Hair Race-ing
2020; Indiana University Press; Volume: 19; Issue: S1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/15366936-8565825
ISSN1547-8424
Autores Tópico(s)Gender Roles and Identity Studies
ResumoUse to beYa could learn a whole lot of stuffsitting in thembeauty shop chairsUse to beYa could meeta whole lot of other womensittin' therealong with hair fryingspit flyingand babies cryingUse to beyou could learn a whole lot abouthow to catch upwith yourselfand some other folksin your household.Lots more got taken care ofthan hair . . . .—Willi Coleman, “Among the ThingsThat Use to Be”At the most banal level, a beauty shop is where women go for beauty. But as Willi Coleman evocatively notes, at beauty shops “lots more [gets] taken care of than hair.” The degrees, types, and technologies of artifice and alteration required by beauty are mediated by racial, sexual, class, political, and geographic cultures and locations. Thus, beauty shops can be considered as sites of both cultural and identity production. Some have argued that if the female body generally has been subjected to “externalization of the gendered self” (Peiss 1994, 384), the explicitly racialized female body has been subjected to “exile from the self” (Shohat and Stam 1994, 322–33). With the rise of global colonialism, slavery, neocolonialism, and imperialism, African-origin bodies have been stigmatized as unsightly and ugly, yet, simultaneously and paradoxically as hypersexual (Hernton 1988). White female bodies are racialized as well, but this racialization is enacted via the assumption of de-racination, racial neutrality, and naturalized white invisibility (Frankenberg 1993). This White supremacist racial history interacts with masculinist imperatives of gender and sexual homogenization and normalization in particular ways (Young 1995). Moreover, bodily beautification requires material resources and aesthetic practices that are class bound. The beauty shop, then, can be analyzed as a site where hegemonic gender, class, sexuality, and race tropes simultaneously are produced and problematized.In particular, hair—the subject and object of beauty shop work—epitomizes the mutual referentiality of race/sex/gender/class categories and identities. One can, as I found during a six-month participant observation at a Dominican beauty shop in New York City, “learn a whole lot of stuff sittin’ in them beauty shop chairs.” Here, the concern is to present both the representational and the production practices of hair culture as a window into the contextualized complexity of Dominican identity. The hair culture institutions, practices, and ideals of Dominican women in New York City during the late 1990s are presented as an instructive selection from a larger study (Candelario 2000).The importance of hair as a defining race marker highlights the centrality of beauty practices. Hair, after all, is an alterable sign. Hair that is racially compromising can be mitigated with care and styling. Skin color and facial features, conversely, are less pliant or not as easily altered. That Dominicans have equated whiteness both with lo indio, an ethno-racial identity based on identification with the decimated Taino natives of the island that now houses the Dominican Republic and “lo Hispano” or Hispanicity reflects the multiple semiotic systems of race they have historically negotiated. La/o india/o is invoked to erase the African past and Afrodiasporic present of Dominicans (Howard 1997). Hispanicity affirms the ethno-racial distance between Dominicans and Haitians, an organizing principle in Dominican national imaginaries since the rise of the state.Operating in the context of both Latin American and United States’ notions of race, transnational Dominicans engage in a sort of racial “code switching” in which both Latin American and United States race systems are engaged, subverted, and sustained in various historical, biographical, and spatial contexts and moments. For example, for a variety of reasons I explore at length elsewhere (Candelario 2000), Dominicans in Washington, D.C., identify as Black nearly twice as often as Dominicans in New York (see also Dore-Cabral and Itzigsohn 1997; Levitt and Gomez 1997; Duany 1994). Confronted in New York City with the U.S. model of pure whiteness that valorizes lank, light hair, white skin, light eyes, thin and narrow-hipped bodies, the Dominican staff and clients at Salon Lamadas continue to prefer a whiteness that indicates mixture. The identity category labeled “Hispanic” is deployed as the signifier of somatic, linguistic, and cultural alterity in relation to both Anglo whiteness and African American blackness. That Hispanic looks are preferred over both the Anglo and African American somatic norm images (Hoetink 1985) of the host society attests to resistance to acculturation and insistence on an alternative, or “other” space.Dominicans, who might have been considered Black by European and U.S. observers were it not for their own colonial antipathy toward Haiti