La Muñeca Morena — The Brown Doll
As the Christmas season is coming to a close, I reflected on some of my most memorable Christmases. Two stand out. One from my childhood and one from adulthood.
Every season has their “hot items” for kids. The year that stands out for me is 1991, when all of the cousins wanted a toy called a water baby. I was 8 years old at the time and probably nearing the end of my doll phase but I wanted one anyway. They were simply dolls that you filled with water and it was meant to be a doll that would have more realistic movements like a real baby.
We always split our Christmas Eve between my mom’s family and my dad’s family and each dinner was held at the respective grandmother’s house. My dad’s family was more “fun” at the time because I had more cousins to play with over there. My sister and I packed up our haul from my maternal grandmother’s house, piled in the car and crossed over with our parents into Ojinaga, Chihuahua, Mexico. In some ways our holidays were an eerie foreshadow of how our family would be legally split apart and forced to divide not only holidays but our entire lives between two different countries a few years later.
When we got to my Abuela Toña’s house, they had just finished dinner and were waiting on us to open presents. There was a designated aunt who was the gift commander in chief and would create order out of chaos as our excited giggles filled the house. The rules were simple as each person received a gift, everyone else had to wait patiently while they opened it, held it up, told us what it was, and we all cheered in admiration. This time they switched it up on us, they handed all of the girl cousins a gift and told us to wait until they gave the go ahead. We all opened it up at the same time and it was the beloved water babies we had all wanted! As we all used our clumsy little fingers to try and free the toys from the packaging it struck me that my doll was different. Given the title of this post, you can deduce that my doll was the only brown doll. This was significant for a couple of reasons I’d never had a brown doll before and I definitely felt singled out in a way that I hadn’t felt before.
“I suppose this taught me the underlying value that people place on color: if it’s darker, it’s of less quality.”
If you’re in touch with Latin cultures, you’ll realize we come in all shapes, sizes, and skin colors. My skin color had been called out as a question or looked at with pity well before this holiday. My mom shared stories about how as a tiny baby people would make remarks like, “How cute! But she’s so brown” or in Spanish “Que chula, pero esta bien morenita” or asking her if she was my nanny because she has light skin. Seeing this, my mom decided to counteract it by teaching me to say, “Morena pero fina/Brown but of fine quality” whenever someone would comment on my skin color. I suppose this taught me the underlying value that people place on color: if it’s darker, it’s of less quality. Looking at my brown doll I wondered if it was made the same as the others. I checked and it was. I wondered why I had never had another brown doll before. It seemed to solidify my status as different, even from the rest of my cousins; however, it also solidified my grit and commitment to ownership of my skin color as a thing of pride. It made me fearless of diversity and in fact pushed me to seek it out. This became most apparent through my childhood friendships. I’d frequently befriend those that were radically different from everyone else. It became normal to me to not fit in or be like others. It became comfortable, in fact.
“…appreciate the things that make you uniquely you and open your mind and heart to someone who is different from your norm.”
Fast-forward exactly 20 years later and my most memorable Christmas as an adult came to be. I was 28 and my Caucasian boyfriend and his mom came to spend the holidays with my family in Mexico. That year my now husband proposed to me in front of my family. A gift that I will cherish forever. It was at odds with tradition and “norms” but that’s precisely what I loved about the whole thing. It was a brown doll moment all over again. A gift and invitation to make a life with someone who was radically different from the people I had grown up with. My interracial marriage, much like my skin color, is a badge of honor a signal to the outside world that I am unafraid of diversity and that I see and feel the beauty in difference. It is not a thing to be feared but an opportunity to learn about the world. I hope this holiday season you have time to appreciate the things that make you uniquely you and open your mind and heart to someone who is different from your normal.
