Resistance

What does womanhood mean? What is the impact?

Mujer en el Paisaje (1943) by Mariano Rodriguez

At a very young age I learned what it means to pay it forward. I wasn’t familiar with my teachers at the time, but being raised on a farm allows you to establish a connection in the way things come back to you. It is not impossible to change things, if you tend to it with your whole being. You can watch your efforts blossom, or experience the burden of what it’s like to not try as much as you should have. As I’m coming to learn through my own stories, tending to my grandparents’ farm was the onset of my womanhood. I needed compassion and accountability to show up for it, I needed history to understand it, I needed language and community to maintain it.  

My grandfather always filled our heads with stories. It broke up the day, from the back to back chores, often shifting me and my sister’s mood to either a happier one or a madder one. His stories from his life in Cuba always seemed exaggerated: he’d set up a hidden hideout for his wife and child while he fought in the resistance against the communist revolution, he’d built a boat with his bare hands, he’d punched the doctor who removed my grandmothers appendix because he commented on her small waist, and even Castro himself had handcuffed him and threw him in a jail for a week with no food or water. After riddling our minds with questions about what actually happened in Cuba, he would tell us he was going to buy us a pony for Christmas. That pony never came. Those stories became nothing more than stories - a performance essential in thrilling us to make time pass faster as we adhere to his instructions on the tasks for the day.

When I first started therapy in 2018 I talked a lot about the men in my life. How their presence has placed permanence in my ways of being. “They’re dominant and fabricated and hurt,” I used to tell her, as ways to describe them. “Desperately reliant on the hierarchy system,” I’d go on. She’d respond, “To understand man is to understand their doom.” My therapist and I really used to stick it to them, the man I mean. I miss our theatrical conversations from that time period. She allowed me to matriculate in gender oppression with more intention.

Our teacher bell hooks says, “Maleness is a mask.” A man’s credibility relies in his performance: a lifestyle he has learned as a boy which is built upon needing to prove themselves to earn reward (i.e, a woman perpetuating his role, grandchildren utterly infatuated with him). To be cherished comes after providing value first. My grandfather wore the mask, and then my father did. It could cost them everything to simply be themselves, so they had to survive in the world the only way they could. If you allow it, you can see the mask almost everywhere.

These days, I see the mask predominantly in the form of politics. I see men on podiums making daily threats on reproductive rights, I see them make claims of deportation, I see them making racist claims on ethnic groups, producing narratives that inflict fear, and I see them in complete adoration of their guns. I see a desperate attempt of their search for value, how the deep need for it puts them in self-contempt. The public pedagogy from the right thrives on establishing divisions, to maintain a false sense of self.

In the same vein, I think about the lens in which I was raised to see women. The women in my family passed down their soft exterior and a rough, messy interior. I carry the baton of female resentment and struggled for many years (maybe still do) to make sense of it. In my house, women perpetuated men, supported them, oftentimes alienating themselves from other women in order to sustain themselves in their pursuit to continue alongside their partners. I saw an epidemic of loneliness from both sides. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t prove these theories right in my own marriage. Men don’t need our softness, I’d thought as a child. Men need us to hold them accountable, I’d learn later in life. I aim to see my husband for who he is and not the value he provides for me. I want our relationship to rely on keeping one another accountable. 

In the Spring, I was fortunate enough to take a class on gendered experiences. In the class, I was reminded early on - to understand the gendered experience one must first have a heavy dose of historical western knowledge as the foundation. Colonialism is the onset of the interrelatedness of the gendered experience. Since the results of the election, I have been brushing up on Imperialism, how it still maintains the United States as a superpower, and a reliable system for the men in the masks. Colonialism started because primitive people were deemed unable to use their “minds or intellects,” a necessary tool in dehumanizing them. Our founding fathers wanted indigenous people to forget their origins, to forget that they are humans. A legacy of suffering and destruction, Imperialism persists, still abundantly with us, taking new forms of conquest and exploitation.

