Why Immigration is a Feminist Issue

In a recent panel discussion held by the National Organization for Women (NOW-NYC) on feminism for women of Color, I was asked why mainstream feminisms has not considered immigration a feminist issue.

As a transnational Latina feminist, immigration has always been one of my top priorities, right alongside reproductive justice and the wage/professional gap that affect mostly women like me.

As this question was presented to me, I struggled for a response because on the one hand, I don't understand how an issue that disproportionately affects women and children is not considered a feminist priority, but on the other hand, I also understand that when something doesn't directly affect a group of people, they are less likely to regard it as most important.

As transnational women of Color, we understand that if immigration reform is not a priority, our families will be the ones affected the most.

This has been said many times, but I'll say it again: Mainstream feminists must listen to women of Color when they voice their struggles.

Open Letter To Organizations That Want Me To Speak For Free

Dear organizations that want me to speak for free,

In the past few months I have received several emails from organizations that would like me to speak at an event they are hosting in the upcoming months, particularly for Women’s History Month. Mostly I am invited to speak on issues related to sexism in the workplace, STEM outreach, and transnational/Latina feminism; topics that I feel very comfortable speaking about as I live these experiences in my daily life. It took me forever to feel comfortable saying this but I am expert in these topics and I have years of first hand experience that I can share and use to train other organizations in how to make their workspace welcoming and less hostile to women. I can also speak on what it feels like to be a transnational feminist living at the intersection of two cultures.

But I won’t do this for free.

What's Your Favorite Position? BOOM!

On Feminism and Faith

Not a day goes by that someone doesn’t call me a “radical feminist” and accuse me of trying to destroy religion and traditional values.

People on the Internet are both my biggest critics and my most enthusiastic supporters. But because of them, I have been forced to truly question my own beliefs on the compatibility of feminism and religion.

I think that they can coexist. Here’s why.

The thing about feminism is that it’s about empowering women — and that means all women – regardless of differences. And while I may personally find most religions inherently misogynist and oppressive, that does not give me the right to deter any other woman from finding spiritual nourishment in a religious community.

If feminism becomes synonymous with anti-religion, we risk alienating the women we seek to uplift and support.

If anything, feminism and religion are deeply connected because our views on gender are very much based in religious doctrines. And we cannot fight for equal rights by disenfranchising those who reconcile their religious beliefs with feminism.

Why Feminism Can Be Scary for Some Women

This post was originally published for Everyday Feminism.

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Feminism is a polarizing term.

You either fully embrace it as a way of life or want nothing to do with it.

Personally, I’ve always led a feminist lifestyle. But until recently, I would often start conversations about women’s right with the dreaded phrase “I’m not a feminist, but…”

Why was I so hesitant about calling myself a feminist?

The truth is: I simply didn’t understand what feminism was about, let alone how freeing it could be.

I had misconceptions that feminism was about usurping men’s power and dominating them. I truly believed that being a girl required protection from harm, and that I should be content to have men that could offer me that security.

But more importantly, I didn’t think that I, as a woman, was oppressed.

Career, Independence, and Love

Courtesy of http://www.123rf.com

In spite of my impassioned moments I am a level-headed person. Though I do find myself almost tearing out my hair every time I hear someone say that women are sacrificing their love lives, relationships, and families for the sake of their career. These comments feed into an old-age idea that women's desire are all rooted around family and motherhood, and that women are not desirable when they are independent and self-sufficient.

This week, Tyrese Gibson, the R&B singer, actor, author, and former fashion model tweeted this:

Ladies...Don't independence your way into loneliness
— Vision Implementer(@Tyrese) October 23, 2012

I do not care what Tyrese thinks about women, but he does have over 2 million twitter followers and has the power of media on his side. I can tweet all day long about feminism, but I do not have 2 million followers, so my messages do not reach as many people. I find his tweets falling into the same ritual of warning women of the "consquences" of their single or successful career statuts. Reading this tweet from Tyrese reminds me that only women get the "warning" about independence leading to loneliness. Independent men are sexy, reliant, and make good husband material. Single men in their 40s are never lonely, they are free to do as they please with their time. But independent women? They are just waiting for a man to save them, or in need of someone to take care of them.

Growing up I saw my divorced mother struggle to regain the independence she lost when she got married, because my father refused to have a wife that would put her career before her family. The thought that a family is created by both parents, and that they could both financially contribute to their marriage was never given a thought. While some families can afford to only have one parent work, that was not the case for my family. We struggled financially for years, and although my mother was a college graduate, while my father did not even graduate from middle school, he was the de facto head of the household. He managed our finances, our business, and activities. He decided how much money my mother would get for groceries and back-to-school shopping, while freely buying rounds of drinks for his friends at the local bar.

My father was not the smartest man when it came to managing our family's money, and while he doesn't represent all men, his refusal to allow my mother to be part of the household finances is all too common. I say this all the time, but I almost want to get it tattooed on my forehead so as to make the message clearer: PATRIARCHY HURTS MEN. My father measured his manhood only within patriarchal boundaries.


