Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism (7 page)

At this point in my college education I had been around well-off students long enough to envy their carefree attitude toward money and their families. Parents were striving to be friends with their kids, while their children worked hard to portray the idyllic campus setting advertised in college brochures. On the rare occasion of a visit, my family tried hard to imitate that sense of artificial familial and financial bliss. But simultaneous English-to-Spanish translations, brunches of sneaked cafeteria bagels and roundtrip tickets on Greyhound gave us away. I was ashamed that we weren’t like my classmates’ families—apparently middle class and happy—so I lashed out at the easiest target, my stepfather. Much of my anger was misdirected toward him partly because during college I had learned that men are the source of all problems that afflict women, a notion reinforced by the liberal women on campus. And I swallowed it whole, like a potion that numbs you from the inside. This was my next lesson in feminism, and the first one I unlearned.

My stepfather was not at fault. We had expected him to fill a role that had never been defined for him. He had simply modeled himself on generations of Dominican men who abuse the privilege of being male in a country that suffocates women so men can take deep breaths. Our family existed in a different place now, somewhere between the social values of the Dominican Republic and the economic realities of Immigrant, U.S.A. As a budding woman of conscience raised by a woman of great will, I refused to believe that we depended on him, on men at all. Had the women in my family accepted that, we would have gotten nowhere, accomplished nothing. We never expected that my stepfather would build this new world for us with his bare hands. His two stepdaughters, Americanized by our education, grew more intolerant each day, however. My sister was now a teenager and had accepted the sitcom realities TV offered. She wanted to live the Dominican version of
Family Ties.
She wanted a world of pesky (and comedic) family quarrels, all magically resolved before dinnertime or the next commercial break. Instead, she had to make do with a rebellious college-age sister, two all-consuming younger siblings and a mother too tired to blink.

It was hard to know what my mother was feeling during those hard years. Sometimes she would break down and cry out of frustration from the piling bills or lash out at a minor disobedience. She was quick to punish and often held grudges for weeks, leaving my sister and I to tiptoe around her. Up to then, her universal will and dominion of her home had gotten us through most of my young adulthood and my sister’s adolescence. But these virtues failed at keeping our uneasy cohesiveness from collapsing. It continued to be him and us, although now “us” also included his children. If asked, my stepfather would probably say we turned his children against him during a couple of years of continuous struggles. What was he to do? Fight or flee? He decided to stop fighting. He left the house and his children. He went to live with his sister and her family upstate.

As the oldest, in college, and assumed to be the most knowledgeable about all things American (from the VCR to the tax system), I became the partial decision-maker in the house. Should the little one enroll in an after-school program? What curfew should my adolescent sister have? When should my brother’s friends be allowed over? My new status brought on more responsibility than I was ready for, but there was a need to make everything work. My sister, Mom and I together became a type of mom/dad/sister Transformer, like the 1980s animated series I learned English watching. We were interchangeable parts of a working whole. In many ways my sister understood and accepted her new roles with more tact and willingness than I did. She took jobs during high school to help with expenses; she sacrificed going away to college for her first year, while I focused solely on getting out of the house and finishing college—and finally becoming my own person.

 

My mother and sister taught me my next lesson in feminism: Your life as a woman is an extension of the lives of your family members. They sacrificed for me, knowing that my success would help our whole family. They nursed me through college, study-abroad ventures and summer internships. For my mother there was the expectation that if she sent me off to college, I would come back home. I would become a professional, get a well-paying job, move back to the house and be the other breadwinner. That’s how the immigrant dream played out in her mind.

After college I returned home ready to launch my independence. During my absence my stepdad had moved back, and the family was living under a new, tacit but unsteady cohesiveness. I knew enough not to meddle. Caught up in the monumentality of adulthood, I saw their marriage for what it was. He had rescued her—a young widow with two young daughters—in exchange for a dutiful wife who would give him the children he had always wanted but had not been prepared to raise. Neither of them had anticipated the power immigration would exert over their lives. Their wedding vows had not included fine-print stipulating what to do about the demands of their immigrant life in New York. I doubt that my mother knew she was teaching me to be a feminist along the way, as she struggled to make sense of her marriage and her family.

