Pelo Malo

I remember the first time I felt pain because it happened when I was four-years-old, getting my hair straightened by my mother’s friend. The hot comb, which had gingerly hovered inches from my face, suddenly slipped from my hairdresser’s hands long enough to brand me like livestock. I clamped a hand to my forehead and jumped back in anguish and reproach. In lieu of an apology, my beautician brazenly said: “Todo por la belleza.” Anything for beauty. In some convoluted way that included being burned, walking around with a scar to rival Harry Potter’s, and don’t-you-dare-complain-about-it-either. After the pain subsided some (and my hair had been declared done), I hopped off my chair and scurried to the bathroom, climbing atop the toilet seat to examine my hair dresser’s handiwork in the mirror. As I stared at my new ‘do I forgot all about my disfigured forehead and giddily touched my silky, straight mid-length hair where just an hour ago brown frizzy curls had reigned my crown. It was the first time I had seen this sort of hair transformation and I was enamored with the results. Thereafter, I had my hair straightened for parties and special occasions with the thought that my poofy, curly hair wasn’t pretty. Once flat irons came around in high school, making it easier for me to do my own hair, I straightened it much more frequently; and when I joined the workforce, I blew my hair out every single day. I used to think my curls made me look childish and that straight hair was more professional and appropriate. I didn’t hear anyone tell me my curls were beautiful until my boyfriend surprised me by telling me he loved my natural hair and that I shouldn’t straighten it. His love for my curls help me to begin to love them, too.

I think back now and wonder: Why had I gotten my hair straightened at just four- years-old? Why was I forced to sit frozen as a mannequin for a whole hour as a kid to have a hot iron rod dangerously near my face, heating every crinkly curl into resistant but sleek submission? It was all for a professional picture where I wore a pink party dress and smiled pretty for the K-Mart photographer, my newly tamed hair the star of the show. Of course, this might’ve been the best way to get that picture-perfect portrait but if we want to get deeper, it was also a subtle message that my hair wasn’t right, and it needed to be changed from its natural texture. I read an excellent article written by Johanna Ferreira titled, “Why the Curly and Natural Hair Movement Is So Important.” In it, Ferreira talks about how hair isn’t just hair and for women of color, rocking our natural textures is often a political statement versus an aesthetic one. She informs that hair discrimination is not always obvious:

Sometimes it’s a subtle comment, like ‘Are you going to straighten your hair for that job interview or your first date?’ Messages like that give into the mentality that curly, coily, or textured hair in general isn’t beautiful or sophisticated enough to be seen in those kinds of settings. This impacts curly-haired women on both a psychological and emotional level.

 At a young age, the idea that my curls weren’t beautiful had been inseminated in my brain with just that simple photo where I had to go through all the pageantry of getting dolled up. I hadn’t asked my mother to straighten my hair; I was too young to even know to ask that. No, my mother had decided for me and it was not because she thought my hair was ugly; it was because that’s how she learned to do her hair. No one taught her to love and appreciate her curls; rather, the only education she received on hair care (and that she therefore passed down to her daughters) was to relax our curls. It was my mother’s lack of education in her childhood that deeply affected my younger sister Margarett the most who felt that the only way her hair could look nice was to straighten it every day.

At the end of last year, my boyfriend and I received the results from our 23andMe genetics tests. I’m half Ecuadorian (on my dad’s side), half Puerto-Rican (on my mom’s) but what I discovered is that I’m 15% Black, which explains my sister’s African features: darker skin, broader frame and coarse hair. Regretfully, our African ethnicity was never discussed in my home and my sisters and I (and I’d include my own mother) missed out on enriching our understanding of our culture and beauty. Inside our nuclear family, Margarett was the only one who exhibited African features and she felt different because of it; my mother’s older sister and nieces, who shared Margarett’s traits, lived in New Jersey, and eventually moved to Puerto Rico, so they weren’t always around for her to speak to and learn tips for caring and styling her hair. Even if they were around, they wouldn’t have enlightened her too much because they had been taught the same things: relax and straighten your hair. My sister felt an unfortunate lack of acceptance and understanding because she looked different; my mom has hair like mine, and my dad (whose hair my sisters and I envied growing up) has glossy, straight locks. Neither could understand what to do with Margarett’s hair and my dad even, unwittingly, would insensitively tell her to do something with her hair when it was perfectly fine! The only thing culpable with her hair was that it didn’t look the way my parents thought it should look. My mother’s overt frustration with Margarett’s hair, which was most evident when she’d untangle it in the bathtub, was palpable enough for my sister to absorb as well.  Flummoxed, my mother did the only thing she thought was right: she’d relaxed my sister’s hair to make it more manageable. I didn’t realize as a young girl how much my sister’s hair could impact her. Ferreira writes:

For my fellow Latinas and Black girlfriends with much tighter and coiler textures—the struggle has been even more real. Many of these girls grew up being told that their hair was not beautiful and that they had to relax it straight [..] to look more ‘presentable’ in society. For many of these women, wearing the hair that naturally grows out of their scalps was not an option.

