Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism (12 page)

 

In my early twenties Tía’s secret was divulged to me one night over lots of sake with my mom. As the story goes, Tía married for reasons of convenience at fourteen. She broke up her marriage a year later by simply walking out on her husband because divorce was not legal in Colombia until the early 1990s. She was a street-smart hustler: charismatic, undereducated but possessed with a prodigious entrepreneurial ambition. She constructed a house on a piece of affordable land she purchased next to a cemetery in downtown Bogota (in 1932 women were granted property rights) but had trouble finding tenants. So she agreed to convert the house into a high-end brothel and have it administered by outside parties. The brothel catered to an upper-class clientele of businessmen and politicians. With the profits Tía Esther bought herself a white Ford Galaxy and launched her own taxi service along with a
salsamentería,
a deli that her younger brother managed.

As she told the story, my confident, headstrong mother seemed overcome with pangs of guilt, unsure how such information might affect her only child who was on the verge of womanhood. To truly understand Esthercita, whom we had gotten to know during our visits to Colombia, my mother believed that I had to understand how my Tía was able to live the life she lived. This information was also something that my mother hoped I wouldn’t tell too many people. I was given a warning that neither my father nor my mother’s older sister had ever told their husbands Esthercita’s full story. But instead of feeling ashamed, I claimed it for myself, incorporating our family’s scandal into my new feminist theory—Esthercita had been involved in a cultural taboo and in my mind that was more inspiring than if she had been a sacrificial good girl. I found nothing wrong with her source of income.

For those new to Latin American culture and all its ironies— especially the deliciously anarchic attitudes of Colombia’s people—it is a bit difficult to explain the acceptability of my great aunt’s actions. In Colombia morally loose ladies and sacrilegious attitudes coexist with respect for the family unit. When listening to my mother’s story, I, a
gringa
born in the comparatively puritanical United States, had to remember that the norms here weren’t the norms in Esthercita’s homeland. Although sex work has been demonized by mainstream Western feminists, I still felt that its roots stemmed from women who were out to defy the status quo, as it often gave women a form of self-sufficiency and power, especially in economically stressed countries.

When I spoke to my Tía in 1999, Esthercita admitted that she had to conceal the brothel from our family for a while, as well as the many men in her life who simply wouldn’t understand her method of money-making. She was also thankful that our family managed to get over the initial shock rather quickly (Hell, nobody was truly a saint in my family). When I gently questioned her further about this time of her life, Esther didn’t flinch. She spoke about it freely and without shame. The prostitutes, she told me, were decent, well-dressed ladies from the city who were managing to make a living during an era when there wasn’t much out there for women except marriage. She also claimed she didn’t have much involvement—she was only the landlady and stopped by occasionally to check up and collect the rent. The brothel remained open for close to four years and allowed my aunt to support herself handsomely and travel. In Esther’s eyes her only faux pas was to trustingly leave money in the care of one of her male lovers, who lost a small fortune in a bad investment.

While my mother was telling me this, I had images of a Toulouse-Lautrec-like bordello with red velvet walls and women with feathered boas around their necks and nothing else on save for skimpy lingerie. To my dismay, I was later told that the brothel wasn’t as lavish as I had envisioned. The house was sparsely decorated with a common room and some austere bedrooms off to the side. It was more like Luis Buñuel’s
Belle de Jour,
where the catatonic Catherine Deneuve liberated herself in a brothel made up of tough but gorgeous Parisian women.

Though I was never able to philosophize about the pros and the cons of prostitution with her, I sensed that Esthercita viewed prostitution as acceptable—as long as a woman chose it for herself. But I strongly doubt if she would have ever prostituted her own body. Still, she openly enjoys talking about the dynamics of the relationship between men and women, telling dirty jokes, and she has kept an openly gay man as one of her lifelong best friends. She never had children or remarried and always barks at me about the absurdity of marriage. Had my aunt lived in a small town, it would have been hard for her to escape the stigma of allowing prostitution in a building she owned. But since she lived in the big city, she was able to dabble in the risque without many ever knowing her secret.

Because I have other choices to support myself financially, I find that prostitution can be degrading—it seems like a violation of my sense of intimacy. But I’ve come to accept that Tía Esthercita did what she had to do to establish herself in Colombia as a woman with high aspirations in the 1950s. Because she was involved in what people considered a scandalous endeavor, she liberated herself from the conservative confines of Bogota society. Her financial and social independence gave my grandmother first the shelter and then the courage to escape an abusive husband and run away with her two daughters to the United States. My own mother continued Esther’s legacy by divorcing my then-conventional macho father and going back to school, getting her bachelor’s degree and ultimately buying herself a shiny new white Camaro. These are the women that helped frame my understanding of feminism.

