Category Archives: Latina and Latino Studies

Immigration Policy in the US: It’s All About Race

by Tanya Golash-Boza

The current debate over immigration policy in the United States revolves around how many immigrants we should let in and what we should do about those immigrants that are here without authorization.

In the contemporary United States, it seems completely natural that we would enforce our borders and regulate the entry of people into this country. Many people believe that the failure to do this would result in complete chaos.

It is thus remarkable that, for the first one hundred years after the founding of the United States, there were no laws governing who could or could not enter into or remain in this country.  For the first one hundred and fifty years after the establishment of the United States in 1776, economic development in this country depended on immigration. The free movement of labor between Europe and the United States was essential to the economic growth and prosperity of the United States, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest.

Discussions over immigration restriction first became popular when large numbers of Chinese immigrants began to arrive in the United States during the 1848 Gold Rush.

The arrival of thousands of Chinese immigrants into California provoked nativist sentiments among whites and these sentiments eventually translated into public policy.

In 1875, the Page Act was passed, which prohibited the entry of “undesirable” immigrants. This law primarily was designed to prevent the entry of prostitutes and forced laborers from Asia, and effectively barred the entry of any Asian women into the United States for the next few decades.

Debates over immigration policy in the United States have always had racialized undertones – except perhaps when the laws were outright racist.  The first major piece of immigration legislation was the Chinese Exclusion Act, signed into law in 1882. In an essay titled “The Chinese Exclusion Example: Race, Immigration, and American Gatekeeping, 1882-1994,” Erika Lee argues that

“Chinese exclusion introduced a ‘gatekeeping’ ideology, politics, law, and culture that transformed the ways in which Americans viewed and thought about race, immigration, and the United States’ identity as a nation of immigration. It legalized and reinforced the need to restrict, exclude, and deport ‘undesirable’ and excludable immigrants.”

The Chinese Exclusion Act was overtly racist in that it targeted one specific group: Chinese laborers. In specifically excluding a group because of race and class, the Chinese Exclusion Act set the stage for U.S. immigration policy, which has both overt and covert racial and class biases.

The Chinese Exclusion Act initially only governed entry policies, but worries over fraud and illegal entry gave rise to the 1892 Geary Act and the 1893 McCreary Amendment, which required Chinese people who resided in the United States to possess proof of their lawful right to be in the United States. These “certificates of residence” were the first precursors to today’s legal permanent resident cards. Such documents were required only of the Chinese until 1928, when “immigrant identification cards” began to be issued to all arriving immigrants.

Nineteenth century immigration laws tended to focus on Asian immigrants. By the 1920s, however, the United States no longer depended on the large-scale influx of European labor. Technological advances, which reduced the need for labor, along with rising nativist sentiment in the context of wars with Europe led to increased support for immigration restrictions.

These sentiments translated into legislative action. The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act was the nation’s first comprehensive immigration law.  As Mae Ngai explains in Impossible Subjects, “It established for the first time numerical limits on immigration and a global racial and national hierarchy that favored some immigrants over others” (Ngai 2014: 3).

The quotas set forth in the 1924 Act were based on ideas of white superiority – particularly the superiority of Germans and people from the United Kingdom. Whereas 65,721 visas were allocated to people from Great Britain, Italians were only allocated 5,802 and the Turkish only 226. The quotas were ostensibly based on the national origins of US citizens in the 1890 Census, but they excluded people of African and Asian descent.

While Congress used quotas to exclude undesirable races from entering the country, the Courts ensured that those who were in the United States would not attain citizenship. In the early 1920s, the Supreme Court decided that Japanese and Indians in the United States were ineligible for citizenship

The restrictive quotas and laws prohibiting Asians from attaining citizenship were eventually lifted. Today, our immigration policies are ostensibly colorblind.

However, over 90 percent of immigrants in the United States today are non-white, meaning that laws that restrict or provide opportunities for immigrants will have racially disparate consequences.

A Congressional decision to provide avenues for legalization and citizenship for undocumented immigrants would go a long way towards reducing inequality between Latinos and whites insofar as about 75 percent of undocumented immigrants are from Latin America. In contrast, decisions to enhance immigration law enforcement would further restrict opportunities for Latinos insofar as 98 percent of people deported last year were from Latin America.

No matter what your opinion is on immigration law enforcement or immigrant legalization, there is no denying the fact that discussions about immigration in the United States are and have always been discussions about racial difference and racial equity.

Tanya Golash-Boza is a 2015 Contributing Blogger for Mujeres Talk. She is on the faculty of UC-Merced and has published books and articles on the topics of immigration, migration, race, racism, transnationalism, borders.

