I grew up in a Hispanic community; surrounded predominantly by Dominicans and Puerto Ricans. I was raised to embrace my Dominican roots--the music, food and language. My mother use to comb my hair when I was young; it was always tangled and I never liked untangling the knots in my hair. All I wanted to do was run around in my curly tangled afro however much my mother objected. As I got older I began to feel troubled when someone in my family would say pelo malo (bad hair) to me, or anyone.
Within my concentration I aim to embrace and celebrate the natural hair I was born with. As I got older I embraced my kind of hair regardless of the prejudice and stigma in my own community. There seems to be a negative connotation when it comes to admitting anything about our African ancestry in our outward appearance. Many people I knew went to a lot of trouble to deny the kind of hair they were born with. To fit the conventional standards of European hair I too began to straighten my hair. It became a weekly habit and now my curls are not the way they were before. Whenever I wish to embrace my natural curls it no longer gives off the radiant glow it once held; in other words they no longer stay as curled as they used to. Hair has become a powerful symbol for many Hispanic women, especially in my culture, for how we feel about ourselves in a country where European values continue to hold sway, however much non-Europeans integrate into the mainstream. So then what is this “bad hair” that I so commonly hear spoken about? What makes hair bad? With my paintings I aim to embrace and celebrate natural Afro-latina hair though depicting the various different hairstyles women of my culture wear, but also to critique the way mainstream culture still dictates a lot of how women think about appearance in my culture.
