My grandmother has a portrait of the Virgin Mary hanging next to her dining table—la Virgensita. Her eyes follow you like the Mona Lisa’s. She lives there on the wall because she blesses us while we eat and provides us with the grace necessary for our salvation. But mostly she just scares the shit out of me and makes eating tamales more stressful than necessary.
My relationship with religion is comical, if not non-existent. I joke regularly at family baptisms, weddings and funerals that it’s amazing I didn’t burst into flames when crossing the threshold of the church. It’s my little gag: money-back guarantee if I don’t make that joke when entering a holy building.
Yet if my brother tells me something I don’t believe, the first words out of my mouth are “Say ‘swear to God’ or I won’t believe you!” We are both atheists, but we know that if you tell a lie then swear to God you weren’t lying, he will smite you.
I get a chuckle out of both of these things, but it’s also pretty telling of what I think of God and his preachers these days.
There is a fear that is ingrained in us from childhood, a special kind of guilt that hangs over our heads instead of a halo. And while I shook off most of the evidence in my mind that these things existed by the age of 13, they grew back and got stronger the older I became and the more I questioned my mother.
♦
I was 15 when I first considered having sex with a boy. He always said how he loved my curves. He would stop by my locker and play with my wild, curly hair when no one was watching, and he would learn words in Spanish to flirt with me secretly, but in plain sight.
I didn’t know how I would get away with it—I wasn’t even sure if I could—but the whole experience of imagining it would happen was in itself so powerful and visceral that just contemplating sex was scary enough to stop me from actually going through with it.
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It’s a weird mindset growing up and knowing that as a Latinx person I am heavily fetishised while also knowing that in my culture, which is largely influenced by Catholicism, I would be ostracised for engaging in sex out of wedlock.
I used to watch From Dusk Til Dawn as a kid and Selma Hayek dancing in lingerie with a python around her was like a religious experience. I bowed to her then and I bow to her now.
At age six I would watch J.Lo’s If You Had My Love video every Saturday morning on TV, in which she live-streams her life half-naked.
I have countless experiences seeing myself in these characters, and they’re all instances of the brown woman being portrayed as a fantasy for men.
But what we’re told behind closed doors, with Virgin eyes watching us, is that our sexuality is not to be acted upon. We are written and represented as passionate and carnal women, as having a desire more intense than that of the average woman for wild sexual encounters. And yet this idea stops when the sentence does. Or it’s supposed to anyway.
♦
I remember the day after first having sex better than the sex itself. I was at my grandmother’s place being taunted by that portrait again. I felt like crying into my horchata, not because I regretted my decision, but because I feared the wrath that was to befall me. I felt like everyone in the room knew and this was my intervention: my parents, my grandparents, my brother and Mary, all ready to lambaste me. They didn’t, obviously. Nobody knew. But God is supposed to be all-knowing and Mary is supposed to be my saviour and she sure as shit wasn’t going to bail me out of this one.
See what I mean? Irrational fear. Powerful stuff.
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I didn’t want to disobey my mother. That was never the goal, despite what people might think teenagers aim to do. For the most part I was raised in a pretty lenient household. If I wanted to drink with my friends I could as long as I did it in the house. I’d rather know that you’re safe here than drinking in some park with God knows who. If I didn’t want to go to school I didn’t have to, as long as I didn’t make a habit of it and kept my grades up.
My parents made it really easy for me not to break the rules—everything was done with my health and happiness in mind. I’m grateful every day for that, because I never felt like I had to lie.
But now, I would never ask for their approval nor dare to mention it. I would have to lie.
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My mother had just watched an episode of Dr. Phil about a teen mum who was dumped by her boyfriend and left to raise her baby alone and wanted me to watch it too.
“Come here, Vane. I want you to watch this and see why you don’t have sex with just anyone. This is why you don’t make these decisions when you’re a kid.”
I’m not a kid, I thought. I’m 16. I have my Learner’s!
Out loud I said, “Okay, Mum.”
“Don’t just say ‘si mama’. Are you watching?”
“Yes, but I’m not even like her.”
The girl on TV had dropped out of school, admitted to first having sex at age 12 and thought smoking was cool. I didn’t see any similarities between us.
“I don’t care. You need to see the consequences of your actions.”
♦
I don’t blame my mum. She is neither a bad person, nor a backwards one. She made sex a pretty unguarded subject in our household as a result of the secretive household she grew up in. Any question my brother or I had was to be shared at the dinner table and answered openly. But she is also the product of a world where a woman was always at fault; the seductress, the serpent hidden beneath an innocent flower.
She was raised in a world where the first person you slept with would, hopefully, be the last. My upbringing is something I can reflect on and dissect now as an adult, but the fact that very traditional people raised my mother in a different time is something that has never been lost on me. And I said so to her, once.
“You just have different beliefs to me! I’m not you, and you have to be okay with that.”
I broke her heart that day, at age 17. That I would not be like her was a dagger to her chest .
I don’t think it was what I said. It was the tone, the near-disgust that she would ever think I would be like her. I’d take it back if I could. Take back bitterness that my tongue whipped out. I’d take a slap over the face she made at me.
Are you watching, Mary? How much grace will you provide me to save me from being struck down? How many Hail Marys will this cost?
“I’m sorry you don’t want to be like me,” she’d said, and walked back to her room.
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Being Salvadoran, Latinx, coming from a Catholic family and being female are all things I can analyse now. At ages 6, 13, 15—or really any age before 21—I never knew that these things intertwined. I had no way of dissecting the innate sexism in the way we talk about femininity and sexuality in Latin American culture. I didn’t realise that a lot of this mentality comes from following a strict religion for generations, and that of course these rules are designed to chastise a woman for being a woman and excuse a man for being a man. It is an unwritten burden all Latinx people are expected to bear.
I am the fantasy and the Madonna, he is the machismo and holy man. We are cursed to fail at being both.
♦
I still eat across from Mary, and her eyes still follow me anywhere I go in the room. I don’t know if she watches me when I leave, but I know that I am a little less scared of facing her on Judgment Day, if only because I do things with more integrity now compared to when I was a teenager.
My mother birthed me and raised me the best way she knew how. I am not a failure for having broken one rule, nor is she one for having placed it on me. I’m not a sinner for fucking someone, and I am not a saint no matter how many Hail Marys I recite.
For every ‘mamasita’ I’ve ever received I have an equal number of ‘cochina’—balanced like Rosary beads, and a prayer I hear everyday.
Mamasita, cochina, mamasita, cochina…
Amen.
About the author
Vanessa Giron is a Latinx freelance writer based in Naarm. She primarily writes on identity and culture, and how these things have shaped her as a woman in country that is not her own. She is a member of the West Writers Group with Footscray Community Arts Centre as well as a critic for The Big Issue. You can find Vanessa on Twitter @vanesssagiron or on her website vanessagiron.com