and later, toward Haitians, historically have been endowed with a sort of literary and political honorary whiteness in the service of both the domestic elite and the military and political-economic interests of the United States. It is an ethno-racial identity formulation predicated on the physical disappearance of Taino natives, coupled with their literary (Sommer 1983), iconographic, and bodily re-inscription, and a concomitant textual and ideological erasure of blackness (Torres-Saillant 1999). Rather than use the language of Negritude—negro, mulatto, and so forth—to describe themselves, Dominicans use language which limits their racial ancestry to Europeans and Taino “Indians”—indio, indio oscuro, indio claro, trigueño, moreno/a. The result is an ethno-racial Hispanicized Indian, or an Indo-Hispanic identity.A series of regionally anomalous events in the political economic history of Santo Domingo accounts for this distinctive formulation of whiteness. Chief among those anomalies are the relatively short duration and limited importance of plantation slavery, the massive depopulations caused by White emigration, the impoverishment of the remaining White and Creole colonials during the seventeenth-century Devastation, and the concomitantly heavy reliance upon Blacks and Mulattos in the armed forces and religious infrastructure (Moya Pons 1995, Torres-Saillant 1996). At the same time, Spanish colonial norms of whiteness, what Hoetink (1967) has called the “Iberian variant” of a White “somatic norm image,” were darker than the contemporary Anglo-European version.French travel writers of the nineteenth century, when visiting the Spanish part of the island then called Saint Domingue, noted that people who seemed obviously of mixed African and Spanish descent considered themselves, not mulattos or colored, but los blancos de la tierra, literally, “the whites of the land.” According to Moya Pons, “This meant that despite their color, [the Whites of the land] were different from the slaves whom they saw as the only blacks of the island” (1996, 16). In other words, in Dominican history, whiteness—whatever its bodily parameters—is an explicitly achieved (and achievable) status with connotations of social, political, and economic privilege. It is, moreover, understood to be a matter of context.The representation of Dominican women in the beauty shop occupations reflects both the importance of beauty culture to Dominican women, and the shifting opportunities available in the New York economy. When Dominican women first began to arrive in New York in the 1960s and 1970s, they generally frequented shops owned by other Latina/os, especially Cubans and Puerto Ricans, who were already established in Upper Manhattan (Masud-Piloto 1996, Rodriguez 1991, Sánchez-Korrol 1983). Although Dominicans had been migrating to New York City since the early nineteenth century, the Dominican community began to establish itself more permanently after the 1965 revolution and the 1965 U.S. Immigration Act (Martin 1966). The post–1980 flow of Dominican women into beauty shop occupations—whether as owners, hairdressers, manicurists, shampoo girls, estheticians, or masseurs—reflects simultaneously changes in the New York economy from manufacturing to service industries, changes in the demographics of the Washington Heights area, and changes in Dominican beauty culture in the Dominican Republic as well (New York City Department of City Planning 1995). While Dominican women continue to be overrepresented in the nondurable goods manufacturing sector (Hernández 1989; Hernández et al. 1997), particularly in the apparel industry (Pessar 1987a, 1987b; Waldinger 1986), the volatility of that sector, together with the regimentation, occupational hazards, low pay, and low status of manufacturing and much service-sector employment, make beauty shop ownership and employment appealing by comparison.In addition, in the Dominican Republic beauty culture has come to be seen as a respectable and professional field. Although commercial beauty shops have existed in the Dominican Republic since at least the 1930s, they generally serviced the elite. The majority of Dominican beauty culturalists operated out of their homes until the 1980s. Typically these shops were located in a converted front room, patio, or garage space and consisted of an owner-operator and a young neighborhood assistant. Shop owner-operators and assistants alike were considered nearly at par with domestic workers, and thus were of low socio-economic status. Additionally, beauty culturalists were reputed to be women of loose sexual morals. In the early 1980s, however, beauty culturalists began to professionalize, via the establishment of a professional organization, Asociación de Estilistas Dominicanas (Dominican Hair Stylists Association), the proliferation of beauty schools and certification programs, and a shift from the use of domestic and home-manufactured products to an increasing reliance upon hair-care products and technologies