Focus on Dr. Daisy Cocco De Filippis

Dominican Blue Book

President Daisy Cocco De Filippis was born in Santo Domingo. Her parents moved to the United States when she was 13 years old. She served for many years as professor of Spanish and Latin-American Literature at The City University of New York (York College). De Filippis is currently president of Naugatuck Valley Community College—the first Dominican president of a community college in the United States.

President De Filippis holds a Ph.D. in Spanish Language and a M. Phil. in Spanish Literature from the Graduate School and University Center of CUNY, as well as an M.A. in Spanish Literature and a B.A. in Spanish and English Literatures summa cum laude from Queens College, CUNY. A published author and literary critic, her scholarly work is recognized internationally as pioneering the field of Dominican women studies and Dominican authors in the U.S.

Prior to coming to NVCC, Dr. De Filippis served as provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Eugenio Maria de Hostos Community College of the City University of New York (CUNY). Dr. De Filippis began her career at York College as an adjunct lecturer in 1978, advancing to become a professor of Spanish and ultimately being appointed associate dean for academic affairs.

As president of NVCC, Dr. De Filippis has been honored by the Latino and Puerto Rican Affairs Commission, Connecticut Women’s Education and Legal Fund, the Boys and Girls Club, Habitat for Humanity and the Martin Luther King Jr. Commission. She was also invited to speak at the Waterbury mayoral inauguration in 2012 and named Dominican Mayor of the Day in 2013. She has previously been the recipient of, among many other honors and awards, the Woman of the Year Award from the Association of Dominican-American Supervisors (2006), the Order of Merit, Duarte, Sanchez and Mella in the Rank of Commander, presented by Dr. Leonel Fernandez, President of the Dominican Republic (2005), the Hija Distinguida of Santo Domingo (Distinguished Daughter) Award, presented by the Mayor of Santo Domingo (2005), the Educator of the Year Award from Dominican Times Magazine (2004), the Order of Merit Cristóbal Colón, in the Rank of Commander, presented by Hipólito Mejía, President of the Dominican Republic (2003), the Myers Outstanding Book Award, presented by the Gustavus Meyer Center for the Study of Bigotry in North America, to authors of Telling To Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios (Duke University Press, 2001), Simmons College (2002), the Influential Latina Award, El Diario/La Prensa (1998), a Citation for Outstanding Contribution to the Community and Academe, Ruth Messinger, President, Borough of Manhattan, New York (1996), and a Citation for Outstanding Contribution to Academe, Claire Shulman, President, Borough of Queens, New York (1994).

Like the best professors, De Filippis begins our interview by directing me to the definitive written resource on the subject at hand, in this case her remarkable essay “The House that Mamá Biela Built,” published in Telling to Live. She then proceeds to speak spontaneously, with flowing ease and often poignant honesty, about her early life and intellectual formation.

“My grandmother was a teacher. Born in 1898, she had very emancipated ideas for a woman of her time. She believed that girls could do anything boys could do, and she also believed in me with a passion that nobody else has yet believed in me. My parents were divorced when I was very young, and she taught me to love one of my fundamental loves, the place where I go to find a sense of order and beauty in the world and that is poetry. Poetry defines the manner in which I communicate. I’m not really a poet, although I do write poetry for my granddaughters, because I would like them to remember me in a similar fashion; but I have written many books promoting, translating, and analyzing the poetry of Dominican writers. I learned from her a sense of who I was and what it meant to be Dominican. We used to walk the street to visit women who had been friends of her mother. I was a little girl who actually liked to sit with old people and listen to them tell me stories about how the city was formed, who our family was and what they contributed to that. I would sit in the park and read and make sense of things, I was going through a difficult time since it’s not easy to have your mother remarry when you are four years old. She was my anchor, and through her, I learned to love my island and love my half-island; and through her I learned that there are many traits in my character, resilience and creativity and endurance, that come precisely from what it means to grow up with palm trees that never bend, though they certainly sway, and are not broken by the storm. All of that shaped my view of the world.”

At the Graduate School and University Center of CUNY, De Filippis wrote her doctoral thesis on Dominican poetry: the first dissertation to deal with Dominican literature, it thus became the first of numerous historic milestones she has chiselled out for the community in her career. Due to the boldness of her endeavour, she was advised to present the subject in a European theoretical framework. “I used the theories of Michel Riffaterre. The semiotic study of poetry really looks at the way words relate to one another so that they make meaning. The words need to have a reason to be there, to belong. Semiotics is about organizing. That was the framework, but I got into texts that dealt with a Dominican reality, that brought in the voices of the Dominican countryside. It created a controversy in the Dominican Republic.” De Filippis acquired the reputation of being “a Dominican critic who promotes Dominican works.” In fact, however, her guiding principle was much broader: “I just promised myself I wouldn’t write about anything I didn’t like. That I would just take the time to bring justice to good works.”

