Starting to Understand the Mannerisms
Based on an episode with Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez 🇳🇮
Welcome to Latinx in Power, a podcast aiming to help to demystify tech, the way we do that is by interviewing Latinx and Caribbean leaders all over the world to hear their perspective and insights.
Prisca Mojica (she/her) was born in Managua, Nicaragua but calls Nashville, Tennessee home. She uses storytelling to educate others about systemic oppression. As a respected speaker, she has shared her stories with college and university students across the USA.
In this episode, we discuss Prisca’s passion for naming the experiences of first-generation Latina immigrants navigating systemic roadblocks. She sheds light on the ways sexism and systemic racism impede success for women and people of color.
Additionally, her theological training enables her to explore the relationship between religious trauma and white supremacy in the United States.
Subscribe to Latinx in Power!
Apple | Google | Spotify | TuneIn | Stitcher | Deezer | PocketCasts
What does it mean to be a Latina for you?
Today, I think it means a lot of things, but mostly it means community, specifically Latina and immigrant. I think it’s a very different experience than being born in the US or being a few generations in. I really connect with a lot of immigrants.
Even when I was really young when we came to the US, but still, it’s still a different way of thinking. Your parents were thinking differently.Your parents make sense of the politics in the US differently because it’s informed by the politics in their country. So, it means a lot, but it mostly means community for me.
If you move to a new city, doing it all over again, my partner often says, “Let’s move to another country.” I’m like, “Oh, my gosh, no. Doing it once, I finally feel I understand things, and I came at seven. I’m not trying to start from scratch again.” It is work, and only other immigrants understand that I think.
The codes, like, just like, how do you vote? What’s the humor? Because it took me a while to understand American humor, popular shows like The Office. It took me forever. It was Season 3 when I was like, “Okay, I think I understand what’s supposed to be funny.” It’s the little things that we don’t even think about, just the way that you dress to look American, to read as from here versus as an outsider, all that. The fashion, the hairstyles, the mannerisms, it’s so much more than just I learned the language. That’s good enough.
Or references, I meet people now in Nashville and they’re like, “Yeah, my grandfather fought on D-Day,” or whatever. I’m just like, I don’t have context other than books for that stuff. I just feel so I’m catching up. Or even celebrities everybody knows, like Bill Cosby or something. I still don’t know who that is. But if you want to talk about Cantinflas, Lucero, I could talk about another slew of cultural references, but I don’t have American ones still. You’re just always learning and you’re always behind on something.
I’m curious to hear more about your personal journey as a first generation in the United States and how this influenced your work.
I write a lot about specifically being first generation because there was so much that was happening. When we first moved here, we were an immigrant neighborhood, and I didn’t know that there would be a difference when we moved to another neighborhood that had a lot of 1st, 2nd, 3rd generation.
The fact that my mom didn’t speak English, it was like a thing that I realized that a lot of their parents, a lot of people in my class didn’t speak Spanish, but they were Cuban, Puerto Rican, Colombian, they were from all these Latin American countries, but hardly anyone spoke Spanish. A lot of them spoke English with their parents. I felt different even among people that were Latinos or Latinas, just like me.
Writing about the experiences that I’ve written about has been about naming stuff because they’re very particular to my experience as a first in the American school system, as a first trying to apply to college, as a first going to a master’s program. What happens when you have so many questions, but also you don’t even know what questions you need to be asking. That is a very immigrant and first-generation experience. I feel like it’s the reason why I started to write because I started to finally start to have answers and was like, “Oh, I need to write this down.” Because it can help someone else figure that stuff out.
I had the Internet, I don’t know what that means. And sometimes when you find the answer, it’s just another question. It’s exceptionally hard and the shame that comes because people will be like, “How did you not know that?” You get that a lot. I’ve got so many people being like, “Why are you so old for being in school?” It was because immigrants often get held back. Our education isn’t considered good enough when we come to this country and we get held back. I was eight years old in first grade. We’re not even on the radar. So, not only are we lacking the information, but if nobody’s extending that information, we’re also being shamed for not knowing it.
You explore the intersection of sexism and the development of girls and women. Can you elaborate on this and how it relates to your advocacy work?
I grew up in a really traditional Latina household. Gender is still very prescriptive in Latin America. I think with the Christianization of Latin America, the lack of education and resources in a lot of our countries. In the US gender binary, we’re still finding it. There’s all these anti trans laws that are coming in, but we have more vocabulary for stuff that I definitely grew up just being told, you’re a girl and this is what you’re expected future is, which is to be a mom and to be a stay-at-home mom preferably because that is like, if you’re lucky, you get to become. It was everything. It shaped everything. It shaped the way that I was not encouraged with my grades in school. I was encouraged if I washed dishes.
