Hair

At six, my hair was black and straight, just like my father’s. In the few pictures we have together, we look like mirror images:  Dad and his mini-me. 

Mom couldn’t be bothered to style my hair and constantly complained about it getting tangled, so she forced me to keep it shorn in one of two styles. The worst of the two made me look like a pineapple; the hairdresser actually took a razor to the back of my head. There are multiple photographs of me looking like a boy in a dress, including during my first communion, when I wore a flower crown over my freshly shaved head. 

I longed for my classmates’ long, sleek hair, and nagged Mom to let me grow mine out for years. She said no, you’re not responsible enough, but eventually relented, when I was around nine. She eyed me regretfully one evening, however, and told me I looked like an ugly, wild thing. She glanced at her best friend, who was there most Friday afternoons, for confirmation. Edith nodded in agreement. “Best to keep your hair short.”

Mom also asked my aunt Paty once what she thought about my hair, no doubt expecting a response similar to Edith’s. Paty looked at me, a little teary eyed, and said I was beautiful. 

On both occasions, I ran to my room and cried. This was my childhood hobby, and maybe the reason I’m all out of tears as an adult. Rejection made me cry, and acceptance also.

When we moved to Houston two years later, my hair changed in the span of weeks. It became lighter in color, perhaps because of all the time we spent walking under the Texas sun, and gradually went from straight to wavy to frizzy to an unruly, curly mop. I took multiple showers a day, imagining that one day, I would come out of the shower and my hair would go back to being the way it was before, that the water would weigh it down enough to make it straight again. But it never returned to its original state, no matter how many times I brushed it, how much conditioner I use. I later decided the Houston humidity must have changed it temporarily, but even when I returned to Cuernavaca, my hair remained forever transformed. 

For a while, I was convinced my hair was the reason I didn’t fit it, that it was the one thing that kept me from being beautiful. I began straightening it every day while in high school and kept doing so when I went back to Mexico for college. On the rare occasion when I couldn’t, I wrapped it up into a tight bun. Everyone thought I had straight hair. Only a few hairdressers knew my secret, and they all said the same things:

“You have a lot of hair.”

“I know.”

“It’s very dry.”

“That’s just the texture of curly hair.” 

“You obviously don’t take care of it.”

“I do my best.”

“I’ve never seen hair like this before. I don’t know what to do with it.”

After a while, I started cutting it myself, just so I wouldn’t have to see the mild disgust on their faces. 

I haven’t been to a hairdresser in sixteen years.

My hair rests in layers upon layers on top of my head, a canopy in a rainforest. I find the sight of other people’s scalps remarkable; it is so difficult to ever get to mine. It takes me over thirty minutes to get my hair wet when I’m in the shower: it repels water, refuses to absorb it. It also falls at an alarming rate; there is so much hair everywhere, all the time. You would think I am going bald, but it’s been this way since I was thirteen and I am the least bald person I’ve ever seen. Sometimes, we find it in my dog’s shit, as if, walking that low on the ground, she couldn’t help but swallow the stray hairs. I can rake my fingers through my head at any given moment and pull out a fistful without even wincing, as if it had never been attached to my head. 

At twenty-five, at the end of summer after a bad breakup, the worst break up of my life, I started losing hair in spots. Three of them, the size of quarters, maybe bigger. Of course, no one knew, because all the remaining hair was enough to cover up the missing chunks and could have covered even more. I thought it might be a scalp infection caused by my new hobby; open water swimming. But the doctors could not figure out what was causing it. I decided, after seeing no improvement, to visit a healer. She told me that loss in life often results in loss of hair, and that people shed more hair during the fall, the same way trees lose their leaves. I was so scared of going bald I realized (momentarily) that any hair, even mine, was better than no hair. Eventually, the hair returned, unchanged, showing both its resilience and the resilience of my hatred for it.

I still fervently believe having straight hair will change my life. The first time Husband ever told me I looked beautiful was after he saw me with straight hair. I pointed this out and he felt bad, but I knew in my heart he was right. After I got my driver’s license, I ask him to buy me a fancy hair straightener as a reward. It is the most expensive thing I’ve owned, and life changing in its own way, but still not enough, because every morning and after every shower, my hair is still curly.

The best thing money has ever bought me is straight hair, after I had it chemically straightened last summer. The procedure took six hours of sitting in a room with two women wearing gas masks working on my head while I choked on what were probably toxic fumes. They told me it was the longest it had ever taken them to straighten anyone’s hair, and, as usual, seemed to resent me for it. I have resigned myself to the fact that I will have to undergo this procedure at least twice every year; after a few months, I can already feel the roots of my hair pointing upward, coiling like snakes atop my head.

My best friend also has curly, frizzy hair, not the pin-straight hair most Mexicans have. He came home fuming one day after someone made fun of it, going on a rant about how difficult it was to have hair that deviated from the societal standard. I felt slightly comforted to think society might be to blame. He borrowed my hair straightener for Halloween, trying to channel Harry Potter. Later, he asked to borrow it again, for graduation. Even my Marx-loving bestie can’t resist the appeal of straight hair.

I tell myself we aren’t imagining it. I watch a dating reality show where a man, listing his preferences, says he absolutely will not date girls with curly hair. “It’s not fun,” he says. “You can’t run your hands through their hair. You’ll never be able to pull them out.” I am constantly surprised by how this hatred for curls appears in the most random of places. Ana Wintour’s newest biography, which I recently read, said if there is one thing she loathes, it’s frizzy, curly hair.

My ex-girlfriend had curly hair too; light brown, blond-in-the-sunlight Botticelli curls. People always wanted to touch them, pull on them like springs. She got so many compliments, even from strangers on the street while I stood there, frowning under my bird’s nest.

I got my curly hair from my mother, but Mom’s hair is curlier than mine. One of her students used to refer to her as “the teacher with the circles on her head.” She keeps it cropped short, has for as long as she has been my mother. She frequently quotes a book by a Mexican fashion stylist, who said it was preferable to keep your hair very short if it was curly, as curls above one’s ears often looked like deformed marshmallows. 

I later realize that perhaps the reason Mom hated dealing with my hair wasn’t that she hated me; it was that she hated herself. 

In Mexico, hair is part of a complex racial history. When I told my grandmother that my dream was to have long, straight hair, she scowled at me. “Do you want to look like those Indians who sell tortillas on the street?”

Indeed, that was the kind of hair I dreamed of having.

Curly hair, on the other hand, is associated with having Black ancestry. In Mexican Spanish, the word for curl is chino, which, today, means Chinese. But the word can be traced back to the Mexican caste system. During colonial times, chino was used to refer to children of mixed white, Black and Indigenous heritage. Due to this, it was accompanied by many negative stereotypes, and came to signify things as varied as concubine, slave, servant, and also, a person with curly hair. Eventually, all other meanings were lost. We kept only curly, and its negative connotations.

I hated my curly hair long before I learned that fact.

This is how racism works. You learn to hate everything about yourself before you know why you hate it, before you realize what you hate belongs to Black people, to brown people, before you learn that you are one of those people.

When I was younger, I willed my hair straight. With time, and after my chemical straightening, I learned to bend it to my will. If you hate yourself enough, there’s always something you can do, someone else you can become.

Sometimes, you learn to accept that it’s just too late for you, too late to accept yourself.

I know that without my curly hair, I’d be my best version. No one will ever be able to talk me out of that.

This is also how racism works. Once it has a hold of you, it is hard to let go of it, or hard for it to let go of you.