Christine Zuni Cruz*

A Reflection** on Margaret Montoya, Máscaras, Trenzas, y Greñas: Un/Masking the Self While Un/Braiding Latina Stories and Legal Discourse, 17 Harv. Women’s L. J. 185 (1994), 15 Chicano-Latino L. Rev. 1 (1994)

Please click here to access a PDF version of this article.

I. Introduction

As I pull out the original beige color Chicano-Latino Law Review reprint that Margaret gave me when we exchanged scholarship during one of our joint projects, I notice its faded coloring and it sends my mind back over the years. Our now braided experiences, united by the institution where we have spent the greater part of our careers, were first brought together by the meeting of our now adult children—Margaret’s daughters, Diana and Alejandra, and my son, Immanuel—when they were in middle and elementary school. They met at a retreat of the faculty in northern New Mexico, even before Margaret and I were well acquainted as colleagues. A fast and rewarding friendship, an intellectual exchange, an inter-familial relationship, and a collegial synergistic connection still continue to this day.

Professor Margaret Montoya’s Máscaras, Trenzas y Greñas: Un/Masking The Self While Unbraiding Latina Stories and Legal Discourse[1] was published during the first year of my entry into the legal academy as a visiting professor. This reflection on her influential article addresses three of the major themes that resonate most strongly for me. The first is the assimilative pull of the legal academic institution, the second is the power of narrative, and the third is transculturation.

The relationship of masking to assimilation and acculturation makes it a sophisticated, dynamic, and fluid device. Masking gives rise to a complex analysis, especially for historically oppressed and culturally and linguistically subjugated peoples. Masking, as descriptive of the experience of the “Other” in academic institutions, diversified but not sensitive to diversity—in fact, hostile to the power of multiplicity and bound to singular, dominant frames of intellectual and creative markers—is illustrative of the suppressive and oppressive nature of assimilation. Some can take masks off and return to self; others cannot, or do not want or “need” to take them off, and are forever changed, melded into the mask.

Masking is a metaphor for the assimilative process and demand of education. The masks that assimilative pressures require those outside the dominant frame to wear, and the experience of “assimilative masking” that affects us through feeling, or being, forced to don masks, or even to desire and embrace them, and to mistrust or mask the truth of self or our difference, can create real challenges to fostering intellectual diversity, autonomy, self-determination and maintenance of our identity. It is primarily ideological masking[2] which I address, but almost all masking in academic institutions results in the loss of the expression of intellectual diversity, mental sovereignty,[3] and diverse knowledge frames.

The second major theme of Máscaras is the power of narrative. Narrative is linked to truth and related (for me) to finding voice. Montoya’s article, which utilized and captured the impact of narrative on legal discourse, imparted an important message early in my scholarly development. Narrative breaks from the dominant frame of legal scholarship and embodies a culturally and intellectually diverse manner of expression and thought. Narrative itself is also the dominant and legitimate form of expression employed to carry on the Indigenous legal tradition.

Lastly, these two themes are joined by a third. I have been researching and writing on Indigenous identity and considering its political, legal, and uneasy borders and boundaries with other identities, including inter-racial and inter-tribal identities. One word and a footnote in Máscaras raised new insight for this work.[4] Transculturation provides a contrast between Indigenous and mestizo identity, one that I will only mention here but raise to capture that constant thread of conversation that always pushes and pulls on Professor Montoya and me because of our separate identities and the dialogue we choose to engage in across our own differences.[5]

The themes of assimilation and narrative resonate just as clearly when I read the article now, in conjunction with writing this retrospective reflection, as upon my first read twenty years ago. I recall receiving the draft that became the article I hold in my hands. I remember the forceful resonance of her narrative. The narrative of the strong bond between sisters resonated because of my own experience with three older sisters. Especially relevant was the experience of my sister Evelina, myself, and other Indigenous students for whom the doors of an elite institution were opened for the first time in our collective tribal histories upon our admittance to privileged academic space. This was then followed by the experience I had sorting out my presence in the legal academy. Margaret asked me to tell her what I thought of her pre-publication draft of the Máscaras article. I read it and it struck that unmistakable and compelling chord of truth.

II. Masks and the Assimilative Task of Education

I begin with a brief consideration of masks from a Puebloan Indigenous perspective, which is my foundational frame of reference. “Masks” are common to Pueblo expression, just as they are to other Indigenous peoples’ expression throughout the world. In the Pueblo world they are reserved to ceremonial representation and are most commonly associated with the spiritual[6] and  other living creatures that share the land and are critical to traditional survival or to the ecosystem and the Indigenous knowledge frame. Masking is also associated with levity. The masked or painted Pueblo clown[7] is important to the way in which correction and instruction are imparted through humor in public ceremony. Masks worn in ceremony are powerful representations. The Puebloan frame of masking imparts both the symbolic power and spiritual significance of masks.

In modern Indigenous resistance movements worldwide, the “masking” of the face has emerged as a symbol of struggle against oppression. This deliberate masking of individual identity serves in part for protection from the government, for example, in the Zapatista movement’s “uniform,” which includes the covering of the face.[8] However, the meaning of the mask/ing, as in Pueblo ceremony, is far deeper.

The masks are a symbol not only of autonomy, but also egalitarianism. The masks are very symbolic to the Zapatistas…[T]hey say . . . they gave up ‘the word’ (or their voices) so they could be heard and, by wearing masks, they gave up their faces in order to be seen. ‘With my mask, I’m a Zapatista in a struggle for dignity and justice,’ replied the masked man to whom this question was posed. ‘Without my mask, I’m just another damn Indian!’[9]

Donning masks for the Zapatistas is both assuming and critiquing power. “Marcos[10] has said that ‘we cover our faces in order to show the world the true face of . . . Mexico.’”[11] The mask/ing also has multiple representations; it is “the faceless global majority excluded from decisionmaking on the one hand, and the disguise of the modernizing state and increasingly small global ruling class on the other.”[12]

In both instances, the masked person is known to family and community. However, in the first instance, masks transform the person through the power of ceremonial re-presentation of another symbolically significant identity. In the second instance, masking is intended to obscure identification to protect one’s identity from the threat of retaliation expected as a result of organized resistance, as well as to challenge and critique power, and to “give face.”[13]  Professor of Geography E. Jeffrey Popke, says,

The mask worn by the Zapatistas is thus more than simply a device to avoid being identified. It symbolizes the anonymity of Mexico’s nameless and faceless indigenous people, and hence serves as a critique of the way in which modernity has denied them a subject position within the Mexican nation. . . . Part of the Zapatista mission is to recover this face, to reclaim their status as subjects and citizens. . . . This ‘giving of face’ can be viewed as a way of re-establishing a form of ethical engagement, of insisting that we open ourselves to the presence of the other.[14]

These frames show masks’ dual power to transform the wearer and to obscure, project, and protect identity and face. They are equally relevant when one discusses the masking of identity that occurs in educational institutions: masks represent the assimilation into the dominant knowledge and cultural frame educational institutions demand, as well as the masking of identity that occurs to protect one’s “true identity.” In academia, masks represent the many ways in which the true self, particularly if it is Other, is transformed, cloaked, suppressed, oppressed, or protected, including in the performance of identity, expression, and production of knowledge.

Three questions emerge: What are the masks we are asked to wear in our academic institutions and why? Are we being asked to wear masks that hide our difference or otherness?[15] Are these masks intended to subvert diversity or the face of diversity or diverse expression? Montoya powerfully depicts a mask of whiteness, representing in part the expectation of conformity to the dominant norm reflected by whiteness, including English proficiency, as well as the dominant western frame of knowledge, knowledge production, and manner of cultural and written expression.[16]  In a powerful sculpture by Lorraine Bonner, entitled UNMASK!, Ms. Bonner depicts two melded Janus[17] faces, one holding a black mask to the face with holes for the eyes, and the other holding a white mask to the face with an opening only for the mouth. The black mask renders the person voiceless and the white mask blinds the person providing only voice.[18]

Dealing with diverse peoples, languages, knowledge systems, and ways of thinking is a challenge/threat for the American academic institutions most study and teach within. Indigenous peoples have a history in which assimilation served as the primary task of American education and assimilation continues to reflect the Indigenous experience with education. This is true in the modern legal academy. The acquisition of a legal education through an accredited law school is required before one may engage the legal system. This imbeds Indigenous Peoples in both an educational and a political system, not of their own making, but with which Indigenous Peoples are compelled to fully engage in order to preserve remnant lands, peoples, languages, and Indigenous knowledge frames.

III. “Who are you/we?”

The danger of the (linguistic, cognitive, social, and cultural) masking that Indigenous Peoples go through in academic institutions is that the tribal self is forgotten or buried, and eventually transforms into the mask of whiteness itself. Unable to shed the mask/s acquired, our identities become forever altered. The act of masking illustrates the shifts and changes fundamentally required in the movement from tribal knowledge system to another knowledge system; Indigenous cultural understanding of masks and modern Indigenous resistance analysis of masking helps us understand the transformative, protective power and symbolism of masks. Specifically, the metaphor and symbolism of masking also represents the oppressiveness associated with masking. This is seen in the two masks poised to cover the faces of Lorraine Bonner’s clay figures in UNMASK!.[19] The smooth white mask may privilege or allow voice, but blinds. The smooth black mask allows one to see what is happening, but silences or oppresses giving voice to what is seen. These masks are metaphors for the law of white spaces that operate in institutions. [20]

“[K]ill the Indian in him and save the man,” are the words attributed to U.S. Army Lieutenant Richard Henry Pratt, who when making this statement quoted a “great general”, who said, “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.” [21] Pratt participated in the then-bold experiment of educating native warriors and leaders who were incarcerated by the United States government in St. Augustine, Florida for armed resistance to the imposition of federal authority over them and their peoples.[22] American education was thus proposed as an alternative to literally eradicating Indigenous Peoples from the emerging American settler nation in the 1800s once authorities determined that it was cheaper to educate Indians than to wage military campaigns to kill them.[23] The linguistic, cognitive, social, and cultural knowledge frame that Indigenous Peoples adhered to was targeted as the “Indian” in need of killing.

Assimilation transforms and is intended to change us, un/consciously. It is intended to address negative assessments of difference as well as to recreate us to fit in (in less negative ways).[24] Resisting and maintaining our own identity becomes a challenge.

Montoya’s descriptive use of trenzas and messy hair describes the performance of identity as we move from the negative stereotype, the greñas, to the consciously public aspects (braids) of our managed and performed identity. This represents the ability to maintain the true self through understanding that we “perform” identity, including the identities required to be covered by the assimilative masks as well as the masked identity.[25] This un/conscious battle of the private and public self through the use of performance and masks dependant on the space one is occupying evidences an awareness of the importance of resisting the melding of the masked and unmasked identities into one permanently masked identity. To me, this represents not only the importance of maintaining unique social and cultural expression, but of maintaining the critical foundation of separate tribal identity; the existence, outside dominant frames of knowledge and expression, of Indigenous knowledge and language, including a legal tradition, which support the cultivation of different ways of being, thinking, and existing in the world—a sovereignty of the mind and intellect.

It would be a while longer before I recognized and felt that I had found my own voice and my own cultural expression in contrast to the prevailing pattern and norm of legal scholarship existing in the culture of written discourse of the legal academy through what, even now, is perhaps still considered contested “legal” scholarship.[26]  I recognized Margaret had found her voice in Máscaras through the power it had and I deeply admired her for accomplishing what I was struggling to do without fully realizing my own struggle.

IV. Narrative and Voice

Law schools prepare students for a profession that frames thinking, writing, and approach to the law in a very specific manner, and requires its participants to operate within this frame for success. For admission to the bar, and permission to operate within the justice system as lawyers, a law school education is required, representing a minimum of nineteen years of education total. This educational training casts us into a particular frame of thinking about law and everything connected to law. To break from the frame requires moving outside of it entirely. Narrative allows for this: the reframing of thought is necessary to permit consideration of a legal tradition linked to orality. Narrative shatters the small, narrow frame which contains the only information, language, and experience that is said to be relevant to the American common law tradition. Both objectivity and relevance affect legal scholarship and legal proceedings in the common law tradition and both test and reject all or parts of collective[27] and personal narrative.[28]  Narrative is critical to the expression of the Indigenous (Chthonic) legal tradition.[29] The dominant framing of what legal discursive expression looks like, what it allows, and what it locks out entirely, is challenged by narrative.