 

I have always viewed the women in my family as anomalies among Latinas. Because I was born in the States and raised in a white suburban neighborhood by my liberated mother, I wasn’t subjected to the traditional traumas of most Latinas. Many of my other relatives and
amigas
had to come to terms with living under a constricting, role-playing roof: “father qua head,” “mother qua helper.” My mother’s most famous speech, which she gave often, was about how I should never rely on men. Her own mother had supported herself and her two daughters as an immigrant in the United States by working factory jobs until she remarried again in her late forties. My
abuelita
exacerbated an already bad pneumonia while working packing foods in the freezers of a Howard Johnson’s in Queens, New York. She developed a lung disease that took her life at sixty-one while she was still full of vitality. Motherless, my mom at age thirty-six was now truly on her own.

Sometimes I see my mother as two women: my mother from the North and my mother from the South. “A woman must have a career to support herself, Adriana, because you can never rely on any man,” she insists. In my teens I thought her declarations of independence were simply antimen campaigns from an embittered woman looking for love—especially because I found the opposite sex so intriguing. Though I have seen my mother cry over a broken heart, she has always practiced what she preaches—she has traveled the world and made her voice heard in her community. This was my mother from the North talking during the take-home Burger King dinner conversations we had in between her full-time job and night classes at the local university. At that time she was studying for a bachelor’s, and I watched her blossom while reading about “zipless fucks” in Erica Jong’s
Fear of Flying
and reveling in her art classes—a skill she also picked up from my grandmother, who painted right up to her premature death.

My mother from the South showed me how to dance and feel beautiful. I marveled in watching her and her stunning single Colombian-American girlfriends dance to the sounds of the
cumbia.
My mom would seductively place one hand on her belly and let the other dangle out in front of her, pulsating to the scraping rhythm of the
guiro,
a percussive instrument made from a gourd that is used in many Latin American countries. Mom, being young and charming, attracted plenty of American men into our lives who showed us their versions of the good life—but all of them were intimidated by Mom’s no-bullshit streak and love for debate. While nobody in my circle of adolescent friends had the experience of recognizing their own mother as a sexual being, I was well aware of her uniqueness. Sensing my awareness, Mom thought it best that I learn about my own body and the wonders of sex through books like
The Joy of Sex
and
What’s Happening to My Body,
which she placed in my room one day. Talking would have been a nightmare, but she knew sex was a loaded weapon for someone like me, who hadn’t yet read the manuals.

Unlike many Latinas of my and previous generations, I didn’t have to confront
marianismo,
the counterpart for machismo. Symbolizing the primacy of the Virgin Mary in the female role, marianismo describes the self-sacrifice and rejection of pleasure women subject themselves to so they can please others, especially the men in their families. It is the belief that Latinas should live in the shadows of their men—father, boyfriend, husband and son. My parents’ divorce had the effect of liberating me from marianismo, although I didn’t realize it until my adolescence. They split up when I was eight, so my father didn’t get to witness my tumultuous sexual awakening firsthand.

My desperately concerned mother threatened me on several occasions with a trip to a Catholic boarding school in Colombia, which would set me straight. My mother and I knew this was pure theater (though I had visions of myself in a habit), because both of us regarded churchgoing as merely attending weddings, funerals and baptisms. But what really triggered my latent
marianista
tendencies were my mother’s threats to call my father and tell him about my sexual escapades with the paperboy. The notion of having my father find out that I had a raging libido seemed worse than any convent. Having been made to feel dirty by my mother and those stubborn as ink hickeys on my neck, I still enjoyed being Daddy’s little girl on my weekend visits with him. Latina guilt or not, I was also protecting a father who had been wounded by my mother leaving him. In the end she never called him, however, and I never set foot in any convent or preppy private school.

Years later, in my sophomore year of college, my father and I finally had it out over my overnight stays with a boyfriend. Fueled with the seedlings of early feminist scholarship, I told my father that I was not a virgin and called him a dinosaur for thinking that any one man was worth so much that I would sacrifice myself and wait till I was married. “I’m here to have fun too, Dad,” I said. I still cringe at the way he looked at me in disgust. It took a while before we were ready to talk again, but when I explained that I was living in a new era for women that he was not accustomed to, it was one of the most redemptive moments of my life. “Things have changed, Dad!” I insisted. Sitting there pale and with a tightly clenched jaw, I think he finally understood how being born in this country and living apart from him had had an irrevocable effect on me, his only daughter.

 

Educated in American schools and universities, I recognized the legacy of white superstar feminists like Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer. Though at times their styles were overheated, they were crusaders for equal rights, bra-burning privileged white women who took on a firestorm of antagonism for their revolutionary consciousness-raising. I greatly appreciated all they had done for American middle-class women, but I wasn’t sure if enjoying the company of men was a central part of their brand of feminism. I much rather enjoyed the guiltless sex of Erica Jong and the vixens and vamps depicted by Camille Paglia, who praised the brazen behavior of the unholy popstar Madonna. I was part of the early ’90s generation of lipstick feminists and the post ’80s backlash on “ugly feminists.” We shaved our legs and armpits and made calculated remarks like: “I’m not a feminist, but . . .” We were not sure of what we really wanted, but at least I felt safe being vague. Most of the time I was still fighting battles for the respect of my boyfriends, professors and bosses.