Bell hooks, in The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love, defines patriarchy as:

"…a political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence."

My mother would often refer to my dad as a machista. A machista is a man who domineers, specially the women in his life, to prove his masculinity. Machismo teaches men to show their virility, power, and manhood by being controlling and aggressive. The concept of machismo is heavily influenced by socially imposed gender roles and the idea that anything feminine is weak, and vice versa. While my significant other is considerably more open minded about gender roles than my father was, we both struggle with what society wants from us. In my home I have the most education, a salaried career, and make more money. He is a freelancer, blue collar worker, whose paycheck is directly related to how many hours he works; yet our intimate relationship is balanced. We both strive for success and uplift each other, always with an understanding that success is not measured in money and that our relationship is built by both of us. If I fail, he fails, and vice versa.

Nonetheless, our society is still deeply entrenched in gender roles, which brings me back to the notion of women having too much independence. What some see as "too much independence" in regards to women, is actually women being normal contributing members of our society, which in turn is good for everyone. Women being active members of our society reduces the pressure that men face to build a career, wealth, and family on their own. It just creeps people out because for eons women's place were on the sidelines.

Men and women are very much affected by gender roles and the pressures that come with that. Balancing a career, a family, and ones personal life is not easy, but the onus is always on women to either balance all facets of life perfectly or choose one (career or family.) A desire for independence along with love and protection is a human desire. However, men and women are not a monolith and can choose whichever life best suits them, sometimes doing so at the expense of a lot of social reprieve. Women who choose to be stay-at-home mothers or quit their jobs after marriage might not represent my lifestyle, but they have every right to make that choice for themselves. A woman who is fulfilled by her career and is not interested in marriage or a family has made that choice for herself and should not be seen as lonely; not unless she says so herself. And women who juggle all facets of life also know that at times they might not do it perfectly, and that's ok. Personal choices are just that, personal choices. They do not reflect a gender. So I will not entertain the idea that women are "too independent" when a man's independence is never questioned. The issue is not really about a person being self-sufficient, autonomous, and in control of their own life, it is the notion of a woman being autonomous, and that is unsettling. It is unsettling to men as it is to some women, because it dismantles gender roles that many truly believe in. What is disheartening to me is that women's independence is a talking point.

It is disheartening to me that women's independence is always a focal point for skewed gender roles and responsibilities in our society.

Shaping a Latina Feminist Identity

Courtesy of Tennessee Guerilla Women

My mother would never call herself a feminist, even though she is the embodiment of a feminist. She will say that feminism is incompatible with Catholicism, but warns me of the perils of religious fanaticism; that life is tough for all women, while reminding me she wants me and my sisters to have more opportunities than she did; that she does not have time to protests things she cannot change, although she singlehandedly raised three daughters, working 12 hour shifts as a home attendant for the elderly, six days a week; and that she really wants me to one day get married and give her grandchildren, but there's no rush!

For many years I thought my mother's refusal to believe in feminism came from her misconceptions of what it meant. Maybe she was caught up in the whole "lesbian" and "hairy legs" myths that are so often associated with women who are just trying to be treated as equals. But the reality is that as a Hispanic woman she did not believe that the traditional, Western, view of feminism related to her. Feminism for her felt like a movement she was not entitled to be part of. Surely women played a major role in the revolutionary movements of the 20th century in Latin America, but those efforts were rarely spoken of in feminist circles. According to history books women's rights movement of the 19th and 20th century never truly took root in Latin America.

The only way I could understand my mother's brave streak, while her other female relatives were so deeply entrenched in gender roles and a patriarchal household, was to look at her past, starting with the woman who gave birth to her. My maternal grandmother became pregnant with my mother out of a love affair in Dominican Republic. My grandfather was already engaged to be married, and he was not going to lose his macho status by being associated with a woman of "lose morals," so he abandoned her. Being a single mother is not easy in any part of the world, but Latin America is steeped in conservatism that shames women for being overtly sexual, while exalting men's promiscuity. My grandmother was shunned from her village, kicked out of her home, and left to fend for herself and her baby daughter. Ironically, it was my grandfather's oldest sister, unmarried and in the process of becoming a nun, who took a pregnant woman in. After my mother was born her aunt made sure that her niece was fed, clothed, and educated, and she looked after the woman her brother had abandoned. Unfortunately my grandmother was never able to get rid of the stigma of being a single mother and the embarrassment of her lover's abandonment for a more honorable, ie. virginal, woman. She suffered several mental breakdowns, was hospitalized for neurosis, and in 1970 she committed suicide by swallowing a poisonous cocktail of pills. My mother was raised by her paternal aunt, a woman who was planning on becoming a nun and never expected she would have to be a mother to her brother's child. Years later the one thing my mother was certain of was that she was alive, educated, and healthy, none of it had to do with a man. There were no men in her life, except for the few times her biological father would invite her to his immaculate home, where she felt unwanted and out of place.

