Session 3 | Assignment 1 |  Understanding how trauma is inherited and resisted across generations

I watched this emotionally intense film in 2 sittings~ the anguish that remains after watching it to the end is related to a familiar 'rage fatigue' that I often experience in my body. The horrible work conditions, the abuse of child workers, the sexual violation of women by bosses ("same as it ever was"), the robbing of earned wages, etc is a reality for so many people who come to this country looking to make a living, raise their children, put food on the table. A few years ago, I read a book by several historians called "Myth America". The book addresses the misinformation that has led to the legendary claims of an America that is a fiction ("This land is your land, this land is my land"), and these historians set to do some myth-busting, targeting the lies and illusions of America as a freedom-loving, welcoming land of opportunity.

And yet, for many people in the film, the faith that they may someday have more than a crumb of the "American Dream" leads them to gamble what little they have for what more they want. I understand that gamble, having watched my mother and grandparents spend their lives recovering from a losing hand, not seeing that the game was stacked against them from the start. I have had no such illusions.

The impact of this film on my experience of generational trauma has been most profoundly clarifying~ I have an understanding of my mother's dark silences and how some of her "strange" behaviors were actually efforts to protect her children. I'll give an example of one of them. Of her 7 children, I was the only fair-haired girl with "good hair"~ straight hair, All the others had "bad hair"~ dark and wavy. Looking Puerto Rican was something my mother was very cautious about, and though she never spoke about the mistreatments and humiliations she experienced being poor, raised by a teenage mother, relatively unprotected, were made clear by her reaction to "bad hair". My siblings grew up fearing her haircuts. She was viscerally angry when she pulled and chopped their wild, curly, untamed hair, yelling at them to "sit still" and "stop crying". I would often be the one to "fix" those horrible haircuts, and soothe the tears of my swollen-eyed little sisters and brothers. Her haircuts were more of an exorcism than a grooming. I see that her fury was about destroying any clue that her children were not white, because that would subject them to unspeakable brutalities and injustices that she understood, and we did not. We did not understand.

I called one of my sisters this week to talk to her about those haircuts. What a crazy photo album we could have put together with those 'before' and 'after" pictures! We laughed at the thought, and went on to talk about how none of us saved pictures from those years. We too learned to erase who we were, what we saw, what was done to us. Just like our fierce and protective mother.