow, I got a blue check mark. But that blue check mark is very overdue, and so long as other Black and Brown creatives continue to be shadowbanned online or otherwise ignored, we are not free. I am not free.
If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.
—Lilla Watson
When we stop trying to find validation in the eyes of our colonizers, when decide not to strive and beg for cookies from them, then we will never be satisfied with their crumbs, no matter how they package them. When we shed the individualism of white supremacy, we can actually begin to create communities among BIPOC. We can then refuse individual incentives, and instead work toward our communal benefit.
For me, that invitation to the Obama White House in 2016 was another moment of clarity. I remember feeling conflicted because legitimacy is alluring. I loved thinking that that invitation meant I was not a fluke. Being taken seriously was and continues to be important to me, but my definitions of success have changed drastically since.
When I received that invitation to the White House, I immediately called mi mami and papi. I had them on speaker, and I told them in my most vainglorious way that Obama had invited me to the White House, as if it was not just some committee of people. But despite all my efforts to pitch my legitimacy to them, all I received in return were crickets.
I was dismayed, because as someone who has never been able to impress her immigrant parents, all I wanted was their recognition. I often battle internally between what the white gaze would find impressive versus what my immigrant, working-class parents find impressive. And the conclusion is always that they are not the same audience. I know that I need to stop treating my colonizer’s accolades like they define me, because they do not, especially not to my parents.
But still, I am a person who has to continually learn and relearn how decoloniality has impacted all aspects of my life. So on that day when I called to share with them my big news, from Obama himself, I repeated myself. Maybe they hadn’t heard the first time. Then mi mami said: “Que bueno!” And then she went on to ask me about something irrelevant to the enormity of the news I had just shared. I hung up and I cried, because I could not wrap my mind around their indifference. Younger me would have chalked it up to sexism and their overall
expectations of me due to my gender. But today, I know that their indifference was bigger than that. I have begun to realize that I cannot serve two gods at once; I cannot expect my parents to have the same expectations for my life as American white people. There was no reconciling these expectations.
What I mean by serving two gods is that I cannot fully embrace the white gaze when I have immigrant parents who have had to adapt differently to it. My parents accepted westernization to survive, and I have had to assimilate to potentially thrive. We are not the same people, and my accomplishments are not even on their radar because those accomplishments are not really possible for people like them. People like me—proud, immigrant, working-class BIWOC—we do not get invitations to the White House. So, re-existing for me is finding ways I can utilize my faux legitimacy to create a life of dignity for my parents and for others like them. In their flourishing, I can find real legitimacy, real validation, and healing.
What I had done was replace one colonial institution, my very conservative fundamentalist church, with another colonial institution, academia. I made the mistake of thinking one was better than the other, when in fact they function in the same ways. Both of these colonial institutions are meant to indoctrinate BIPOC for seemingly our own good, and recompense in both of these worlds is only found through total devotion, an unquestioning loyalty. Learning to reject all that I had assumed was my identity was hard, but it was necessary for me to begin to truly live.
[The oppressed] discover that without freedom they cannot exist authentically.
—Paulo Freire
My successes are nothing if they are mine alone. And my legitimacy means nothing when I earn accolades in isolation and without uplifting those around me. Decoloniality allowed me to finally understand that. I cannot claim that I can fully decolonize my mind and worldview; I’m sure that there are aspects of my life where I still cling onto colonial frameworks. But I am willing to do the work it takes to resist colonization when I do encounter it.
That is not to say that liberation is easy. In fact, it is the hardest series of awakenings that I have had to contend with. It is not fun to exist and stand firmly and proudly in the margins with both my body and my mind. It is painful to unlearn everything I had fought so hard to learn. But this is the work of liberation.
Because mi mami and papi are unimpressed with what has become of my life and my work, I have to keep rethinking why I am impressed with the work I do. I have to think about what it would take for me to no longer feel impressed by my own work.
I did not end up going to the White House that year; I took a deep look at myself and knew that accepting that invitation meant complicity. Obama deported more undocumented Latin American and Caribbean people than any other president in the history of this country. This is also not just about President Obama, but the history of the United States and how my own familial lines have been impacted by past presidents. This is about the acts of terror that US presidents have enacted on people throughout the world since the creation of the United States.
And because I began to see my legitimacy through a different lens, I knew that I could not endorse that presidency or any presidency through my presence. I intimately know what complicity can look like; I did it for the majority of my young life. By not attending, I wanted to ensure I signaled first to myself that I am ferocious, with or without them. I also wanted to inform the greater powers, through my protest, that I saw them and I knew their game. I also knew their game was rigged. But I am going to win without them.
The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.
