The Mexican Jumko Ogata has abundant curly hair, Chinese hair, they would say in her country. It’s part of her physique, but also of her identity. And of her work.
A writer of fiction, essays and film critic, Ogata published in 2022 together with the illustrator Reina Pelcastre, a children’s book where she talks about precisely that topic.
The protagonist of “My Chinese Hair” -which is written in Spanish and Mixtec- says that it bothered her not to look like other girls her age. Until her grandfather shows her all the styling possibilities that her curly hair allows. She shows him that you can be beautiful in different ways.
Thus, based on a daily anecdote, Ogata builds a story about diversity and inclusion, which has given him a surprise: not only children celebrate his text, but many adults have approached him to praise him.
We spoke to her as part of the there festival, that is celebrated in the city mexican From queretaro between the 7th and the 10th of September.
whatWhat problems hayes had for you hair? youand I ask why is the central theme of your book “My Chinese hair”.
Let’s see, I haven’t been handicapped in the sense of being denied a job or any significant opportunity because of the texture of my hair.
Rather, it has been a personal matter, of microaggressions, of comments at home, on the street, which over time lead you to think that what comes from your head is wrong and that it must be changed, that there are some good textures and others bad
I had seen books that talked about the subject, and I thought that when I was little I would have liked it very much to be able to read a book that spoke directly to me, to the girl who was made to feel bad, who was always told that she was not Enough, that I had to change to “be well”.
This is how the idea of “My Chinese hair” arose. We wanted to situate the issue of Chinese hair, which is what we call curly hair in Mexico, in a very Mexican context, and for it to be like a hug for those of us who have this type of hair and constantly receive these messages from society.
Now, what I did not expect and it is very funny is that, after it was published, the children liked it a lot, but the people who have been affected the most are adults, who usually arrive crying and saying that they wish they had had this book. in childhood.
whatand why did you decide do a children’s book and not an autobiographical novel or literary essayFor example?
For various reasons, but mainly because of the studies I did on children’s literature.
There’s a well-known writer, Rudine Sims Bishop, who pointed out about 40 years ago that there were very few books written directly for black boys and girls in the United States.
She says not only do more children’s books need to be written, but she also talks about the importance of mirror-and-window literature.
The mirror reflects stories, children see themselves in others who are similar to them in the cultures and languages with which they have grown up. And the window shows them stories of children from very different places, from other cultures, with other ways of living.
So what I do is unite these two ideas in my book.
I am not trying to make a negative description of the situation; it is simply recognizing the differences between my culture, my way of being, my body, etc., and those of other people, and learning from those differences to nurture healthy coexistence through children’s literature.
And it is not necessarily exclusive to girls or boys who have Chinese hair.
It is also so that all the little ones can learn that if tomorrow they have a friend who has Chinese hair, well, they can say “she or he is like the character in my book”, and they can even recommend “you can comb your hair in such a way”. and such a way”, or tell them “how beautiful is your hair that looks like a cloud, or a flower”, instead of resorting to the negative stereotypes that we see in other spaces.
Reading this book and other texts yoursone pI would hate come to the conclusion that if someone is born black in Mexico, they are not considered Mexican?
Yes, it’s true: people of African descent are not considered Mexicans.
In my case, being a person of black and Japanese descent, the violence of foreignization crosses me at all times.
When you do a government paperwork or something at school or at work, the first thing they tell you is “that name is very strange, where does it come from?” or “that last name is very striking, where are you from?” I answer that I am from here, from Mexico. To which they follow, “so, where does your dad come from?”… Well, also from Mexico.
Blacks in Mexico are not considered Mexican even though we have been living here for centuries.
And I tell you something, that is not the case with some other diasporas like the European ones and with their distinguished surnames, whose belonging to this space is never questioned.
Speak much of the third root and the problem of talking about blackness in Mexico… What are you talking about?
The third root is the term with which the Afro-descendant population or the African influence in Mexico are often named, under the logic that all of Mexico is a mestizo country that has both roots, the European and indigenous, and that the African It’s the third.
But there are several problems with this logic.
First, racist assimilationism, that is, “we forgot that you were here too, well, you are the third root”. And it is defined as if nothing.
Second, it does not question the idea that all Mexicans have white and/or indigenous ancestry.
