Tag Archives: racism

Familial Racism

“Over the next few years, Mercy would cut my hair off many times, as if trying to teach me something about who I was, who I was supposed to be: my grandmother was the first person to ever call me nigger.” (Diaz, pg 51) 

From the start of her story, Jaquira Diaz has brought us all along her beginning childhood life in Puerto Rico. She touches on her childhood adventures and her family troubles. From the violence that would creep into her life and her own family issues. Diaz’s father has been a very present person in her story, the first story she shared was of her and her father at catholic church for a funeral of her father’s hero. She constantly references how similar she is and looks to her father. Saying “I was just like Papi, with his wide nose, with dark eyes, tight curls, skin that browned easily after a little bit of sun.”(Diaz, pg 18) She always felt very similar to her father and how he behaved. This explains how hurt and troubled she was with her father’s infidelity, stealing his favorite book and never letting him know that she had it, “I would lay my head on my pillow and feel nothing but the sharp sting of my father’s betrayal.”(Diaz, pg 37) 

Her grandmother Mercy was something that Diaz did not connect with, probably being that she was racist and colorist. Her grandmother constantly made racist remarks about Diaz’s family because her father was black with black features and Mercy outwardly disliked that. Diaz remembers “Our white grandmother, Mercy, hated that my hair was a tangle of dry and frizzy curls like my father’s. Bad hair, she called it.”(Diaz, pg 49) Her white grandmother ended up constantly cutting her hair short into ugly hairstyles then blaming the look on the fact that it was curly, kinky hair. To have a grandmother that blatantly did not like a part of you since you were young must have been horrible and traumatizing that she kept cutting her hair. To the point where Diaz was being bullied in school, people constantly asked her “Why do you look like a boy?” (Diaz, pg 51) I hope that as we continue the book someone stands up to or stops Mercy because that is just cruel. 


Díaz Jaquira. (2019). Ordinary girls: A memoir. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.

Belonging in the Face of Oppression

While reading the first part of Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Diaz there was a recurring idea of belonging. Diaz explored her feelings of belonging in childhood through telling stories in relation to gender and race. The lack of belonging that Diaz felt in her family occurred when she was compared to her brother. In comparison with her brother, she often felt isolated because she felt that he was often favorited due to his gender. The connection that she felt with her father during childhood was complicated by the secret trips her father would take her brother on to La Plaza. He would not allow her to go to La Plaza because she was a girl and this reasoning caused a fit of anger and left her, “longing for something to lift this burden of girlhood” (Diaz 9). The strong bond that she felt with her father was hindered due to his beliefs about what girls should and should not do.

The lack of belonging in her family was also felt because of her race. Diaz often felt disconnected from the stories she read and the movies she saw. “I’d lie in my own bed, imagining myself in those movies, writing revisions of them that included characters like me” (Diaz 42). The characters in the stories were people that did not look like her and therefore she struggled to see herself in the stories and connect. This feeling was reinforced by the racist comments that were consistently made by her grandmother. When giving her a haircut, her grandmother cut her hair short like her father’s hair and antagonized her with comments about not being able to look like her white mother. “It wasn’t the haircut, she said, chuckling, it was my bad hair…Your father’s fault. Your father and his black family” (page 50). While her Abuela proudly displayed her darker skin tone and hair, her grandmother put her down and made her feel like she was less than. Diaz’s lack of belonging has a strong connection to the intersection of multiple forms of oppression, and in this section specifically, it was sexism and racism.

Citations

Díaz, J. (2020). Ordinary Girls: A Memoir. Algonquin Books.

Grande, R. (2019, October 29). Abused, Addicted, Biracial and Queer: Jaquira Díaz Is Anything but

               ‘Ordinary.’ The New York Times.https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/29/books/review/ordinary-girls-jaquira-diaz.html

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