It can be a challenge to find one’s voice and the use of narrative allowed me to “find voice.” I view finding voice as related to the removal of masks that permits the true self to speak free of encumbrance, be it the self hidden by imposed masks, or covered by masks silencing voice or allowing voice without vision, the latter two as illustrated by the masks in Bonner’s sculpture, UNMASK!.[30]

Sometimes voice is affected by the protective mask necessary for our safety or success, and therefore necessary for us to impose on ourselves, like the Zapatista “face-covering” protecting a face of resistance. The subversive use of masks—to cover, to be seen, or to use the mask to reveal the truth of what is masked and the subversive use of voice—to hold silence in order to be heard, flip the assimilative tools of institutional mask/ing and silencing:

It would seem evident that masks conceal and silence quiets.
But the truth is that masks also reveal and that silences speak.
To conceal and to quiet, to reveal and to speak, masks and silences.[31]

Speaking out assumes prerogative. Speaking out is an exercise of privilege. Speaking out takes practice.
Silence ensures invisibility. Silence provides protection.  Silence masks.[32]

Reflecting on Máscaras highlighted the critical role narrative has played in my own work and the impact Máscaras has had on me and others for whom narrative is an aspect of cultural discursive expression. Employing narrative in legal analysis allows resistance to the often too narrow legal discursive and analytical frame. Montoya’s employment of narrative influenced my work and my thinking about the dominant frame of legal analysis and law.[33] Narrative was like a key that unlocked a door that opened discursive expression about the law. The employment of narrative in writing about the law, its impact, and context, also opened a door of understanding concerning the connection between narrative, its use, and its relationship to the Indigenous legal tradition.[34]

If there is power in narrative then there is disempowerment in silencing narrative. This occurs in law through rendering parts of story and narrative irrelevant in legal process and discourse, as illustrated by the Josephine Chavez case Montoya discusses in Máscaras. Legal opinions limit facts to the legally relevant narrative, but to challenge and question whether narrative can inform analysis of the law devalues it. In contrast, in the Indigenous legal tradition foundational law is contained in collective narratives, including origin stories,[35] journey narratives,[36] and other narratives connecting Indigenous autochthonous peoples to the land.[37] The disconnection of narrative to the law in the American common law tradition all but shuts down the ability to impart understanding of the Indigenous legal tradition into common law through oral narratives in spoken word or song. Additionally, asserting that narrative is irrelevant to legal analysis is disempowering on an individual level, as illustrated in Montoya’s description of the Josephine Chavez case.[38] The narrative of Josephine Chavez’s life absent in the Court’s written opinion in the case is an example of the Court’s focus on legally relevant facts as masking Josephine Chavez.[39] Law and the legal process masked her reality.[40]

Finally, on a collective level, it is disempowering to dismiss narrative for Indigenous Peoples whose legal tradition is imbedded in narrative. While there is room for “relevant facts” and partial narrative, there is no room for irrelevant facts, and “whole narrative”[41] is rarely relevant in American legal process or legal analysis. When narrative contains law, narrative has heightened importance to the law. In societies that operate in the oral tradition, law is contained in various texts, including narrative, art, land, song, and symbols. American common law normalizes partial narrative and it has no experience with whole narrative containing law. It is therefore no surprise that the introduction of narrative to legal analysis and its use in discussing the law is challenged as unscholarly legal discourse.

Personal narrative is representative of the impact of the law at a local, specific level. Within indigenous knowledge frames, the local ecosystem contains valuable knowledge upon which higher and connecting knowledge is premised—Indigenous knowledge stems from a specific ecological order,[42] including the connection that the local has to the surrounding ecosystems, to the larger global ecosystems and to the celestial. In this respect, personal narrative represents the local, which connects to the collective narrative. The larger connection of law to the spiritual emerges from the collective narrative. Narrative is greatly valued; it emerges as a vessel of understanding and knowledge and in the Indigenous legal tradition, law can be found imbedded in collective narrative.[43] The local, just like the personal, is a necessary site of resistance.[44] Perhaps this is why Montoya’s article on narrative resonated so powerfully with me and was connected to my own ability to find voice in employing narrative in written legal discourse.

Finally, in reading Máscaras for this reflection, transculturation   resonated in a new way for me, largely as a result of my research and writing on Indigenous identity.[45] Indigenous identity, mixture, and the different treatment of mixture by Tribes, has been a focus of my research. I have found myself especially interested in the treatment of inter-tribal mixture and the challenges experienced and affected by mixture of tribal identities. With Indigenous identity so deeply embedded in particularized tribal existence, I consider whether this is a rejection of the idea of transculturation[46] in Indigenous identity in that there is not an interest in the emergence and formation of a new identity from the mixture, but rather an interest in the perpetuation and continuance of a singular and specific tribal identity.

Máscaras was the familiar in the strange; the strange that I had become so accustomed to that I had forgotten it was strange until contrasted with the truth of narrative, and my own need for the truth, power, and liberation I find in narrative.

V. Conclusion

“My truths require I say unconventional things in unconventional ways.”[47]

To consider Máscaras on its twentieth anniversary is to recognize the timelessness of Margaret Montoya’s influential work on narrative. Additionally, it allows me to consider all Professor Montoya and I have experienced and grown/groaned through together, including reactions to our joint work on narrative,[48] that span the spectrum from complete silence and dismissal from those it alienates, to great excitement from those for whom it resonates. I wonder aloud whether the silence, coolness, impatience is related to the dominant law’s truncated mode of story-telling, or the lawyer’s inability to move easily in such unbounded discursive space. And whether the joy shared by those who respond with excitement to the Narrative braid is related to their recognition of the truth, power, and freedom of themselves in narrative.

Finally, it allows me to publicly thank and acknowledge Professor Montoya for mentoring, collaborating with, and supporting me through the years.[49] There is a reinforcing synergy that occurs between those who share intellectual friendship; this synergy is known only in its presence, not its absence. The importance and true power of critical mass[50] and diversity in academic institutions is demonstrated in the bridges of understanding that would not occur without the friendships that arise across difference.

Cite as: Christine Zuni Cruz, La Verdad, El Poder, y La Liberación, Harv. J. L. & Gender (Apr. 2013) (reflection on Margaret Montoya, Máscaras, Trenzas, y Greñas: Un/Masking the Self While Un/Braiding Latina Stories and Legal Discourse, 17 Harv. Women’s L. J. 185 (1994), 15 Chicano-Latino L. Rev. 1 (1994)), www.harvardjlg.com/2013/4/1350.

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. ― Milan Kundera 

I felt so moved by Professor Montoya’s article Mascaras, Trenzas, y Greñas: Un/Masking the Self While Un/Braiding Latina Stories and Legal Discourse,[1] because her words captured so much of what my grandmother experienced, though they lived worlds apart. My grandmother, Sheila Didi, was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. Born and raised in segregated Kenya, she was one of the first Indian women to graduate with a law degree from England. As a young woman, she helped defend the infamous Mau-Mau trials in Kenya. In the wake of India’s independence from British rule, my grandmother moved to India, where she spent her life serving the poor as a human rights lawyer and a grass-roots activist. Like Professor Montoya, my grandmother adopted a variety of social and political masks throughout her life to be accepted by her peers. However, usually no mask was sufficient. My grandmother often radically defied societal norms, pioneering a new identity, like so many progressive minorities in her generation. The stories of countless minorities such as my grandmother remain untold and unrecorded.

My grandmother was seen as an outsider for much of her life—as an Indian girl raised in segregated Kenya; as one of the first minority law students in England; as a young Indian Kenyan woman in the Kenyan Independence struggle; as a highly-educated Hindu Brahmin woman involved in grass-roots activism in provincial India; as a politically active wife and mother in Indian leftist circles; and as one of the only female lawyers in the Indian High Court. She masked various aspects of her identity to be accepted by the mainstream community as a student in Kenya and England as well as a young activist in the Kenyan Independence struggle. When she began practicing law and became politically active in India, male lawyers and grass-root activists were at first very suspicious and unwelcoming. However, her elite legal education made her an indispensable asset, often giving her the license to defy gender and cultural norms. As my grandmother gained prominence in legal and political circles, she didn’t need to mask her identity as much. People began accepting her for her true self and saw her as a role model. However, her harshest critics reprimanded her for letting her family life suffer as a result of her legal and political activism.

I was assigned to read Professor Montoya’s article as a junior at Wellesley College.  This article, as well as the support from my advisors, Dr. Rangita de Silva de Alwis and Professor Christopher Candland, inspired me to write a hundred and ten page memoir about my grandmother, which remains unpublished in my personal archive. I wrote this memoir not only to honor my grandmother’s legacy, but to examine the forces that have shaped and defined me. I was born in India and raised in the suburbs of New Jersey. I feel like I have always lived on the fringe of the “real” America and never been fully accepted by the mainstream. In the United States, I have a shallow identity. I am an Indian-American girl, whose family immigrated to the United States in the late nineties. However, in India and Kenya, I am known by a myriad of familial, social and political relationships dating over a century. Learning about my grandmother’s life has been extremely empowering. Whenever I find myself feeling miserable or wallowing in self-pity, simply remembering my grandmother’s struggles and triumphs, gives me immense strength to move forward.

I first visited my grandmother’s childhood home in Kenya when I was sixteen. My great-grandfather was one of 32,000 young Indian men, recruited by the British Empire to build the Kenyan-Ugandan Railway at the turn of the 20^st century. My grandmother, who was born in Nairobi in 1928, always spoke of her childhood in Kenya with nostalgia twinkling from her eyes. Her childhood home stood along an unpaved road bustling with mutatto vans, aggressive street vendors, cars and bicycles. The outer rooms had been converted into a local bar with red, plastic chairs, while the interior rooms were a small slaughterhouse. The stench of dead animals was unbearable. It was hard to imagine that this house, which consisted of five rooms and a veranda, was once shared by twenty-two people – my great-grandparents, five siblings and the families of three of my grandmother’s uncles.

In high school, my grandmother realized that as an Indian girl in segregated Kenya, she was severely disadvantaged.[2] She went to the Arya Girls’ school, which was run by European nuns. Kenya was a segregated, rogue state, where Indians and Africans often faced brutal forms of racism. She worked hard to be an excellent student. However, she quickly realized regardless of how hard she worked, as an Indian girl, her teachers would always deem her inferior to the white students. “We would sometimes encounter our teachers on segregated buses and on the streets outside of school,” my grandmother vividly recalled, “but they refused to acknowledge us! Such racial arrogance was dehumanizing!” History was taught from a British-centric perspective. Her history teacher, a short, fat Irish woman often told them, “Girls, you should be grateful to Henry the VIII. Why? Had he not created the British navy, India would not have been discovered!” These teachers also often openly insulted famous Indian revolutionaries such as Subhash Chandra Bose. This was the ultimate insult for my grandmother and her classmates, who saw these leaders as superheroes. Soon they began revolting by organizing protests in school.

