I switch my tone toward my dad; it is a matter of distance for me. I refer to him as mi papi and then as my father or my dad, real quick, as I attempt to shield myself from him. Mi papi would never harm me, but my father and my dad did, often.
I utilize Cynthia Enloe’s Bananas, Beaches and Bases quote, which can be found on p. 108. Enloe writes about gender and militarization, the connections between war and the subjugation of women. I write about this book with reverence because it gives back humanity to communities that are already dehumanized by virtue of being nonwhite. I highly recommend this text.
The final hooks quote is found on p. 14 of The Will to Change.
Finally, in terms of understanding emotional abuse, I recommend reading Marti Tamm Loring’s Emotional Abuse: The Trauma and the Treatment (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998). And in terms of summing up the tales of La Malinche, I recommend the anthology edited by Ana Castillo, Goddess of the Americas/La Diosa de las Américas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe (New York: Riverhead Books, 1997) and the anthology edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 4th ed. (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015). I have more references in my bibliography, and for those references I have Dr. Maria Paula Chaves Daza, who teaches at Bard College, to thank. She was the first person who introduced me to the Malinche texts and who I reached out to for sources on it all, and she sent me numerous sources that were instrumental.
NOTES FOR INTERSECTIONALITY CHAPTER
I dedicate this chapter to Monique. Monique is a girl I met as a teenager. Monique joined our youth group when we took a trip to the local Christmas fair. It was nighttime when she arrived, and the senior pastor’s son thought she was beautiful. I remember they spent the whole night chatting and flirting, and everyone was buzzing about it in the way that only people who value pastors and their children do. The next morning, at church, she showed up with her mom and dad. In the daylight, Monique had a five-o’clock shadow, as hairy girls sometimes do if they do decide to shave their faces. The senior pastor’s son never spoke to her again, and the entire youth group whispered about this for years. Everyone made fun of Monique behind her back, but she had never done anything to us but be friendly. Monique’s only crime was that she was a hairy girl. I wrote this chapter for her, and for all the hairy girls with equally gut-wrenching stories of being unchosen.
Kimberlé Crenshaw is the first person to come up with the term intersectionality, and introducing this chapter with a quote from one of her writings felt like a good way to position the entire chapter. This particular quote can be found in her article “The Intersection of Race and Gender,” in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, ed. Kimberlé Crenshaw et al. (New York: New Press, 2010), p. 375.
A primary source for this chapter is a book by Rebecca M. Herzig, Plucked: A History of Hair Removal (New York: NYU Press, 2016). The first quote I use from this source can be found on p. 130 of her book. This text unveils the history of hair removal throughout time, including the presumption of inferior status of Indigenous people by the hairier Europeans and the torture of Brown men in Guantanamo by removing their hair. It is a dense read but a necessary one, in terms of understanding how we got to a place of valuing female hairlessness. The second quote I use of Herzig comes from pp. 9–10. I found this text when it was recommended by gender-nonconforming author, performer, speaker, and fashionist@ Alok Vaid-Menon and quickly purchased my own copy. I learn a lot outside of academia through public scholars like Alok who make accessibility their brand.
I am also heavily informed by Patricia Hill Collins’s book Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). That book is a great accompanying piece of theory that will complement a lot of what I write about for any reader interested in further unpacking intersectionality.
When I write about the ways that my intersections work to privilege me, that specifically comes from Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic’s Critical Race Theory (p. 58).
Gringo is a colloquial term utilized matter-of-factly to speak about white people in my community. However, the minor intonations can add a lot of context for the word. I am utilizing “-ito,” which is a diminutive of the word and asserts care and love.
Myra Mendible’s “Introduction,” in From Bananas to Buttocks (p. 7), provides the in-betweenness quote.