That was my most recent lesson: Feminism is comprised of values that are important to you as a woman, not ideals arrived at by forced consensus to which you should adjust your own life. To me, that is the core failure of (North) American feminism—the alienation of women like my mother who don’t have the leisure to fantasize about a life free of the influence of men, who have the demands of an extended family and the rigors of defining themselves in a place between two real and often contradictory worlds.

As I entertain adult notions of parenthood and let my imagination float into a distant future—children, husband, who knows?—I know my role as mother/wife/companion will depend on how I choose to define myself in the moving now that will be my present. I also know that our own roles and family itself shift and change depending on many factors. Culture, class, gender, tradition, womanhood, immigrant life, growing up Dominicana in Nueva York—they will all influence and shape my life as I go.

 

Taigi Smith

 

 

 

 

 

When I think of home, I envision a place where memories and wounds run deep like murky rivers, a place where dreams sing like unfinished songs, the soil where we lay our roots and our heads. San Francisco’s Mission District was the place I called home, a close-knit community where poor and working-class folks lived side by side while struggling to obtain a piece of Americana. After two years of living in New York City, I am ready to return home. It is almost Thanksgiving and between trips on the D train and fifteen-hour work days, I barely feel the autumn leaves beneath my feet in Brooklyn. My body shivers from the November chill, while my nose, red from windburn, runs uncontrollably. I find myself wishing for the comforts of home and smile: In a few days I will be in San Francisco, sitting at my mother’s table, full of sweet potatoes, pasta and, if I’m lucky, turkey. At forty-five years old, my mother is still unconventional and has yet to cook a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. She faithfully replaces the turkey with a simpler bird: Cornish hen.

Will my mother, who like me, spent several years in New York, recognize that at twenty-four years old, I have found myself on the brink of insanity, unsure of where the next year, let alone my entire life, will lead me? Will she be able to see that working at a TV station has made me aggressive, competitive and edgy, or will she be deceived by my nice clothes, make-believe smile and pleasant demeanor? I am heading home, to the streets of the Mission, in search of my comfort zone, Shotwell Street, where the memories are good and the streets familiar.

In the summer of 1980, I was a tall, skinny, eight-year-old, with big feet and wild braids. My friends and I gathered at our usual spot on Twentieth and Shotwell to amuse ourselves. There wasn’t much to do during the long days of summer. We were the children of bus drivers, housekeepers, migrant workers, the unemployed and the mentally ill. Most of our mothers were raising us alone and struggled, like single moms do, to provide us with the basics. The mothers of the Mission worked long days to afford simple things for us, like Top Ramen, notebooks for school and shoes that fit. They weren’t afraid to scream our names from their windows or yell at us in public.

We lived together on this block surrounded by automotive shops and single-family homes in the heart of the Mission, America’s Latino pit stop for high hopes and big dreams. Some families had come seeking refuge from the bloody wars that had ravaged El Salvador and Nicaragua during the 1980s, while others had immigrated toward el Norte to escape the desperation of Mexico’s barrios. My mother, then a twenty-four-year-old single-parent, found the Mission through a friend, and although she’d never admit it, Moms was a hippie seeking solace from the craziness of the Haight-Ashbury, the legendary stomping ground of the Grateful Dead and reefer-toking flower children. She acted like a womanist even then and didn’t know it. I consider her a womanist because of her strength. She has run more than twenty-five marathons in her lifetime, and she still logs about fifty miles a week. She raised me with a loud voice and a burning passion, as if her life depended on my failure or success. She raised me on her own, without welfare and with an intensity that I’ve never been able to replicate. She was gutsy enough to hitch a ride across country to forge a better life for herself and me, and for this, she remains my hero.