With President De Filippis, the conversation flows naturally and easily back and forth between life, literature and language. “My dreams and aspirations have always been very, very high,” she recalls, “because I grew up with a grandmother who introduced me to books as the best way to find meaning in life. In a difficult situation, the best getaway is to enter a book and find yourself in it and find comfort in it and through reading, you understand that there are multiple ways to make meaning in this world and there are different ways of organizing and creating stability, beauty, and knowledge that are not dictated by one culture or by one gender or one people. So I learned very early on, I was bilingual in the Dominican Republic, by the time I was eight or nine I was fluent in Italian, and I learned a lot. My stepfather’s mother came to live with us, and since I gravitated towards old people, I had two grandmothers, one Italian, one Dominican. It shaped my understanding that you could say things in different ways and it would still mean the same thing. You could look at the world, organize the world with different grammatical order, with different words, and the meaning at the heart would still be the same.”

Stories that tug the heartstrings featured prominently in the adolescent De Filippis’s development of her keen eye for patterns of meaning. She likes to say that Charles Dickens picked up where her grandmother left off: “in the sense that Great Expectations was the first complete novel that I read in English, in 9th grade. You know Dickens talks about children who are abandoned and disenfranchised but in the end, somehow justice prevails. There’s a sense of comfort that things are going to work out. And so I think that first year, being in this country and being away from my grandmother, and the way she taught me, reading took over that role.” Later in life, visiting the Dominican Republic for the summer with children of her own, De Filippis had the chance to watch her grandmother giving the same lessons to them. “She would draw a leaf, and she would begin to show me the different parts of the leaf in her drawing, and then we would go to the park– el Parque de Ramfis, now called el Parque de Hostos. What we try to teach our college students in General Studies, which is how connected things are—I learned that from her, as a kid: that a leaf can nurture a life, can feed it, but also can nurture the spirit if you paint it or if you write a poem about it, if you write a story about a tree. Those lessons I learned from her early on and I brought them here, and then Dickens gave me the sense that I could survive, because junior high school is a really tough environment.” De Filippis has since written articles on the subject of the trials and tribulations of junior high students. She notes that she still mourns her grandmother, who died at the age of 86.

Summarizing her revelatory essay, De Filippis tells me that “the conclusion of ‘The House that Mamá Biela Built’ is that I am that house. I am that house that she built, and my survival or my strength and the fact that I can go to New York and now be in Connecticut and have a way to make home and I use the tools to make this home: being who I am, a Dominican mother who is now a grandmother, who is also an administrator and educator but who has also written many books and reads poetry. This campus reads poetry all the time.” She mentions that acclaimed Dominican writers Chiqui Vicioso and Marianela Medrano (a close personal friend of long standing) will be visiting soon. Medrano hosts a poetry reading called Confluencia four times a year at Naugatuck Valley Community College, a tradition now in its sixth year. The fifth-anniversary milestone was marked by the publication of a book: Confluencia in the Valley: Five Years of Converging with Words, with a Foreword by President De Filippis herself.

De Filippis recently stepped down as president of the Dominican Studies Association, a position she had held since the 1990s. “We would get together every couple of years: it was about me disseminating Dominican Studies but also about having the young people that were coming up get to know one another and hear what they have to say and create our own sense of space and history.”

What challenges she has faced as the first Dominican community college president? “I think the challenges that I have are about the same as I would have, whether I were Dominican or not. You’re really trying to open the doors, to bring people in. This past May, our graduating class was aged 17-71. We have a group of students who are finishing high school and for two years they take some college-level courses and get a certificate in manufacturing, so I had a bunch of 17 year-olds who were graduating from high school who already had a certificate from a community college so that they could begin to look for work.” Though the school is predominantly white (60%), De Filippis is proud to say that the current freshman class is 25% Latino (the figure for the entire student body was 14% when she arrived), and that the school is applying Hispanic-Serving status.

As De Filippis tells it, the story of her becoming president of NVCC hinged on a basic, undeniable chemistry, a sense of mutual trust and serendipitous synergy that became apparent in her immediate encounter with the school, with the people who work and study there. “There was an incredible meeting of minds when I came here. I really wasn’t planning to come. Somebody nominated me. They wrote to me asking if I would like to be considered and my husband said, ‘You can’t say no to what hasn’t been offered, or to what you have not seen.’ He and I drove over here and I saw Waterbury, which has one of the highest poverty rates in Connecticut. And I saw a lot of young men, especially black and Latino men, on the corners. And I thought, ‘So, I have a reason for coming to this place.’ I came here and the search committee had set up interviews with all the different constituencies in the school from 9:00 in the morning until 5:00 PM, when I finally met the search committee. The students, faculty senate, student senate, different administrators, you name it. And the message I got at the end of the interviews was: We really want you to come. So by the time I talked to the search committee, I also wanted to come. The challenge I had was this: I came to an environment that was ready for change. I always say, I’m very grateful to those who came before me, because they did some work that I don’t have to do.”