One of the gifts my dad gave me was a cooking pan. He was so happy to give me a pan because I was 14 and I could start cooking meals and I was starting my own collection of kitchen stuff. That’s just how I grew up. The expectation was that I was going to have a traditional female role in my household one day. So, that limited my options a lot and I didn’t even think that I could be something else. So, I write a lot about that because I think that a lot of us are still growing up in these very strict gender binaries. A lot of Latinas specifically, are growing up in these really strict binaries. And it does stunt our development.
Even if we’re watching something different on TV, we have a lot of access to TV, where women are being empowered and women are becoming anything they want. Women are vice presidents, they own businesses. But a lot of those women on TV still don’t look like me still. The shows where they do look like me, they get canceled really quickly. I don’t get to see us being something so much more than what my parents are telling me that women like me are supposed to do. It does impede our development, and the culture hasn’t done a lot to cancel out that messaging.
It’s also the code too, because I live in the south and women get married still really young in the south. The gender binaries still feel very real in even white families in the south. I’m not as familiar with white families. I don’t understand their more subtle ways that they talk about even bodies. Like, you are expected to be a certain size, these family dynamics and you are shunned for getting bigger, but it’s different. I don’t understand their codes, but when I see it in my house, it feels so in my face.
When somebody says “estas gorda”, I don’t hear it like that when I’m in white spaces, but something is happening that’s similar, but I can’t always catch it in white spaces. I think it’s that more than anything. It is like bubbles, because I do have those conversations with my family, but sometimes it feels I don’t know if that happens to you, but it feels like mi mami holds space for me to be different. Then my sister tries to challenge the things that challenge her and be more like me. Mami will be like, “No, you’re not like Priscilla. You got to behave. She could do what she wants.” And I’m like that’s a lot of improvement.
Can you explain to us this concept and provide some examples? I’d love to dive a little bit deeper into that.
I think we get caught up in this idea that what it means to be successful is very linear. It means doing really well in school, going to a good college, getting a really solid job with a 401(k), and moving up the ladder in your employment, retiring. That’s what we think of, like, “Wow, you did it.”
When I think about my family, my dad’s a musician, he’s never had a 401(k). And my mom didn’t go to college. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t experience success in their lives. That doesn’t mean that because they’re not attached to these institutions of educational success or corporate success or whatever, that doesn’t mean they’re not successful and that they’re not experiencing celebrations worthy of the ones we give to, “You graduated from college, that’s a big deal.” You took a certificate course and you learned more Spanish. That is freaking cool! Or you love your family, you raise wonderful kids, that can also be success because you might not have got all the access to do all this other stuff. That doesn’t make you less than.
In my mind, I think for a really long time, I put things as, “This is better and this is failure.” That really messed with me when I realized that success also means family connections. It’s a lot of luck. If you don’t have family money, if you don’t have some financial support from your family, it’s a lot of luck. It’s a lot of privileged intersections.
The fact that I’ve had the education that I have opens a lot of doors for me. The fact that I am a woman of color but I’m not a black woman has also meant that some doors are open for me where they will be shut for black women. It’s just being aware of all the systems at play and being able to not attach your worth to what we’re told makes us worthy. Rather than deciding, I’m going to be proud about this thing, even if on paper, it’s not something that we would consider wonderful and successful. It’s bragging about. So that’s what it means.
I think inadvertently, if we overvalue ourselves in relation to institutions, we are inadvertently devaluing people who aren’t. People who usually don’t have access to that stuff are poor, are of color, they’re not usually white. Who we’re devaluing are the people who we should be uplifting more. We don’t realize that we’re just like, “I’m so proud. I got a college degree.” And then you could be proud, that’s not the point. But when we commit our whole identity to these successes, we are undervaluing those who can’t.
It’s like a way to connect with people that I think is more authentic than what we’re told in school. You go to school and you sit down and somebody, your teacher, professor, assumes you know nothing, and they just are giving you information, and you have to take it as fact. You get a degree and you graduate.What do you do with that? You go and do the same to other people. You just assume they don’t know anything because they don’t have the degree you have, and then you talk to them from top down, and it hasn’t worked.