Moms convinced the owner of our building to rent her a one-bedroom apartment for less than $200 dollars a month. We were one of a handful of black families in the Mission then, so it was almost impossible not to notice us. I learned how to make quesadillas on an open flame at my friend Marcy’s house while her mother spoke to me in Spanish. Most mornings, I would wake up to the sounds of Mexican ballads blasting soothingly from the building next door. Even today, I can still hear the sounds of wailing mariachis playing guitar and singing songs
de amor.
I always knew I was different than many of my Mexican friends and neighbors; we spoke different languages and ate different foods. But I never felt out of place in the Mission. As children of the Mission, we were raised to love and accept each other. Even today, as adults, we remain friends.

The Mission of the 1980s was a place filled with music and dance. On the far corner of Twentieth and Shotwell was an old garage that had been transformed into a dance studio. For months you could hear the sounds of Brazilian drums resonating from the walls of a once vacant garage. At night women and men would emerge from the building salty with sweat, glistening and seemingly exhausted. You could hear them chattering incessantly, in Spanish and English about Carnaval, the Mission’s answer to the legendary Rio de Janeiro annual event. For months dancers packed the studios that laced the Mission to practice for the twenty-four-hour festival of samba, salsa and steel drumming.

During Carnaval the neighborhood women transformed themselves with fifty-foot feathered headpieces and barely-there thong bikinis to parade down Mission Street twisting, gyrating, shimmying and singing. A woman could take off her bikini top and flaunt her breasts without embarrassment or inhibition during this raw celebration of femininity and womanhood. It was not until I, at twelve, put on my own bikini and feathers and danced with the Brazilian troupe Batucaje’ that I truly felt the electricity generated when women of color come together to celebrate themselves as beautiful, cultural and creative beings. Here we could dance, sing, sweat and flaunt ourselves and our bodies like no other time. This was Carnaval.

I also remember the rallies on Twenty-Fourth and Mission during the eighties and the sounds of political activists demanding freedom, shouting, “No More, No More, U.S. out of El Salvador!” They were white, Latino, young and old—most of all, they were loud and unrelenting. Many were women, unafraid of showing civil disobedience and unfazed by the threat of arrest. Who would have thought that almost twenty years later, these same women would be fighting against land developers to keep the neighborhood they called home?

 

I finally made it home for Thanksgiving, but something strange had happened to the Mission. I had only been away for two years, but it had been transformed into a place I found hard to navigate or recognize. Many of my childhood friends had already disappeared, and some Latino families I grew up with were nowhere to be found. The brown faces had diminished, and I was trapped in an unfamiliar scene filled with Caucasoids and trendy bars. It was gentrification.

Gentrification: The displacement of poor women and people of color. The raising of rents and the eradification of single, poor and working-class women from neighborhoods once considered unsavory by people who didn’t live there. The demolition of housing projects. A money-driven process in which landowners and developers push people (in this case, many of them single mothers) out of their homes without thinking about where they will go. Gentrification is a premeditated process in which an imaginary bleach is poured on a community and the only remaining color left in that community is white . . . only the strongest coloreds survived.

The word on the street was that the neighborhood was being taken over by white people—yuppies and new media professionals who would pay exorbitant rents to reside in what the
Utne Reader
had called “One of the Trendiest Places to Live in America”—and there was nothing people of color could do. Some were going to housing court in hopes of saving lost leases, but most attempts to fight greedy landlords were unsuccessful. The neighborhood folks, many of whom had protested in the 1980s against the contras in Nicaragua, were now feeling helpless. They were tired of fighting or simply unsure of how to protect themselves. They had seen their neighbors wage unsuccessful battles against landlords, and they were just hoping they wouldn’t be next. The streets were now lined with Land Rovers and BMW’s, and once seedy neighborhood bars now employed bouncers and served $10 raspberry martinis. Abandoned warehouses had not been converted into affordable housing but instead into fancy lofts going for $300,000 to $1 million. The Army Street projects had been demolished, leaving hundreds of people, many of them women with children, displaced and homeless. The message was clear: It was time for the blacks and the browns to get out—the whites were moving in and that was it.