Although the college sits in a landscape of sweeping storybook grandeur, there were some changes to the space and its use that immediately cried out to be made. De Filippis followed her intuition and common sense. “Having been at CUNY, where it was very difficult to see any green, and having come from an island, here, I’m surrounded by a glacial ridge of trees. What I didn’t see, however, what was lacking, was the pulse, the vibrancy, the life, that we had at Hostos Community College, where I had been the Provost for six and a half years and which I loved very much. Here, I had all this beautiful space, but there wasn’t a single garden. I walked through the fifth floor that connects all the buildings on campus, but with these beautiful corridors with glass so you see all this wonderful vegetation outside, there wasn’t a chair for the students to sit in. Everything was beige. There was a sense that, as Aida Cartagena Portalatin (about whom De Filippis has published a book) would say, a woman was needed here, and I am that woman.

“What it was lacking was a kind of nesting, creating a space and organizing the space. I looked around and I didn’t see too many services being offered. I also noticed that the graduation numbers were not high. There were many things like that. So I started by defining the space as a place where student success is our expectation.” De Filippis also notes with approval that how to make a good flan has become widespread knowledge at NVCC– thanks to the many flans that she herself has made for her constituents (it is, she says, part of the essence of governing as a Hispanic woman).

Far from imposing an autocratic vision, the dynamic transformation De Filippis has wrought consists in empowering her various constituencies in multiple ways. “I have taken the fifth floor and given people permission to paint the walls.” De Filippis found painters and encouraged them to get started changing the look of the place, adding more warmth and color. “We reconfigured one space on the fifth floor and created the Academic Center for Excellence. I envision it as a New York loft with movable pieces, so the students have free tutoring and mentoring that they can go to seven days a week, including at night.” The library was reorganized to make it more accessible, more integrated with the heart of the campus.

“We took all the furniture from the core of the building and sent it to the prisons to be reupholstered. We got the students in the arts program to take ownership of the walls and paint them, so we began to create this learning commons, with multiple seating areas for the students.” These initiatives inspired the workers in the Admissions, Registrar, and Cashier’s Office to come forward with ideas for reorganizing their working spaces “in an orderly way that would make sense for the students,” De Filippis tells me. Services were streamlined and consolidated. The staff of the Center for Academic Planning and Student Success also spoke up in turn with ideas for optimal use of their space.

President De Filippis has also worked with local and elected leadership to bring evening bus service to Waterbury, secure funding for an Advanced Manufacturing Technology Center, receive two Fulbright Scholar-In-Residence guests and bring the federal GEAR UP program to Waterbury. NVCC also established a Bridge to College office, which administers $12 million in grants aimed at preparing students to enter and succeed in college.

With striking clarity of vision, De Filippis repeatedly returns to the connection between these enormous practical and logistical advances made at NVCC under her administration and her lifelong passion for literature. “You see, my writing a doctoral dissertation on the semiotics of Dominican poetry was great because it brought me into the world of Dominican letters. I studied poetry as a tribute to my grandmother. But then I came here and I said, wait a second! Semiotics is also lean management. Everything is where it’s supposed to be, for the purpose that it’s supposed to have.

“I arrived here on Bastille Day, July 14, and I remind them of that. The number of graduating students this year was 1,353. So we’ve more than doubled the number of completions.” Under her guidance, student retention has steadily risen, enrollment has increased from 6,128 students (fall 2008) to 7,293 students (fall 2013), and graduation awards have grown from 521 (2007–08) to 1,353 (2013–14) total awards.

“We are the only community college in Connecticut that has had the honor of having more than 1,000 completions in a year. This is the third year in a row. The first year the number was 1,008, then it went up to 1,252, and now it’s 1,353. But for the black and Hispanic students, the numbers have more than doubled. It’s a 200% improvement in completion. So I’m here for everybody. But because I am here and because I’ve created an environment where the students all know me as ‘President Daisy,’ and I spend time and I listen to them, and they all feel that if this sixty-something woman, who’s a grandmother, who has an accent, who’s an immigrant, can be one of the most effective presidents for a community college—and I’m not bragging, it’s a fact, my supervisor tells me that—then they can do anything. So my being a woman, my being Dominican, my being Latina—and I embrace all of my students, I don’t care what color they are, because anybody who comes here is mine, I’m their mother, guide and mentor, I’m their defender, but to have the black and Latino kids rise the way they have risen gives me tremendous satisfaction. I am doing what I have done my entire life, which is: I am an educator for everybody; I try to help my people as much as I can.”

