Disclaimer: This article represents the opinion of one of Her Campus’s contributors. This is an opinion piece, and it does not necessarily represent the opinions or viewpoints of Her Campus.
I remember the first time my mother began relaxing and blow drying my hair because my curls were a cause of embarrassment to her because they represented my inherited blackness. As I grew up, my hips, bust, and nose also became equally embarrassing. I couldn’t wear tank tops, shorts or brilliant colors like my friends. I had to wear formless, ugly clothing that made me look like a blob. I had to straighten my hair. I couldn’t speak loudly. I couldn’t wear hoop earrings or anything that would even reference my black heritage; my mother would often say that I look like my father—who is a white man when in reality I look more like her.
My cousins and I in my family, who are mostly black, were fondly called “jabaos” or “jabaas.” Once I was older I found out that “jabaos” were mulatos who were light-skinned but with prominent black features like curly hair or “pelo malo” and a prominent nose. We were favored in our family because we were “jabaos” because even though we had defined black features, at least we were white and that apparently made us better. In my majority-wise black and poor catholic school in Villa Carolina, jabaos and white students would get the most attention in class, would be chosen first to represent the school, would be chosen to help in the church, and would have the best grades.
While black and “trigueño” students would have the exact opposite; they would suffer discrimination from the school staff, the teachers, would be stereotyped as delinquents and “problematicos.” Black and “trigueña” girls had to deal with all of this plus the church shoving purity and religious beliefs up their vaginas while the entire school sexualized them. White and “jabao” girls would be considered to be “more good,” pure and chaste compared to the black and “trigueña” vixens and “putas” with bibles and textbooks in their hands.
I can’t stop talking about the concept of Afro Latinidad and colorism in the Caribbean— in the context of Puerto Rico as a colony of the United States in particular. As a woman of color and an afro-latina, I can see that in Puerto Rico, colorism in black families is rampant; racism in Puerto Rico is rampant. It comes from the mouths of parents, priests, cousins, sisters, brothers and even from strangers in the streets. It is institutionalized when all of our prominent politicians are white in appearance, and when all suburbs are white while barrios and “caserios” are black. It is in our media when all of our favorite TV celebrities are mostly white, and when all of our telenovelas are white while black characters are the help or the ignorant “campesino.” When our local TV programs use comedy based on stereotypes and blackface. It’s in our daily lives when black mothers tell their daughters to marry white men so they can “mejorar la raza,” when interracial couples can’t walk the streets without being criticized or treated as jokes, when a girl’s beautiful hair is called “pelo malo” because it is curly, when we call women and men ugly just for being black or having black features, and when black families favor their light-skinned children over their darker-skinned ones.
This racist and colorist narrative is so seditious that it even has invaded our literature. We see this in Jesus Colon’s essay titled “Angels in My Hometown Church” in the figure of Doña Maria Luisa Martinez who says at the end of the essay “Pedritooo…Pedritooo…Come over here immediately!!! You shouldn’t be playing in front of the church with…that boy!!!!” It caught my eye because Pedrito is a white child from affluent family who strikes up a friendship with Jesus who is a black youth, and it talks about the race relation between Puerto Ricans that is representative of that same racism and colorism that many claim we do not have because of our holy trinity of races (Spanish, Taino and African), but what people forget is that the father holds more power than the son and the holy spirit.