For poor single mothers, gentrification is a tactic “the system” uses to keep them down; it falls into the same category as “workfare” and “minimum wage.” Gentrification is a woman’s issue, an economic issue and, most of all, a race issue. At my roots I am a womanist, as I believe in economic and social equality for all women. When I watch what has happened to my old neighborhood, I get angry because Gentrification like this is a personal attack on any woman of color who is poor, working class and trying to find an apartment in a real estate market that doesn’t give a damn about single mothers, grand-mommas raising crack babies or women who speak English as a second language.

The shameful thing is that the yuppies have changed the fabric of a neighborhood that was by all accounts an affordable, great place to live. The Mission wasn’t one of those neighborhoods destroyed by the 1980s crack epidemic. It wasn’t a destitute community with burned-out buildings and shuttered-up storefronts, where gunshots rang out in the night. It was a cultural mecca where working-class people of color took pride in the community. The colorful murals that decorated the walls of local buildings were a testament to the rich culture of local Latino artistry, the numerous thriving
marquetas
and restaurants were living proof of a small yet growing business district. We had nightclubs, supermarkets, auto body shops, meat markets, florists, delis and clothing stores owned and operated by first- and second-generation Mexican Americans. For many of the immigrants, the Mission was a break from the poverty that had surrounded them in Mexico and El Salvador. Although the work days were long and hard, most of my neighbors were grateful for the job opportunities that came their way. At least in the United States, there was a way to support one’s family.

Many of us existed in a microcosm where working for white people as cooks, housekeepers and migrant workers was a way of life. Many years later I realized this type of work was actually part of a larger system in which poor people (many of them women) did the low-level, low-paid work that no one else wanted to do. As a result of this system, most of us remained poor. Today I see that we were probably making the best out of a difficult situation. Even now, we (me and the women I grew up with) insist that we would purchase homes and raise our children in the Mission if we had the financial means—our memories of the community are that good.

The infiltration of our neighborhood by the wealthy and the privileged is heartbreaking. To act as if our neighborhood is something that they needed to “clean up” or “take back” is insulting. It is as if our new neighbors deny that our businesses, familial relationships and community ever really existed in the first place. Many of the white people who have moved into the Mission see us in stereotypical terms—as immigrants, as people with thick accents and brown skin, as people who play loud music and collect welfare. In essence, they ignore who we really are. Our new neighbors can’t see that our homes are impeccably clean and that many of the Latino families here are headed by both a mother
and
a father. And although we barely scrape by at times, we go to work and pay our bills. They want to believe we are all on welfare, destined to become single mothers and crack addicts. The truth is, however, that most of us have proven them wrong. We learned well on Shotwell Street from our single mothers and other women: Teena is now a sheriff, Maricela a police officer, Sonia a journalist at the
San Francisco Chronicle
and I am a writer and a producer. None of us grew up to be statistics.

 

I started calling myself a womanist while attending Mills College in Oakland, California. Mills, a liberal arts women’s college, catered to families who could pay $22,000 a year. I was able to afford it thanks to a tremendous financial aid package. Many of the white women at Mills who called themselves feminists didn’t understand my experiences as a black woman. In women’s studies classes, for example, the individual histories and struggles of black women were often ignored. It was in an African-American women’s studies class that I learned the word “womanist.” Dr. Dorothy Tsuruta was at the time the most progressive (and only!) full-time African-American professor at the Mills. She was regularly criticized because many of the white women who attended her classes felt alienated. They became upset and felt excluded when Dorothy told them that the term womanism, as defined by Alice Walker, was meant specifically for women of color. Dorothy was eventually fired from Mills for shaking up a system that really wasn’t in the business of liberating young, black minds.