From Latinopia June 17, 2012:
This weekend I had the occasion to do a lot of shopping and came back to a tired realization about who I am as a Latina in this country. According to most of the clothes I tried on, my body is not “right.” Which is to say, in different parts of the garments, it’s very apparent to me that my body is not fitting into these clothes they way they are “supposed” to.
First of all, my rear end is much too big. If I am to take the garments I find in a variety of clothing across retailers as any indication, my butt is simply abnormal. Finding skirts and dresses that allow me to step outside of the dressing room without scandalizing the world (a big rear pulls up the hems a few inches in the back) becomes a colossal undertaking…
When clothes tell me I don’t fit, is that like our popular culture telling me that I don’t fit? In an existential way? That’s an interesting question. I’m not melodramatic enough to believe that is actually the case. Rather, I think that our culture’s systematic exclusion of Latinos and other minorities (say, even, women) has unintended consequences. Say, for the sake of another example, when telephones try to auto-correct your texts in Spanish — would that happen if there was a Latino engineer involved when texting technology was created?