imported from the United States. Beauty shop work, in other words, has come to be viewed as a skilled profession one trains for and pursues.Work in the New York Dominican beauty shop, while not entirely autonomous or especially well-paying, makes possible greater autonomy and flexibility and higher earnings and community status. Job quality and job satisfaction are often higher than in manufacturing or other service-sector employment. In addition, the Dominican beauty shop represents a female-dominated entrepreneurial sector, somewhat parallel to the male-dominated Dominican bodega (grocery store). In his study of Dominican entrepreneurs in New York City, Guarnizo (1993) found that entrepreneurial Dominican women frequently chose beauty shops as their niche. He reported, “One out of every five respondents is a woman. Unlike male [business] owners, however, women are clustered in a single sector: 60 percent of women own service firms (especially beauty salons and other personal service establishments) while only 25 and 15 percent of them own commercial or manufacturing firms, respectively” (121).The appeal of this sector for Dominican women in New York City is manifold. In economic terms, beauty shop start-up costs are substantially lower than commercial or manufacturing firms, and therefore are more accessible to low-earning, poorly capitalized, or less-educated women. Further, barriers to entry are fewer, both in terms of fixed capital and human capital (Schroder 1978; Willet 1996). In cultural terms, beauty shop work is considered women’s purview, while commercial or manufacturing ventures are generally considered male domains. Bodegüeras (female grocery shop owners), for example, while not uncommon, often have male kin representandolas (representing them) at the store counter. Similarly, while Dominican men do own beauty shops, they are less likely to be owner-operators, preferring instead to hire women managers.Currently there is a thriving Dominican beauty culture industry in New York City, supported primarily by Dominican, and increasingly by African American women (Williams 2000). In Washington Heights/Inwood alone, that is, in the vicinity in northwestern Manhattan from 155th street to the 190s, from the Harlem River on the east to the Hudson River on the west, where 40 percent of the Dominican population in New York resides, there are 146 salons (1992 Economic Census, Service Industries, Firms Subject to Federal Income Tax, Zip Code Statistics, Manhattan Yellow Pages, April 1999–April 2000). On average, these salons are two-tenths of a mile (or one-and-one-half blocks) apart from one another. There is, in other words, a salon on nearly every single block in Washington Heights.1By comparison, there are only 103 (or 40 percent fewer) beauty shops in the far wealthier Upper East Side, which is the district from East 61st to East 94th Streets, from Fifth Avenue to the East River. These salons are eight-tenths of a mile apart on average. In Harlem, where average per capita income is nearly identical to that in Washington Heights/Inwood, there are 112 shops. Shops in this district, which ranges from 114th to 138th Streets, and from Fifth Avenue to the Hudson River, are four-tenths of a mile apart on average. Washington Heights/Inwood is only slightly more densely populated than Harlem, but has 30 percent more shops. These numbers are all the more impressive given the exceedingly high poverty rate (36 percent) and low per-capita income level ($6,336) among Dominicans in New York City. It is quite clear that hair and beauty shops are important to Dominicans.Today, the Dominican salon in New York City is a neighborhood institution that indicates community actualization. If, as the old sociological maxim holds, for most immigrant communities the establishment of ethnically specific funeral homes indicates community salience (e.g., Park et al. 1925; Gans 1962), for Dominicans, the beauty shop holds a similar role in the community. The Dominican beauty shop, with the physical space it plots out and the social relationships it contains, is a site that not only reflects transnational community development and cohesion, but helps sustain it.Salon Lamadas, where I spent six months as a participant-observer, is in many ways a typical Dominican salon.2 It is located in the heart of Washington Heights, on St. Nicholas Avenue several blocks south of the 181st Street shopping district. Surrounding the salon are a telephone station, a pharmacy, a Pronto Envio (remittances center), and a family restaurant. This is a typically busy commercial and residential street, trafficked primarily by Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and, increasingly, Mexicans.Founded in 1992 by an owner operator, Salon Lamadas is an average-sized shop with four stylists, including the owner, and a shampooer, a manicurist, and a facialist/ masseuse. Music is always playing at the salon, sometimes quite loudly. Generally it is merengue and salsa, although one or two ballads