I ask what her proudest accomplishment as president so far is. “Having created an environment where students believe in themselves and having given the support for them to jump high, to aim high, and achieve, and I’m going by the number of completions, which is spectacular here.” In her scholarly work? “Giving voice to the Dominican literature written in the United States in Spanish.” Here, again, De Filippis’s sense of literature as a dynamic social force is crucial. “I have received as much recognition from the community as I have from the academy. Helping as much as I can to create space, not only at the institutions where I am but in the institutions where I have friends who are academics, for Dominican writers in particular, but not limited to those. You want to maintain the flow of the community. I think I contributed to that.” She is also a prolific translator, but mentions that only in passing, as she moves on toward more vital concerns. “As much as time would permit, I have done a lot of work to promote that. I (and many others) have become a vehicle for the country to open itself to its racial makeup, to the role of women, to the need to embrace the Haitian as your brother or sister, because after all, we are Haitians here. Who cares whether I was born on the west or east side of the island? I’m very proud that the women in particular have embraced a very open and inclusive approach. We, from here, have become examples; have become a constant mirror to some of the lesser angels of the island.”

The unity of art, scholarship, and life is a truth De Filippis affirms once more as I ask for her advice to young aspiring scholars or administrators. “I never took a course in administration, education, or accounting. I have managed more budgets than I could tell you. The humanities and the arts teach you to think on your feet, teach you to read, teach you to communicate, teach you to be serious, and give you the tools to do anything. The best administrators, in my experience, are those who begin as faculty, who learn what it’s like to get through one semester, which bring the experience and can then guide others and become the chair and ultimately, if they have the patience for many meetings, continue to advance. I always tell the women’s groups I get invited to speak to that I didn’t have a road map; what I kept on with was my spirit open to possibilities. And then, when you go there, whatever it is that you do, the important thing is to believe in it. If you love it, you will do your best. When I began teaching at York College, everybody thought that being an accountant was the way to go. But in the end, you’ve got to be able to get up in the morning. I love my job. I love what I do. It has meaning for me. I want to do more of it. And I could tell you honestly that since the day I began working in 1975 when I graduated from Queens College with a bachelor’s degree and they made me an adjunct—I taught two courses. And I went to pick up my first check. I laughed all the way home, because I would have paid to stand in front of a classroom and teach.”

As we conclude our conversation, President De Filippis stresses the continuity between her past, whether as a child in the Dominican Republic or as a young teacher at CUNY, her present at Naugatuck Valley, and her future legacy. “Wherever I came, I carry all those people with me. Wherever I am, I’m Dominican. Wherever I am, I will honor that. And wherever I am, I want people to understand that it is a good and beautiful and honorable thing to be Dominican. I have three sons and two beautiful granddaughters, one of whom is nine years old, and she writes poetry. She sent me a poem last week: ‘I am from / burnt caramel flan / and the soft fabric / of my abuela’s shawl.’ My work is done.”

This is one of several profiles featured in the newly launched Dominican Blue Book by the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, which this year is celebrating its 20th Anniversary with a grand event, The Dominican Intellectual Legacy Gala, on Saturday, December 6, 2014, at 6:30 p.m. Congratulations to the Dominican Studies Institute on this important anniversary!

“Adam’s Rib: Island Taboo Unveiled”

 

by Iris Lafé

I had long forgiven my father. For the sake of my battered mother’s dignity safely folded the skeletons in the family closet as good little Puerto Rican girls and boys so often do. Five decades later and our homecoming to their native Puerto Rico (1999), the dreadful specter of domestic violence returns to haunt me again—this time, in high definition. In this essay, I explore a silent tragedy ravaging La Familia Puertorriqueña of the 21st Century: Femicide.

My story begins with a visit from The Muse. While languishing in the remote, rural quiet solitude of my aging parents’ Barrio down south, my heart cries out for the battered mujeres of Puerto Rico. I was expecting her.

“There’s a reason you came back to the troubled homeland when you did,” she prompts. “Family violence, child abuse and benign neglect, the traumatic ripple effects on victims and to society is a subject you know all too well. Remember your experience. Don’t be afraid. You lived it and carry your mother’s memories deep inside the well of your anguished soul. You both survived, as a single mother you broke that cycle of abuse and your only daughter remains virtually unscathed. But look at the future, getting bleaker by the day for the next generation of women and girls, if they survive at all. Be the light, tell your story and break the silence.” The Muse emboldened me and possessed my disenchanted body right on the spot.