I remember my exhausted mother sitting in the living room on the edge of the sofa, my sister cross-legged on the floor between her legs, tirelessly combing through her knots, preparing Margarett for the relaxer. Margarett started getting these relaxers around the second grade and admits loving them because she felt the wind in her hair and the compliments helped her self-esteem; nevertheless, she hated the process and now only straightens her hair when she doesn’t wear it curly. She wishes she would’ve received the proper tools in caring for her hair so that she wouldn’t have damaged it so much with chemicals and heat. I wish the same thing because so many years of frying my hair with heat have left my curls dejected.

I have a nebulous recollection of my sister in the 4th grade having to do something that most girls would rather die than do: cut their hair so short it resembles a boy’s haircut. My sister went through a lot with her hair, even with something that should be simple like brushing it, but when we were kids no one showed us the proper combs to use. As a child, Margarett had a lot of trouble combing her own hair because she wasn’t taking care of it regularly and it would get badly knotted. Well, one day the knots got so knotted and intertwined that not even my mother could separate the strands; and unfortunately for my sister a huge knot was trapped right at the top of her head like a bat in the attic. There was no going around it—it had to be cut. My mother took us to Maritza’s Salon where she whispered to the hair dresser what dreadful task was at hand. Margarett was forced to sit in the styling chair while Maritza vigorously and mercilessly chopped off her hair, leaving her with a very short bob. My sister remembers bawling her eyes out throughout the entire appointment, hating the woman for cutting her hair, feeling like her femininity was being stripped away as she watched each chopped lock drop to the hardwood floor. It was a hard time for her, a period in her life when she was developing, noticing boys, and to have her hair taken from her was a huge blow to the ego. To divert attention from her pixie cut (and make herself feel like a girl even without long hair), she wore headbands with pretty patterns, eventually transcending her awful experience and enjoying the purchase of cool headbands, her new fly accessory. Learning this, I had no idea how vulnerable cutting her hair left Margarett and I can’t help but think that with just a little knowledge and education on hair care, it could have been avoided entirely.

This idea that there’s “good hair” and pelo malo (“bad hair”) is unequivocally lazy because good hair is healthy hair; good hair is hair that is properly taken of, which will ultimately make you feel good. When you condescend to the idea that you, your daughter, your sister, or your friend, has hair that doesn’t look beautiful except when it’s straightened, you’re not taking the time to love on that hair and give it the TLC it desperately needs. Take all the time you need to find the right products to moisturize and condition your hair.  I’ve noticed that when it comes to curly, coarse, textured, kinky, nappy—whatever you want to call it—hair, it seems that everyone around you has an opinion on what you should do with it. As if they have any right to say shit to you! I remember in 7th grade my teacher, a white nun with the eccentric proclivity to pair her baby blue habit with running shoes, spouted her thoughts on the matter in the middle of class: “It’s a sin to straighten curls. I don’t understand why girls do it.” While I do believe we should learn to be comfortable wearing our hair natural, and loving every strand, it’s also perfectly okay to straighten it for styling and manageability purposes—or for whatever reason you have. We should never have to explain how our hair looks like to anyone or why we’ve decided to wear it a certain way that day. Whether you love our hair or not, we’re going to do whatever we want to do with it because it’s our hair. It really bothered me when my teacher said that because I just couldn’t understand why she thought she could comment on someone else’s hair. Maybe that was her way of empowering us Brown chicks, but to condemn us for using a flat iron? To her credit, she was a Catholic nun and it’s inherently embedded in her to guilt shame anyone around her by calling out their actions as sins. So maybe it wasn’t even a hair thing. My point is, whether you’re working for God or not, everyone should keep their opinions on what they think other people should and shouldn’t do with their hair to themselves. What we should be having a dialogue on is the way we feel about our hair and where those feelings originate.     

In 2009, the comedian Chris Rock debuted a documentary called Good Hair, a film inspired by his little daughter asking him why she didn’t have “good hair.” The documentary promised to delve into the question of why women of color didn’t think they had “good hair,” and what was “good hair,” anyway? I didn’t get a chance to watch it then, but thankfully, in this age of finding any film on a streaming service, I rented it on Amazon with the intent of learning how other women with textured hair felt about their hair and how it might have affected their self-esteem and thoughts on their beauty. The documentary wasn’t what I thought it was going to be; it didn’t go deep enough into the question of why people of color have the hair that we have and how it’s beautiful even though it doesn’t look like white people’s hair; and who said that was the standard of beauty, anyway? What I did learn from the film is that we can’t discriminate women for relaxing their hair because men do it too, and for what purpose? As Paul Mooney jokes in the documentary, “If your hair is relaxed, white people are relaxed. If your hair is nappy, they aren’t happy.” This is because “if you’ve never seen Black hair in its natural state, you’re scared of it.” This is so true and brings me back again to when my dad would criticize my sister’s hair without realizing that’s what he was doing. No wonder the Black hair business is a billion-dollar enterprise, largely comprised by the purchasing of weaves. That’s a staggering figure and goes to show how much hair can matter in making women feel good. The other fact the film highlights is just how bad chemical relaxers are with a demonstration of a scientist pouring one of the chemicals used in relaxers on a chicken, and it burns a gaping hole right through the poultry! While the documentary focused too much on a hair battle and weaves, I’m just happy the film brings up the topic at all and starts the conversation on the struggle we face with our hair; nevertheless, it could’ve done a better job on educating viewers on the beauty of Black hair, embracing it and showcasing all the cool ways you can wear it be that afros, braids, dreadlocks, cornrows, bantu knots, etc.   

