In her new book, Tías and Primas: On Knowing and Loving the Women Who Raise Us, Prisca helps us understand the women in our lives: la loca, tu tía escándalosa, la prima perfecta and so many more. Prisca shares her own path from la prima perfecta to la loca, and her best advice for truly getting to know the women we love.
Follow Prisca on instagram @priscadorcas. Find her latest book here.
Alicia Menendez : About a year and a half ago, Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez revealed to me that she was working on her second book, and now it is here, and it is phenomenal. Tías and Primas: On Knowing and Loving the Women Who Raise Us is a sort of love letter to the women who hold our families together. Prisca and I talk about all the archetypes, la loca, the WhatsApp tía, la prima perfecta, and now Prisca herself made life choices, leaving a marriage, choosing not to have children, that launched her from one archetype to another. We also talk about the reality of being women who are still very much in progress and the pressure to be okay. Prisca, thank you so much for being here.
Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodriguez:
Thank you for having me.
Menendez: Tell me, Prisca, about either your favorite tía or your favorite prima.
Mojica Rodriguez: I like them all, but there was something redemptive about writing Tu Tía, La Loca. When I speak up in my family, they're very Christian. There's a lot of [Spanish 00:01:20], and so it feels so dismissive. There's an element of being shut out because you're thinking outside the box that we're all supposed to think within.
Menendez: Especially because you're very clear, la tía loca, it's not that she actually has mental health issues, it's that she's dismissed as being wild because she doesn't adhere to the standards of her family or her community. But I think that line gets blurred. I think that people sometimes think there's something legitimately wrong with that woman when the only thing that is quote, unquote "wrong" with her is that she's seeking her own freedom.
Mojica Rodriguez: Yeah, and I live in that. I exist in that space of being thought as unwell because I don't abide by a very specific set of rules.
Menendez: I also love the you disaggregated la loca from la tía escándalosa, because sometimes those two also get lumped together, but they felt really different.
Mojica Rodriguez: They felt really different, and I even had to argue it with my editor, and then be clear of how they felt really different to me growing up, even, within households where those existed.
Menendez: Part of the decision to focus on tías and primas is a response to the flattening of Latina identity, that we only exist in three stereotypes as portrayed in popular culture.
Mojica Rodriguez: Yeah.
Menendez: And so part of thinking about tías and primas is helping really tease out these various experiences. In order to do that, you situate your own experience. Anyone who's read your first book, For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts, they know your story well, but you give us an abbreviated version. Nicaraguan, grew up in Miami, preacher's daughter, Spanish-dominant family, and then you write so beautifully about the decision to identify as brown. I was hoping you could read for us from that section of the book?
Mojica Rodriguez: Okay. "I am a non-white, non-Black Latina, and identify as brown, even when that is not a recognized racial category. I do not pass as white, I have never been treated like a white person in Latin America or the US. I never get told I don't look Latina enough, and people are never in disbelief when they hear me identify as Latina. Among my communities, I am the Latina who other bilingual Latinas speak to in Spanish first. Among non-Latina white people, I am phenotypically the Latina that Fox News uses in its fear-mongering reports on immigrants. I am the Latina people think of when they picture someone who is criminal, because that is what they have been told about brownness. Because we live in a white supremacist society, I have a particular racialized experience. My brownness is not evident when I speak due to any trace of an accent, nor is it evident when I share where I was born.
"Instead, my brownness enters rooms with me. Even when I stand quietly in a corner, I still get racialized as other. I do not look white, I do not pass, so I do not get asked where I am from with genuine curiosity. I have learned how to navigate spaces where I can predict racial biases will bubble up, managing my appearance and learning how to stand up straight like someone who expects respect. And while it doesn't always work, it feels like a shield I work and rework as I learn more and more about internalized biases. I am Latina enough. That has never been my fight. I have earned that title by shouldering all the negative stereotypes that white Latinas have readily perpetuated in the media through faking accents and dyeing their hair black or brown to get roles in US shows.
"They have received the benefit of being exotic through a type of brown face, but they do not have to shoulder the negative effects their complicity creates because they are white. It is the Argentinian, Anya Taylor-Joy, Latina, who folks want to meet and prop up as Latina excellence, who reminds them that their whiteness is interesting at times. It is the Yalitza Aparicio Latina, whose success is perceived as an anomaly and whose Indigeneity is mocked. I have a particular set of experiences from growing up looking like my Indigenous ancestors, and the cultura who wants to forget who our countries belonged to before our colonizers came. White Latinas show disdain towards me as much as non-Latina white people do. I'm a past they never want to remember, and that is what I mean when I say I am brown. Not a metaphor, but a living, breathing experience of otherness."