When it comes to intersections, I became aware of my own through other storytellers. A wonderful series of essays I was inspired by comes from the anthology Presumed Incompetent. Through these essays, I found my own voice. A particular essay I love, on feeling special as a Black woman, is written by Serena Easton and titled “On Being Special,” in Presumed Incompetent (pp. 153–154): “Racial interruptions were everywhere—constant reminders that I was different and unequal, and didn’t belong.”
When I say that I had a reckoning with whiteness, it does not mean that I ever identified as white. Rather, I had passively allowed whiteness to tell me that Indigeneity was not worthy by rejecting that part of my family line, much like everyone else in my family did. It meant that I functioned within the limited notions of meritocracy and individualism, both by-products of a white-supremacist and capitalist society. Investing in whiteness was how I ended up buying bootleg colored contacts. It has nothing to do with being white, but rather aspiring to be accepted into whiteness.
I write about conditional acceptance in this chapter as proximity to whiteness—and I name it as an illusion. A recent example can be seen through COVID-19. East Asian communities experienced a blanketed assumption of their culpability for the virus, and various think pieces that came from the Asian community described feeling the white gaze in a way that was dangerous and dehumanizing. Frank Meng, “Asians Under COVID-19: ‘Yellow Peril’ or ‘Model Minority’? Neither,” The Spectator, May 7, 2020, https://spec.hamilton.edu/asians-under-covid-19-yellow-peril-or-model-minority-neither-79d2969a0bc. This puts into question the model minority label since it is obviously conditional.
NOTES FOR THE MALE GAZE CHAPTER
The first quote I use in this chapter is from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (p. 51). As I have said, this entire book utilizes Freire as a foundational text, and it is written reflecting that.
When I write about rebelling against the status quo of respectable womanhood, I am aware of the risk in that rebellion because of my lived experiences, but I am also informed by Mikaela Pitcan, Alice E. Marwick, and danah boyd’s “Performing a Vanilla Self.” Explicitly, in this article we see that women have to maintain their social and economic capital through good behavior, otherwise we risk more than just friends—we risk everything.
The Bible reference on tattoos is found in Lev. 19:26–28 (NIV). Another Biblical reference I utilize, related to the terms ayuda idónea, can be found in Gen. 2:18: “Y el SEÑOR Dios dijo: No es bueno que el hombre esté solo; le haré una ayuda idónea.”
A great reference and book I used to back up my own stories is Elizabeth E. Brusco’s The Reformation of Machismo. If you also grew up in a conversative Christian Latinx household, this book will be very insightful, and might invite you to look into a new argument around machismo and Christianity that I know I had not considered. Not everything I recommend is in agreement with what I write about, but still informs it regardless.
bell hooks is one of the more relatable authors I have read in terms of interpersonal experiences with the patriarchy. The two quotes I use are from “Understanding Patriarchy.” I live from this quote from this text: “Patriarchy is the single most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation.”
Two Latina theo-ethicists I am heavily informed by, whose theologies impact my own work, are Marcella Althaus-Reid and Ada María Isasi-Díaz. This includes Isasi-Díaz’s book, En La Lucha/In the Struggle: Elaborating a Mujerista Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004). Whenever I am pushing against traditional theologies, I am using the knowled
ge of Latina theologians who have written extensively to undo toxic patriarchal theologies from hurting more Latinas.
The line about “ethnic spectacle” is informed by a cinematic journal that talks about Carmen Miranda. I have learned that a lot of the spicy Latina stereotypes are a product of interventions, and Carmen Miranda was used as a means to that end. I recommend Shari Roberts’s “The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat.”
The idea that intellectual womanhood must be stripped of feminine markers has a long-documented history, and this comment is bigger than me—it comes from a deep understanding that women are not given proper attention and respect in academia. And for that particular professor, gaining respect meant complicity, which is my main critique of white women’s survival strategy: complicity. Angela P. Harris and Carmen G. González, “Introduction,” in Presumed Incompetent, pp. 4–5:
Among researchers and scholars, the romance of the brilliant, lonely genius in pursuit of Truth—even if the heavens should fall—still lingers around promotion reviews. These revered characteristics, however, are not only associated with the hard sciences. They are also traditionally linked with masculinity and are understood as the opposite of femininity. For instance, rationality is prized at the expense of recognizing—or being able to deal with—emotion (Harris and Shultz 1993). On every campus, tasks associated with femininity—such as teaching—are valued less than those associated with masculinity, and the most prestigious disciplines are those with the fewest women. This means… that people with female bodies or feminine self-presentation are likely to be excluded from certain disciplines or understood as inferior.