In “Good ‘Hair?’ Hardly. How Chris Rock gets it wrong,” Alynda Wheat illustrates keen observations the film doesn’t spend enough time discussing. Two of them are: white women use weaves too; and, almost all women across the cultures want long, thick hair not just Black women; to isolate Black women is egregious. Wheat writes, “White women frequently chemically treat their hair to make it straighter or curlier, and dye it so regularly they don’t even know their natural color. Does this make them culturally insecure? Hardly.” She’s right to point this out, because white women do get perms to curl their hair and don’t get called out for being insecure about their naturally straight hair; however, when women of color do it many consider it an insecurity, and that’s not always the case. To Wheat’s second point she proclaims that “[l]ong, fabulous tresses seems to be an ideal in many, many cultures, and Black women shouldn’t be criticized, ostracized, or psychoanalyzed for wanting the same thing.” For many of us, we like to straighten our hair because we want to create length or a quicker morning routine and nothing else. Good Hair’s central focus is on Black women using relaxers and buying thousands of dollars’ worth of weaves to, supposedly, achieve a more European look, but that can’t be 100% true because Black women aren’t the only ones purchasing weaves for length, volume, style. Using a weave can be like anything else: for a specific style and it can help any woman who wants to achieve a certain look not so that they can look white.

It didn’t help my self-esteem growing up in the 90’s and aughts to see the lack of representation of women of color on television or movies with hair that puffed up like a lion’s mane. Portrayal of Latinos were scarce—hell, even all my favorite books had white leads and when I’d write stories my protagonists were white, too, because I didn’t think there could be Hispanic characters. I remember there was a Nickelodeon show Taina with a Latina protagonist, but aside from that if I wanted to see people like me I turned to telenovelas, but the problem there was I wasn’t finding people with my background—a Latina girl with immigrant parents trying to survive in America. The problem was there weren’t many projects back then made by us or for us. I imagine for my sister it was even tougher to relate to anyone on the big screens, billboards, and magazines; to not see a reflection of yourself in the movies and TV shows you watch is alienating and detrimental. That’s why even though Good Hair wasn’t all it could be, I so appreciate the film introducing this topic to the mainstream. I’m so happy that today we’re living in a curly hair movement and I’m living for it. Thankfully, there’s more representation in the media with actresses like Zazie Beetz from Atlanta rocking her beautiful natural hair, and Issa Rae on Insecure shows off creative hairstyles that can inspire other Black girls when they want to style their natural hair.

I do remember a seminal episode from the 90’s sitcom Sister, Sister where Tia Landry gets her curly hair straightened at the salon and all of her classmates notice her, adulating her with compliments at her dramatic transformation. Her straight hair even wins her a spot alongside the Mean Girls of Roosevelt High School. Now, her hair did look bomb, that’s not the issue; the cringe worthy problem is her classmates’ innocuous exclamations of joy when they see that her voluminous curls have been stretched into sleek locks, surreptitiously giving her the message that they prefer her hair in a way that doesn’t overwhelm them with her Blackness. Tia is accepted and embraced by her classmates and all it took was changing her hair. The problem is not what we decide to do with our hair, but how others react to it and that’s the only thing that needs to change.

I’ve heard the hapless phrase “pelo malo” thrown around to describe hair that isn’t deemed desirable just because it might take a little more time to work with. But I think the relationship we build with our hair feeds our soul and bonds us to our other sisters as we pick each other’s brains for hair tips. It’s unequivocally unacceptable to make anyone think what’s innately natural is ugly; moreover, if our mothers weren’t taught to care and love on their hair we need to change that mentality to teach our children self-love, breaking the cycle of hate. There isn’t “bad” or “good” hair and if we embrace what we’ve got, we don’t have to waste time wondering which kind of hair we were blessed with. We’re just blessed with hair.

 Ferreira, Johanna. “Why the Curly and Natural Hair Movement Is So Important.” Hip Latina,  2019. https://hiplatina.com/importance-curly-hair-movement/.

Good Hair. Directed by Jeff Stilson, Roadside Attractions, 2009.

Wheat, Alynda. “Good ‘Hair?’ Hardly. How Chris Rock gets it wrong.” Entertainment Weekly, Meredith Corporation, 2018. https://ew.com/article/2009/10/12/good-hair-hardly-how-chris-rock-gets-it-wrong/.