Abbie Parajon,
Santa Rosa, CA

Since I was born, my eyes have been praised to be my most beautiful inheritance. My mother’s family resembles the indigenous who walked this land before all. Soil skin, strong hands, and deep brown eyes. Decades of Spanish influence and racial class systems deciding the value of your soul based on the color of your skin painted an ancient beauty over with rust, and this generationally-carried standard has been established into modern audiences. When I visited family in Guanajuato, Mexico, mothers and aunts flocked to praise my own, to praise my fair skin and bright eyes. When my Abuelita won a beauty pageant during her teenage years living in Mexico, heartbroken girls saw only what they didn’t have– what they were told was beauty. When a child is born on the homeland of her indigenous ancestors, a mother will look into the eyes of her baby and frown, shaking her head to a familiar grief, and say “Que pena, ella salió india”. We were taught to be ashamed of our roots, to erase our identities, to sit in a cage and clip our wings for daring to grow feathers a color other than those of a dove. The bond of countless mothers and daughters, continuing to be severed by an invisible knife planted long ago.