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  • Funky Women with DuendeFeminism and femininity
  • Adriana López (bio)

You are a housewife, resigned, submissive,Ruled by the prejudices of men; not I;I am a runaway RocinanteSniffing at horizons for the justice of God.

—Julia de Burgos, “To Julia de Burgos”

The Secret

Feminist might not be the proper sobriquet to describe my great-aunt, Tía Esthercita, but she sure was fearless. In the late 1950s she flouted the church’s social dicta, scoffed at being ladylike, and defied los hombres machistas. She smoked cigars, huffed down whiskey, and indulged in international love affairs with doting, sometimes married, men. She owned a finca on the outskirts of Bogotá and a three-bedroom apartment in Las Torres de Fenicia, a high-rise luxury building in the once chic downtown part of Bogotá. I could never quite figure out how my great-aunt could afford this lavish lifestyle or why my mother’s family always rolled their eyes and spoke furtively when the subject turned to their eccentric aunt—a woman with cojones.

Her secret was divulged to me in my early twenties one night over lots of sake at a Japanese restaurant with my mom. As the story goes, my great-aunt married for reasons of convenience at fourteen and broke up her marriage a year later—divorce being illegal in Colombia until the early 1990s. She was a street-smart hustler: charismatic, undereducated, but possessed of prodigious entrepreneurial ambition. She built a house on a piece of land she had purchased in a commercial area of downtown Bogotá next to a cemetery (women were granted property rights in 1932), but she had trouble finding tenants. So she agreed to convert the large house into a high-end brothel administered by outside parties. The brothel catered to businessmen and politicians who served as her business connections for years to come. With the profits she bought herself a white Ford Galaxy and launched her own taxi service and a salsamentería, a deli that her younger brother managed.

When I spoke to her not long ago, Tía Esthercita admitted that she had had to conceal the brothel from the many men in her life, who simply wouldn’t have understood her [End Page 70] method of moneymaking. But she was also thankful that our family had gotten over the initial shock rather quickly. The brothel, which remained open for four years, enabled her to support herself handsomely and travel the world. It seems that her only mistake was to entrust some money to one of her lovers, who lost a small fortune in a bad investment. She never had children or remarried, and she always barks at me about the absurdity of marriage.

Although I find prostitution degrading to women, I’ve come to accept that Tía Esthercita did what she had to do to survive. Because people considered it scandalous, she liberated herself from the conservative confines of Bogotean society. Her independence gave my grandmother the courage to escape an abusive husband and run away with her two daughters to the United States. My own mother continued the tradition by divorcing my conventional macho father, getting her bachelor’s degree, and buying herself a shiny new white Camaro.

These are the women who helped frame my understanding of feminism.

Beyond Bra Burning

What does feminism mean today? I have always viewed the women in my family as anomalies. Because I was born in the States and raised by my liberated mother in a predominantly white suburban neighborhood, I wasn’t raised with the traumas endured by most Latinas. Many of my relatives and amigas had to come to terms with life under a confining, role-playing roof: “father qua head,” “mother qua helper.”

Not surprisingly, my home is decorated with kitschy Latina icons. I have photos of Frida Kahlo, a Virgen de Guadalupe light switch, and a painting of “Anima sola,” a Colombian folkloric figure in handcuffs who is condemned to the eternal flames of purgatory. These symbols imbue me with a female power solely through their visual presence. They are emblems of the martyrdom and pain of womanhood, of a male-dominated society...

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