Menendez: I wonder what your experience has been contending with your very firm handle on why it is that you were using the word brown to describe both yourself and your lived experience?
Mojica Rodriguez: I met a lot of people, a lot of Latinas who do pass as white, who I would think they were white if they didn't tell me they were Latinas, and who were like, "I am brown, too. I love that you talk about us being brown," and I was like, "Oh, no, no, no, I wasn't clear enough," and I don't want to stand... I'm not at the door of being like who passes and who can't pass as brown. I don't want to get to that place, but I do want to really narrow that definition down.
Subjectivity is a thing, and I'm coming from that place of like, I have all these opinions and I write all this stuff because I am brown. I'm so happy that people relate to it, and I welcome as many readers as possible, but I did want to be like, "No, I think you need to step back a little and maybe acknowledge that your experience and my experience might be different when we enter rooms," and so that's what I'm writing about.
Menendez: You begin with the matriarch, and you write of her, "The shoulders I stand on are mighty, but they cost her everything." In the case of your own matriarch, what was the cost of her being on top?
Mojica Rodriguez: She died at 55, and as I'm getting older, I realize how young that was, and she died of curable issues. She just didn't ask for help, didn't stop, didn't say, "I need to rest," didn't go to the doctor. She just let all that go because she wasn't in the list of priorities, everybody else was, and yeah, it costs her everything. It costs her life to be the standard.
Menendez: You also reckon with a question that I think is going to be familiar for a lot of our listeners, which is what would she think of the choices you're making? We always say, "I am my ancestors' wildest dreams," but you sort of push back on us, like, "Is this what she had in mind?"
Mojica Rodriguez: Yeah. I think a lot about... There's little things she would say like, "Women who wear red nail polishes are putas." I wear red nail polish. If that was scandalous, can you imagine a neck tattoo? Can you imagine me writing books about my family and critiquing the men? All that. For her, it was about subverting power silently and getting access to power through scheming and being smart. It wasn't like screaming and being mad that this is all happening. It was, "No, you have to be smart. That's the way you do it."
Menendez: Tell me about la prima perfecta.
Mojica Rodriguez: La prima perfecta is another one that I identify with a lot, and I think every pastor's daughter sort of is supposed to want to be that, reared to be that girl. So I grew up around that girl, all my friends are that girl, all my cousins. That was an aspiration, to be that girl. I was that girl for a while. It's this prima who does what she's told, who's seen but not heard, who reflects her parents' teaching in every way, and ultimately, it's fawning behavior that we don't call it that. We just praise parents for having raised a good girl, because ultimately, that was the goal. She's perfection and she's everything we're supposed to want to be.
Menendez: The thing I loved most about your [inaudible 00:10:27] is that you say you could have been la prima perfecta. That was a road for you, and the road diverged, and you became tu tía, la loca. And I think we sometimes think of those as two fundamentally different women, when sometimes they're the same woman who at that juncture just made a different choice. What was the choice that you made?
Mojica Rodriguez: I really, really did everything my parents wanted. They wanted me to get married to leave the house, I did it. They wanted me to have kids, I tried. And a lot of things just weren't working.
Menendez: Attempting to have children, not having it come as easily as advertised, really almost feeling like a betrayal for you?
Mojica Rodriguez: Yeah, I was lied to for years. My mom, even on my birthday, my birthday just passed. Her favorite thing to talk about is how quickly she got pregnant, how quickly I came out, no contractions. Like, her body was made for babies, and of course mine was going to be. It was just nature, it was the way we were designed. And when I had my first miscarriage, I remember my mom being in the emergency room as I'm having contractions, because I'm passing it, she's asking me what did I do wrong? Those things broke me, and I just was like, "If I don't have control over the things that I was told I was supposed to do, my body's saying I can't do these things, what's the point of any of it?"
And so I got divorced. I left my ex-husband, and found that I was pregnant, but I also, because I knew my body, I had had countless miscarriages, I lost count after five. I was like, "I don't want to experience another miscarriage," so I made the decision to have an abortion, and those things was just like, I'm all the worst things that they've ever told me, but I feel good about all these decisions. So what does it look like to do the thing that you want to do and have your own mistakes be yours?
Menendez: I've noticed that this comes up for a lot of us, and it comes up in different ways. Sometimes, it comes up in someone's class story, where they grew up working class and now they have more access to resources, or they grew up in a really strict household and now they have freedom and agency, and that's really different. There's a leap that's really hard to make where you are no longer living in your original story, and I feel like you are still excavating a lot of the trauma and scars of those first 25 years?
Mojica Rodriguez: Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Menendez: Do you think you ever make it to the other side? Is there another side?
