Feminist Studies

la prieta is exactly who i have been all my life, with all the complexities, contradictions, and heartbreaks that Anzaldúa describes.¹ When Toni Cade Bambara wrote in the foreword to the first edition of This Bridge Called My Back that "it is the afterward that will count," I felt as if they were referring to me, to my life, to understanding how I am connected to larger systems and causes in the same way I am about to do in this piece. Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Lee Maracle, Patricia Hill Collins, and many other trailblazers like them, my academic tías (aunties), made it possible for people like me to exist within white academia.² Their words reflected my experience within my overtly racist, sexist, working-class family, within my community of refugees in a land very far away from the place I call home. Why else would I even consider submitting this very personal account to an academic journal? How else was I supposed to know that my life matters enough to write about? [End Page 270]

Mama Tulia, my great-grandmother, always boasted about having long, beautiful blonde hair, blue eyes, and whiter-than-porcelain skin. I could see her in my imagination; I could imagine Mama Tulia in her youth with all her beauty. She looked like all the dolls I owned, like all the main characters in the telenovelas we watched daily. I knew that no matter how often I would scrub and wash my skin, I was never going to look like her. My family proudly states that Mama Tulia came from the capital city and was related to a well-known colombian politician.³ Then, they would not-so-proudly mention that she was disowned by her family for "falling in love" with the wrong person, an Indigenous man from the Muysca nation in Chivatá, a tiny village a few hours north. In between laughter and jokes, my family loves to remind me that when I was born, I was taken to Mama Tulia, to be inspected by the matriarch as was customary, and as soon as she held me, she loudly stated, "she has long beautiful fingers, too bad she is tan oscurita" (so dark).

I put quotations around my great-grandmother having had fallen in love with my great-grandfather because if she had really loved him, she would have loved all of him, including his piel oscura (dark skin) and Indigenidad (Indigeneity). Together they had eight children, each one darker than the previous one. Did she hate her kids for not looking like her? My grandmother, my guagua, was the last of Mama Tulia's children and was the darkest with the most prominent Indigenous features.⁴ By my account, my grandmother was the most beautiful woman I ever met, although I cannot imagine her mother ever made her feel that way—the same way guagua treated my mother and my mother treated me. Muy oscura, too skinny, then too fat, with Indio hair, with a fig for a nose.⁵ [End Page 271] Once I started talking, I was too loud, too radical, a man-hater, too angry, too irrational, never good enough.

The blood that runs through me comes both from the colonizers who raped, killed, and destroyed Indigenous communities in Abya Yala and from my Indigenous ancestors who were raped, killed, and displaced.⁶ The source of pride my family feels bragging that they are descendants of the spaniards is as intense as the shame I feel knowing that my ancestors made my grandma hide her Chibcha language from her children and grandchildren. How else were we to survive in a big capital city like bogotá where the criollos, the children of the spaniards, and the Mestizos, the ones who had both Indigenous and spanish blood, would kick you out of places for dressing, talking, or looking too Indian. We had to look like the spanish, we had to look "civilized," we had to act like them, sound like them, and...