Growing up Latina in Ohio, I always felt like an odd duck. Sure, there are Latinx communities in Ohio, but they’re pretty dispersed. I have a huge Mexican family on my mom’s side, but they all live in Michigan. As a teenager, I was pretty rootless.
Being a teen girl is hard enough for body image issues. Puberty stretches our limbs in strange, sudden ways while the entire world seems to simultaneously desire and loathe us. The additional problem I faced was, I inherited a Mexican body I didn’t know how to care for.
My body had broad shoulders, thick thighs, and dark body hair from my face to my toes. Clothes never fit, and everything from fashion mags to health books suggested novel methods to wax any hair that didn’t reside on the top of my head. Not only did I think my body was ugly, I thought I was designed incorrectly.
If I had my fun aunts or cousins around to compare my body to, maybe I would have learned I had the normal body of a healthy, growing woman. Maybe I would have learned other unhealthy ideas. Regardless, I had my isolated family. My role model was my mom.
My mom straight-ironed her hair every day for forty years, and she started doing it for me in first grade. Instead of eating cake on her birthday, she had a hard-boiled egg. When she had to stop exercising due to a back injury, she worried she had a tire around her belly. In reality she was petite as ever.
My mom was also the lone Mexican mom in her workplace and PTA. As much as she enjoyed working out and being active, sculpting herself into a model housewife served as an act of survival. She grew up in Flint, MI, where the lead pipes flow, and she learned that she needed to be closer to whiteness in order to provide for her family’s health and safety. Eventually, this goal consumed her, the way she consumed her body from the inside-out. Since children learn from their parents, it started consuming me.
I never had an eating disorder, diagnosed, per se, but I had an unhealthy relationship to food. Simply, when I was stressed, I stopped eating. I thought my body was unnatural, so when this unhealthy habit started shedding pounds, I thought that meant it was good, regardless of the dizziness or hunger pains.
It wasn’t until going to college, in Columbus, OH, more urban, more diverse, more Latinx friends, that I was able to create peace with my body. Initially, it didn’t come from therapy or dieticians or doctors – it started with No Shave November.
My pre-engineering courses were full of boys competing to see who could grow the fanciest mustache or longest beard. My legs were getting fuzzy from a week of speedy, midnight showers, hastily undertaken after late nights full of calculus homework. I couldn’t grow a beard, but I could leave my legs and armpit hair alone – it wasn’t that much different from any of the guys. I looked up at the NSN sign-up sheet and thought, why not?
I was too shy to join the official roster, but privately, quietly, I let my peach fuzz grow. I wore sweaters and pants to class to cover everything because I was scared classmates would tease me. However, back in my dorm, in my bathroom, I looked at the soft shadows growing underneath my arms, the bristly hair striating my legs, and I felt a small flicker of joy.
Is this what it’s like to love my body? I wondered. It was a strange sense of gender euphoria, not the way my trans friends explained it to me, but intrinsically tied to my brown girlhood. I had taken a body that everything said was wrong and needed fixing, and I told this body, okay, maybe that’s not true. Maybe your deviance is beautiful. Even if I’m the only one who thinks it, maybe this hair is wonderful.
I didn’t anticipate the transformation that would come with this discovery. I started this challenge with the thought, why not? And now all I was questioning was, why? Why do health books tell me to shave when shaving creams and dissolvers give me rashes and dry skin? Why are the only beautiful bodies thin, pale, hairless bodies? Why am I doing all this work for a result that makes me feel awful?
It’s the pervasive, spiderwebbing power of western, patriarchal beauty standards. For Mexican women, it goes back to Spanish conquest. When Spanish conquistadors took over Mexico, they forced Indigenous people to assimilate (adopt their cultural practices and values), or die. This extended to beauty and health. While many people kept their cultures alive, many assimilated. When Mexican people migrated to the US, it only changed the picture to copy, not the practice itself. Impossible standards of womanhood keep us constantly searching for ways to “fix” ourselves instead of creating something better within our own communities.
Growing out my body hair defied all of this. I challenged myself to stop worrying about fitting into programs designed against me, and I started keying into how my body felt. I felt more like a living human with leg hair, so I kept it. Engineering sapped the life out of me, so I changed majors. I felt more energetic when I ate full meals, so I rehabbed my relationship to food.
This isn’t a revolution or anything. But it does reconnect me to me. And that’s mindfulness, babes! That’s the keystone of mental health treatment. Loving my leg hair led to a healthy identification with my inner feelings, reconnecting my mind and body into one whole self. It’s past body positivity and body neutrality – it’s embodied joy.
I noticed the more I existed with my furry body, the more other girls picked it up too. Quietly, privately, my friends grew out their body hair. Over the summer, I’d notice we were all wearing shorts with unshaved legs. In small moments hidden in dorms and study sessions, they’d tell me that they started because of me. And that feels good too.
And honestly, my body hair is cute AF. My quarantine mustache says hi.
