Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism (Live Girls) by

Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Seal Press
Published: 2010-02-23T16:00:00+00:00

My mother had to swallow the consequences that came with choosing a different life for her daughters. When Cristina insisted that she had to leave Brownsville to get a social work degree, our mother was hesitant but she half-heartedly packed up the Reliant and drove her first-born to San Antonio. Walking into the dorm where my sister would be spending the next several years, my mom’s heart wilted when she saw the other students sitting around the lobby. The scene was painfully familiar: they reminded her of sad relatives waiting in a hospital waiting room. Three years later, our mom forced a smile and waved goodbye from the tiny Brownsville airport as her twins flew away to New York and California. She later told me that she had wept the night before as, for the last time, she ironed my long-sleeve cotton shirts just the way I liked them. Like my father had liked them, too.

But a new kind of life, one that she had longed to know as a child, opened up to our mother when we left. Over endless late-night phone conversations, she sympathized with our bureaucratic dilemmas, asked about our new friends and reminded us to eat well and sleep plenty. She came to visit me in California, where we climbed the sloped streets of San Francisco and revisited the migrant camp in Davis that had served as her first home in the United States. When I spent a semester in Puebla with a Mexican exchange program, she made the eighteen-hour bus trip with me, exploring places she’d never explored in her own country. She took lots of pictures of places only her imagination had toured, later carrying them in her purse to show her co-workers. In 1996, Celia took her to New York. Our mom was horrified by the crazy driving and the subways where people stared, so she insisted instead on walking dozens of blocks at a time to see the city. Then, on a sticky July morning, they decided to visit the Statue of Liberty. My mother knew very little about the scores of immigrants who had passed before that same spot for generations. But as a child the monument, which she had seen in books and on television, had represented the glitzy life of New York—a cosmopolitanism this little girl from the ranch had always wished for herself.

Standing there in her broken-in walking shoes, her unruly black curls dancing as the ferry crossed her over the cold blue waters to Ellis Island, Mami choked up and her body was covered with tingles as she contemplated that majestic stone woman for the first time. Miles away from the empty fringes of Matamoros, Antonia H. Ballí had finally seen the world.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.