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Telling Stories That Matter

Hernandez

In her new memoir, A Cup of Water Under My Bed, Daisy Hernández writes about growing up in New Jersey with a Cuban father and a Colombian mother; getting interested in feminism, along with other social justice issues, at college; and getting a prestigious paid internship at the New York Times in 2002only to leave the paper after a year and a half and end up as an editor for Colorlines, a news magazine dealing with race, politics, and culture.

That decision came about, she says, when she realized that at the Times, she wasn’t going to be able to tell the kinds of stories she wanted to tell.

“This feeling had built up over time, but when I covered a story about a fire in Brooklyn, and this Haitian immigrant had died in the basement, that was kind of a turning point,” she said. “I spent about half a day with the family, and I was thinking about the story of a man who basically lived in the basement, and my immigrant father spent a lot of time in the basement, and because of how we report the news, this won’t be tied to any larger story.”

In her memoir, Hernández describes leaving the Times as a divorce between people you like individually. Her parents, who both worked in factories, were baffled by her decision to leave a high-profile writing job, but she says she wanted to be working with people already committed to social justice—not ones she needed to woo.

Hernández writes about an editor at the Times who routinely made racist comments. She says many friends have asked for his name, but she doesn’t think that’s important.

“I knew racism wasn’t just a personal thing, and being at the Times helped me to think of racism as an institutional practice,” she said. “That’s why I don’t name the editor—because who he is as an individual doesn’t matter.”

Hernández, who spent six years as executive editor of Colorlines, has written for a variety of outlets, including Ms., TheAtlantic.com, and NPR. She coedited Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism, which is widely taught in women’s studies classes. Now, Hernández, a visiting writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, gives talks on media representation, race, and feminism. In the talks, she shares how she came to identify as a feminist at college (William Paterson University) and critiques portrayals in the media of feminists as hating men and not wearing lipstick.

“I also talk about how feminism is seen as a white women thing, and I share with them my ideas as a women of color that don’t usually get identified as feminist,” she said. “For example, I see police brutality and immigration reform as very much feminist issues, and I reframe them as being a feminist concern.”

Feminism is about making the world better for everyone, Hernández says. On one level, men who are detained by police have women in their lives who are affected. But it’s more than that that makes her feel the issue is a feminist one—it has a huge impact on her whole community, she says.

“We have more and more images that tell young black and brown men about the narrow box their masculinity can exist in,” Hernández said. “They also tell white men their masculinity is about hunting down black and brown men.”

It was while doing interviews with Mexicans who had come to New York in the 1990s for her graduate thesis at New York University that Hernández became aware of how differently men and women see and experience immigration.

“Immigration is a very gendered experience,” she said. “Most women I talked to for that story said, ‘We have come here and we’re raising our children here,’ whereas most men were holding on to the dream of coming back.”

Hernández writes a lot about her hard-drinking Cuban father, who practiced Santería, but her biggest influences, she says, were her mother and her three aunts.

“Less by words than by actions, my mother showed me it was possible to get up and leave because she was the first person from a family of twelve to do it,” Hernández said. “I knew it was possible to get up and leave and start an alternative life.”

In college, hanging out with LGBT friends, Hernández says she first heard the term “chosen family.” She felt it was familiar because that’s what immigrants do as well—create a family in a new country.

Hernández’s mom and aunts wanted her to do what none of them had done—to assimilate and marry a wealthy white man and have a house in the suburbs.

“There was definitely a message that your romantic life was not about love,” Hernández said. “It was very pragmatic and deliberate about race and class.”

When Hernández told her family she was dating women, one of her aunts didn’t speak to her for seven years. Hernández says while her family always supported her as a writer, they didn’t necessarily feel proud or happy about her romantic life. But that may be changing, she thinks.

“If I’d been married to a woman for the last ten years and had two kids, I think they’d be accepting of that,” she said. “As they’re getting older and thinking more about mortality, they just don’t want to see me alone.”

In A Cup of Water Under My Bed, Hernández includes a chapter on wanting nice things and going into debt to get them. She’s talked with other women of color who have experienced this.

“I haven’t seen this story told by another Latina from a working-class family,” she said. “My family was very frugal, and for people who know my background and politics, they’re surprised what a total materialist I am. They’re like, ‘Weren’t you the one going to a rally against deportation? How can you like high-end things like purebred dogs?’ I wanted to understand my relationship to money better, so I wrote about it. And I’ve talked to other young women of color about the secrecy and shame around their relationship to money.

Hernández says she learned a lot about these women’s relationships with their mothers and how powerful they were when she was editing the book, Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism with poet Bushra Rehman.

“We were trying to come up with sections for the book, things like reproductive health, and one was mothers, and we realized most of the essays could go in that section,” Hernández said. “A lot of women were saying that when they encountered feminism as a social theory and the idea of being strong and vulnerable and navigating institutions and abusive personal situations, they thought, wait a minute, I’ve seen this at home. Our mothers have played such important, pivotal roles.”  


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