September 2014
Photo © Jorge Rivas.
Daisy Hernández is the coeditor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism and former executive editor of ColorLines magazine. She speaks at colleges and conferences about feminism, race, and media justice, and her writing has appeared in the New York Times, NPR’s All Things Considered, and Ms. Magazine.
She is the Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
In her lyrical coming-of-age memoir, Daisy Hernández, the daughter of a Colombian mother and Cuban father, chronicles what the women in her community taught her about race, sex, money, and love. On the outskirts of New York City, Daisy starts out in English-as-a-second-language classes and ends up writing for the New York Times. In between, she struggles to understand her family’s practice of Santería, comes out as bisexual and negotiates the expectations that she become white—like the Italians. A touching and heartfelt exploration of family and identity, A Cup of Water Under My Bed is about sexuality, immigration, race, and class, but it is ultimately a daughter’s story of finding herself and creating a new, queer life.
"Warm and thoughtful, Hernández writes with clear-eyed compassion about living, and redefining success, at the intersection of social, ethnic and racial difference. Personal storytelling at its most authentic and heartfelt."
—Kirkus Reviews
"Journalist, feminist, and first-time memoirist Hernández presents a coming-of-age story that dives into the complexities of language, sexuality, and class…She maintains a lively pace by flashing back-and-forth between childhood and adulthood, personal and professional lives, with an emphasis on her ascent from New York Times intern to regular columnist at Ms. An accessible, honest look at the often heart-wrenching effects of intergenerational tension on family ties."
—Booklist
A Cup of Water under My Bed by
A coming-of-age memoir by a Colombian-Cuban woman about shaping lessons from home into a new, queer life In this lyrical, coming-of-age memoir, Daisy Hernández chronicles what the women in her Cuban-Colombian family taught her about love, money, and race. Her mother warns her about envidia and men who seduce you with pastries, while one tía bemoans that her niece is turning out to be "una india" instead of an American. Another auntie instructs that when two people are close, they are bound to become like uña y mugre, fingernails and dirt, and that no, Daisy's father is not godless. He's simply praying to a candy dish that can be traced back to Africa. These lessons--rooted in women's experiences of migration, colonization, y cariño--define in evocative detail what it means to grow up female in an immigrant home. In one story, Daisy sets out to defy the dictates of race and class that preoccupy her mother and tías, but dating women and transmen, and coming to identify as bisexual, leads her to unexpected questions. In another piece, NAFTA shuts local factories in her hometown on the outskirts of New York City, and she begins translating unemployment forms for her parents, moving between English and Spanish, as well as private and collective fears. In prose that is both memoir and commentary, Daisy reflects on reporting for the New York Times as the paper is rocked by the biggest plagiarism scandal in its history and plunged into debates about the role of race in the newsroom. A heartfelt exploration of family, identity, and language, A Cup of Water Under My Bed is ultimately a daughter's story of finding herself and her community, and of creating a new, queer life.
Colonize This! by
It has been decades since women of color first turned feminism upside down, exposing the '70s feminist movement as exclusive, white, and unaware of the concerns and issues of women of color from around the globe. Now a new generation of brilliant, outspoken women of color is speaking to the concerns of a new feminism, and to their place in it. Daisy Hernandez of Ms. magazine and poet Bushra Rehman have collected a diverse, lively group of emerging writers who speak to their experience--to the strength and rigidity of community and religion, to borders and divisions, both internal and external--and address issues that take feminism into the twenty-first century. One writer describes herself as a "mixed brown girl, Sri-Lankan and New England mill-town white trash,” and clearly delineates the organizing differences between whites and women of color: "We do not kick ass the way the white girls do, in meetings of NOW or riot grrl. For us, it’s all about family.” A Korean-American woman struggles to create her own identity in a traditional community: "Yam-ja-neh means nice, sweet, compliant. I’ve heard it used many times by my parents’ friends who don’t know shit about me.” An Arab-American feminist deconstructs the "quaint vision” of Middle-Eastern women with which most Americans feel comfortable. This impressive array of first-person accounts adds a much-needed fresh dimension to the ongoing dialogue between race and gender, and gives voice to the women who are creating and shaping the feminism of the future.
