Intergenerational Prophecies

I analyze my grandmother’s racial trauma which expressed itself as a racist-colorist way of seeing. The questions that guide my reflection are the following: Through what gaze did my grandmother look at herself? Did my mother and I inherit her way of seeing, that is,​​ a gaze that hates the body it sees? I put special emphasis on the repetitions and continuity that I find among the three family generations. In this sense, I wonder if my grandmother's visual experience functions as a kind of prophecy from which my mother, her sisters and I could not escape, a kind of inexorable destiny like the one faced by Oedipus. Given the nature of my inquiry, I adopt an intergenerational perspective at a historical and family level. In other words, I assume there is a link between individual perception and historical context given that they mutually complement each other. I argue that my grandmother’s self-perception was filtered through a colonial way of seeing. Furthermore, her internalized colorism has been inherited from the times when Mexico was a Spanish colony. For the latter, I provide a brief historical framework that explains the Mestizaje Ideology and how it sets the tone to talk about race in Mexico, as well as Joaquín Barriendo’s definition of coloniality of seeing. Later on, I present an analysis on the (self-)perception of my grandmother, my mother and her sisters, and me parting from exchanges and memories that I consider here as signs and symbols that the ‘oracle’ tried to communicate to me.