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

by Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez

You are the sun, the moon, and the motherfucking stars.

Remember that there are systems in place that stay in place because we are so busy doubting ourselves.

Remember that you deserve to be here, and you deserve to take up space, and you deserve to make demands of your schools, workplaces, governments, and institutions. For all of us.

I have to be soft and kind and approachable, because for Black and Brown people to succeed, to play the game, to make it, we need to make white people feel “comfortable” around us.

As a woman, as a smart woman, my duty is to signal to people that I am smart and somehow, accidentally, I happen to be a woman.

White people will go out of their way to claim themselves as victims, as if the entire system is not built for their benefit.

In the end, I found that being myself meant losing some friends.

Good Christian women are well-behaved, because God is watching. It is not a coincidence that white people benefit from our good behavior, and that their theologies are what we are taught today.

I want working-class feminine Latinas to know that we do not have to shed our identities to be allowed into elite spaces.

Seeing someone with tattoos, long nails, and bold clothing who is still successful—that creates a counter-narrative so that more of us can actually thrive.

Te vas a joder si andas fregando con esa chavala.

Si sigues molestando a esa nina, vas a tener problemas.

And even when we act as we should, as soon as a campus-wide alert is sent about someone who is dangerous, the color of your skin will determine if you are protected or approached with suspicion.

We had to learn to have sharp edges; we have been chiseled into a weapon of self-defense.

When I wing my eyeliner, outline my lips, put on my miniskirt and crop top, I am adorning myself with my war paint and armor. Because to you, I am not human. But it’s okay, because to me and to those who understand: I am a goddess.

But you see, this entire side of the world belonged to our ancestors before yours even arrived, so although we can speak your forced languages, we will speak them however we please. You’re on stolen land anyway.

And in a land that tries to ignore our existence and push us into living as the least of these, our visibility is power. Because you cannot erase what you have no control over, and you cannot control those who have never bowed down to your notions of a hegemonic America.

We are loud, we are proud, and we do not back down.

I affirm myself.

same. I have learned to survive whiteness, and living without all the weight of seeking their approval.

Mi papi got to align himself with his children because he was not home often, and mi mami was the parent to all of us, it seemed.

Mi papi was El Proveedor, and mi mami did everything else.

The men were respectfully engaging me; therefore, they seemed to feel entitled to have those conversations with me. They had no awareness of how traumatic the years of misogynistic church teachings might have been for me. They didn’t perceive that my clipped responses and wary stances came from a place of distrust and pain.

but I will not put myself into situations that trigger my own trauma for anyone’s entertainment, and so I did not engage and did not cooperate.

Women tend to do a lot of work to justify the actions of the men in our lives, while our men do little to nothing to acknowledge our pain, much less try to alleviate it.

When I first encounter any authority figure, I’m still visibly insecure. I tend to assume that I bring nothing to the table.

In a patriarchal society, the focus of the story is on the evils and emotions of the crying women, rather than on the male aggressors and the injustices that brought about these tragedies. And that is why I tell my own stories, because I am not my anger, my fear, and my sadness. My emotional responses to trauma are just a small window into the larger experiences I have lived through.

We call mujeres locas, lloronas, putas, and a slew of other terms that are specifically meant to shame women for not following the rules and for speaking up for themselves.

I hope that we can move away from being a society that blames women instead of protecting them.

I hope that people continue to reclaim the pantheon of Indigenous deities who were discarded or vilified for the preferred Christian God.

Yet, still, my heart has always wanted to embrace you, even if you did not embrace me, and that is the real tragedy.

This is for the girls who tried everything to eliminate their eyebrows once they discovered tweezers. This one is for the girls who obsessed over trimming and maintaining their eyebrows, only to find out that thick eyebrows were the new trend for white girls.

This is for the all the girls who have had to love themselves despite everyone telling them otherwise.

This is for all those tears you’ve shed and all that work you’ve put into loving yourself.

I see you. I am you, and I am still learning and unlearning all the Eurocentric ideals of beauty that fueled my own self-hatred.

Black, Indigenous, and women of color do not have the option to separate their oppression due to racism from oppression due to sexism; they experience both, from all communities.

White people are used to having their experiences constantly centered as the norm; so much so that they cannot read any other experience as a legitimate human experience. By utilizing an intersectional framework, I am decentralizing this normative culture. This story is for people whose intersections mean that they are women with darker genetic traits and a predisposition for hairiness.

I wrote this for the BIWOC who had grown up tormented for something that they could not change about themselves.

I wanted those folks who are not familiar with this experience to be confronted with and feel the discomfort of being excluded, perhaps for the first time in their lives.

I want my readers to enjoy the magic of an intersectional story that does not prioritize whiteness.

A failure of mainstream feminism is that it is white and elite.

A woman of color’s self-love is political and radical, and it is unsettling for the status quo because she is choosing bravely to dismantle the narratives of racist aesthetics against her. So when people bully a girl of color for being content and satisfied with her appearance—a reality that is subjected to racist, sexist slurs in cosmetic industries—and when they tell her to be “humble,” which is normative code for “Nah, you’re not special, you’re not light and delicate in a Eurocentric way,” then she has every right to chew their hearts and spit them out. A non-white girl’s self-love is revolutionary and anyone trying to water it down needs to back right off. —Mehreen Kasana

Because feminism has not actually figured out that women can also have other layered identities, feminism will continue to fail to see all women.

Discovering and embracing the complexities within myself meant that I no longer had to hide. That is why intersectionality matters.

Your very American name will be said properly in all your spaces, and even my own spaces, and my name will be consistently butchered. So, I expect you to at least hold my name, my entire name, with the same protection and care that has always been given to you due to the color of your skin.

Being Nicaragüense is my birthright, much like having the ability to never fear being killed by a cop on a simple traffic citation is yours.

White people taught me about my otherness, and then I challenged them with it—because white people will still claim colorblindness to avoid admitting their own privileges.

I valued my ability to look like a million bucks while wearing secondhand clothing, but I soon realized that this is not a skill that is celebrated outside my community.

You cannot force someone to see your humanity after they have already decided you are inferior.

Understanding just how completely we live in a segregated society meant that I finally had the information I needed to take some weight off myself for constantly feeling misunderstood.