In Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez’s new book, “Tías and Primas: On Knowing and Loving the Women Who Raise Us,” the author and activist confronts the traditional Latina stereotypes imposed by mainstream American culture — the idea that Latinas can only be spicy, submissive and hotheaded.
Mojica Rodríguez, the founder of the Latina Rebels platform inspired by Latinx communities, chronicles the lives of her blood relatives and chosen family in her latest book, with each chapter representing unique archetypes that are seldom cataloged in mainstream culture.
She writes, for example, about the “WhatsApp aunt” whose experiences in a war-torn nation prompt her to become the mobile organizer for her country-wide scattered relatives. There’s also the pretty cousin who encounters perverted admiration through her proximity to whiteness and European facial features.
Mojica Rodríguez, the author of “For Brown Girls With Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts,” embarks on a fall tour to promote “Tías and Primas.” De Los caught up with the writer to deep-dive about the Latinas in our lives.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.
What inspired you to reflect and write about the women in your life?
The first time I really started to think about it was when I was an English major and I had this class where we only read epics and they were all written by European white men. I just kept thinking, who’s going to write our epics?
I think my grandma was the greatest and the most catastrophic loss I had in my family. And it was like, “Who’s gonna tell her story? How is she gonna be remembered?” It was screaming to be written.
Is each chapter a complete anthology of one individual in your life or just a piece of them?
It’s like pieces of people, because even I identify with 17 of the archetypes. I think a lot of us are a lot of these archetypes, but we don’t get held in all that vastness and all that complexity and all that bigness that we are, especially in the diaspora.
In the beginning of your book, you talk about expanding beyond the three Latina stereotypes: the submissive Latina, the spicy Latina and the rebel Latina. But do you think you might be creating a new set of stereotypes by writing this?
I’m a non-Black Latina. I’m an immigrant who grew up as a Christian evangelical. Those things inform what I write. If you don’t see yourself reflected in that, then that doesn’t mean that you are not in the narrative, that just means you have a different context. I kept thinking, “Are people gonna think I’m re-creating these stereotypes into this other thing?” But I hope I clarified all that by talking about it.
How do you hope people relate to the stories that are so personal to you?
The more specific I get with something, the more I find who my reader is. If you don’t relate to my stuff, then you probably weren’t the reader for it, and that’s perfectly fine. I think we get caught up in the monolith idea in the U.S. We’re racially different. We come from different class backgrounds, we come from different migration statuses. For me, telling the really particular story is gonna speak to a very particular Latina. It isn’t gonna speak to the whole community. And I’m trying to move away from that narrative by being so specific.
If you could title a chapter for yourself, what would it be?
I’m trying to complicate the idea that any one of us can be defined into one chapter because I feel like it depends on the day of the week. Yesterday I was asked which one I identify with the most and I was like, “Well, today, it’s La Loca.’But last week, I was asked that and I said, “Childless tía” because my sister just announced that she’s pregnant. It just depends on the week and what’s happening and what my mental health is like. It’s like a lot of things impact where I feel in the spectrum.
Why was it important for you to include quotes from feminist theorists like Cherríe Moraga and bell hooks?
I’ve grown up in my household and in my life with the idea that women’s emotional lives were just silly. That’s the way that men have treated me and my family. Adding those theory texts to it to say like, “No, there’s like real s— happening here. There’s data, there’s studies, there’s people writing about us.”
Have you had pushback from family?
I live in the world where I’m “la loca,” as far as my family is concerned. It’s an easy way to dismiss women’s thoughts. They don’t acknowledge that I’m a writer. They don’t acknowledge my books. They’ve never read them. They have no interest in them. I think it scares them for me to come to be raised to be submissive and then to write the things that I write, scares them. It makes them feel like they’re a failure, I think.