Her social activism helped give her a license to defy gender norms from an early age. While many Indian girls remained in purdah,[3] wearing veils and spending the majority of their lives within high-walled enclosures at home, my grandmother was permitted to stay late at school and listen to lectures by the leaders of the independence struggle. Her mother, Shanti Devi Sharma, led Indian women to organize fundraisers, food drives, and protests for the Indian Independence movement.[4] She was a leader in the Arya Samaj temple[5] in Nairobi, which would regularly receive letters from Mahatma Gandhi.[6] Like Indian students across Kenya and South Africa, my grandmother and her classmates performed important milestones of the Indian freedom struggle in front of large audiences. These performances were a way of educating youth and their families about the struggle. At one such performance, my grandmother recounted with great excitement that “people came in the thousands to see us! When the performance ended, there was a standing ovation, and the audience began chanting Inquilab Zindabad! [Long live the revolution!] Jai Hind! [Long Live India!]. Our parents then realized that we could achieve something great for India!” her parents then decided to send her to the best possible education in England.  My grandmother soon set sail to attain a law degree in England in 1947, a year when over ninety-two percent of Indian women were illiterate.[7]

In England, my grandmother tried her best to assimilate into British society, even at the expense of abandoning certain Indian traditions. According to Professor Montoya, this is common among minorities trying to succeed.[8] My grandmother was one of the first two Indian women to attend Cardiff University. She wore Indian saris every day—sticking out like a sore thumb on campus. Her mother had hand-woven many of these saris, in allegiance with Mahatma Gandhi’s mandate to protest British fabric. My grandmother’s attire proclaimed her politics, just like Professor Montoya’s clothing at Harvard Law School. It made her acutely aware of how Indians were perceived in England. Kapila Hingorani, the other Indian student at Cardiff at the time told me that Indians and Africans were often perceived as savages by most British. British students would often ask them if they had swung from branches like monkeys to get to school in Kenya and India. Due to stereotype threat, just like Professor Montoya, my grandmother made the extra effort to seem clean, polished and well bred. Every day she carefully and tightly braided her long black hair and pressed her saris until no wrinkle was in sight.[9] Like many Indian students in England, she refrained from eating with her hands and learned the dining etiquette for traditional European five-course meals. She also tried to learn ballroom dancing, which was perhaps most shocking of all: “I remember after the College balls, outside our all-girls dormitory, there would be a line of girls and boys hugging and kissing. We walked past quickly, but sometimes we couldn’t help but catch a glance. We had never seen anything like it before. They didn’t feel at all embarrassed” My grandmother even went as far as legally changing her Indian name “Susheila,”[10] to the British name “Sheila.” Despite her efforts to fit in, like Professor Montoya and other minorities who were the first to enroll in western universities, my grandmother felt isolated. In the words of Professor Montoya, her private self was suffocating.[11]

Associating with international students offered her a new window for acceptance and empowerment. She spent all her vacations at an international youth hostel in London, where she became friends with many students from India and other European colonies. As youth from colonies rampant with poverty and racism, these students shared a deep camaraderie. Like the majority of students in England from colonial states, they became attracted to socialism.[12] World War II had recently ended and India as well as other colonies had just won their independence from colonial rule. As the educated elite of these developing nations, they were brimming with idealism and felt a heady responsibility for leading social reform. Many of the students my grandmother met later became famous pioneers of the leftist movements in their native homelands.

Quickly my grandmother plunged deep into the international Marxist movement. Under the guidance of the renowned Fabian Society in London, my grandmother began intensely studying socialist texts, which encouraged women and men alike to spearhead the transition to a socialist world. Just as Professor Montoya was empowered by her activism in the Chicano student movement, similarly my grandmother’s new Marxist identity gave her an “ideological” mask. Through this prism she experienced many new worlds, traveling to Budapest, Warsaw and Berlin for international socialist youth festivals that attracted tens of thousands of young people from around the world. My grandmother loved to talk about these youth festivals ad nauseam.

When we went to Budapest, fifty of us traveled from London in a truck! We sang songs, played games, cooked food, and drank alcohol along the way. We would spend the night at youth hostels in various countries. We would even occasionally sleep in barns! In Venice, we slept under trees near the Lagoon. In Budapest, we were greeted by a sea of Red flags, as well as portraits of famous Communist leaders worldwide such as Lenin, Marx, Stalin and Mao Zedong. There were so many events on all sorts of political and cultural issues from around the world. I remember attending ballets about evil landlords and harvest dances performed by Hungarian peasants.

My grandmother soon fell in love with Indian boys, who would serenade her with Tagore love songs and talk dreamily about the coming of the socialist revolution.[13] They were leaders in the London Majlis, an extension of the All India Students Federation, which strove to bring socialism to India.[14] She soon rose to become the General Secretary, making her acutely aware of injustice in India and beyond. She also worked closely with the World Peace Council, participating in large protests against the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.[15]

When my grandmother returned to Kenya in 1954, after finishing several years of law school, she felt doubly estranged not only from her ancestral roots as an Indian Kenyan, but also from her law classes in England. Professor Montoya wrote that this is common among minorities who were the first to attain higher education.[16] Equipped with legal knowledge and a more global perspective, my grandmother was awestruck by the poverty and discrimination. Learning about the intricacies and minutia of English law seemed futile, when back home in Kenya, there was virtually no rule of law. Even decades later, when she recalled those days, you could hear the fury in her voice: “The British had a double standard! They had fought against fascism, Aryan superiority and what not in Europe, but they treated us Indians and Kenyans like slaves!” she said. She explained the curfew system in place under the reign of Kenyan Martial Law:

Africans could only roam the streets until five pm. Sometimes, if we missed the curfew we would actually hide the Africans in the boots of cars. Can you believe it? The British would often just lay down barbed wire around an area and demand Africans to show their Kipande as they say in Swahili, or their identity card. All those without Kipande were immediately sent to jail. I will never forget, one time I was standing outside my father’s shop, and I saw an old African man with a wooden basket buying vegetables for his white master. The police came and demanded to see his Kipande. The old man began apologizing profusely because he didn’t have this identification. But the police gave him several lashes and threw him into their van! It shook me. I saw the plight of this old man. Tears were just rolling down my cheeks!

My grandmother joined the Kenyan Independence struggle. This was the first time she immersed herself in Black Kenya. After making Black friends in England, in Kenya, she was eager to transcend racial boundaries and “know Africans as persons.” Initially she did not tell her family that she was meeting them. Interactions among the Indians and Africans were often frowned upon. Like many Indian families, her servants had been her only contact with Black Kenya. As a young Indian Kenyan activist, not all of the African activists were friendly and welcoming to her. “I was totally shocked and ashamed when I found out that there were Indians who were acting as home guards, and helping the British suppress the Africans.”[17]

Her English legal training made her immensely valuable to Kenyan activists. She began working for prominent Indian lawyers in the East African Indian National Congress, who were fighting for those in the infamous Mau Mau struggle. [18] She worked for Fitz D’Souza and Achroo Kapila, who defended Jomo Kenyatta, a revolutionary who later became Kenya’s first Prime Minister, and countless others in the Mau Mau trials.[19] “Under Martial law, the death sentence was often pronounced on flimsy evidence after holding a sham trial. It was common to see young African women crying outside the courtrooms because their husbands or some other relative was pronounced to be hanged,” my grandmother recalled. When she returned to England, she worked for Peter Mbiyu Koinange, who was defending thousands of poor Kenyans whose land had been evicted by the British.  He later became the Vice President of Kenya.

Upon graduating from law school in 1956, my grandmother left the splendors of London and moved to India to a tiny, industrial town named Ludhiana to serve the poor. She was perceived as an exotic outsider due to her elite education in England.  Grass-roots activists were often deeply suspicious of her. Her friend told me:

Most activists were men from the working class and lower castes. It was extremely rare to see a young Hindu Brahmin woman, that too a law graduate from England, with a keen desire to work in the slums, villages and labor colonies. It was a strange sight—Sheila would often wear her fur coat to outreach sessions in villagers and sometimes go door to door to raise awareness for various causes.

There were also very few women in the field. My grandmother also organized countless protests and rallies where she and the other women would sing songs to protest. Perhaps, as women in the 1950s, singing was considered a more acceptable way of unmasking their radical intentions and communicating them to the masses.[20] With much time and effort, my grandmother gained acceptance, running for State Legislature in 1962 and later for Parliament in 1977 on a leftist ticket.[21] During Parliamentary elections, my grandmother recalled:

People came in thousands to see us in the final debate! This was the first time I had addressed so many people from all walks of life. In the beginning, thousands of people began chanting my name along with my party’s name. I felt so elated. I thought, are all these people really chanting my name— Sheila Didi? Who is this Sheila Didi? Do I know her?

As one of the first three women lawyers out of two hundred men in the Punjab and Haryana High Court, my grandmother staunchly defied traditional gender norms and faced many hardships as a woman. “Often times, male clients would not take me seriously. They would smirk— how could a woman be powerful and convincing in court? I often had to work harder than the men to prove that I was an excellent lawyer.” Though men hesitated to accept her, she was extremely valuable to the courts. After independence, the Indian courts continued to utilize the English criminal code. With a law degree from England, my grandmother was one of the privileged few who could interpret British law. And yet, after my grandmother passed away, I discovered that some senior advocates would ask her for sexual favors long after she was married with three children. She never told me, perhaps because she wanted to shield me from this ugliness.

My grandmother handled human rights cases involving worker rights, sexual harassment, corruption, domestic violence and dowry. She often defended the poor, who had little means to pay her. As a prominent member of well-established grass-roots women’s organizations—the National Federation of Indian Women and the Punjab Istri Saba, my grandmother was acutely connected to problems at the slum and village level.  Through these organizations, she provided pro bono legal counsel to women on a host of issues every week. These women often did not have the knowledge, resources or familial support to take legal action. In 1962, with the help of the National Federation of Indian Women, she fought one of the most prominent dowry cases,[22] which went up till the Supreme Court. A poor woman named Kamla Dhamda was murdered by her in-laws, because they claimed her family had given insufficient dowry.  My grandmother recalled “her father would come and visit me daily at our house.” My grandmother won the case, as Dhamda’s in-laws were sentenced to life in prison.[23]

During the brutal Khalistan militancy[24] in the 1980s, my grandmother witnessed many atrocities while traveling across Punjab to the hotbeds of terrorist activities with the Punjab Istri Saba. At times there were over seventy cases in my grandmother’s files in just one month. In order to maintain order, the state became draconian. My grandmother recounted a chilling example, where two young men, who were accused of being part of a criminal tribe, were imprisoned without a trial. These men were innocent and had no idea why they were in prison. Their sixteen-year old wives, Phoolmati and Santra, stood in front of the prison for days. The girls were sexually harassed by the police. One of them was even hung naked from the ceiling of a prison ward for days. Such cases were unfortunately common during this era of utter lawlessness. The case continued for months before the police officers were fortunately arrested and convicted with seven years in prison.

On a personal front, my grandmother was hardly the stereotypical Hindu Brahmin wife and mother.[25] Her roles as a human rights lawyer, a political activist and mother of three often combatted with each other. Her family life suffered because she focused so intensely on her social activism. Her harshest critics have chastised her for spending limited time at home with her three children and for not knowing how to cook as an Indian woman. She did not marry until she was twenty-seven, which was considered dinosaur age for Indian brides in the 1950s. When her family urged her to get married, she declared that she would only marry a Marxist, who would be permissive of her social activism. She married my grandfather, Madan lal Didi, a trade-union leader. Like most Indian public servants, he often received a meager salary. Often times, my grandmother became the sole bread-winner. The day after her wedding, my grandmother began canvassing for my grandfather’s political campaign in the sweepers’ slums. This was extremely taboo for a bride, as Brahmins deeply pride themselves with their cleanliness. After marriage, often times, my grandmother’s political protests would become violent, concluding in her arrest. My grandmother was once imprisoned for about a month shortly after giving birth to my father. The warden allowed my father to spend a few nights with her in prison. There was also often no division between the personal and political in the house. Many times the villagers she was defending in court would visit the city for their court cases. They were often too poor to afford housing so my grandmother would house them in her living room. There were over seven people sharing a modest apartment. Family members sometimes complained that the house was a guesthouse for anyone with political or charitable ties.

After writing much of my grandmother’s narrative, what was equally eye-opening was the way various people and groups reacted to my writing. When I began writing this memoir, little did I know I would be challenging a variety of power structures. Though my grandmother was one of the 1000 women nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005,[26] she did not think she was extraordinary by any means. When I told her I wanted to write a book about her life, she and many family members were appalled. Could this be a worthy pursuit as an Economics major at Wellesley College? In her old age, many knew little about her accomplishments. They simply saw her as just another little old lady, who lived in a second-floor apartment on Ring Road in New Delhi, India. As an 83 year old, she was frail— wearing a neck and hip brace and limping with a walking stick.

Some felt threatened by my writing, which recorded my grandmother’s accomplishments. Some have consistently dismissed her achievements. Perhaps this is a way of justifying their lackluster lives. One person told me “child, you are forgetting that your grandmother was a woman. As a woman you are responsible for taking care of the household, which she did not do well.” Many also felt threatened by me. As I interviewed family and my grandmother’s colleagues for this project, I was also no longer a sweet, young girl who sang Indian Classical music melodiously, but a foreign American judging them through a starkly different perspective. I constantly questioned the validity of my perspective due to my age, gender and Indian-American identity.

Perhaps this is a testament to Professor Montoya’s words about how the stories of outsiders, of minorities and of women are often silenced. Speaking out and discovering the validity of your perspective requires a great degree of confidence, as Professor Montoya says. As I began to research further, I realized that what I was experiencing was a systemic problem. Though much has been written about elite Indian political families such as the Nehru-Gandhi family, little has been written about reform at the grass-roots level, and particularly about the women in this movement. My grandmother’s stories and those of thousands of women in the Indian women’s movement remain largely untold and unrecorded. Perhaps for this reason, many of my grandmother’s colleagues felt their lives were insignificant and unworthy of publication; they didn’t seem to realize how their public contributions were important forces in broader reform.