surface. Often in the afternoon the television is turned on, as well, and is usually tuned to Cristina, a popular Miami-based, Spanish-language talk show. In addition to the music and the television, the blow dryers are constantly going. Despite all this noise, the women hear each other quite well, and carry on conversations across the room. The atmosphere is one of conviviality and easy familiarity.The salon is open seven days a week. Although many salons in the United States close on Mondays, Dominican salons do not. This is true for several reasons. First, Dominican women use salons for regular weekly hair care, not for intermittent haircuts and hair treatments. Therefore, there is steady demand throughout the week, although Fridays and Saturdays are still the busiest days. Second, the staff needs to work six days a week in order to earn enough money to survive in New York and to remit dollars to their families in the Dominican Republic (Hernández and Torres-Saillant 1998, Grasmuck and Pessar 1991). Third, because Dominican women are heavily represented in blue- and pink-collar work (Hernández 1989; Hernández, Rivera-Bátiz, and Agodini 1995), the salon must accommodate to their varied and long working hours.Salon Lamadas, like most neighborhood salons, has a core of clients who frequent the shop regularly, usually once a week. Thirty of those “regulars” were approached for interviews. Fifteen agreed. Although this is not a statistically representative sample, neither in size nor in selection, they are a diverse group in terms of current age, age at migration, generation of migration, residency status, labor-force participation rates, professional status, educational attainment levels, Spanish- and English-language proficiency, marital status, household composition, and physical appearance.The interviews consisted of two or three separate three-hour interviews. The first was a life-history interview, in which the respondent’s migration, labor markets and educational experience, family life, and personal history were explored. The second interview inquired into the respondent’s experience of Dominican beauty culture, both at Salon Lamadas and more generally. In addition, a third interview consisting of a photo elicitation component was conducted, following Furman (1997) and Kottak (in Harris 1964: 57). Using color photocopies of images copied from hairstyle books utilized at Salon Lamadas, respondents were asked to select and describe the women they found “most attractive” and “least attractive.”The explicit work of the salon, the transformation of a Dominican woman’s hair into a culturally acceptable sign of beauty, hinges the customer’s sense of self and beauty on certain racialized norms and models. The Dominican salon acts as a socializing agent. Hair care and salon use are rites of passage into Dominican women’s community. At the salon, girls and women learn to transform their bodies—through hair care, waxing, manicuring, pedicuring, facials, and so forth—into socially valued, culturally specific, and race-determining displays of femininity.Many of my respondents recalled visiting beauty shops as children with their mothers. Chastity, for example, said, “I used to always go with my mother to this shop in Flushing, where I grew up. She would go all the time and I’d go with her. I must have been real little because I remember being like ‘Wow’ and ‘Ooo’ about everything. They all looked glamorous to me. (Laughs) She still goes there, and it was the first shop I used myself. I still go there sometimes just to catch up on the neighborhood gossip.”3 As Chastity explains, for young girls with their mothers, the shop seems “glamorous” and adult, and therefore awe-inspiring.These shops act as community centers; the exchange of information and women’s insights is as much a part of their function as the production of beauty. Further, as in Chastity’s case, it was often the mother’s shop that young women first visited. Generally speaking, however, they themselves did not become beauty shop clients until they were about fifteen years old. That fifteen is the age when Latin American girls of means are introduced into society, and when Latin American girls generally are socially considered “women,” is not coincidental (King 1998). Kathy recalled her first salon visit: “Aha, the first time I went to a shop I was already like fifteen years old. And it was to have my hair trimmed a little. But I already wanted to get out of the ponytails and buns already. And so I went to a neighbor who had a shop in her house and I had my hair washed, trimmed, and set. Oh, I looked so pretty.” The repeated refrain of how “pretty” they looked after their first beauty shop visit also marks the transition from “innocent” childhood to “sexual” young womanhood. All of the respondents raised in the Dominican Republic, and several who were raised here, recalled that the transition from childhood to young womanhood was marked by the loosening of their hair from ponytails and moños (buns).Others