At the same time, I indulged in being fashionably slim and “exotic” on my East Coast college campus. Though I was never called a “slut,” at least not to my face, I engaged in casual sex with pseudo-intellectual men and enjoyed the game of conquest without experiencing much remorse when rejected. Surrounded by mostly Jewish men from suburban towns, I started to realize that being a goy excluded me from ever being taken seriously for marriage. I had begun to feel like I did not completely fit in. I felt like an other.

As mainstream feminism inspired me to rebellious heights, I looked to the writings and efforts of Latinas and women of color. Aware of the plight of Latinos living in the United States, issues of race and class began haunting my thoughts the more I lived in the real world, away from that fantasy land of intellectual nurturing called academia. As a freelance writer, I made it a point to visit various cities in Latin America—Caracas, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago, San Juan, Mexico City, Medellín, Cali, Bogotá, Buenos Aires and Havana. I knew it would be necessary to know firsthand about the everyday lives of Latin American women to begin to compare the differences between women’s issues in Latin America and what Latinas in the United States were struggling against.

It was in the essays of Xicanista writer Ana Castillo, about the censorship of mestiza women on both sides of the borders, that I found a voice to help me understand the unfair treatment that darker women receive. Though I never had to bear direct abuse, reading Castillo’s words in
Massacre of the Dreamers
made me think of how my grandmother’s health deteriorated as a result of working in a factory. I was made aware that if I had to emigrate from Colombia today, I would be facing similar challenges to those of any immigrant woman of little means coming to the United States to find work. Castillo spoke loudly, stating the ugly facts about how Latina women were the lowest paid women in the country. None of the white feminists I had come across had mentioned the women of color working class. She chronicled Latinas’ long and infuriating battles with machisimo and the hypocrisies of Catholicism’s Madonna/whore syndrome. While the white feminist movements had their own mother goddess to pay tribute to, Castillo spoke about the spiritual and mystical womanhood found in indigenous earth religions through her writings on
brujas
and
curanderas,
or wielders of magical healing. I felt trapped in the steel cage of my hometown of New York, and my only outside experience with earth religions had been on my journeys to Latin America. Castillo spoke about the traditions of our ancestors and adapted them into messages of loving oneself, empowering the dormant bruja in me. She was the first author I had seen on the cover of a book who was striking, fierce and oh so Latina.

While my experience up till then with the mainstream middle class tended to separate me from many women of color, my contact with this new feminism brought me back into closer contact with my own ethnicity, my own self. Reenergized by my new vision of the world, I began seeking women of color who were interested in discussing literature and this new consciousness we were feeling. Through these women of all shapes and sizes, I was inspired to start writing stories of my own. And only through the writing was I able to connect the dots to the women in my family.

Today my home is decorated with kitschy Latina icons. I have photos of Frida Kahlo, a Virgen de Guadalupe light switch, representations of the female orishas from the Yoruban pantheon, and a painting of Anima Sola, a folkloric legend pictured in handcuffs condemned to withstand the eternal flames of purgatory. These symbols imbue me with a female power solely with their visual presence. They are emblems of the pleasure and pain of womanhood, society’s misinterpretation of us and fear of our sexual energy. It surprises me how Frida’s image has drawn even white women to worship her. Perhaps it is because of her ferocious brow, her unabashed hirsuteness, her bisexuality and her dark eccentricity—qualities in opposition to the ideal of the American woman. My bookshelves are replete with texts that investigate the lives of legends like Argentine ruler Evita Perón, La Malinche (the Spanish conqueror Hernan Cortes’s indigenous translator) or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a Mexican woman who entered a convent just so that she could educate herself at a time when women were denied higher education.

And I’m fascinated by the lyrics of the Colombian rock group Los Aterciopelados. Androgynous lead singer Andrea Echeverri possesses a melodic yet husky voice that taunts machos by proclaiming herself to be a
chica difícil
(difficult chick), a
cosita seria
(serious little thing) not wanting to be
la culpable
(the guilty one) or not wanting to ruin her figure with a baby. Her songs are about the quotidian life of women in Latin America, whose reputation is always at severe risk of being tainted. Astrid Hadad—a Mexican, Mayan and Lebanese singer—combines performance art with feminist lyrics in her album
Ay!
Crooning campy
rancheras,
she performs onstage in a Virgin de Guadalupe costume that depicts
la virgensita’s
famous radiating aura. With ironic detachment, she addresses serious problems like domestic violence in songs like “Me golpeaste tanto anoche” (You beat me so much last night). Why do I bask in such dark humor? Maybe because it brings out the surrealist double-meanings of machismo while reminding me of the contradictions of being a progressive woman in love.