When I Learned To Hate Myself

I’ve worn bangs my entire life. Maybe it was because the go-to and easy look for girls with pelo liso, maybe. But I remember very clearly being sick of my “childhood” bangs at age 12, and so I proceeded to grow them out. I loved not having these flecos that had to be trimmed often. I hated this strip of hair that only made it more noticeable when I started to sweat. At age 12, I was super pumped to let me bangs grow out.

But then I began to get teased by my classmates. They started calling me “India” and “Pocahontas.” This was all said to me with the pent-up anger of Latinx with a lot of self-hatred. These insults were fueled with a type of narrative that wanted and still wants to disassociate ourselves from all things indigenous. I was only 12 and I was taught a very clear lesson: I look indigena so to them, I was/am ugly.

To be prepubescent and to have a very real awareness of the many ways in which your cultura hated you was too real. So, of course, when I turned 15, I bought myself my first pair of colored contacts from a kid in school who sold them for #20. To be prepubescent and to have a very real awareness of the many ways in which your cultura thinks you are inferior because of the features on your face and the color of your skin, you naturally begin to want to NOT look like yourself, NOT like your ancestors.

When people tell me that colorism isn’t real in our countries, I remember the day I asked my mom to take me to a salon to get my bangs back. I had cried in school that day, because I was tired of being teased. I asked for bangs and I very clearly told my mami that I wanted them so I did not look like Pocahontas anymore.

Although it was inevitable to look indigenous, and I knew that to get rid of my indigenous features was non-optional, but I still wanted to at least go back to NOT being called an india. In the era of Disney princesses, I did not want to be the brown one because they taught me that the brown one was the ugliest of them all.

They taught me to hate myself because they taught me that looking like my indigenous ancestors meant that I deserved to be made fun of for something that I could not help. They taught time to hate myself because of something that no one should be ashamed of: I had my ancestral brownness scripted on my face and on my body, and I was taught to hate it.

At 12 years old, I was taught to hate myself and I have been working real hard to undo all that internalized self-hatred. At 12 years old, I was taught how to best hide my features but no one should want to erase any part of themselves. They taught me how to begin to erase parts of myself, and so they taught me that I could erase myself entirely. They taught me all that.

I have worn bangs every since, because growing them out still triggers some strong guttural reaction that reminds me that I am not suppose to love myself. But as of two weeks ago, at age 31, I decided to grow out my bangs. And every morning, I look at myself in the mirror and try to intentionally love myself, because to undo that taught self-hatred is a daily practice, and to teach myself how to truly love myself in an embodied resistance that does not happen casually. At age 31, I am trying to live into what I write about, and I am challenging myself to see myself as I fully am: una Nicaragüense con bellos rastros indigenas.