What was the big shift for me was, I got my master’s degree. I’m the first in my family history to get a master’s degree of all the Mujicas and all the Rodríguez that have ever been in my family line. I went home, and I started to do that thing of, like, I’m going to teach my family all the things I learned, and it didn’t work. It did not work. I remember my mom being really pissed because she’s like, “Why are you talking to me like that?” I realized, “Yes, I’d gained all this important knowledge, but they didn’t give me the tools to talk about any of it.” The way that they gave me the tools was very, “You’re dumb, I’m smart.” And you can’t talk to people like that. You just can’t. And that’s not how the world works.
It’s the reason why a lot of people don’t end up in college. Not everybody learns that way either. So, what I started to do because I come from a family of storytelling, it’s that men and women tell a lot of stories. I know how all tías met their husbands through storytelling. I could tell you my dad’s version and my mom’s version of how they met each other.
We would get blackouts in Nicaragua a lot, and we would just sit outside, and everybody would just tell stories the whole night. You just spend six, seven hours telling stories. I just had to tap into that, and I had to learn it because it’s muscles that you stop using through schooling and through just doing these institutional checklists, you forget that you have these muscles of communicating with people. And so I started practicing again.
With my mom, it was how I was like, “Okay, she’s not responding to this, but I do think that these conversations are important.” And she’s worth my effort. I just started being like a kid, being like, “This scar is from when this happened, and then this scar is from when this happened.” And I found and then she would be like, “Oh, I have scars like that too.” Instead of like, “You know nothing, I know everything.” It was more like, “Let’s be vulnerable, and hopefully, we can both grow from these conversations.”
Which advice would you give to someone who is passionate about social justice and wants to make a difference in their communities?
I think there’s a lot of ways to do this, so find what your calling is in it. I call it my ministry. My ministry isn’t to teach white people how to treat us better. Some people think they’re called to do that and they really want to make the effort. They want to figure out how to teach, how to talk. Mine is teaching other Latinas or helping other Latinas see what’s happening. We literally are one person. All we can do is to not drain ourselves because activism work is really exhausting.
I’ve been on the end of doing everything, being at every rally, being at every door knock. It’s really hard to sustain, especially when you’re the first daughter of an immigrant family when the lot is reliant on you. So, find the thing that you’re passionate about. Find the thing that you think will speak to the people that you want to speak to and do it. Don’t overthink it, just do it. And be okay with learning along the way. Be okay with making mistakes.
I think a lot of people get into activism and then somebody’s like, “Hey, that was a little racist, you shouldn’t do that.” And they’re like, “Oh, I don’t want to do this then. Fuck this.” Then they leave the movements because of that and that’s more harmful. We have to be really humble and be okay with making mistakes. Be comfortable with saying apologies when those mistakes are made and keep it moving because if community and liberation is the goal, then it’s going to take a lot of patience and a lot of willingness to learn along the way.
Which advice would you give to someone who is trying to figure out their calling?
I think it could be a lot of things. But first find the medium. If speaking is the thing, listen to what other people are saying, listen to a podcast, go watch YouTube videos. If making content is the thing, then go follow the pages that are doing it. Find the medium that feels good and then research it. There’s so many people doing so many cool things in different mediums. So, find it, build community with the people in those spaces. If you’re going to commit to podcasting, then find other podcasters. Don’t do this stuff like you’re on an island, it’s not sustainable. So, find your community and roll with it. I think it’s a lot of trial and error. I thought I was going to be really good at some things that I turned out to not be really good at. So, try different things that speak to you, and eventually you’ll figure it out. But it takes a lot.
Which resource helped you in your journey and that you would like to share with us today?
I’ve always been an avid reader. I don’t really like music. I know that’s really weird to say, but I don’t really do music. I’m not really a good TV watcher. My eyes glaze over and I end up in my head six hours later. I’m like, “What was I watching?” But I love reading and reading has been a way that I have found I’ve learned the most. I connect with people the most, and it’s turned into my medium. So, I write books now and I hope to create the kind of books for people who are interested in the kind of writing that I was seeking for years. It’s been a lot of books. I mean, if you all can see behind me, I have two bookshelves full of books and these aren’t even all my books. These are just the immediate books. I love reading, I think books are amazing and will change the world.
I hope you enjoyed the podcast. We will have more interviews with amazing Latinx leaders the first Tuesday of every month. Check out our website Latinx In Power to hear more. Don’t forget to share comments and feedback, always with kindness. See you soon.
Additional Reading Mentioned in the Interview
📩 Hola, Hi, Olá. Join the Latinx In Power!
We send emails no more than twice a month. Click here to subscribe!
