Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism (14 page)

 

Marianismo
is the crux of our existence.
¹
Although the book
The Maria Paradox
inadequately simplifies this mother-daughter dynamic as a clash between “old” and “new” worlds, it offers a solid explanation of marianismo. Using the Virgin Mary as a point of reference, marianismo defines women as obedient servants who “happily” sacrifice themselves for everyone else’s good. In marianismo, it is a woman’s duty to be subservient and submissive, not to make decisions for herself.

Among the ten commandments of marianismo listed in
The Maria Paradox
are: “Do not forget a woman’s place. Do not be single, self-supporting, or independent-minded. Do not put your own needs first. Do not wish for more in life than being a housewife.”
²

I was taught to defy marianismo, however. My friends and I were overencouraged, if not pushed, to pursue university degrees. Our mothers saw education as a vehicle for liberation from economic dependency, typically the factor that kept them in unhappy relationships. My parents spared no expense or effort when it came to education for my sister and me. Getting a college education was mandatory for us even though it contradicted some tenets of marianismo. In college I, along with the women I am still close to, began to be exposed to the work and boldness of feminists and womanists. I learned about the concepts of “voice,” “the personal being political” and the “masculinization of nationalism.” I read enlightening work by Julia de Burgos, bell hooks, Angela Davis and Assata Shakur.
³
I interacted with amazing professors, like Micere Mugo, Linda Alcoff, Alicia Vadillo and Terri Northrup; and I was inspired by the mothers who fought against police brutality in New York City and the accomplishments of the Latin Women’s Collective, a now-defunct organization that focused on developing Latinas as leaders.

Even though I grew up knowing that Gloria Steinem was dedicated to women’s rights and recalled the ERA (Equal Rights Amendment) posters, my first real understanding of feminism came through the women who looked like me and who spoke to me culturally and politically. They were committed to liberation, of a colony or of one’s self. As a Puerto Rican, these questions of race, class and national liberation were critical to me. I subscribed to bell hooks’ definition of feminism:

 

I understood that I was a Puerto Rican
woman
and that the woman part of me couldn’t be a backburner component. The patriarchy was real and reflected in many of the political campaigns in which I participated. Learning how to identify and address sexism was a process. Pointing it out was on many occasions dismissed, passively agreed with or responded to defensively with examples of female political martyrdom. I saw how sexism—or rather, not dealing with it proactively—could cripple political work. Instead of feminism being linked to race, class and national liberation—and made part of our daily work and progress—it was mostly relegated to panel discussions.

Nationalist Lolita Lebron wore a skirt when she and her armed comrades charged the U.S. Congress in 1954 to defend Puerto Rico’s right to be a sovereign nation. In 1915, Luisa Capetillo, a feminist and socialist who organized workers in Puerto Rico, was arrested for wearing pants in public in Cuba. Both Lolita and Luisa inspired me. I was driven by the ultimate freedom of my people and myself. These ideals came into conflict at home, however. It was easier to organize a rally against a tuition hike or get involved in a movement to free political prisoners than to face the painful contradictions of who I was raised to be.

Growing up, my sister and I had
muñecas
and knew to cross our legs when sitting down. We also had an easel, a Starsky and Hutch set, race cars, a cash register and a Fisher Price doctor’s kit. An ex-air force boxer, my father taught us to shoot a BB gun at empty Nestle Quik cans and how to snap a punch. According to my mother, getting married and having kids was not a priority, and philandering husbands were unacceptable. But the premise of marianismo (women as servants), along with the aspects of suffering and guilt, were ingrained, both inside and outside of the home.

 

I had a striking introduction to women’s suffering in Catholic elementary school. I had picked up a book about Saint Rose of Lima. Even though I was little, I understood she was Latina because she was from Peru and Peru was in South America. That meant she had some kind of link to me because she spoke Spanish while all the other saints seemed to be from Europe. As I read the paragraphs on the bottom of the pages and looked at the pictures on top, I was both horrified and fascinated. Saint Rose stuck a pin in her head and slept on rocks to prove her commitment to God. She rejected the advances of Satan—who was drawn both as a hideous giant and a tempting stud, not the Red Devil-pique figure. I was amazed at the things Saint Rose did to herself. Soon after reading that book, I was petitioning for something or trying to repent for being “bad.” I made myself suffer. I wasn’t brave enough to resort to rocks, so one night I threw barrettes and bobby pins all over my bed and slept on them. I wanted to serve God but I didn’t want all the pain involved. Yet I understood that the more you suffered, the more saintly you were, which makes you closer to God and yes,
superbuena.