Mojica Rodriguez: I mean, I think I wonder that, too. It's a thing that I talk to my therapist a lot, like, "When am I going to be okay?" I'm in the stage of feeling anger I never felt, feeling rage, actually, that I haven't allowed myself to feel. Even just when I left my ex-husband and had my abortion, I just was like, "Look happy doing it, because your parents can't see you struggling with these decisions. You can't let them know that you maybe have doubts," so that I'm in the stage of the anger, the resentment, and I'm just feeling it. I'm moving through it. I'm swimming in it, and I'm writing my way out of it, but I think I've got a few books left to figure out and sort stuff.
Menendez: I think it's important, because I think that there are people who want to be the next you, who read your book and they're like, "Oh, she's okay now. She did it. She did the whole thing. This is it." And I just want people to understand that even the people we perceive as being on the other side are still in process, and there's the possibility that we remain in process forever.
Mojica Rodriguez: Yes, yes. And I'm grateful for the line of question too, because I become afraid of meeting people who have read my book, because that is the assumption that they meet me with, is like-
Menendez: They need you to be okay.
Mojica Rodriguez: Yeah, they need me to be okay, and I know I'm not, and I can't go back to the perfecta, I have to be polished. I have to be good. I have to be happy. I have to be strong all the time, and I'm just not all those things. I'm still living and breathing through a lot of my decisions.
Menendez: I feel in some ways that chronicling all of these women was a little bit like a process of elimination, like, "I don't want to be like this person. Everything comes with a cost, but I'm not willing to pay the cost of being that woman."
Mojica Rodriguez: Yeah.
Menendez: And so I loved your experience of spending time with your widow tía. What is it about her way of moving through the world that catches you off guard?
Mojica Rodriguez: I think I use this word to describe her, but the self-governance and the lack of... Because I have a lot of friends who are single, especially if they're straight, and we talk about dating a lot, like ad nauseam I would say. And I'm just like, "[inaudible 00:15:30], you're 30. It's okay, you could do whatever you want. You don't have to cook for no one." I'm just like, "Oh, my God, you're losing the plot here." But I don't say that, because that feels not sympathetic to the pressures that women feel to be partnered up, even if it's a failed or horrible situation.
There is such a pressure to have that life, that with her, I got to feel the permission and be like, "Ah, yeah, there's so much out there without these men, there's so many more options for us. Our life can be much more abundant." And she was allowing herself to live in that and sit in that. I didn't want to say it to her either, being like, "Don't you just love that he's no longer here?" But it was in the room. It was in the room, and that felt important enough, and we both knew it, even if we couldn't say it.
Menendez: And then there's perhaps my favorite, the other WhatsApp Tía, because my God, the way you describe not only this woman but her corner of the internet, and I think what you really capture is that what makes her special is she doesn't expect much in return. This is about being a booster and a guide without a demand for reciprocity.
Mojica Rodriguez: I think it's also, it was important for me to call her a community organizer, because I think when migration sort of splits off families all over, she's still organizing us. She's still rallying us, getting that Zoom to watch that virtual wedding for that one cousin. She's pushing and guiding, and it is also a type of community organizing that I think is less acknowledged because it's done by women in their family units, usually.
Menendez: What has your family said about this book?
Mojica Rodriguez: So my family doesn't read what I write, I think it makes them anxious. Like I said, I'm la loca, and so what I do, they don't co-sign. They're very embarrassed that I say things we're supposed to just not mention, never bring up. We're supposed to present our family as, like, happy, perfect.
Menendez: Do you wish they read your books?
Mojica Rodriguez: Yes, because I think they would understand what I'm trying to do, if they understood how much love I have for them and how much I really try to write about them kindly.
Menendez: You literally are a girl with sharp edges and a tender heart, it is both.
Mojica Rodriguez: Yeah, 100%.
Menendez: Congratulations, Prisca. Thank you so much for doing this.
Mojica Rodriguez: Thank you, thank you.
Menendez: Thanks for listening. Latina to Latina is executive produced and owned by Juleyka Lantigua and me, Alicia Menendez. Virginia Lora is our producer, Kojin Tashiro is our lead producer, Tren Lightburn mixed this episode. We love hearing from you. Email us at hola@latinatolatina.com, slide into our DMs on Instagram or on Threads and TikTok @latinatolatina. Check out our merchandise at latinatolatina.com/shop, and remember to subscribe or follow us on RadioPublic, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Goodpods, wherever you're listening right now. Every time you share this podcast, every time you leave a review, you help us to grow as a community.
CITATION:
Menendez, Alicia, host. “Why Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez Chose to Celebrate Our Tías and Primas” Latina to Latina, LWC Studios, September 9, 2024. LatinaToLatina.com.