The winners of history often write history books. Personal narratives, as Professor Montoya writes, can often challenge the dominant power structure. Individual stories remind us that our generalizations about places, movements, and ideology erase diversity and difference, which is why recording personal stories is crucial on a personal and political level. The more I poured hours into researching my grandmother’s life, the more empowered I became. Sometimes a sentence embodying her idealism, her sacrifice, her courage struck me and my eyes brimmed with tears. I hope my writing inspires others to write their personal narratives.

Acknowledgements:

The above article is a revised excerpt of my 110 page memoir about my grandmother, which remains unpublished and part of my personal archive. My grandmother’s quotes in my article stem from this work. I conducted my research by interviewing her over Skype and many scholars in the US over several months. I also spent a month interviewing prominent scholars, lawyers and social activists in India, with the help of a grant from the Wellesley College Dean’s Office.

Over the last two years, so many people have helped me immensely. I want to thank Professor Margaret Montoya for recognizing my work as worthy of publication. I am also eternally grateful first and foremost to Dr. Rangita de Silva de Alwis and Professor Christopher Candland for their inspiration and support. I also would have never read Professor Montoya’s article if it wasn’t for Professor Tom Burke. Professor James Oles, Professor Marilyn Sides, Professor Nikhil Rao, Professor Gyan Prakash, and so many other distinguished scholars also offered me critical guidance. My family, friends and my grandmother’s colleagues offered immense support and personal insights. The following list certainly does not do justice to all those who have helped me. I have listed them alphabetically and not by any means in order of importance: Ms. Kanta Advani, Mr. Pawan K. Bansal, Ms. Rani Balbir, Mr. Bant S. Brar, Mr. Amarjit Chandan, Mr. Devi Dayal, Mr. Jogender Dayal, Mr. Rahul Diddi, Ms. Shumita Didi, Mr. Amit Ghosh, Mr. Anupam Gupta, Ms. Sumitra Gupta, Ms. Pushpa Hingorani, Ms. Khoja, Mr. Jaswinder S. Mand, Mr. Inder Mehta, Ms. Oshima Reikhy, Ms. Rita Sharma, Dr. Visho Sharma, Ms. Poonam Singh and Mr. Debi S. Tewatia.

I had many sleepless nights while writing this article. As a twenty-two year old girl in an Indian family, I was commanded to not write about many of my grandmother’s experiences— ones that could harm our family’s honor. I apologize to my family and family friends. After much thought, I decided to breach the silence and write an honest account about my grandmother’s life, one voicing her struggles and triumphs.

Photos:

Photo outside of my grandmother’s school in Nairobi, Kenya in the 1930s. My grandmother is in the middle, holding the two babies.

My grandmother at the age of 18 in Kenya (on the right) with a friend, Sheel Chabra

  My grandmother in the top row in the middle. This photo was taken on a Polish ship called the Batory, while going to the Berlin Socialist Youth Festival in 1953.

My grandmother on the left sitting by student tents at an international socialist youth festival in Budapest in 1953.

My grandmother on the left performing an Indian dance for a group of European students at an international socialist youth festival

 My grandmother in Nairobi, Kenya in  1955. Peter Mbiyu Koinange, pictured next to her, later began Vice President of Kenya

My grandparents in the late fifties, after their marriage, at Okhla Barrage by the Yamuna river  in Delhi.  The photo was taken by poet Krishan Adeeb.

My grandparents’ wedding in 1956

I have always been an avid reader and believe that we can discover truths about ourselves through storytelling. These stories I will share help explain who I am today—a women of color who is deeply committed to social justice, but also deeply invested in the existing hierarchical structures—trying to find happiness somewhere in between.

***

玉不琢不成器 

(Jade must be chiseled before it can be considered a gem)

- Chinese Proverb

***

Every time I tell a story about my life, I start at the same place: I am a first generation Hispanic American, whose parents came to America with the dream of completing their college education. In the Dominican Republic, both had been academic stars in their high schools, especially my father, who taught a course on calculus at the college level when he was in high school. Upon their arrival in the States, both of my parents quickly learned English well enough to get their GEDs (a feat that, even after 6 years of formal training in French, I still highly admire). For financial reasons, it was impossible for both of them to go to school at the same time, so my mother continued her education while my dad worked. As the years went by, my father was never able to finish college, something that for many years I considered a moral failing on his part—after all, my mom had had a hard time, but she had forged through, doing all her reading with the help of a Spanish/English dictionary, constantly misunderstood and undervalued because of her accent, even dealing with overtly unfriendly professors, who looked towards her pregnant belly (me!) with palpable derision. Every obstacle only made her more determined to succeed. As I have matured I have developed a more nuanced view of my father, who always follows his own path. His own ambitions may have been deferred, but he did so at least partially so that his children could have a better future.

Education has always been the cornerstone of my family’s values. Both of my parents sacrificed many of their own dreams so that my sister, brother and I could always get the best education. Through our hard work and a combination of financial aid and scholarships, we have all been able to attend top schools most of our lives.

Given recent media attention on heroes such as Sotomayor, this may not sound like an uncommon success story for the children of immigrants, in fact, it sounds like a perfect example of the American Dream, but in my experience, we are still definitely not the norm. As a result, I have spent much of my life feeling like an “outsider”; my Latino culture alienated me from my classmates while my level of education set me apart from most of my extended family. At school the differences were seemingly trivial. For example, I did not know who the Beatles were, had never watched Star Wars, and had never been skiing, yet all these little things all reminded me of my ineptitude in a certain cultural understanding. Even as I have become more fluent in American culture, I remember the original rift and have never felt that it is a legacy I truly own. With my extended family, my eroded Spanish language skills created an actual language barrier, but it mostly hid the even bigger gap between us caused by divergent experiences. For example, out of ten granchildren over eighteen on my mother’s side, only three of us have completed  college, my sister, my brother, and I.

I often imagine myself as standing precariously on a thin fence—some days, each side is pulling at me, other days, neither side cares if I stay or go. It’s a very lonely place. I have come to accept that I will always feel isolated, and have even come to view it as a positive aspect of myself. This sense of isolation has made me the person I am today—someone who is open-minded, empathetic, and a little unconventional. On good days I reason that I can put this understanding of not belonging to better represent others that are, as a group, considered outsiders—be it the LGBT community advancing marriage equality, or undocumented teenagers searching for a path to education and citizenship. I want to help address some of the major social issues that confront our times and make an impact on legal institutions that influence our society’s future. I may be balancing precariously on a fence, but that means I can see what is going on on both sides.

On bad days, the struggle for justice seems impossible, and I often find myself feeling frustrated or hopeless. To combat self-doubt and moral exhaustion, throughout my life I have memorized quotations that inspire me, and these quotations have become like prayers or mantras that I reach for when I am frustrated and cannot imagine how things will get better. Through them, I feel connected to the countless others who have struggled to forge a path to a better society, and I find the strength to keep going. For example, when I feel inadequate or ill-equipped to handle a new challenge, I imagine myself as a lump of jade, and I remember that each new challenge is an opportunity to smooth out some of my rougher edges.

***

“Dripping water carves a stone”

-Latin Proverb[1]

***

From my perspective, the greatest privilege afforded to a straight white man in this country is the privilege to be himself, act in his own interests, and succeed or fail for himself. As a Hispanic woman, I feel that I have to represent women of color in an elite profession, and therefore need to follow a path that most people will think demonstrates success.

Sometimes I feel that, because I am a member of a minority group, even when I win, I still lose. For example, when I was accepted to Princeton University, I was elated and incredibly proud of myself. This began to change as news spread around school – I gradually detected a sense that my accomplishment was undermined by the implicit assumption that my acceptance was due to the color of my skin.[2] Regardless of their true intentions, I couldn’t help but notice a sense of resentment on the part of friends and classmates and felt degraded by the way my peers “congratulated” me: “Congratulations! Of course you got into Princeton.” All this time I thought my peers saw me as an equal, as an individual, but all of a sudden, it didn’t matter that I had demonstrated my abilities year after year. Everyone believed they knew how I had gotten in to Princeton—I was offered a spot because I was a woman of color, and of course all great colleges need “those people.” It only took the insinuations of a few misguided people to make me feel like I was not actually seen as a person; I was a token, a trophy.[3]

I too came to think of myself in this way, and, throughout my 1L year, I often found myself doubting whether I deserved to be at Harvard Law School. I did not live up to my expectations at Princeton, because I did not prioritize doing my best. At the time, I thought, what did it matter if I did the best? Regardless of my accomplishments people would assume yet again that my race was the deciding factor in my success. I bought into this in the worst way, feeling I didn’t have to meet high expectations because anything I accomplished would already be seen as “surprising” and “amazing”; whatever level of success I did achieve would be “ratcheted up” by the fact that I am a minority woman. As I go through these hallowed Harvard halls, I shouldn’t feel the need to scream at the top of my lungs “I could get in without being Hispanic!” and yet sometimes I still do feel that need. Even when I feel more confident, I wonder how others feel about my presence here—sometimes I have to beat back the urge to blurt out my credentials, as if that will clear the air of the unasked, lingering question of just how much of my acceptance is due to my brains, and how much is due to my race.

Consequently, I feel the need to succeed “because of” and “in spite of” my minority status.[4] I don’t have the chance or the privilege to succeed purely for myself, because as a stand-in for my gender and race I feel that I have to prove that I belong here. I am just a piece of cheese, walking backwards up a cheese grater.[5]

***

I put on my masks, my
costumes and posed for each
occasion. I conducted myself
well, I think, but
an emptiness
grew
that no thing
could fill. I think
I hungered for myself.[6]

***

Can the mask ever become the self? I have a stronger accent in Spanish than I do in English, and my own identity is inextricably tied to the American experience. Sometimes it is at home, with my family, that I feel masked, as I censor myself, overly conscious of the privilege of my education and the great distance between my own perspective and theirs. Although it is less constant, however, I definitely am not unmasked here either—partially because I don’t want to be. To be unmasked before my peers is to be fully upfront about my race, my history, and my class, and it’s just so much easier to act as if my experiences are the same. And in many ways, thanks to my education, it is the same. I realized, at the end of the day—I don’t know what an unmasked me looks like.

I first read Montoya’s article, Máscaras, Trenzas, y Greñas: Un/masking the Self While Un/braiding Latina Stories and Legal Discourse,[7] last spring as my 2L year was wrapping up. As many others have testified, I found myself tearing through its pages. My heart beat against my chest and the lump in my throat made it painful to breathe. It was hard to pinpoint exactly what I felt: anger at her experiences of alienation, anger for my own experiences, discomfort, and pure and honest elation. It felt good, for once, to read something that I could relate to so strongly. It put into stark contrast how distant and removed I often am to the things that I read—and how much of my law school curriculum has consisted of sanitized stories and removed, intellectual arguments. I, too, was once saddened and appalled by the cases I read, and sometimes I still am, but the feeling has become flatter. I’d been desensitized to the power of a true story, but Montoya’s narrative was like being dropped into a bath of ice water, as I remembered, it doesn’t have to be this way. We have control, if real or imagined, of our own stories. We have the power to look beyond our assumptions, question our beliefs, and redirect our lives. This is my story.

Thank you, Professor Montoya, for reminding me that it is my right to tell my story, even if, especially if, it is not a story others have heard before. Thank you for reminding me that to be a lawyer, I don’t have to excise all the compassion from my being. Thank you for being a Latina that has gone before me.

We may be thinking it, but our hands are not raised. Today’s Harvard Law School is decidedly different from the one described in Prof. Montoya’s piece, not due to an absence of critical thoughts, but to an unwillingness to share them.

In forming section families during 1L, HLS has spawned a self-surveilling community of peers that pretends at friendship for fear of either making immediate waves or alienating ourselves from future networks. We fan out from lecture in small pockets of confidantes, sharing our anger or frustration with a particular statement or case, but in the classroom, there is no boisterous policy discussion, no free exchange of ideas, no honest conversation. If the Socratic method was ever anything but an autocratic tool, it has been sacrificed on the altar of televised confirmation hearings, the eternal memory of the Internet, and 80 person families soon to become nothing more than LinkedIn alumni groups.

