For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts: A Love Letter to Women of Color

by Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez

DEAR BROWN GIRL… You are eternal.

You carry your cultura in your veins and academia in your heart.

But you must hold your parents in your heart as you dismantle the systems that have kept people like them down.

You belong entirely to yourself.

Accessibility is about power, gatekeeping is founded on the protection of power, and to all that I say: fuck that, because information that can change lives should never be hoarded.

Society has weaponized objectivity to silence us, to kill us, and to oppress us.

I do not write for white people; there are an endless number of books written for them.

I do not want to be a voice for the voiceless, I want to eliminate the barriers that keep people without fancy degrees out of important conversations.

Mujerista is a non-Black Latina feminist liberation theology, and part of this theory prioritizes the poor and disenfranchised above anyone else.

But learning through these books how to completely free myself from toxic theologies that had shaped me was a revolutionary act of self-preservation.

I speak the language of my colonizers and have adopted colonizer posturing through generations of forced self-erasure.

My oppression and subjugation are not in competition with Black and Indigenous people. Rather, I hope to fight alongside these communities.

And once we understand systemic oppressions and their violence, then we can begin to fight together against them.

Freedom is not a destination; it is a communal journey.

Voluntourists seem to forget history or strategically ignore it. Either way, we cannot reward ignorance, even if it comes dressed in the semblance of goodness.

It was the sort of kindness where they did not ask for our mailing addresses or phone numbers, because it was not about becoming lifelong friends. It was and continues to be about the feeling we gave them about themselves.

Their need to come and see our “thankful” and “joyous” faces is fundamentally wrong.

The church was seeking power, and do not let anyone fool you into believing otherwise.

Christianization was not a peaceful act.

The assumption that some people do not have the wherewithal to save themselves implies their assumed inferiority.

The idea that you must elevate someone’s existence means that you do not view them as capable of knowing what is best for themselves.

This traumatic act of devaluing entire groups of people based on racist definitions of civilized and uncivilized is still felt today.

To this day, Latin American mestizo people are largely anti-Indigenous, and this is a result of being told that Indigenous people are inferior and mixing means elevation.

We did not create anti-Indigenous sentiment; we were taught it, we were forced to accept it, and then we internalized and perpetuated it on our own. That is the insidious nature of colonization. Many people have survived by assimilating toward the dominant group’s values, and this internalized racism continues to traumatize entire nations.

The erasing of one’s Indigenous connections is common for a lot of people in Latin America.

My family tells stories to keep people alive even after they have passed.

Trauma is inherited.

Voluntourism is a multimillion-dollar industry, and it is run and sponsored by white Christian folks who seek to forget the sins of their forefathers.

We left her roots. A tree cannot live without roots, and neither can many people.

The white people I met there were well-meaning, well-read liberal folks who happened to know all the ins and outs of racism and colonialism, but somehow positioned those problems outside of themselves rather than taking ownership of them. They did not understand themselves to be part of the problem, and they did not see themselves as benefitting from these systems of oppression. Many saw themselves as strictly allies.

I realized we had little in common because they saw themselves as saviors while I was seen as someone who needed to be saved.

I had learned the language to name my experiences, which allowed me to heal from my childhood.

Nobody tells working-class students of color that our reality will not change much even after getting multiple fancy degrees. No one mentions in the “stay in school” propaganda that even when we have our education, the assumption of our inferiority persists.

When you are made to feel like you are not beautiful, and society teaches you that the worth of girls and women lies in their beauty, then you start to feel unlovable.

I will take up space, even when it hurts. I will stand with my head held high, even when I doubt myself. I will prove them wrong, even if I have to prove it all to myself first.

Most people are not able to work so hard that they are no longer poor.

machine. Gatekeepers use the myth of meritocracy to distract busy working-class and working-poor folks with so much self-blame when they fall short that they will not think to revolt against their oppressors.

I read often, because I found more education from my own books than from my teachers,

The assumption was that success looks white and middle-class, and I defied that not because I am smarter but because I rejected his perception of me.

Resegregating schools between AP students and regular students was a way to separate by class and race.

The only people who lose are the “regular” children, whose potential will never be tapped because their parents are poor, immigrant, Brown, or Black. They lose because they cannot outsmart a system meant to reward their docility and punish any resistance.

We were being taught that we deserved access, but were given no tools to critically think about why others do not get this same access.

We are taught that being poor is a reflection of your own laziness.

This was not a competition for who could work harder to get an A; this was about whose parents had provided their kids with enough access to succeed at this academic level.

This was about competing with students who never even understood the concept of gatekeepers. This was about students who felt entitled to extensions, help, compassion. This was about students whose teachers had invested time and energy in them. This was about students who had mentors before I even knew what that meant. These students were all the chosen ones, and I felt alone.

“You are not white enough to dream, so do not bother.”

The people who make it to these institutions to teach are often so disconnected from the experiences of working-poor people of color that they simply cannot help, because they cannot even fathom the full extent of systemic inequality in this country.

They cannot fix what they cannot understand, and in their ignorance they maintain those gates as strong and unmovable.

I was failing at whiteness, but that didn’t make me a failure.

Some days, you will forget that oppressed communities have been using laughter to deal with our oppression for centuries. Instead, you will be kicked out of restaurants and told you are being too much.