Sacred Heart Reads: For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts
As a middle-aged Latina mother and grandmother, I never thought I was going to identify myself with a book so much as I did with “For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts.”
This book offers an understanding of the Latina womanhood, their fears, and real-life experiences of colorism, racism and sexism throughout our lives and that we often pretend never happened, that is all in our head and are taught to move on and accept.
Chapter two, three and four are the ones that I identified myself with the most. We never talk about colorism in Latina women, nevertheless, to admit how painful it was to be a child rejected by my own community, including our own family because of the color of our skin. Growing up during the eighty’s was extremely hard as a girl with brown skin, the colorism chapter is the perfect way for her to describe how having a dark skin was assumed that we were not good enough, pretty enough, or smart enough, let alone be found attractive as a young woman and being able to be love and care for.
It brought some of the most painful memories, one of them being the time when I witnessed my mother fighting back her tears of anger as she was told that I could never be able to be la Reina de la primavera (Spring Queen a well-known tradition in my hometown in Mexico) because I was too dark, and my hair was too black.
My mother was told that I should be happy because I was good enough to be a tree in the background. This event, tradition or whatever you wanted to call it, to me it was as clear displayed of colorism, it was an effort to find the most beautiful girl to represent their town, of course she needed to be white-pale skin with preferable colored eye and blond hair;
I was far from having those features so my hopes to become one were zero to none. This left me feeling insecure and powerless for part of my childhood and young adult life.
This book also touches on the fact that I often struggle with the impostor syndrome, like other Latino women we often question our places, we live in our own shadows of fear assuming that we are not good enough for new opportunities. I too tend to minimize my power, potential and the worth of my success. Anyhow, I highly recommend that you read it.