To be a “woke brown girl” in America is no easy task – just ask Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodriguez, founder of the popular online platform “Latina Rebels.” Widely known as Prisca Dorcas, she is an acclaimed writer and activist from Nicaragua who focuses on the plights experienced by people of color in America. Dorcas visited Eastern Connecticut State University on Oct. 4 for a “University Hour” presentation titled “Dear Woke Brown Girl.”
Dorcas is uncompromising in her mission to protect and uphold the stories of her Latino community. With a lighthearted demeanor, she can be sharp with her language; an intentional behavior that stands in contrast to her conservative Pentecostal upbringing.
She shared that it wasn’t until graduate school when she was regularly around white people. Studying at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN, she soon realized that she was not being treated the same as her peers. Dorcas recalled attending a party with a group of friends and one of them saying that they would never fight her, assuming she’d beat them up. “You know nothing about where I come from, yet you have very real assumptions about what this brown body does,” she explained to the Eastern students.
The first piece Dorcas shared, “Politics of Pigmentation,” highlighted this sort of stigmatization, centering on the idea that her “mami” always warned her about getting too much sunlight. “She is not telling me to stay out of the sun for a deep concern for my health,” she read. “My mami does not want me to be too brown.” It took years, Dorcas revealed, to love the color of her skin.
The writer consequently stressed how important it is to bring her mother, a brown woman who has adapted to the very oppressions that Dorcas fights, into the spaces that she has been to. She wants to do what her mother could not, but without alienating herself. She uses her and her grandmother as guides to non-linear logic, discussing societal issues in a story-like manner with no clear beginning or ending. “I am a mami’s revolution.”
Dorcas concluded by reading “Dear Woke Brown Girl.” She described the piece as something she needed to hear during those challenging times in graduate school. “Woke brown girl, do not let them take away your passion,” she spoke, “And boy will they try, without any compassion, to keep you down. But remember that without passion you will extinguish, and if for some reason you do, and you might, there will be other woke brown girls to pick you and light you up again.”