—Audre Lorde
I utilize my White House invitation to signal my legitimacy to white people but never to signal my legitimacy to the people whose humanities are tied to mine. Mi papi and mami taught me that, and for that I am grateful. To the people whose liberation is tantamount to and tied with my own, I show you compassion and kindness, and I wrote this book for you. I call this my love letter to BIWOC.
I do not come from people who valued their worth in relation to their education. Due to migration and colonial frameworks for what is worthy and respectable, not all degrees transfer and not all careers in our home countries become viable in the United States. Mi mami never graduated college, and mi papi’s teaching degree means nothing in the United States unless he is able to go back to school to fulfill whatever arbitrary requirements are imposed by American exceptionalism. This is hard to do when you are the sole financial provider in your household and you have bought into the toxic idea that men need to work and women need to stay home to raise children. There is simply no time to transfer a degree when you are busy with surviving. So, education and degrees had no value in my household, because when you understand struggle intimately, you understand that those things are not created for your benefit.
I wrote this so we can build together, because to them we are not human, but together we can be unstoppable. Relinquish the lies they told you about yourself, and build outside their white institutions and systems of power. Let’s build with our communities in mind, en masse, and shut them out. They can keep the shrinking world they created for themselves; we were never wanted there in the first place. Decoloniality is woven throughout this book: Democratizing knowledge is a decolonial practice. Storytelling used to resist Western ideals and to resist the gatekeeping of knowledge is a decolonial practice. Refusing to use academic jargon, which was designed to confuse and obscure, is a decolonial practice.
Breaking hierarchies, dismantling allegiances to whiteness, scrutinizing the concept of legitimacy, and centering nonwhite people are all acts of decoloniality. Reimagining or re-existing is a decolonial concept that attempts to create a world in which our dignity as BIWOC remains intact. The living and breathing relationship that I have with mi mami today is a decolonial practice that I live out daily. Decoloniality is about divesting from colonial concepts, structures, and institutions as much as possible, even while knowing that colonialization is here to stay. Decoloniality is a form of resisting, and decoloniality is lived and experienced daily. Decoloniality requires that we fight, and I have a reservoir of fight left in me. But it also requires us to rest and be gentle with ourselves.
Plan for this to be a lifelong fight, because it is. And ensure that you have rituals of healing and significant ways of caring for yourself, to create a reservoir. Prepare for those moments when the wind gets taken out of your sails, because this will happen. The entire system relies on our complicity, and when we step out of line, we are destined to become targets. So find what your community needs, what your community values, and you will be surprised with how much you will learn.
I aim to work as tirelessly to continue to embrace my Brownness as I used to work to fit into whiteness. I hope to redirect that energy to create spaces for us, because I do not wish my experiences on others. I do not want to prepare people for the harshness of this world; I want to change it. Freedom is not a destination, it’s a communal journey.
May it heal you, may it challenge you, may it make you laugh, but most importantly, may it lead you back to you.
CONCLUSION
To gain the word
To describe the loss
I risk losing everything.
—Cherríe Moraga
I have struggled a lot with ending a book that is still being written. I believe that there is no summit when it comes to the journey toward learning and growing. Everything I learned in academia has been supplemented and expanded upon since I left, and there will always be more to learn.
It is hard to conclude something about systemic social ills, knowing that different strategies will need to be continually developed. There is no easy solution that is going to be effective at eradicating inequality forever; overcoming one injustice means having to turn to the next injustice. But since I must end this book, I will part with a few words.
Brown girl, this world does not want to see you survive it, so defy it and dare to thrive. And desah
ógate to stay tender and soft. Desahógate to shake them off you. Tuve que aprender new ways of existing, and desahogándome often. Self-preservation is one of my new skills that I will carry with me as I continue to heal and learn better ways to keep our communities safe.
Yo me desahogue because that is how I resist a history of silence and complicity. Me desahogue para incomodarme. Me desahogue so you can sample from my stories, and find your own.
Me desahogue to resist, because at some point, I began to create hierarchies where I devalued where I came from and chose to value intellectualism more than I valued anything else. Me desahogue to remind myself that my vulnerability and my community, not colonial institutions, will heal me.
Decoloniality helped me understand why I never felt safe in any space, and it helped me find peace in creating new spaces, for me and for us. Creating Latina Rebels was a decolonial practice. When I did not see myself represented, I did not wait for change. Rather, I made change that I could realistically do long-term. I learned to find my worth from my community, and not from white institutions. But that all took time, and it took years of unlearning colonial thinking in order to learn a new way of living: re-existing.
In my desperate attempts to assimilate and seem less different as an immigrant of color, I began to value myself through colonial terms. Colonization is about nation-states who dominate, kill, and oppress people to gain economic growth and power. In the Americas, colonialism was introduced through religion and conquest by European countries. To do decolonial work means to attempt to function outside of the social norms that exist today. Decolonial work attempts to reclaim some of the power that many Brown and Black people were killed to obtain.
For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts Page 21