Descubriendo a las Mujeristas

Being a girl in Honduras, I learned a lot of things while growing up My parents enrolled me in a catholic school it was all girls and it was part of the Opus Dei. The Opus Dei is a branch of Catholicism with strict rules. Since it was an all-girls school they taught us to be ladies. They'd teach us how to sit, talk, and dress but also how to be working women. We had a class called Home Economics where they taught us how to combine clothing items, how to sew, and some recipes. My school was big on moral values, something that I am now very grateful for about my education. All in all, many of the things they taught us was so that we'd grow up to be people with good manners, kind, and succesful. What my school was also big on was the fact that we were girls, ladies, women. Girls Ladies Women. First and foremost, we were women. Before being an individual we were part of a community: the community of the family in and out of the Church. In these communities we had duties to fulfill as God's daughters, as wives and mothers, and as women. Our destiny was to honor God by honoring our husbands, our work, and our sacrifices. By being born a woman we were immediately handed how we were supposed to act and what we were expected to do. And what happens if you don't act the way a "real woman" does? Does it mean you are not a woman? And if you are not a woman then are you a man? And if you are not a woman and you are not a man then what are you? The options are very limited and the expression of the individual is not well received. Women for years have noticed how limited their lives are living within these norms and they realize that they are capable of so much more but that they are expected to give up their dreams and personal goals to meet the expectations of being housewives and mothers. When we moved to the United States I found a community of women that had progressive ideals. When my friend Roxana invited me to an event called Brown Girl Hour I discovered the term and movement of the Mujeristas. A mujerista is a woman who fights against her oppression. They are women who develop strong moral subjects, the importance and value of who they are, what they think and what they do. For me, the Mujerista theology is the liberation of the individual within the latino community so that we are no longer born and are told what we have to do but instead we are appreciated as people and are guided to become individuals who are well-educated with moral virtues and that in these schools that are segregated we are not taught "how a lady acts" and "how a gentleman acts" but instead we are taught how a well-educated person acts and how we should treat others.