The problem is not talking about black people in Mexico, but instead of recognizing that the idea of miscegenation is racist and harmful, the African part is simply being incorporated in a very romantic way, but that perpetuates those exclusive ideas about race and racialization.
whatyou explain memore about your vision ofof mixed race as breeding ground to feed racism and exclusion of black communities in Mexico?
And not only of the black communities, but of the indigenous ones, of the Asian ones.
The concept of miscegenation in Mexico, also as a State action that has been going on for hundreds of years, is that not only does the entire population necessarily have to have white and indigenous ancestors, but also be so in the ideological part, in the values you have, in your way of life, what language do you speak.
And that makes, almost invisibly, that miscegenation is also a process of dispossession, of destruction of the original languages and cultures, which condemns everything that comes out of that rigid construction of the mestizo.
So, there is not only a systematic effort to eliminate and “de-indigenize” the original peoples, but also to exclude and destroy, and to view people of African descent with rejection and disgust.
For centuries people of African descent have been described as an undesirable, lazy, uncivilized population, etc.
One of the clearest examples of the damage that miscegenation does is in the speech presented by José Vasconcelos, who is one of the most important Mexican thinkers of the 20th century.
Vasconcelos has a paradigmatic essay in which he talks about the cosmic race, (the essay is called “The cosmic race: mission of the Ibero-American race”) that is highly praised to date in public discourse, in which he says that all races They are going to combine to form this cosmic race and each one is going to add very nice things and it sounds very romantic, but all in a very superficial way.
But if we pay attention to it, the essay also asks “what values will this new cosmic race have?” And he replies that “since it is fully combined, it will lean towards white European values, because they are obviously superior.”
This would come to be like a “good vibes” racism, which is not the same as gringo racism, which is segregationist, but rather has its own dynamics. And sometimes, for that very reason, it is difficult to identify, because they say that since it is not similar to what the gringos and the English do, then it is not racism.
When it is the opposite: it is a very insidious racism, because everything is under a discourse of love and friendship. That actually means the destruction of everything that is not “right.”
Colombian academic José A. Figueroa He argued that racism was the way that dominant whites found to spread slavery once it was abolished in several Caribbean countries. In a country like Mexico, how is this idea applied?
Let’s start from the idea that Mexico is a very diverse territory. And in that sense there are also many dynamics of racism in each territory.
I, for example, am from the state of Veracruz, which is part of the Greater Caribbean region, where there is a large black and indigenous population, and this creates very particular dynamics that are totally different from those that exist in Sonora.
It must be made clear that there is no absolute form for all of Mexico, but the common characteristics throughout the territory are those of white supremacy, which translates into dispossession, capitalism as an economic form that requires exploiting people to the point of his death.
That is to say, the cane fields that existed since the 16th century and that continue to exist in Veracruz function just as well there as in Cuba or the Dominican Republic or Haiti.
And it is that everything is under the assumption that this is the truth, that all things have always been like this and must continue like this. They make you think it’s so normal that you don’t even question it.
I, in the workshops that I do, find myself with great resistance to question that.
They tell me that the Mexican governments have been very kind to everyone, including immigrants, that Lázaro Cárdenas opened the door to the Spanish, but 20 years before, no one mentions that there was a massacre of the Chinese population in Torreón.
There is other coming termyes using a lot, anti-racism. The question may seem obvious, but how exactly would you define it?yes?
This arises because when I talk about racism with other people, or in the workshops I do, one of the first responses is “I’m not racist, no, I have a brown family or I have an indigenous aunt.”
It is a deeply rooted way of thinking, which tries to say that “I am not guilty, that others are racists, that I am good.”
And I share that we have all grown up in an equally racist society and our parents didn’t directly tell us anything, but it’s at school, it’s on TV, in the extended family. You cannot avoid these prejudices and these ways of thinking.
So what I want to reflect on is that instead of pretending go, in trying to ignore the problem, you have to make a conscious process of saying, “well, I am also part of this gear and I have perpetuated this violence and that does not mean that I am already a bad person, that I cannot redeem myself never and it ended there”, but there is room to grow, to learn, to transform the realities in which we are.
And for that it is not enough to say “I am not racist”, but it is about being actively anti-racist.
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