Free Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism by Daisy Hernández, Bushra Rehman Page A

simultaneous English-to-Spanish translations, brunches of sneaked cafeteria bagels and roundtrip tickets on Greyhound gave us away. I was ashamed that we weren’t like my classmates’ families—apparently middle class and happy—so I lashed out at the easiest target, my stepfather. Much of my anger was misdirected toward him partly because during college I had learned that men are the source of all problems that afflict women, a notion reinforced by the liberal women on campus. And I swallowed it whole, like a potion that numbs you from the inside. This was my next lesson in feminism, and the first one I unlearned.
    My stepfather was not at fault. We had expected him to fill a role that had never been defined for him. He had simply modeled himself on generations of Dominican men who abuse the privilege of being male in a country that suffocates women so men can take deep breaths. Our family existed in a different place now, somewhere between the social values of the Dominican Republic and the economic realities of Immigrant, U.S.A. As a budding woman of conscience raised by a woman of great will, I refused to believe that we depended on him, on men at all. Had the women in my family accepted that, we would have gotten nowhere, accomplished nothing. We never expected that my stepfather would build this new world for us with his bare hands. His two stepdaughters, Americanized by our education, grew more intolerant each day, however. My sister was now a teenager and had accepted the sitcom realities TV offered. She wanted to live the Dominican version of Family Ties. She wanted a world of pesky (and comedic) family quarrels, all magically resolved before dinnertime or the next commercial break. Instead, she had to make do with a rebellious college-age sister, two all-consuming younger siblings and a mother too tired to blink.
    It was hard to know what my mother was feeling during those hard years. Sometimes she would break down and cry out of frustration from the piling bills or lash out at a minor disobedience. She was quick to punish and often held grudges for weeks, leaving my sister and I to tiptoe around her. Up to then, her universal will and dominion of her home had gotten us through most of my young adulthood and my sister’s adolescence. But these virtues failed at keeping our uneasy cohesiveness from collapsing. It continued to be him and us, although now “us” also included his children. If asked, my stepfather would probably say we turned his children against him during a couple of years of continuous struggles. What was he to do? Fight or flee? He decided to stop fighting. He left the house and his children. He went to live with his sister and her family upstate.
    As the oldest, in college, and assumed to be the most knowledgeable about all things American (from the VCR to the tax system), I became the partial decision-maker in the house. Should the little one enroll in an after-school program? What curfew should my adolescent sister have? When should my brother’s friends be allowed over? My new status brought on more responsibility than I was ready for, but there was a need to make everything work. My sister, Mom and I together became a type of mom/dad/sister Transformer, like the 1980s animated series I learned English watching. We were interchangeable parts of a working whole. In many ways my sister understood and accepted her new roles with more tact and willingness than I did. She took jobs during high school to help with expenses; she sacrificed going away to college for her first year, while I focused solely on getting out of the house and finishing college—and finally becoming my own person.
     
    My mother and sister taught me my next lesson in feminism: Your life as a woman is an extension of the lives of your family members. They sacrificed for me, knowing that my success would help our whole family. They nursed me through college, study-abroad ventures and summer internships. For my mother