We have each either accepted that we will leave as we entered or realized that we no longer have to spread lies about our good intentions to find success in a world of guaranteed six-figure salaries.

Does anyone get radicalized in law school? Is that a thing? Is legal education something that can radicalize people? It seems like law students have two basic experiences with radicalism. One, you come in with your prior commitment to resistance or heterodoxy and try desperately to cling to bits, flashing them here and there, cannibalizing some commitments to legitimize others, or grooming them only secretly. Alternatively, you’re radicalized after graduation, because you carefully learned all this stuff about justice and power, and left idealistically, planning to join some radical historical moment implementing it, and then you wind up feeling totally frazzled by it.

I think I’m feeling more of the first. I quickly gave up on the idea that this was going to be a time to share interesting perspectives with others. I think part of the problem is the basic structure of what we do here in law school, competing desperately for scarce resources and credentials. That’s arguably a good way to sort out who is qualified for what, but it really doesn’t seem like a good way to teach and learn. And it’s also kind of terrifying. When we fail to get some credential or resource, not only are we letting ourselves down, it’s hard not to feel like we’re also letting down the people or ideas we came here to fight for. That doesn’t leave a lot of room to contest what people care about. Instead, I just feel pitted against all these people I like or love, many who care about completely different things, each competing for the success of what they care about.

So I have these lines from Souls of Black Folk printed out and pinned above my desk at home: “education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to know.”[1] And it’s true: law school is a fucking drag, and it’s largely because choosing to enter such an alien and dicey environment (or such a potentially alienating one, as Prof. Montoya suggests) is revolutionary. It’s also only by relishing (or forcing) the diversity that you can try to make sure the revolutionary experience improves you, rather than alienating you further. If you’re not constantly being blown by the minds of “all kinds of” your brilliant peers, and also blowing their minds, then you’re probably doing something wrong.

Do you feel like an outsider? Well then, test out your most dangerous outsider ideas on all the brilliant people surrounding you. Embrace the disappointment and discontent. The best law school moments feature crooked grins. Grin crookedly right back. Do I feel like an outsider at law school? Sure, constantly, and in so many discrete ways. What do I do about it? Treat everyone like an outsider!

Please click here to access a PDF version of this article.

A Reflection on Margaret Montoya, Máscaras, Trenzas, y Greñas: Un/Masking the Self While Un/Braiding Latina Stories and Legal Discourse, 17 Harv. Women’s L. J. 185 (1994), 15 Chicano-Latino L. Rev. 1 (1994)

When Margaret Montoya composed Máscaras, Trenzas, y Greñas: Un/Masking the Self While Un/Braiding Latina Stories and Legal Discourse (hereinafter Máscaras), she was doing what she always does: making and marking history. Published in 1994 concurrently by the Harvard Women’s Law Journal[1] and the UCLA Chicano-Latino Law Review,[2] Máscaras was emblematic both of a time and a life. It embodied a breakthrough in legal scholarship, and helped to catalyze a paradigm shift within the U.S. legal academy that is both accomplished and lively today. Though perhaps this was not well understood then, it should be by now.

In 1994, women of color had just begun to penetrate legal academia, and among them Latinas were a true rarity. Like other groups historically excluded from the academy, women of color had begun breaking barriers and working their way through mainstream institutions in the 1970s, and by the 1990s were beginning to reach the unfriendly gates of the legal professorate. Along the way, they had to do, on the fly, many of the things that people still write about to survive and prosper in hostile or indifferent institutions.[3] At that time, the “imperial” academy reigned with near hegemony.[4] Realism had been substantially assimilated and domesticated, while the critical legal scholars had been decimated, scattered, and almost silenced.[5]

Under these personal and structural circumstances, Professor Montoya and her academic generation pioneered overlapping fields of legal studies sharing and blending a critical and outsider perspective. Whether in critical race theory, feminist legal theory, LatCrit theory or queer legal theory, women of color have been at the forefront.[6] They have altered the intellectual landscape forever with the force of their ideas and the persistence of their examples, with an impact that has spanned both substance and method. Substantively, women of color have refused to accept the unstated premises and imperatives of the legal or social status quo, and have begun their work with challenges to oftentimes-hidden foundations. Their counter-normative pioneering has helped reshape fields of law ranging from employment to property to criminal. It has helped to expose and destabilize the grip of patriarchy and other identity-based ideologies of inequality over law and policy, and over culture and society.[7]

Methodologically, women have challenged analytical abstraction and uncritical empiricism, insisting instead that voices from the “bottom” be heard.[8] They have sought to center in knowledge and policy the insights born of experience with subordination. For decades, they have worked diligently and brilliantly to promote a critical kind of contextualized empiricism focusing on “shifting bottoms”[9] in a way that combines social science and experiential knowledge to challenge the limitations and impositions of academic imperialism.

Notably, that generation of pioneers championed the technique of storytelling as legal method.[10] This turn to critical legal narrative became a potent method for conveying substantive insights and knowledge historically kept suppressed or marginal by the norms, incentives, and politics of imperial scholarship. When dismissed by self-anointed gatekeepers of imperial tastes,[11] they persisted in the novel combination of traditional and non-traditional approaches to legal scholarship.[12] While the terms of engagement were seriously in contest, Margaret Montoya captured the sense of that historical moment:

The exploration of personal agency through autobiography and the seizure of discursive space formerly denied to Latinas are regenerative acts which can transform self-understanding and reclaim for all Latinas the right to define ourselves and to reject uni-dimensional interpretations of our personal and collective experience . . . The emphasis of critical scholarship (critical race theory, feminist jurisprudence, critical legal studies) on narrative affirms those of us who are Outsiders working within the objectivist orientation of the legal academy and validates our experimentation with innovative formats and themes in our teaching and in our scholarship.[13]

But this work on substance and method went beyond the advancement of criticality and narrativity from outsider perspectives.

Moved not only by a sense of history but also by a sense of mission, Professor Montoya and her generation strove to reconstruct the very being of the profession to help bridge existing gulfs between law and justice. Pushing always for the linkage of theory to action—of legal knowledge to social change—they have modeled a new kind of academic activism that values service and teaching as much as scholarship in the pursuit of equality, opportunity, and dignity. They not only have launched new lines of inquiry and fields of scholarship but also have refined the very basics of the profession to make academic work holistically relevant to social justice in personal, collective, and sustained terms.

As a result, legal criticality has prospered. From the vantage point of the present, we know that Máscaras has helped to make and mark this history. It is no coincidence that Margaret Montoya of Las Vegas, New Mexico, composed this text when and how she did. It is no coincidence that we celebrate it today.

Combining the granular with the structural, the institutional with the individual, the personal with the political, Máscaras reflects and projects the convergence of three major forces. The first is Margaret Montoya herself—her life, her story, her heritage, her family, her times. The second is the unfolding of “diversity” as a social and political phenomenon across the U.S., both within the academy and throughout society, in the mid-to-late twentieth century. The third is the emergence of critical and outsider studies from within the legal academy of the United States at precisely this moment, which has opened new chapters and possibilities in the academic production of legal scholarship. This text seamlessly, magically interweaves these three themes or forces to become the classic it has become today.

Opening with a choice bold even today, Professor Montoya begins with a revealing and powerful account of growing up Mexican in mid-1950s New Mexico, and the epistemological and political ramifications of that upbringing which were to follow:

I remember being assigned to tutor another second-grader in reading. He wore denim overalls, had his hair shaved for some medical procedure and spoke mostly Spanish. I think of him now, and perhaps thought of him then, as being exposed—exposed by not being able to read, exposed by not having a uniform, exposed by not having hair, exposed by not knowing English. From my perspective as a child, it all seemed connected somehow—Spanish-ness, sickness, poverty and ignorance.

By the age of seven, I was keenly aware that I lived in a society that had little room for those who were poor, brown, or female. I was all three. I moved between dualized worlds: private/public, Catholic/secular, poverty/privilege, Latina/Anglo. I moved between these worlds. My trenzas and school uniform were a cultural disguise. They were also a precursor for the more elaborate mask I would later develop.[14]

Using the metaphor of the mask, the article then takes us through a detailed, deep (and sometimes sadly common or familiar) review of the multiple and varied ways in which identity and power intersect in law and society to privilege some at the expense of others.

Expanding the scope of this framing, Professor Montoya uses trenzas—braids—and greñas—unruly hair—to explore and narrate the process of un/masking set up by the use of the máscaras metaphor. This process of masking and unmasking produces, in different ways at different times, acts of revelation—unmaskings that reveal the unruly roots or circumstances of our othered identities, the exposed greñas resulting from the display of characteristics or features disfavored from a mainstream, privileged, power perspective. Other times, the project of masking amounts to the careful arrangement of the self for presentation to the forces and structures of power and opportunity—the braiding of one’s self to present an image or package acceptable to gatekeepers of law and society. Thus, máscaras, trenzas, and greñas reflect the un/masking of the self while un/braiding Latina stories and legal discourse. These three constructs provide the essential discursive toolkit for Professor Montoya’s pathbreaking articulation of critical antisubordination perspective in this article.

Reflecting that upbringing and the socio-cultural circumstances of her generation in legal education, the text juxtaposes the worlds of personal origins with that of academic success to expose and learn from the dynamics of approval, inclusion, humiliation, or disregard that humans execute daily to shape destiny. It is an enduring case study in the engagement of the personal and the structural, of the systemized macro-aggression and of the personalized micro-aggression.[15] The stories of class discussions, including the pregnancy and prosecution of Josephine Chavez—apparently the only Latina to be encountered in a legal casebook at that time—are riveting.[16] Whether in criminal law questioning criminality itself or in tax class trying to discuss the coupons of negotiable bonds,[17] the key point again and again is the un/masking of law as power. And in centering narrative, Professor Montoya demonstrates powerfully that “telling stories” is very much a profoundly knowledge-producing method.

As Professor Montoya notes, storytelling is a core practice in law.[18] Clients tell stories to their lawyers, witnesses tell stories to police, lawyers tell stories to jurors, and reporters sell all those stories to the public. Given its pervasiveness, storytelling should come as no big deal when encountered in legal scholarship. Yet, it is; perhaps, because narrative often helps to articulate critical stances toward the status quo with a force that imperial “analysis” often enough cannot.

When the rhetorics and methods of “law” did not permit critical insights to be effectively expressed in conventional or imperial terms, the turn to narrative created new possibilities for sharing insights and producing knowledge. As Máscaras underscores, these are not stories told for their own sake, but to illuminate obscured social realities and catalyze remedial action. Professor Montoya explains it this way, specifically about the Chavez case:

Embedded in Josephine Chavez’s unfortunate experience are various lessons about criminal law specifically and about the law and its effects more generally. The opinion’s characteristic avoidance of context and obfuscation of important class-and gender-based assumptions is equally important to the ideological socialization and doctrinal development of law students.  Maintaining a silence about Chavez’s ethnic and socio-economic context lends credence to the prevailing perception that there is only one relevant reality.[19]

As Professor Montoya has shown in this text and a thousand times since, she never has been one to remain silent—even though law school’s “training” made her feel that way for a while.

It bears emphasis that, in the 1980s and 1990s, a critical outsider stance was riskier than it is today. Those were days when most barriers remained intact, including those based on color and sex. Professor Montoya herself was the first Latina admitted to Harvard Law School. That was 1972. As Professor Montoya observes in Máscaras, “in 1989, only 6.2% of Mexican-Americans over age 35 had completed four years of college, as compared with 20.6% of the non-Hispanic population.”[20] Half a decade later, when Máscaras was published, 1.9% of U.S. law professors were women of color.[21] Illustrating the demographics and dynamics of the moment, 15.2% of assistant professors in 1994–95 were women of color.[22] Nearly a decade later, in 2002–03, the numbers were 4.3% and 13.6%, respectively.[23] Pause a moment to reflect on the demographics and discourses of all those rooms and conferences for all those years. For two decades, the odds have been that Professor Montoya found herself a “society of one” in most professional contexts.[24] In any given workplace situation, she was making and marking history.

Pioneering is a rough and lonely business, attractive only retrospectively, if at all. This is how Professor Montoya phrased it:

Mine is the first generation of Latinas to be represented in colleges and universities in anything approaching significant numbers. We are now represented in virtually every college and university. But, for the most part, we find ourselves isolated. Rarely has another Latina gone before us. Rarely is there another Latina whom we can watch to try and figure out all the little questions about subtextual meaning, about how dress or speech or makeup are interpreted in this particular environment.[25]

Professor Montoya and her generation had little choice but to become critical and outsider pioneers. That they have done so with much courage, creativity, and love is a testament to their resilience, character, and vision. That they never shirked danger is a gift to us all.

