Story: I Am Not Better Than Mi Mami

I am the first in the my family to do a lot of things, like go to college and get a graduate degree. And all my accolades began to go to my head. I began to feel like I was better than the people who made it possible for me do be able to do what I do. So I wrote this as reminders, for myself to not measure my worth according to white standards of excellence, rather to measure my worth according to how I treat people.

My mami is not terca, nor is she ignorant, nor is she someone you need to decolonize forcefully. I have a mami who loves me, despite how much as she will try to indoctrinate me into becoming a “good” virtuous woman, aka wife and eventually a mother.

Where I have been and where I am going is entirely different than what she imagined for me, and when I was younger I resisted and argued and I even screamed for my liberation. I felt like she suffocated me. And yet, I have been able to do things that no one in my family has ever dreamt of doing. And it got to my head…so one day, mi mami said something that I will never forget. She looked at me straight in the eyes and said: “Yo no soy estupida.”

My newly acquired “book smarts” cannot ever mean that I get to forget that my mami is where she is today because she is a survivor.

Read the rest here.