Day after day I was riveted to the Spanish local TV news. During breaks from my 24/7 caregiver duties, I began to chronicle my life on the island, to document what I was witnessing—it became a feverish compulsion—a reflex and residue from my California days in broadcasting and the media: Where’s the story? Get the story and get the scoop. Switching channels, clearly, from the missing coverage on mainstream networks beaming down by satellite, I had the scoop.

On the U.S. Caribbean colony—population 3.7 million “Forgotten Americans”—violence against women had reached unbridled, unconscionable proportions. From January to June 2011, in only six months, an unprecedented nineteen (19) mujeressuffered brutal, gruesome deaths, mortal mutilations and slayings reminiscent of a Stephen King novel—an abomination to our noble society.[i]

Despite La Ley 54 (domestic violence protection and prevention act of 1989) Puerto Rico had the highest per capita rate in the world of women over 14 murdered at the hands of a spouse or partner and the numbers kept climbing, ending 2011 with 30 femicides, scrutinized in an ACLU report.2 These are terrorizedwomenthe police failed to protect (whether by omission or commission) among the total of 1136 men, women, and children violently murdered that year.[ii]

The vivid scenarios of families trapped in violence, condemned to unmitigated poverty, beamed me back to my childhood household in 1960s New York.

The sweltering Lower East Side tenement, exuding the aroma of festering refuse from the back alleys, made me gag each time I scurried past the dingy hallways into our fire escape window apartment #1. The humble hearth Mami, the dutiful domestic—Boricua clean freak—whitewashed using her penetrating Pine Sol cleaner and irresistible sautéing sofrito vapors rising from the stove. Her story I’d begun to write:

Everything I am, ever was or ever shall be I owe to mi santa madre. Mami was a saint— “Saint Tolerance.” She put up with my father´s “casca rabia” irascible, grumpy temperament, early years of matrimonial hell, always on her knees, praying without cease at her overworked altar of Catholic Christian faith. Holding high hopes for a miracle, that one day, Papi would stop getting drunk, using her as his punching bag; while she still loved “el macho de la casa” (her sole provider) unconditionally. To the day he passed away, she justified, “tu Papá es bueno.” Your father is a good man, her misty eyes imploring me to forgive him, her final dying wish.  

It hadn’t looked that way to me. I’d seen “The Hulk” crush her face into one bloody pulp. From the age of five in Loisaida, I witnessed the “War of the Lópezes” time and time again. The silent and sullen type, under the influence Papi was “a bad drunk,” your standard Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde. Generous shots of rum fueled a strange combustion unleashing the beast, a cruel monster of a two-legged kind. No civility whatsoever, he fumed and roared, the foul-mannered brute he became, ¿Pendeja, cómo dejastes que’se nene se queme? Idiot, how could you let the child get burned? he charged. No questions asked of Mami, as if she were chattel, less than human to boot, and beat!—reared on erroneous illusions of greater male entitlement.  

Earlier, my curious brother reached up to the hot stove toppling the simmering pot of yummy habichuelas (beans) onto his 3-year-old frame. An ossified Papi arrived from his midtown-Manhattan garment district job pushing clothes racks (earning a paltry $35 a week) to find little Junior badly burned.    

A sewing machine operator (he forbade to keep her factory job) Mami was busy too; in the living room sewing piecemeal to earn some cash to feed her hungry brood. The roach-overrun cupboards were bare again. Accidents were common with my hyperactive brother. Impatient for dinner on the table, he wiled into the kitchen to silence the grumbling in his belly. Mami feared Papi squandered his meager earnings again—drinking.

“Yo no tengo la culpa.” It´s not my fault, Mami pleads Papi to hear her out. “You don’t help me raise these children. You’re their father.” It never failed, on pay day, Papi took a detour to the liquor store for his panacea and was plastered by the time he got home, swearing ¡hijo eh putas!, those sons of bitches, without a care our little hearts were pumping fear. An in-your-face Mami dares to “sass” her Lord and master! “¿Pa´ qué fué eso?” She went there? Not again!

Papi clenches his teeth, huffs and puffs arrogance. His sledgehammer fist craters the walls, crashing into Mami’s lovely cinnamon-colored face, rapid fire licks meant to show her who´s boss. The heavyweight punches dislodging her front teeth vanished her cheerful alabaster smile. “Why don’t you leave that man, he will kill you the next time,” I begged my inconsolable mother, afraid I could be next, to suffer the wrath of a drunken, domineering father. A future feminist was burning inside the “Mini-me.”  

“I can’t. I will not raise my children without a father,” she despaired; Adam’s Rib beaten but not broken. Down her swelling face cascaded red rivulets of tears.