recalled first visiting a beauty shop in preparation for their migration to the United States, a moment which also might mark the transition from girlhood to adolescence. Nurka, for example, recalled that before migrating, when she was fourteen, her mother took her sisters and her to a beauty shop in town: Look, it was to come here. Exactly. Yes. (Chuckles) I had never gone to a salon. I always, I had two pony tails like this, and that was it. But I went. When we were coming here, mommy went to pick us up. And she took the three of us to the salon. I think my brother also had a haircut. And it was, we were in the country, and mommy took us to the east, to Bayaguana, the place was called. She took us there to have us all have our hair cut. They trimmed our hair, they washed our hair and it was, “Oh!” Everyone, “Oh! What pretty hair! Oh, how pretty!” (Laughs) And that was true, yes of course. I remember it as if it were today, yes.For Nurka, the transition from childhood to adulthood was marked as much by the change from pigtails to hair done at the shop, as by the move to New York. Her transformation into young womanhood is socially recognized by people who acclaim her “pretty hair,” now loose and womanish.Like Nurka, Chastity remembers her grandmother styling her hair into pigtails and later moños for neatness and ease of care. So long as mother and grandmothers were responsible for their children’s hair, these were the preferred styles. As Nana explained, Look, I hated those buns. It was three buns, one here, one here, and one here. My grandmother used to make them with a piece of string. And the other children used to make fun of them saying like “Tin mari de dos pingó, cucara macara titire fué” [a nonsensical children’s rhyme]. I used to tear them [the buns] apart when I was walking to school. So then, when I became a little bigger, my grandmother told me that I was already old enough to take care of my hair myself. And that was such a joy for me! Oh! I started wearing curlers and styling my hair well.The transition of hair care from one’s caretaker’s hands into one’s own, thus, paralleled the increasing responsibility for one’s own body and self.. . . Cause in our mutual obvious dislikefor nappinesswe came togetherunder the hot combto shareand shareand share—“Among the Things That Use to Be”A central aspect of Dominican hair culture has been the twin notions of pelo malo (bad hair) and pelo bueno (good hair). Bad hair is hair that is perceived to be tightly curled, coarse, and kinky. Good hair is hair that is soft and silky, straight, wavy, or loosely curled. There are clearly racial connotations to each category: the notion of bad hair implies an outright denigration of African-origin hair textures, while good hair exalts European, Asian, and indigenous-origin hair textures. Moreover, those with good hair are, by definition, not black, skin color notwithstanding. Thus, hair becomes an emblem of the everyday engagement of blanqueamiento, or whitening.The Dominican salon, in being the preeminent site of Dominican hair culture practices and technologies, provides insight into the relative saliency of blanqueamiento, which is fundamentally about physical relations, sexual and otherwise, between people. This is not to say that blanqueamiento does not operate in nonmaterial culture realms as well, as Piedra’s (1991) work on literary whiteness has aptly illustrated it does. However, there is an explicit physicality to blanqueamiento, particularly as it implicates racialized gender. It is there that beauty culture practices comes into play. Blanqueamiento is a long-term process of encoding whiteness bodily. Hair culture is a much more immediate, if more ephemeral, solution.In the United States, non-African American women rarely have the opportunity to interact with African American women around beauty regimes. Consequently, they do not experience first-hand the variety of hair textures in the African diaspora through touching, washing, or styling “Black hair,” through seeing media depictions of Black hair care, or through seeing African American women themselves caring for their hair. African American women, on the other hand, constantly are exposed to White women’s hair care and hair textures through a variety of hegemonic media: dolls, television, cinematic and print media representations, and through observing first hand White women’s hair ministrations throughout the day. Currently, women with non-African-diaspora hair textures spend a great deal of time throughout the day grooming their hair—brushing it, tying it up, loosening it, washing it, drying it, or otherwise fussing with it. By contrast, African-diaspora hair once styled retains its set and is typically washed every third or fourth day at home or in the salon. Thus, many non-African Americans simply do not know what “Black hair” feels like, how it is maintained, what products are used on it, and what beauty practices are employed.The first time that many White women are exposed to Black women’s