The stories preserved in Máscaras thereby also serve as stark reminders of the legal academy and culture constructed by this nation; an academy and culture designed specifically to filter out folks like Professor Montoya. For example:

In 1922 the Yale Board of Admissions was deeply concerned about the “Jewish problem.” In that same year, a Yale psychologist warned the state bar association that “this invasion of foreign stock” was undermining the “finer professional spirit and feeling which characterizes the professional training of the typical American lawyer.” Dean Swan of the Yale Law School suggested to the state bar in 1923 that students with foreign parents should be required to remain longer in college than native-born Americans before being admitted to law school. At a Yale faculty meeting in the same year, Swan argued against using grades as a basis for limiting enrollment to the law school, because such a development would admit students of “foreign” rather than “old American” parentage, and Yale would become a school with an “inferior student body ethically and socially.”[26]

This exemplar shows the tightly interlinked operation of racism, nativism, and related supremacies in the design, construction, and consolidation of legal education and culture in the United States. This is the carefully drawn baseline of structural exclusion based on neocolonial identity politics that critical outsider scholars and activists have been struggling to overcome and reform—a baseline grudgingly modified at the margins in recent decades, but never unhinged ideologically from its exclusionary designs and effects.

Once again bringing together the personal/biographical with the intellectual/social, Professor Montoya concludes Máscaras with an illustrative note on the legal politics of language, identity and power. This section of the article tellingly is titled, “Pursuing Mestizaje (Transculturation) in the Legal Academy,” and begins with legal history and personal circumstance already entwined:

The Euro-American conquest of the Southwest and Puerto Rico resulted in informal and formal prohibitions against the use of Spanish for public purposes. So by inscribing myself in legal scholarship as mestiza, I seek to occupy common ground with Latinas/os in this hemisphere and others, wherever situated, who are challenging “Western bourgeois ideology and hegemonic racialism with the metaphor of transculturation” . . . incorporating Spanish words, sayings, literature and wisdom can have positive ramifications for those in the academy and in the profession, and for those to whom we render legal services.[27]

In the end, then, this is the legacy of legalized injustice that forms Margaret Montoya’s antisubordination agenda; this is the wreckage of history that her work and life now help to make and mark anew.

Two decades on, Professor Montoya and others of her generation are nearing retirement from the academy as new generations enter its ranks.[28] The legacy of academic activism that critical outsider pioneering has accumulated in the twenty years since Máscaras was published is thus our collective inheritance literally—the unfinished mission of our inter-generational work as law professors committed to antisubordination change in multidimensional terms that span race, sex, class, orientation, disability, and other constructs of privilege and oppression. Pushing this “rebellious” agenda along is the challenge awaiting the new (and coming) generations of critical outsider scholars, lawyers, organizers, and activists.[29] What comes next is the history that remains for us to write and produce, but we have strong and vibrant foundations from which to proceed. And for their living, breathtaking achievement, social justice legal studies in the U.S. and beyond will be always indebted to Margaret Montoya and her compañeras de color, who have unmasked law and pioneered critical outsider studies with grace and grit during the tumultuous decades since the late 1980s and 1990s.

Bravo! Kudos! Mil gracias por todo!

Cite as:  Francisco Valdes, Unmasking Law: Women of Color Pioneering Critical Outsider Scholarship, Harv. J. L. & Gender (Feb. 2013) (reflection on Margaret Montoya, Máscaras, Trenzas, y Greñas: Un/Masking the Self While Un/Braiding Latina Stories and Legal Discourse, 17 Harv. Women’s L. J. 185 (1994), 15 Chicano-Latino L. Rev. 1 (1994)), www.harvardjlg.com/2013/03/unmasking-law-women-of-color-pioneering-critical-outsider-scholarship.

All the leaves are brown, and a gray sky
Washes (as a mother bathes her little ones)
The ownmost sadness of a dry-eyed day.
Her tears withheld, more triste than any crying,
The wintry seeming of a cold November dusk.

Holding his breath inside, closed up tight,
She had buoyed the knotted nets, been cast out
And hauled in, hand over hardened hand,
Like a hollow ball of cloudy glass, blue-green.
But now her own hands hold her liebchen down.

He asks, Where are the children?
She shows him, for answer, where the splashing
Stopped — shows him sadness untouched
By the categories, forlorn things
all broken by their transit in the sea.

1.  Notes to the poem

A mood is set by the opening line, which recalls “California Dreamin’” by The Mamas and the Papas: “All the leaves are brown and the sky is gray.”[1]  Together, “brown” (before the pause in the first line) and “down” (at the close of the second stanza), almost speak the unspeakable word: drown.

Although the poem’s action perhaps matches many cases, one of them – Commonwealth v. Tempest[2] – stands out in my memory.  I encountered Tempest when my colleague Stephen Morse workshopped his paper, “Undiminished Confusion in Diminished Capacity,” which begins with an account of the case and a discussion of the defendant’s mens rea.[3]  Stephen quotes from Patricia Tempest’s confession:

I got up quarter to eleven or something like that.  My husband had already left to go to work.  I gave Gregory his breakfast.  He was already up watching T.V.  It was the last day for kindergarten.  I was packing him a lunch for his picnic.  I gave him juice with vitamin E.  I told him he had to get a bath.  He didn’t want to go right away.  He wanted to finish watching his program so I told him to come up after he did.  I went upstairs and filled the tub.  I filled it more than normal.  When he came upstairs he noticed and said it was kind of deep.  He got in the tub himself.  I washed the front of his body, then I told him to turn around on his stomach.  He told me I didn’t wash his face yet.  So, I washed his face.  I told him to turn on his stomach. When he did I pushed his face down.  He struggled and cried, “Mommy you’re drowning me.”  He kept fighting for a couple of minutes – it could have been longer.  He still tried to move a little but I kept his head under until he stopped.  He didn’t move any more so I got out of the tub, I had gotten into the tub to hold him down.  I didn’t know how long it would take to drown, so I left him there in the tub.  He was on his back.  His face was sideways.  I sat there and told him, “I had to kill you.  I’m sorry.”  I went into the bedroom, put the television on and watched the movie.  I went downstairs and got a banana and ate it, and also took my medicine.  I came back upstairs and watched another program – $20,000 pyramid [sic]. My husband came home at 25 of 4. I told him I killed Greg.  I’d drowned him.  He went upstairs and came back and looked very sad.[4]

My poem “Sadness and the Criminal Law” considers the truth in Mrs. Tempest’s description: “He went upstairs and came back and looked very sad.”  This is a truth in perception: he looked sad to her.  It is also a truth in description: her flat description of her actions is sad.  It is as if the sadness in her way of recounting events reflects back to me my own experience encountering her case particularly (and criminal law generally).  It is as if Mrs. Tempest were describing my reading of criminal law cases, and (later) my teaching of criminal law.  (I went downstairs from my office, so to speak, and came back and looked very sad.)

2.  Sadness in the classroom

Long ago, having considered the available Criminal Law casebooks, I chose to teach the course from Lloyd Weinreb’s Criminal Law.[5]  The casebook opened with a case study that provided not only the usual judicial opinions, notes, and questions, but also newspaper articles and other sources enabling (I hoped) a wider and deeper look into the human and social contexts within which the criminal law operates.  Weinreb’s case study was People v. Chavez.[6]  Later, reading Professor Montoya’s account of her experience as a first-year law student in class discussion of the Chavez case, I wondered whether students had found our conversations about the case integrating or alienating.

Each year, as I prepare to teach Professor Montoya’s article to our first-year law students at the University of Southern California, I learn anew how hard it is to face criminal law’s sad stories honestly, without evasion.  From her student’s seat, Margaret Montoya questioned otherwise unexamined limits to the inquiry.  Why, in our focus on whether the baby was far enough along in the birth process to count as a human being whose killing can be homicide under state law, are we ignoring the young Latina on trial: her poverty, her reasons for concealing her pregnancy from her family?  A judicial opinion “sensitive to her story, told in her own words,” would ask unflinching questions.

What did it take to conceal her pregnancy from her familia? With whom did she share her secret?  How could she have given birth with “the doors open and no lights… turned on?”  How did she do so without waking the others who were asleep?  How did she brace herself as she delivered the baby into the toilet? Did she shake as she cut the umbilical cord?[7]

Other questions also cry out for answers.  If the mother failed to exercise due care toward the baby, what about the father?  Would the baby have lived if there had been a way to surrender the newborn to the care of others?  If personhood consists in an integration of the masks we wear,[8] how shall the law understand and vindicate the worth of a baby whose very existence was masked from the start, and who died before having any chance to question, bifurcate, integrate, and braid?

Professor Montoya teaches that not only legal issues but also selves can present hard cases.  Like the competing reasons that make issues hard to decide, competing masks or symbols[9] – along with their correlates, competing loyalties and aspirations – complicate selfhood and authenticity or integrity.  Shall the student who is grieving for a stillborn child speak up in the class discussion?  The student who has had an abortion?  The student whose sister is in prison?  Is there a way to speak that honors the personal truths bound up with those experiences?  How shall I relate myself to the issue without deforming the one or the other?

Though we are not similarly situated with one another in relation to any single criminal law story, I believe that many of us become hard cases unto ourselves as we first read the criminal law, prepare for the class discussions, and choose not only what to say (and what not to say) but what to permit ourselves to feel.  Encountering death without any of the devices (such as elegies, eulogies, libations, mourning’s black dress) that express grief in socially recognized ways, we do not know what to do with our sadness.  Strange sadness, do you visit me on behalf of the dead baby, or on behalf of the young woman who hid her pregnancy and gave birth in darkness on the toilet?  Or do you visit me on behalf of sisters and brothers who never got to say “sister” or “brother,” or on behalf of the hurts and harms of poverty and discrimination?  I think you visit me because I have not died to fellow-feeling, and you would not have me die.

Though a form of fellow-feeling, sadness is not the same as compassion.  Compassion disposes us to help the sufferer whose suffering we feel as if it were our own.  It is a moral disposition, orienting us to act toward others as we would wish others to act toward us.  Sadness does not similarly incline us toward action; indeed, sadness sometimes might make all action difficult to undertake.  Moreover, sadness is not as centrally ethical as compassion.  In the depths of sadness, I do not know what it is to do unto others as I would be done by, because I do not know how I would be done by.  Though we emerge from the depths of sadness to carry out the work of justice and judgment, we do not (and should not) break free from sadness altogether.  If I am to do the work of judgment and punishment, if I am to accept responsibility for the social distribution of opportunities and harms, I had rather do so in sadness than in anger or cool unfeeling.

Because it is a kind of unknowing, we can speak of the mystery of sadness.  Even if we knew everything there is to know about Ms. Tempest, her life, and her family and circumstances; even if we knew everything about Ms. Chavez; we would still live in the mystery of sadness.  And so we confront a problem that is both personal and institutional: how to honor the mystery of sadness without benefit of liturgy.  The culture and conventions of the law school classroom afford us no suitable moment of silence, no prayer for the departed, no blessing.  All the more, then, should we be aware that each hour in the criminal law classroom we stand within the mystery of sadness: stand there without benefit of devices for averting inappropriate affect, without words for warming our hearts against the cold, without gestures warding off the violence we do ourselves when we deny the very structures of our human existence.

