Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism by Daisy Hernández, Bushra Rehman Read Free Book Online

will not make these same mistakes twice. I know I cannot be colonized. I realize now that I can’t be with anyone who wants to pat me on the head and tell me how neat it is that I am Mexican but never actually wants to hear me talk about it. Far too many times I have tried to speak of my struggles or those of my people to be met with bored or un-understanding eyes. It leaves me frustrated and isolated. When one friend learned what I was writing this piece about, she replied, “Blah, blah. Heard it all before. Nothing new.” My body goes numb when she says these things. I want to punch her, slap her. Instead I just call her an asshole. When I am done with this essay, I will make her read it. Her lack of emotion and understanding makes it next to impossible to speak to her. She is as sensitive and caring as an electroshock. I see her words as self-absorbed ignorance, resentful and dismissive of a culture she does not even try to understand. I struggle to make my voice heard so that she and people like her will learn that there is more than just a white experience.
     
    In my parents’ relationship my mother constantly struggled for equality. She fought to be seen as my father’s equal. In many aspects she succeeded; in my eyes and my siblings’ eyes she was equal if not more than my father. Her unconditional love and support gave us the strength and independence we needed. When my mother became tired of my father controlling the family money, she became self-employed. With the small amount she earned working, selling jewelry at local festivals, she would buy us the fast food my father wouldn’t let us eat. She would take us to dollar movies and bus trips downtown to the children’s science museum. Around my mother I could always be myself. I never had to live up to any false expectations, unlike with my father.
    My mother is the strongest womon I know, she stayed with my father so that my siblings and I could have an education, so that my sister and I would have the means to take care of ourselves, so we would not need to depend on any man as she had. She felt she had no escape from my father, she was not from this country, she did not speak the language, nor did she have anyone to turn to. So my mother did the best she could. My mother hid her tears, cried in her pillow, and I slept soundly. This was her sacrifice. She did not want us to feel her inferiority. She put her feelings of inadequacy aside and raised us to be proud. And for this I am absolutely grateful to my mother. In fact, I feel fortunate that I was raised with such true contrasts. It helped me find balance. My mother now tells me that her biggest fear when my sister and I were growing up was that we would be submissive. We laugh about her worries now. My mother says that she could not have hoped for more feisty, self-assured daughters.
    I do not hate my father. I love my father. I respect him as a father but not as a person. If it were not for him, I would not be as proud and outspoken as I am today. If it were not for him, I would not be passionate about womyn’s issues. I look at my father and I see the best example of what not to be. He preached one thing but did another. This taught me to question not only him but the world around me. This helped me see through the lies society fed me. It also made me take action. My father always spoke of the injustice in the world, the racist war on drugs, factory farms, homophobia, free trade. He taught me so much, but he left so much out. He spoke and spoke but never did a damn thing about these injustices. He saved his activism for reading books and preaching to those he could feel more intelligent than. It is because of my father that I am a vegan, even though he eats meat. It is because of my father that I don’t tolerate homophobia, even though he says “dyke.” It is because of my father that I teach English classes to undocumented immigrants, even though my father calls them “wetbacks” and tells me I