NOTES FOR WHITE FRAGILITY CHAPTER
This chapter’s primary texts are Cheryl E. Matias’s Feeling White, Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, and Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic’s Critical Race Theory. The quote I open the chapter with is from Matias, Feeling White (p. xiii). The other quote I use from Matias can be found on p. 43. But all the aforementioned authors can be used as reference for just about everything I state in this chapter.
The quote I use from Audre Lorde can be found in “The Uses of Anger,” p. 282. The symphony of anguish in this article can be found throughout the entire book, and this chapter highlights it while summarizing it all.
The assumption about Amy Cooper’s political affiliation can be found online easily. I found some information on this in The Root. That is not to say it is an indisputable fact, rather that I am not the only person pointing out that her seemingly liberal politics do not match her actions, and with that logic and my own experiences I build on the argument against the anti-racist liberal white person.
I should note that when I talk about “immigrant friendly” South Florida, I do not want to idealize South Florida, but I do agree that white supremacy is most dangerous when white people are the ones enacting the violence. Although BIPOC can still subscribe to white supremacists’ ideals, the violence they enact is on a different scale, although dangerous still.
I utilize a quote by Amy Cooper, which can be found in a CNN article, “White Woman Who Called Police on a Black Man Bird-Watching in Central Park Has Been Fired,” CNN, May 26, 2020, https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/26/us/central-park-video-dog-video-african-american-trnd/index.html.
The final quote I use is from DiAngelo and can be found on p. 5 of White Fragility.
NOTES FOR DECOLONIALITY CHAPTER
The primary source for this chapter is a book by Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). To fully understand decoloniality, and make your own assessments of it, I implore my readers to pick up a copy of this book. It is dense, but it is great for this type of work. The first quote I use to open the chapter can be found on p. 5. The second quote can be found on p. 3.
The story of my mami I first wrote for the Latina-owned publication BoldLatina.
When I talk about intellectualism and its distance from so many people, I am not the first to come to that conclusion. Dr. Constance G. Anthony said it best in her article “The Port Hueneme of My Mind: The Geography of Working-Class Consciousness in One Academic Career,” in Presumed Incompetent (pp. 300–312): “In a certain respect, being working-class and becoming an academic is an oxymoron. Academics aspire to genteel, professional success; working-class life rejects the genteel for the overt—at times even rude—acknowledgement that life is difficult. Academics revel in a world of carefully chosen words and phrases; subtlety and indirection are prized. A well-delivered, witty repartee at a party is always rewarded. At a working-class party, it would be much safer to say exactly what you mean in a direct way.” This sentiment is felt by academics of color, BIAOC, throughout.
When I talk about mi mami’s spirituality, I am heavily informed by the “Introduction” in Voices from the Ancestors: Xicanx and Latinx Spiritual Expressions and Healing Practices, ed. Lara Medina and Martha R. Gonzales (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2019), pp. 3–20, specifically pp. 4–10. The put-your-pee-outside trick rests on the idea that sweet-smelling pee meant that there was sugar in your pee and therefore your body was not doing what it needed to do to regulate that. Rural and poor people have always found ways to keep one another alive when vital medical supplies and doctors were not around or did not exist, and this is just one of those strategies.
I use the word “modernity” because it is a word within the decolonial field that signals developing. It is a coded word used to imply improvement, though that is contested throughout this chapter.
Again, this chapter is informed by Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, because this entire book is a pedagogy of the oppressed through storytelling.
For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts Page 25