When I first read Margaret E. Montoya’s revolutionary article, Máscaras, Trenzas, y Greñas: Un/Masking the Self While Un/Braiding Latina Stories and Legal Discourse,[2] I was a young law student at West Virginia University College of Law actively seeking to expand my doctrinal readings with theoretical readings in critical race theory and critical legal studies. I came across this article by chance; it was one of those random LexisNexis searches that many law students conduct. When I read the article, I drew several connections that guided my exploration of the idea of the mask. The first was to The Fugees’s “The Mask” from The Score.[3] The second came a little later after I had seen the movie, Heading South, where one of the characters says, “Beware, sir. It’s hard to tell the good masks from the bad, but everybody wears one.”[4] In this article, I will discuss the importance of Montoya’s mask, her máscara. I first explain the importance of the mask for Montoya and in the literature that I see as necessary to comprehending the complexity of Montoya’s mask.[5] To do this I draw on several disparate sources to extract the meanings of the mask and the implications for legal scholars and activists. This piece helps position Montoya not only as contributing to LatCrit scholarship and feminist jurisprudence, but also as contributing to an intellectual tradition of theorizing the mask by expanding the rules of the game, by taking the work scholars have completed for years to theorize the intersections of performance, subjectivity, and identity and making it relevant and compassionate for current social justice struggles. Throughout this article I am also concerned with Montoya’s lasting LatCrit[6] legacy, which has been evident at the most basic level in the tremendous number of citations her article has garnered inside the legal academy and beyond. Lastly, I discuss the ways in which Montoya’s mask remains a relevant consideration for critical race and feminist legal theory. Montoya’s article is central to the pantheon of critical race/latina/o critical theory scholarship and it is an honor and indeed a necessity to take account of it twenty years later.

I. Montoya’s Mask

Montoya’s mask has its genesis in a tremendous literature base, much of which concerns (or should concern) legal scholars. By unpacking that literature base, scholars might better be able to discern the broad applicability of Montoya’s mask to a host of legal issues. In this section I consider the roots of theories of the mask and also the ways in which the mask has helpfully been applied outside academia.[7]

This exploration begins some time ago. René Descartes, the famous theorizer of existence, in his Preliminaries and Observations, wrote:

Actors, called upon the stage, put on a mask so that we cannot see blush on their faces. So, as I am about to mount the stage of the world where I have been a spectator so far, I advanced masked.[8]

I read Descartes, as one ought to, with a critical eye. I am informed by the work of Judith Butler who has discussed the importance of performativity to ontological conceptions of existing in the world as well as epistemological ways of disseminating and translating knowledge.[9] I also have in mind the complication of the traditional divide between the body and the mind where, for example, Gilbert Ryle troubles Descartes with his characterization of Descartes’s theory as the “ghost in the machine”[10] as well as Gloria Anzaldúa’s mestizaje,[11] or the blurring of binaries in favor of a “both/and” construction of subjectivity.[12] Anzaldúa is, of course, particularly concerned with the complexities of articulating a Latina identity in the matrix of gender, race, ethnicity, and class politics in the United States, which makes her a necessary voice to have in one’s mind when discussing Montoya. Montoya calls on all of these thinkers as she exposes the masks we wear daily. Although Montoya is calling into effect a specific notion of the masked Latina, her theories apply to us all as we advance upon the stage of life. Montoya’s masterful contribution may then be seen as resurrecting the insights of Descartes, despite his failings, in light of the important ideas of gender and race performance in and around the university.

Descartes is theorizing the permanence of the mask. We are always wearing one or more. The distinction between drama and life is negligible. Even in our spectatorship, when we say, “I will not participate,” we are engaged in mask-play. So, the task of making intelligible the body is finding the blush on actors’ faces. We cannot engage in the critical work necessary for change without this sort of un-masking. We must find the blush, make legible the emotional and affective.

Montoya made a similar dramatic analysis in her article when she wrote:

Throughout history, masking and unmasking concepts have been used to explore the inner self—the person hiding behind the public face. These themes can be found in works produced by Euro-American males included in the traditional academic canon. Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage/And all the men and women merely players,” illustrates this idea. Figuring out how to present oneself in public has elements of a theatrical performance for everyone.[13]

Here Montoya theorized the broad applicability of the mask to all. The mask is not the privilege of the few but the burden of the many. Theorizing the mask, for Montoya, is not solely about articulating feminist and Latina identities; it is about understanding the role of power relations and the dramatic cover required to cope with an aggressive and otherizing world. This important insight speaks volumes about the potential of un-masking to many critical interpretations of law as well as scholarship across disciplines and in many activist communities. Montoya has given scholars and activists a tremendous new way to put to work a theory that we know intimately, yet have theorized haphazardly.

Lest we move too quickly, Montoya began her article artfully, “Using personal narrative, this Article examines the various masks (‘máscaras’) used to control how people respond to us and the important role such masks play in the subordination of Outsiders.”[14] From this simple beginning, Montoya alerts us to the central facets of her mask. First, it may be exposed by personal narrative, something I liken to truth-telling. This truth-telling casts aside the mask, interrogates it, problematizes it, and challenges it with a new form of subjectivity. Second, masks are multitudinous. There is never one mask, but instead people wear multiple masks as they navigate a complex world. Third, masks are imbricated in power relations, informing the way others engage us. Fourth, masks subjugate. Masks produce the conditions of possibility for Outsiders to be maligned. Masks function as a second skin, a corporeal reconfiguration masking over the real body. In essence, the mask challenges corporeality by placing the corpus with the mask as skin upon itself. This is to say that the mask becomes the corporeal body. A new visible corporeality transforms the un-masked corporeal form into a masked double-skinned creature whose insides eventually rot away.

Think of Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz’s articulation of the relationship between the King’s two bodies.[15] What existed in this scenario, faced with the coming demise of the King’s corporeal reality, was the notion that the King lived beyond the corporeal body. This move was intentional because the King could not survive his corporeal trappings, yet the continuity of the sovereign was central to the righteousness of his monarchical power. So, the King had to exist above and beyond his corporeal body. The corporeal King mattered less and less than the mystic King that never died. The second body was an “abstract physiological fiction of a sublime, quasi-angelic body, a body of immortal flesh that was thereby seen to enjoy both juridical and medical immunity.”[16] So too do masks exist beyond the corporeal reality of Outsiders, forcing them to be outside yet in, never breaking free from the mainstream Insider corporeality. The mask is quasi-angelic in Montoya’s theory in that it is the pristine persona that we perform to be seen as pure and good, and applies to notions of the “model minority”[17] and “good Negro.”[18] Insiders need masks to fit well because the masked Outsider is one that could live even as the corporeal Outsider, the “real life person,” passes away. That oppositional relationship helps constitute the Insider. The mask is not simply a strategy the Outsider uses to avoid the microaggressions of the Insider; it is a strategy the Insider encourages to make the Outsider more like the Insider and also a constitutive strategy to validate the Insider as Insider.

Not to be outdone by his French predecessor, Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Gay Science, wrote:

What is and remains popular is the mask! So let them all continue to go their way, all those masklike elements in the melodies and cadenzas, in the leaps and gaieties of the rhythm of these operas! Ancient life, too! What can one understand about it when one does not understand the delight in the mask, the good conscience in everything mask-like![19]

Nietzsche tells us the mask is popular. We love them even as they make unintelligible our lives, as they mask subjective corporeality with an objective standard of the corporeal, rendering us objects, not subjects. In other words, the mask ossifies subjectivities into objective states of being. Nietzsche highlights the choice of wearing the mask. It is not as though the Insiders placed them on our faces and we walked away reticently. Part of the insidiousness of the mask is that Outsiders are complicit in their adornment of corporeal reality. Masks are specific performative elements of our identity.[20] We could choose not to wear them and face the consequences, which are quite often too great (being labeled as rebellious, aggressive or angry, for example, and the subsequent beatings, lynchings, and mob violence). So we choose to wear them. How can we expect to read the body, to read the subject, when the mask is always-already there? It seems that un-masking helps to destabilize the privileged position of the mask and Montoya has provided us with a clear justification for this un-masking. She wrote:

Our conceptual trenzas, our rebraided ideas, even though they may appear unneat or greñudas to others, suggest new opportunities for unmasking the subordinating effects of legal discourse. Our rebraided ideas, the trenzas of our multicultural lives, offer personally validating interpretations for the máscaras we choose to wear. My masks are what they are, in Santayana’s words, merely “arrested expressions and . . . echoes of feelings,” the cuticles that protect my heart.[21]

We must accept our masks not as impediments to our progress, but as sites of contestation. They are with us; there is no escaping them, wishing them away, or abolishing them from our lives. That knowledge is empowering. It positions us as controllers of our own destiny able to embrace the mask while also critiquing its pernicious effects. It positions us as having the ability to embrace the difficulties in front of us in our toiling for a better world. When we are able to do that, we may be able to engage in effective engagement not only with our own ideas of subjectivity, but with collective subjectivities to form meaningful political actions.

Oscar Wilde, in “The Artist as Critic,” an essay in his collection Intentions wrote, “Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”[22] Perplexing as this is, Wilde reveals the subtly complex relationship between truth and falsity. The relationship between masked-ness and truth-telling is significant in that in falsity, in the wearing of masks, truth may not only be maintained, but also fostered. If, as Wilde suggests, one tells the truth when protected by the mask, what happens when one removes the mask? If the only way we get at truth is when masked, we must take account of the complex relationship between truthfully presenting the self and engaging in truth-telling. This of course suggests that there is a link between the mask and truth-telling.

Online forums, anonymous blogging, and comments on websites all evidence this masking procedure and the complexity of truth to our mask-wearing personas. We are afraid of truth and truth-telling, but our quest for truths is not helped by our mask-wearing, it is only impeded by it.[23] In a world where truth comes masked, truth does not come at all. Montoya may be read then as complicating these notions of truth-telling by encouraging a politics that is about truth, yet recognizes the ways in which the ever-present mask mediates truth. This is no small insight indeed.

Walter Benjamin, in Berlin Childhood around 1900, wrote of the “arsenal of masks” one wields as a child to enact specific subjectivities through the presentation of the subjectivity sought to be experienced.[24] Benjamin emphasizes the multiplicity of masks just as Montoya does.[25] Compare Montoya who wrote, “This image with its dichotomized character fails to capture the multiplicity, fluidity and interchangeability of faces, masks and identities upon which we rely.”[26] Montoya takes a Benjaminian twist here, articulating the multiplicity of masks as the latticework of identity construction.

Masks are ways for us to be comfortable in the uncomfortable. They are tools. No matter what misgivings we may have about masks, they have utility. Childhood makes this all too clear as we grapple with a confusing world and evolving and uneasy impressions of the self. Making legible the body, un-masking, removing the corporal mask in favor of the corporeal body, is a work against utility. It is not easy. It demands hard work. Montoya’s narrative is a touching testament to the importance of such revolutionary subjective change. We cannot seek to understand the body without an un-comfortableness that will be very likely foreign to us. Masks allow us to imagine the world we want, but they also inhibit the realization of that world. This double function makes the mask self-referential. It affords us experience while blocking that experience. In this sense, then, masks seem inescapable, but through work like Montoya’s and Anzaldúa’s we can begin this work. We can wrestle control from our masks.

Benjamin also described philosophical works as masks, writing “each complete work is the death-mask of its intuition.”[27] If this is true, what possible hope can there be for un-masking and for reclaiming subjectivity? Benjamin need not be read so tragically. It is true that the work we do is often not as wonderful as we had hoped—that our grand revolutions fall victim to the pragmatic considerations of family, career, and safety. We cannot right all wrongs. We cannot challenge every oppressive system, and we cannot expect to radically break from a system that is so interwoven in the very fiber of our being. Putting into action our ideas makes those ideas something else. Our masks forever alter our identity. Masks render our ideas unlike the kernel of their origin. They are death-masks. Montoya again echoed Benjamin in her analysis of an Aztec sculpture. She described the sculpture in this way:

I have a clay mask made by Mexican artisans that captures this idea but from a different perspective. The outermost mask is a white skeleton face wearing a grimace. The second layer shows a face with an aquiline nose and a goatee suggesting the face of the Spaniard, the colonizer of indigenous Mexico. This second mask parts to show the face of a pensive Aztec. This clay sculpture suggests the indigenous Indian preserved behind the false masks, the death mask, the conquistador mask. In other words, the sculpture represents all of us who have been colonized and acculturated—who have succeeded in withholding a precious part of our past behind our constructed public personas.[28]

Something new is born, but the original intent is dead. In Montoya’s statue, there is no more Aztec, only masked Aztec and masked colonizer. There is no reclaiming of the original, no getting back to some essential notion of Outsider-ness. We would be wise to recognize Benjamin’s idea because it describes both the importance of realizing our world is mediated by the process of putting ideas and identities into action as well as finding hope for new beginnings in our struggles. After all, the death-mask is only a mask, not the central tenet of our corporeality, nor the final word on our theorizing or activism. Montoya positions us to reclaim life, to challenge the death-mask, not because our intuitions can be reclaimed, but because the death-mask gives us opportunities for new braiding opportunities. This is where the trenzas can help us.

