I
had just started my second trimester when I shared a
pregnancy factoid with my mother. “Mami, the babies are
growing hair this week,” I said into the phone.
“Ay, Dios mio!” she responded. “Let’s pray that they don’t
have pelo malo.”
I wish I could say she was kidding. Or that I reprimand-
ed her. Instead, I laughed it off, even though I knew better
than to acquiesce to the “bad hair” stigma. I was carrying
a boy and a girl, and while their health was top priority, I can’t lie—I
was hoping that at least one, ideally the girl, would be spared pelo
malo. I had had enough of it to last me a lifetime.
Pelo malo: Its literal translation is “bad hair.” The term, embed-
ded in black and Latinx culture, is directed at curly, textured, and
kinky hair. In two words, it sums up the belief that this hair type is so
undesirable, so malo, that it has to be corrected. Pelo malo has been
tossed around for so long, we’re essentially immune to its negativity.
A new generation of Latina women is reclaiming a
once-maligned hair type: pelo malo. By Patricia Reynoso
Twist
and Shout
And when your loved ones are the people saying it, there must be
something to it, right?
“From birth, Latina and black women are taught that the closer
you are to white, the easier it is to succeed in life,” says author and
beauty expert Tia Williams, who has written extensively about
beauty standards. “The lighter, the better. The straighter, the bet-
ter. Both cultures are working to heal and get to a place of loving
what we’ve got.”
It’s a challenge. I came of age in the 1980s, an era that certainly
didn’t put chubby, frizzy-haired Latinas like me on a pedestal. Every
TV ad, magazine shoot, and billboard in my very Latin New York
City neighborhood celebrated long, straight, shiny, bouncy, and
well-behaved hair. All of Mami’s favorite telenovela actresses had
this hair type, and later, so did my own beauty idols, like Jennifer
Lopez. (Whether they came by their pelo bueno via a blow-dryer and
straightening treatments was another story.)
BEAUTY
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