I have a very complicated relationship with my hair. I straightened it from adolescence into my early 30s, until very recently when I made a commitment to go back to my natural curls.
Beauty magazines have declared curly hair as the trend everyone will be wearing in 2018, but this didn't spark my decision to go natural. For some Latinas and other women of color, wearing their natural curly hair is not about following a trend. It's a statement of identity — and often a journey of unlearning fraught messaging that characterized curly hair as an undesirable marker of non-assimilation.
I know the old saying about curly-haired women wanting straight hair and vice versa. But this story is not about that. This is about hair as an identifier of ethnicity and a tool that women of color manipulate to make themselves more approachable in a world filled with biases. Our hair is not just about ourselves, but how it makes others around us feel.
"When I teach, I like always to provide some kind of cultural framework so that we don't have this thinking that we're talking about hair as this biological thing that grows out of our heads and has no meaning," Marika Preziuso, a literature professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, recently told me. "What makes hair acceptable and unacceptable is what kind of connotation a specific society gives to specific textures and types of hair."
Preziuso says over and over again in Latina literature, women write about navigating a world with curly hair — a trait that's been historically framed as less desirable in mass culture.
"I'm very interested in not just a celebration of natural style but also an admission of how many challenges [come] with self-acceptance for these particular women coming from these traditions. It's really hard, especially when someone is the product of centuries of historic traumas, to feel empowered overnight."
I want to make one thing really clear, here: I'm not Afro-Latina. My hair is very curly, but it doesn't have the texture of a black woman's natural hair. I'm not equating my experience to that of a black woman with natural hair. The politics and histories are different. Though all women of color in the U.S. must contend with dominant Euro-centric beauty ideals, black women's hair has been under attack and in many ways, still is. Unlike some black girls, I never feared being suspended from school because of my natural hair.
As a young girl, I understood my curly hair deviated from the conventional beauty standards and that it marked me as more ethnic. So much so, that I began to straighten my hair with an actual clothes iron when I was 12. I wasn't alone.
"All you could see was a steam rising, I swear I was burning my poor hair," Boston dancer Ana Masacote recently said to me, describing her own experiments with straightening her very curly hair with a clothes iron as a young girl. Like so many other Latinas from a working class immigrant family, she began straightening her hair or pulling it back in middle school. That's when she was bused to a white, wealthy school. She intuitively grasped hair was also a symbol of class.
"You start seeing the disparity, you start seeing how different your socio-economic status is and that starts making you compare yourself to your peers and start to wonder ... how you can measure up," she said.
Of course, women like Masacote and me were influenced by the lack of Latinas in the media, but we didn't hate ourselves. We just wanted to assimilate enough to navigate the world more easily.
Dance changed everything for Masacote. As she taught a salsa class for her Masacote Dance Company, on a recent afternoon, her curls cascaded down her face. She tells me dance showed her how to escape the feeling of being caged into her body, to feel at ease in it and her hair. "It's really just being able to say that this is me. This is my culture. I'm Mexican. I'm Chicana. And I'm not going to try to portray something that I'm not to make you feel more comfortable."
So why do I feel an urgency to go back to curly now? Well, I'm a mom to a toddler. How can my son love his curly hair if his mom doesn't? And also, Boston. I moved here from New York City last summer, and before that I grew up and lived in Texas. But I've never felt browner, more Latina than how I feel in Boston. Maybe it's my affluent neighborhood where I hear different languages, but see a narrow range of skin tones, and where I've been mistaken for my son's caretaker when we speak Spanish at the park. Boston's made me realize just how noticeably Latina I am and I want to fully embrace that — even through my hair.
Recently, I stopped by Shan Hair, a salon in Brookline that specializes in curly hair. My stylist Antonella gave me an amazing haircut, called a DevaCurl cut, in which she cuts my dry curls in the shape of my head. After a lifetime of straightening it, Antonella is going to show me how to nurture my curls back to health.
"I'm going to teach you how to take care of your curls and also how to cleanse them, how to hydrate them, and how to style the curls, and then you can love your curly hair, right?"
Right. It's time to love it and live with it, just like my identity.
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