hair in close quarters is when they are put into a communal living situation, such as a school dormitory or armed services barracks. A commonly cited experience of Black women is that of the White housemate who asks to touch her hair, thus exposing the White woman’s segregated upbringing, the novelty (specifically, the racialized exoticism) of African-diaspora hair textures, and, ultimately, her own White aesthetic privilege. Black women often recount the strong impact and significance of these encounters, while White women seem surprised at the hostility with which their seemingly innocent desire to touch is met (Cary 1991; Frankenberg 1993).Beauty shops in the United States originated as, and continue to be, socially segregated spaces, in practice if not by law (Willet 1996). Schroder, for example, relates the story of the disruptive effect of a new hire’s “ethnic clientele” in the implicitly (if not explicitly) White racialized “atmosphere existing in the salon” (1978, 193). African Americans and Anglo Americans alike hesitate to frequent each other’s shops, although from the mid-1980s a series of individual and legal challenges to those social norms have occurred (C. Coleman 1995, Goodnough 1995, Willet 1996).Dominican women, conversely, do not experience this brand of racial segregation. Simply stated, Dominican families are comprised of people with a variety of hair textures, facial features, and skin tones. Girls and young women are allowed “hands-on” exposure to a range of hair textures throughout their lives. Fannie, for example, utilized one hair care regime at home suited to her mother’s and her own fine, lank hair. As she came of age, however, and began to socialize with her cousins, whose hair care regimes included roller sets, relaxers and doobies (hair wraps), she became versed in those methods as well. Responding to the question of how she came to work in a beauty shop, she notes that her first experiences with Dominican beauty culture occurred in the context of her family, which is “very large” and very diverse. As she recalls: We would all go to the beach together, in Barahona, there are a lot of beaches. And when we would come back from the beach, I would return with my hair dry and straight, you know? And then, they would come with their hair, you know, curly. You know, bad hair that is relaxed? That when it comes into contact with sea waters it becomes, you know, Dominican hair, Black women’s hair? And they would say to me, “Oh! You’re all set to go dancing, but not me. Come on then, and get to work fixing my hair too.” And so I, in order to hurry up and for us to all get ready at the same time, I wanted to help. And that’s how I started practicing. “Let me set your hair.” “Here, fix my hair.” You know? Between ourselves, girls to the end, getting together.Fannie’s story highlights several themes that will be explored in this section. It was in participating in her cousin’s hair care regimes that she learned and began to practice setting hair. Further, her cousins marshaled her assistance in caring for their hair, evidently undaunted by her personal unfamiliarity with their hair texture. In helping to care for each other’s hair, a spirit of feminine intimacy across racial boundaries marked by hair care practices—“between ourselves, girls to the end”—was developed and sustained. Finally, although she herself is Dominican and has fine, lank hair, light eyes, and freckled white skin, Fannie equates “Dominican hair” with “Black women’s hair” and “bad hair that is relaxed.” It is her cousins’ beauty culture practices, in other words, that “typify” Dominican women’s hair culture.Similarly, Dominican mothers and daughters often have dissimilar hair textures, yet mothers have to care for and style their daughter’s hair. Doris, for example, never used curlers herself, nor did her sisters, but she had to set her daughters’ hair, which is thick and curly. “I myself haven’t used them yet,” she said. “It was out of necessity, out of necessity that I learned. I’d put them and they’d come out, more or less, with lots of pins and things like that. . . . I saw at the salon how they did it and I, more or less, in my mind I had an idea of how they were done, and I did them and they didn’t come out too badly. Because you know, it’s very difficult to get them to come out as nice as they do.” This passage indicates that the salons Doris frequented catered to clients with hair like hers, as well as to clients who used roller sets. In other words, unlike U.S. shops, the typical Dominican beauty shop caters to women of various hair textures. Further, the work done in the shops, as Doris points out, is “very difficult” and requires a degree of skill. Finally, as with Fannie and her cousins at home, the beauty shop helped to socialize Doris, and later her children, into Dominican beauty culture.For Dominicans, hair is the principal bodily signifier of race, followed by facial features, skin color, and,
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