At the age of 20 my mother married my father. For the first time in her life she had a man in her life, but he was not the prince charming people always told her about. Soon after the honeymoon my father made her quit her university studies claiming her first priority should be her children, he kept her from learning how to drive, and eventually regulated the time she could spend outside the home. This was exacerbated after we migrated to the United States, by then my sister was born and my mother was pregnant with her third daughter. Now my mother was expected to live by marianismo, the concept that the ideal woman should be spiritually immaculate and eternally self-giving; she is to self-sacrifice and reject her own pleasure in order to please others, particularly the men in her life. Meanwhile my father lost the status he once had as a married man with children and the owner of his own business in the Dominican Republic. After several failed attempts at opening businesses he drowned in debts, started to drink heavily, and became violent at the slightest provocation. Six years after we first stepped foot on American soil, my parents separated.

The night my mother left we had no where to go. She wandered aimlessly through the streets of Brooklyn, New York with three young daughters and one suitcase. Her nearest relative was on vacation, but it was the only home she could trust. So we sat in her front stoop for hours, although we knew that there was no chance anyone would open the door. Eventually my mother started looking for a spare key and found it. So we slept in her cousin's house for that night. It was a house I had visited often, but that night it felt eerie, as if we had broken into a stranger’s home. After unsuccessfully trying to search for a shelter that would take in a mother with three daughters, we went to the house of one of my school mates, whose mother had recently left her husband. She took us into her tiny apartment and gave us the bedroom of her youngest son. It only had a twin size bed and one window, so my mother would cover the floor with our clothing and lay a sheet over it as a makeshift bed for me and my sister, while she slept in the bed with my baby sister. We did that for six months until my mother was able to finish a training to become an elderly caretaker, get a job, and eventually a new home.

After all of this, my mother was thankful. She says she is one of the luckiest women in the world because she has three great daughters who make her proud. She does not pity herself, she does not even complain. When talking of the past she says that many have suffered more, and that she would not change anything. Admittedly, when I first began learning of feminism, I became upset with my mother. Surely she had to be angry after so many men in her life had failed her. How could she not see that she had to become the sacrificial lamb for us, while our father went out at night and did not once have to worry whether his daughters had enough to eat or a place to sleep? How could she work 12 hours a day and still come home to prepare us a meal and clean the house? I wanted her to be angry, because I was. Why did she have to suffer because of the mistakes others made?


It did not take long for my mother to notice my rebellious streak. One day she had enough of me talking down to her about her inability to see feminism from my point of view. She asked me if I was ashamed of my culture, or if I thought that taking care of children was not a satisfying job; if I truly believed that domestic duties would diminish my worth, and if I thought following traditions were demeaning. She reminded me that I was the one who insisted on having a quinceañera, the Latin American version of the Sweet Sixteen; a coming of age tradition that included a religious ceremony and my father changing my shoes from flat to heels and presenting me to the world as a woman. I wanted that, and today I know that it was a patriarchal society that led me to believe my father needed to confirm my womanhood, but I loved it. I will not deny it. It was symbolic and it allowed me to feel closer to my culture.

My mother, the woman that was the definition of marianismo, the unfeminist, was also the woman who taught me to find my own kind of feminism. A feminism that is threefold and includes an attachment to traditional culture, a satisfaction for being a mother and wife, and a devotion to religious symbolism. My mothers' feminism was about learning to do better than just survive. She was a full-time worker, a full-time mother, and was fully invested in her community and her church. She did not have the option of choosing between a fruitful career or being a stay-at-home mother. In fact, I had no working definition of a stay-at-home mom until I was in college, because it was a far-fetched dream in my life. All my female relatives had no choice but to work because not doing so meant their children would go hungry. So they all babysat each other's children as a way of supporting each other. I tried hard to make my family fit into the ideal feminist household: a home with two loving and equally working parents who somehow could still make time to be with their children and take summer vacations. But that was idealistic. My reality was my mothers' feminism; a feminism that was not just about envisioning a different world, but creating a life that will change it for her children.

Hispanic women are fully aware that our culture is entrenched in misogyny, but not necessarily any less than American culture. Women in the United States are often expected to take their husbands' last name. Many men still go to their bride's father to ask for her hand in marriage; just because we see it as a sweet gesture it does not mean that it isn't patriarchal in nature. Valuing your heritage will not take away from being a strong, independent, self-sufficient woman. I feel resentment at the way that Western feminism made me see my mother as a woman trapped in tradition, when in reality she was a living example of a feminist. Loving tradition and having pride in your culture does not mean these women cannot vocalize the gender issues of their communities. My mother's feminism was the truest form of feminism for me; a belief in the potential upward mobility of all women. Feminism cannot continue to exist as a monolithic block, or we will never be able to include women from all walks of life.