prisca dorcas mojica rodriguez
Raquel Reichard
Eight years ago, Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez founded the digital platform Latina Rebels with the intention to democratize emancipatory knowledge that has long been locked up in college classrooms. Through essays, memes, and online discussions, the writer and activist made it her purpose to share the tools that freed her from the chains of internalized sexism, racism, and classism with Black and brown women and girls. "This information should be available to everyone. It should be available quickly, and it should be digestible," the Nicaragua-born, Nashville-based author tells POPSUGAR Latina. In her debut book, For Brown Girls With Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts (Seal Press), Rodríguez continues to redistribute knowledge by penning an accessible guide for Black, Indigenous and Women of Color (BIWOC) to survive and thrive in a culture and society that intends on keeping them caged and controlled.
In this autoethnography, Rodríguez shares her own intimate, and at times heart-wrenching, experiences with toxic masculinity, respectability politics, colorism, decoloniality, and more to provide primers on such concepts. While the ivory tower attempts to reserve these discussions for academic elites who read and teach about 'isms they don't encounter, she writes about them as they are for working-class communities of color: lived experiences. Through her intimate storytelling and warm embrace of the Black and brown girls she writes for, Rodríguez also gently holds the reader as she invites them on the painful path toward freedom. Read the rest in the article!