Loving, as it were, Papi was a tormented man from the time he learned he was a “castaway”—a love-child kicked to the curb. “Yo no tengo familia,” I have no family, he bemoaned to me on his death bed. “Ello sí.” Of course you do. “You have us, Daddy,” I retorted consolingly, switching from Spanish to English, like we always did since the time I was a little girl, feeling the sting of his rejection all over again. And yet, I empathized with his frail human condition.

Hijo de crianza (adopted by next of kin) Papi never knew his biological parents. Emotional baggage he was not up to the task of handling in marriage; Mami captured his heart at the tender age of 17—she was 27. He piled his arrested development issues on her, inflicted bodily and emotional injuries no child should grow up seeing as my three siblings and I did during the formative years. Early childhood traumas leave an enduring emotional scab that can harden one’s heart.  

On July 14 2011, reported our daily Primera Hora, outraged women advocates, representing the organization Coordinadora Paz Para La Mujer, a women’s collective of emergency shelter and service providers; and the civil rights coalition Movimiento Amplio de Mujeres, MAMPR, (General Mobilization of Women of Puerto Rico) denounced the government for not doing more to confront this issue and declared Un Estado de Emergencia Nacional (National State of Emergency) to stop the killings, demanding government action.[iii] Decrying the failures of La Ley 54 for lacking the muscle (and greater goodwill) of a male-dominated police and judiciary on the island; for not observing the tactical plans and protocols implemented, since 2005, by La Oficina de la Procuradora de Las Mujeres (Women’s Legal Advocate Office); for sanctioning the consequential violation of victim’s rights: bottom line, for being part of the problem, not the solution.

Puerto Rico suffragettes earned the right to vote in 1935. Eighty years later, women victims of gender violence fall victim to another crime, the cavalier machismo attitude judging that “the woman asked for it” including my own Papi until the thrashings stopped.

I pondered Mami’s fate, had not the NYC police handcuffed him and placed him behind bars, shielding her from her abuser. Not so in the case of la colonia:

  • 20,000 domestic violence incidents, on average, are officially reported each year
  • 130,000 women and girls subjected to family violence each year eschew the unresponsive system.[iv]

According to the ACLU, 107 femicides over the five years 2007–2011highlight the new normal today.[v]

My Mami’s action in defending herself scared my Papi straight. The thrashings stopped. To my parents’ credit, true love killed the beast.

[i] González, Leysa Caro. “Emergencia nacional por muertes de mujeres víctimas de violencia doméstica.” Primera Hora. 14 de julio de 2011.

[ii] Alvarez, Lizette. “Economy and Crime Spur New Puerto Rican Exodus.” New York Times. Feb. 9, 2014. [iii] González, Leysa Caro. “Emergencia nacional por muertes de mujeres víctimas de violencia doméstica.” Primera Hora. 14 de julio de 2011.

[iv] Mollmann, Marianne. “A Step Backward for Puerto Rican Women.” Women’s Rights Advocacy Director for Human Rights Watch. Puerto Rico Daily Sun. August 4, 2011.

[v] ACLU. “Failure to Police Crimes of Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault in Puerto Rico.” June 19, 2012.

Iris Lafé is the pen name for an emerging Afro-Latina writer who reports on 21st Century “Colonial” Puerto Rico from her perspective as a Diasporican returnee to the homeland in stylized personal vignettes. A Writer’s Well Literary Competition winner (2012), contributor to herkind.org Global Woman, and former writer KCBS News Radio (SF), Lafé is a Bronx Science alumna, holds a BA in Black and Puerto Rican Studies from Hunter College, and works and lives in the San Juan Metropolitan Zone with her daughter. Currently editing her back-to-roots memoir, Lafé can be reached at: boricua.freedom.writer@gmail.com

Renewal at Mujeres Talk

September 30, 2013

We have news of departures and changes at MT to share with our readers today. We hope you will join us in thanking Sara A. Ramírez, Elena Gutiérrez and Ella Díaz for their service!

Our extremely talented Co-Editor/Moderator from 2012-2013 Sara A. Ramírez is stepping down from this role. A graduate student in Ethnic Studies at UC-Berkeley, Sara will be devoting her time and energy this academic year to work on her dissertation, which promises to be a smart, ambitious, and innovative contribution to Ethnic and Gender Studies. While we will all dearly miss working with Sara, we are excited for her that she has reached this stage in her work and wish her wonderful and inspired writing days ahead. If we were thinking only of ourselves, we might be tempted to say that her departure is not good news, but knowing how long and hard Sara has worked to make it to dissertation stage we share her joy in taking this next step. We hope she knows that she can continue to rely on all of us for support in her journey.

