Unfading Color: Discrimination, Shame, and Resistances of Morenas Women

• In Event: Black Lives Matter, ¡Todas! Fugitive Formations in Latin America and the Caribbean

Abstract

Drawing on Mara Vivero’s (2006) notion of intersectionality this article analyzes my maternal grandmother's account of racial discrimination against being a "morena" woman in the Andes. The research uses a clinical sociology approach to the methodology of reflexive thematic analysis to engage with personal/family stories of resistance to anti-Black and patriarchal practices that fund the formation of being “morena”. The results challenge the utopia of Chilean whiteness and make visible social shaming of Black and Brown beauty as well as the spaces created by Black and Brown women to resist discrimination. The story of resistance of my grandmother Angela, exemplifies some of the strategies Black and Indigenous women used to challenge race, class and gender constrains placed on their lives. Angela was born in the early twentieth century in Arica, a city on the Chile-Peru border, to a family that embraced most of the local racial and gender logics. Within a family whose members had different skin color, the ones with lighter skin were privileged. As a result, Angela had to endure the racism, machismo, and classism of Chilean society within and outside the family. One of the multiple resistance strategies Angela used was to take advantage of her supposed lack of beauty to renounce the gender stereotypes of the time, occupying the public space—through participation in sports, higher education, workplace—to reconfigure the family’s practices and structures of care. Analyzing and telling stories like Angela’s is important because they open ways to challenge coloniality and expand feminism theories upon the experiences and lives of Brown and Black women in education and beyond.

Author

• Patricia Morales, Seidlitz Education