Today, this extends to women’s rights, an emphasis on pro-life to keep women at home, voiceless, and uninformed. This extends to the mass deportation ban, to maintain white supremacy. This extends to the false narratives on POC, sorting us into groups, advancing division. This extends to the urgent and desperate need to keep war weapons open to the public. The elusive and looming threat that guns have particularly on children and their mothers, is intentional. “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” Audre Lorde says.

On the farm, after chores and a few rounds of Dominos, my grandfather and his grandkids would enter the house to find my grandmother nearly done with dinner. We were greeted by sliced avocados, sizzling meat, boiling yucca, a huge pot of black beans, and a display of knives that were needed to break down the chicken. Sometimes I’d catch her scoff at the sight of him. Their silences, when they were around each other, were heavy. The weighted silence passed down to my parents. I felt that this shared silence was connected to something, a connection I wouldn’t be able to place for a very long time. 

In Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, she states “The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us.” My grandparents fled oppression. Did it follow them? Do hispanics know a life without the threat of it? I wondered about the way they had to make themselves quieter, to assimilate in a different country since they had to leave their own, to work relentlessly without any guarantees. I am deeply troubled in the way Latinos don’t know how to pay it forward. As we’ve seen from the exit polls, Latinos carried the results of this election. To quote the article, “Young Hispanics do not have the same muscle memory as their grandparents who voted for Democrats for 50 years.” 

In Cherríe Moraga’s Native Country of the Heart, she speaks about a “cultural amnesia.” Part of assimilating means to lose our memory of our past and our reasons for exile, the resistance our ancestors once practiced. “Without memory, we are lost,” she says. Our memories allow us to pay it forward. Here is a remembrance of our losses: our loss of land, now our loss of history. What can we do to remember?

Maya Angelou teaches us that art is a form of activism. In an excerpt from her interview with bell hooks she states, “Art is not a luxury. The artist is so necessary in our lives. The artist explains to us, or at least asks the questions which must be asked.” How do we respond to injustice? By reading and creating, letting the rage flow from our fingers into something you can touch. Our art should be passed on to allow other people to respond to it. Art is a flowing system of resistance. It needs attention and effort and community for it to blossom. I continue to work on detaching myself from the softness I was raised to have, so that I can pursue art in a truer way. Movements need to be materialized, history is cyclical. I will never forget the betrayal of my own kind, consider this my effort to putting a timestamp on it.

In Gioconda Belli’s The Inhabited Woman, she states “Peace is the respect for the rights of the other person.” Lavinia, the main character, reminds us that peace is limited to the rich, and for everyone else, peace is something to fight for. Women fight with voices. In the book, she eventually strays from her best friend who didn’t share the same views as her. Today, we are far from peace, moving further and further away from it as time goes on. Foster the friendships that believe in your voice, let them help you amplify it. Detach yourself from conformists. Conformists will deny you of your womanhood anyways. 

My womanhood lies here, in these necessary and timely reminders. Womanhood can be found underneath the heavy silences within your family. I feel indebted to finding the language for the silences my grandparents have carried. There is history there, my history, resistance lies in reclaiming it. I move in accordance with my experience, and aim to learn about the experiences of others. Be brave enough to question western ideologies, history is not universal, we each carry our own. My history is blurred. My family came from Cuba in the 60’s, many memories have taken dramatic forms, many stories have been exaggerated to the third degree, but mostly, memories have been forgotten. Assimilation is a dangerous thing, the Latino vote says so. I don't know that my family recognizes themselves in their history anymore, rather in the manner in which they’ve conformed.

Don’t forget where you come from, tend to your stories, write down the accounts of your life that brought you here. Gravitate towards your art, let it grow, pass it down. Foster other artists. Ask questions, loud and curious ones. Participate in your voice: make a living in it, be mistreated in it, be ignored in it, find community in it. Let it break you and re-shape you. Affirmation is something no one can ever take away. An authentic self is the path of a woman, something the man in the mask will never have.