Since joining the Mujeres Talk Editorial Collective last year, Sara A. Ramírez has been a phenomenal contributor and collaborator. As both a lead editor and a second reader, she has corresponded with authors and solicited and/or reviewed no less than eight essays during this past year. Her commitment, dedication and collaborative skills impressed us all as exceptional, especially for a young scholar. We know that these will serve her well in her future career in academia. Sara always brought new ideas to our editorial discussions and successfully followed through on them. She was responsible and forthright in consulting with colleagues on the Collective when thorny issues surfaced. She deftly managed to incorporate varied feedback into editing suggestions to authors. Sara is a terrific editor, both careful and caring in her comments to authors. Most importantly, in her every action Sara conveyed her strong feminist ethics to build, contribute, and deepen opportunities for Chicana, Latina, and Native American women, queer and transgender folks in the academy. For these reasons, we want to take this moment to publicly thank Sara A. Ramírez for her exceptional service to Mujeres Talk and MALCS.

A second member of our Editorial Collective is also moving on to an exciting new project. Associate Professor Elena Gutiérrez is leaving Mujeres Talk to take on leadership responsibilities on another digital project: the Reproductive Justice Virtual Library. On the Mujeres Talk Editorial Collective, Elena reviewed submissions, contributed to discussions about our editorial guidelines, solicited essays for the site, and wrote an excellent essay for Mujeres Talk on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade earlier this year. Elena will be curating the Reproductive Justice Virtual Library site with movement activists and scholars across the nation. We have no doubt that Elena’s many talents in editing and writing will make RJVL a great site. We are excited about this new site, which expands the digital and online presence of women of color even further, so we wish Elena Gutiérrez every success in this exciting new endeavor!

Ella Díaz, who has contributed several excellent essays to Mujeres Talk on adjunct faculty, Latina art, sexuality and politics, mentoring, and the importance of digital publication for women of color, and who has also been a careful, generous, and keen reviewer of submissions to Mujeres Talk, will return to her earlier role as an occasional contributor to Mujeres Talk rather than a regular member of the Editorial Collective. Readers may remember that Ella joined the Collective earlier this year and contributed to the further development of editorial policy guidelines for this unique format. Ella’s enthusiasm and energy as well as her expertise in art and performance and excellent collaborative and critical skills will continue to make a valuable contribution to Mujeres Talk in this more limited role. We also wish her every success in her continued role on the MALCS Coordinating Committee and in her academic career — students at Cornell are lucky to have Ella as a professor!

Finally, we’d like to announce that Mujeres Talk will become an independent website as of October 2013! Look for an announcement of our new site soon! We plan to be up and running later this month and will be returning to our previous biweekly publication on Mondays. We developed Mujeres Talk as a project within MALCS to serve the mission and goals of the organization in an online format. In any growth process there are transitions and transformations. We have determined that continuing to grow and evolve Mujeres Talk and its capabilities will be best accomplished as a site independent of MALCS. We support the principles and goals of MALCS as we continue to build space for Chicanas, Latinas, and Native American women in the academy. We have put forward a proposal for preserving a digital archive of our site from its inception in January 2011 through today, September 2013, to the MALCS national leadership. We hope that our regular readers will continue to contribute to and follow the site. We are excited to embark on this new journey with you and your support!

Theresa Delgadillo
Inés Hernandez-Avila
Felicity Amaya Schaeffer
Elena Gutiérrez
Lucila Ek
Lourdes Alberto
Ella Díaz

Comment(s):

  1. Anonymous    October 8, 2013 at 7:17 PM

    Dr. Diaz’ article both impressed me and saddened me, as I remember well my first three years as Lecturer(hired in a tenure-track position), 5 years as Assistant Prof, 21 years as a Lecturer(with employment security). People gave me much advice, but I could not lfollow it. I had a destiny to fulfill. Me and a large number of other people, faculty, staff, and students,working in UC System set out to transform it. Were we demented? Did we make a difference? I have no answers, but would do it all over again if I could. In the academic world, everything is negotiable. ASR

  2. Sara A. Ramírez    October 11, 2013 at 1:57 PM

    Thank you to the MT Collective for being such fantastic mujeres with whom to work. My experience with MT–especially under the guidance of Theresa Delgadillo and Seline Szkupinski Quiroga–has helped me to understand the complexities of feminist editorial work. Many thanks for this wonderful opportunity.

  3. Theresa Delgadillo, Co-Editor/Moderator    October 12, 2013 at 11:54 AM

    Many thanks to the many who have emailed us personally to express your continued support for Mujeres Talk as an independent site — we’re looking forward to continuing to hear from and work with all!