In church, women were elements of the equation. The statue of the Virgin Mary watched us or waited to be adored. Her greatness came from bearing a special child and being chosen to do so by an almighty being, assumed to be male. The nuns, the Sisters of Mercy, sat in the front pews during Mass and ran the elementary school. The women directed the choir, cleaned the rectory, cooked for the priests and responded to inquiries. But after God, always assumed to be male, the priest was central. He had the power to celebrate the Mass, and in the name of “Him,” absolve us of our sins. The deacons, typically men, were next in importance. Making a church or school function, as the nuns did, wasn’t enough to merit leading a Mass. As classic dutiful daughters, they had the role of servitude. This male-oriented hierarchy in the church followed the patriarchal organization of society. It also was a reality in my family.

In our house, there was clearly a chain of command. My father, a Vietnam veteran and police lieutenant, was the
jefe.
My mother, a former beautician-salesperson-receptionist-daycare worker, was next in line. My sister and I were the subordinates. I was the boss by virtue of being older. My mother was by no means quietly compliant, but my father was frequently the decision-maker, an entitlement that came from being the man and the breadwinner as well as having a college degree, compared with my mother’s high-school education. Mami raised us and maintained our home while Papi earned the money and paid the bills. When this structure and organization was ruptured, we were faced with redefining our positions.

 

My parents split up after twenty-six years of marriage. I was twenty-two and had just graduated from college. Although the breakup was not a surprise, my mother was unprepared and panic-stricken by the thought of having to survive on her own. She had worked for years before and after marrying my father, but a major stroke at a young age had rendered her physically unable to handle many tasks. She could not contribute an income to the household. Despite raising us and taking care of the house, her work had not been acknowledged as such because it did not yield money. In the computer age, she wasn’t ready to reenter the job market. My mother had been deeply frustrated at her dependency on my father. As a result of her physical limitations and her concerns about raising us properly, her life was in the home. She had been unable to establish herself beyond a mother or a wife. This is by no means saying that being a mother and wife aren’t wonderful things. But they are aspects of the self in relation to others. My mother was
la mama de ... la esposa de
...but maybe she wanted at times to just be her, in her own right.

Paralyzed by fear, my mother attempted to transfer her dependency on my father to my sister and me a time when both of us were coming into our own as independent adults. This dependency wasn’t necessarily always financial but in the realms of decision-making, organization and action. She had always overdepended on us emotionally. We were her world and would get chastised for doing things like staying out late as young adults (translation: staying away from her). Our relationship was already troubled by the power dynamic of the parent as superior and the child—even an adult daughter—as subordinate. Although my mother in her proud,
jibara
-never-ask-for-anything way would not tell me that I had to be the “man” of the house, the pressure was there. At times I felt like I had to be her missing husband or parent.

I did not shy away from being there, but I was uncomfortable with her asking me for direction or to make decisions for her. Although she initially and understandably felt devastated and confused about the end of her marriage, I wanted my mother to understand that there was the potential of her emerging from this crisis as a new woman. I wanted her to recognize that she could finally take some ownership of her life and make choices based on her own well-being and desires, and that she deserved and had the right to do so.

In the long divorce process, my sister and I responded as we should have—with support, love, assistance and patience. But there were many occasions when we had to hold our mother by the hand to do something like make a phone call to a bureaucrat. She preferred to have my sister or me deal with any task she found intimidating. When we didn’t comply, she acted wounded, not seeing, at least at first, that we were only encouraging her to become self-reliant and establish her own identity, much in the same way she had encouraged us over the years. We had been taught to be the best and that we were capable of doing anything by the same woman who was now floundering at what she saw as the frightening prospect of independence, or rather, having to go it “alone” and fearing that she would fail. My mother grew up in poverty in Puerto Rico—a poverty rooted in the United States’ domination of the Puerto Rican economy. The possibility of not being able to afford the medical care she needed or to cover her bills was scary. She wasn’t operating from the perspective that she came from a long line of survivors who did what they set out to do—to make life a little better for the next generation.

It was emotionally enervating for all of us. But understanding that this was a space and time for my mother to grow and do things according to her own wants and needs, I gave her tough love. We said no to some requests and yes to others. However we reacted, there was always a level of guilt.