Frantz Fanon succinctly names this mask White in his careful consideration of the Black psyche in an oppressive White world in Black Skin, White Masks.[29] Fanon makes most explicit the connection between race and mask-play. His analysis demonstrates the psychic torment of advancing masked, of struggling to make the corporeal something beyond the mask. His work informs Montoya’s application by grounding the theory of the mask in the larger expanse of race and postcolonial critique.[30] Montoya’s masks seem qualitatively different, however. What she seems to see is a different world than the overtly racial world in which Fanon is writing. Montoya described a world where racism functioned more subtly and admittedly more dangerously, making racism pass as non-existent or solved. Outsiders and Insiders ought not forget that while racism was more overtly violent and indeed even extolled in earlier years, the more subtle forms of racism that manifest themselves in racially coded rhetoric, wry stares, and jokes, are dangerous all the more because of their ability to circulate in society without the critical attention overt racism receives.

The permanence of masks bears further consideration. André Berthiaume, in Contretemps,[31] wrote, “We all wear masks, and the time comes when we cannot remove them without removing some of our own skin.”[32] Montoya echoed Berthiaume when she wrote:

For Outsiders, unmasking is a holistic experience: I do not have separate masks for my female-ness and Latina-ness. The construction of my public persona involves all that I am. My public face is an adjustment to the present and a response to the past. Any unmasking resonates through the pathways of my memory. For Outsiders, the necessity of unmasking has been historical. Strategies are passed on from one generation to another to accommodate, to resist, to subvert oppressive forces. Involuntary unmasking is painful, it evokes echoes of past hurts, hurts one has suffered, and hurts one has heard stories about.[33]

Both indicate the difficulty of un-masking. For Berthiaume, the mask tears away the skin when removed. For Montoya, the forced un-masking is holistic and dangerous. Un-masking, while productive, carries with it a concomitant risk of harm to the subject. It is painful on a metaphorical, spiritual, and psychological level. In this passage, it would be fair to read the influence of Patricia Williams and Adrien Katherine Wing who have described a theory of spirit injury that seems to mirror the trauma of being masked and the affective confusion of un-masking.[34] Un-masking is valorized, but the act of being un-masked is disdained. Un-masking is a self-imposed act. Being un-masked is a perpetration of the Insider on the Outsider. Here, Montoya reveals an important space of agency. If the self can take control of the masking process, then the self can engage in a positive activist politics.

In 1999, the blockbuster movie adaptation of Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow[35] was made and entitled Sleepy Hollow.[36] In the movie, Johnny Depp, playing the starring role of Ichabod Crane says, “Villainy wears many masks, none of which so dangerous as virtue.”[37] Tim Burton may seem like a strange addition to the scholars mentioned above, yet we must consider the weight of his words and not simply the panache of his multi-million dollar movie full of decadent costumes and unrealistic scientific gadgetry.

One might logically worry that after a string of fairly prominent literary and philosophical figures, a Tim Burton movie magically made its way onto the page. I take this movie, and the tale upon which it was based, very seriously. Virtue is the mask of the Right, the mask of the bankers, the mask of White supremacists, the mask of capitalist oppression, the mask of colorblindness, the mask of the patriarchy. We fall victim to masks when we mis-read them or when we simply read them as infallible truth, genuine subjectivity. When we accept that the mask is what the mask purports to be, we accept the villainy of first impressions and surface appearances. We should heed the warnings of Jean Baudrillard[38] and Jacques Lacan,[39] who warn us about the complexities of language and the ways in which language may obfuscate the truth just as masks may. Montoya gives us hope still. Through un-masking, Outsiders can challenge the villainy of the dominant order, the status quo, the complacent masses. Through a praxis of un-masking, we make intelligible our world of symbols, preventing villainy from doing its dastardly work. Montoya is an agent writ large, a true revolutionary. There may be no greater pursuit than un-masking villainy at every turn so as to bring subjects closer to an understanding of truth.

Outsiders need not look to French theory[40] for eruditions on the mask however (nor Tim Burton). Tom Robbins, in his biting satirical style wrote, in Jitterbug Perfume ,[41] “There are people in the world who can wear whale masks and people who cannot, and the wise know to which group they belong.”[42] Robbins is describing the important self-awareness necessary to understand mask-play, a notion that echoes Montoya clearly. Outsiders must do work to understand how they and others wear masks. We know masks are out there. We know we wear them. But, we do not spend much time thinking about these questions. Montoya contributes to a complex intellectual trajectory of theorizing the mask, a trajectory not yet complete. Robbins suggests that there are some people, those who are most wise, who know and understand the ways masks function and how they are put to work. In this way, Robbins suggests a reading of Ichabod Crane’s mask as villainy in light of wisdom as well as the wisdom inherent in Montoya’s critical approach.

II. The Mask as Part of the Crit Canon

Montoya’s mask has resonated far outside the legal academy.[43] Given the importance of the mask to the larger project of critical legal studies, not to mention literature, sociology, and philosophy, Outsiders should continue to think critically about the mask as a way to regain the agency lost while being pushed to the outside. Agency will not come without active revolutionary agents. Montoya has given us this tremendous toolbox with which to work. She has described the central role of the mask to Outsiders. We need not restrict mask-work to LatCrit, feminist, or Critical Race projects. The growing discipline of ClassCrit[44] may as well be interested in theories of the mask to describe the ways in which economic forces shape existential realities and articulate and inhibit subject positions.

Because Montoya has intelligently and compassionately brought to life the complexities of Latina identity in a way that resonates not only for Latina/o communities, but also for all communities of disadvantage, we ought to include her article in the canon of critical race literature. Perhaps this has been done. Perhaps including it in some mythical, constructed canon will reduce the appeal of its discussion of Outsider-ness—for how can one be an Outsider and in the canon at once? I am willing to take that risk. Montoya has taught us that we need more narrative, more combinations and braiding, and more un-masking. To critics who might say that Montoya’s struggles of 20 years ago are struggles long past, let us not forget about the lack of diversity in the legal academy, corporate boardrooms, and our law schools. We have come a long way, but we have a long way to go. Let us not forget that there are struggles yet to be fought and that these struggles will demand complex solutions not simple ones. They will demand tremendous braiding of existing theory with new theory, activism and scholarship, as well as a host of subject positions.

III. The mask today and tomorrow

So where does this leave us? The first answer must be that we are left indebted and privileged to be able to call forth the revolutionary spirit of Margaret Montoya to inform our un-masking of dominant discourses. Indeed, without Montoya the LatCrit and feminist jurisprudences we know today would be different, indeed worse off but for her important contribution. Without her clear, powerful voice our masks would remain firmly affixed to our faces. Our corporeality would be in question. With Montoya’s masterful article we are now in a better position to do the un-masking and braiding necessary to navigate a complex world that still holds fast to the necessity of the Outsider as object not subject. Without Montoya our masks would remain as second skins, corporealities of subjugation, embodiments of master discourses, masks so onerous that our subjectivities would still ache for the opportunity to be set free. We honor Margaret Montoya’s crucial work because we must. It is our responsibility to continue her project all the while recognizing precisely what it afforded us in our pursuit of this tremendous responsibility.

Around a year ago, I learned that I had won the election to become BLSA President. As most of you know, I was running against the incredible Julian Hill, a 1L at the time. He has been the best External Vice President that HBLSA could ever hope for, and more importantly, he’s become a true friend and brother.

After I won, I felt happy, renewed, invigorated, ready to serve BLSA. But to be honest, there was still a nugget of insecurity within me, a part of me that really thought – “Damn. A real black guy didn’t win.” A year later, I now can say for sure . . . yes he did.

But it wasn’t without a lot of growth and struggle. Growing up, lacking the melanin to display the race of my mother and beloved grandmother to the world, I had to incorporate an aspect of performance to express my blackness. Unfortunately, with little guidance from the two to four black kids in my school, who were similarly confused, all I could discover was that being black somehow equals being “less than,” while whiteness equals “greater than.” As one black student in my class would remind me, black people are the ones who don’t call a towel a towel, we call it a “rag”; we don’t use cutlery because we pick up our chicken when we eat it; we are more prone to commit crimes, more likely to be angry, and loud. I was mis-educated to believe that to really be black meant to purposefully act as a lesser form of Western human.

Feeling that blacks were to be “less than” made me resentful, a resentment amplified by white society’s unspoken expectations that, as a white-skinned person, I was entitled to be taking full advantage of what was “greater than.” But I sure didn’t feel “greater than.” I hated my skin color for its arrogance, and as a child, I fantasized about magically turning the white people into the “less thans,” all by myself. The world was still broken, and my young mind could not comprehend it.

It was by entering environments in which I could befriend a diverse array of talented, passionate, brilliant black people that my paradigms of blackness began to shift away from lamenting inferiority, towards emphasizing greatness. One of the first places that helped me do this was the Ujamaa dorm at Stanford University –a dorm in which 50% of the residents were black, where the “minority” became the majority, a place for community, empowerment, and unparalleled intellectual discourse.

Ujamaa took me part way down the road towards racial rejuvenation, but to my surprise, it took Harvard Law School of all places to make my journey complete.

As a 1L, I was not in the best place spiritually and emotionally. But I did what I could for BLSA, because I knew how important the black community had been to me in undergrad. Then, to my surprise, our last 2 presidents, Shaylyn and Reese, asked for me to serve as BLSA Secretary for my 2L year. To feel needed by them, by BLSA, gave me just a little extra spark of life.

Ironically, by increasing my leadership role in this black organization, I finally began to see life as less black and white. My white fingers were typing a very black newsletter, and forcing myself to act as “less than” was nowhere to be found in my BLSA Secretary job description.

By March of last year, I found myself, again at Reese’s suggestion, running for HBLSA President. The day after I won, I remember walking in front of the library, and seeing one of our BLSA members, a girl who was not one to mince words. She looked at me and said, “You look different! In a good way.”

I was a bit confused. I hadn’t gotten a new fade. I hadn’t gotten a tan, although I was planning on it. I wasn’t even wearing new kicks.

And then it hit me – I was standing up straight. For the first time I could recall, my shoulders were facing the sky instead of the ground. My eyes focused on the road ahead of me instead of on my shoelaces. What this girl noticed was a man walking on earth who, for the first time, felt like he belonged there. Not just because I was President. But because I was Black and no one could tell me I wasn’t. And I didn’t get to be “Black” by being “less than” – no, I got there by doing the absolute best that I could!

The tragic irony of this is not lost on me – the blackness that now makes me stand up straight is the same blackness that has been misappropriated to weigh down the shoulders of African-Americans for centuries. For so long, we as black people have tended to empower everyone else’s vision of what ourselves should be. But we can dream so much higher on our own.

That’s what we have tried to do in BLSA this year. This year, we in Harvard BLSA have asked: Why meet just one Supreme Court Justice when we can meet two? Why just summer in Martha’s Vineyard, when we can also winter in Sunday River, Maine? Why eat pizza when we can have lobster mac & cheese? Why go to the club dry when we can buy a bottle? And why have a conference where black people worry amongst themselves about community problems, when we can have a conference that shows the entire HLS student body that we are the best organization on campus in spite of these problems?? How’s that for your racial entitlement!

For the officers and myself, HBLSA’s goal this year has been to encourage a positive standard of blackness, so that when we think about our own blackness, we ALL stand up straight, and tall, and strong, the crowns of our heads pointed towards the heavens.

The power you will feel from doing so is second to none. And the first few months I was BLSA president, I craved empowerment so much that I insisted on signing every email “BLSA Power,” a change from the normal closing, “BLSA Love.” BLSA Love was too weak, anyway, I thought.

But as the months progressed, and BLSA members truly became my family members, it became clear that love, the greatest power of them all, was the only word that could describe the energy I felt from all of you. When Anisha would organize exam prayer circles; when 1Ls Victoria and Jaimie would take the lead in organizing community service events; when 4-year-old Lynette would make an outburst during a meeting and everyone would laugh; when 25-year-old Mondaire would make an outburst during a meeting and everyone would laugh; when Julian would organize “Brotha’s Lunches” on Fridays in the Hark. All that wasn’t just power – that was love.

I recently heard a quote from a man named Panache Desai, who says, “we are put in exactly the place we need to be, to love the people that we are around.” Indeed, I do believe that in some way, all our work here—our classes, our student groups, even this conference – has merely been a front, for all of us to be around each other, and to love one another. Now, I am proud to say to the members of the Harvard Black Law Students Association, that, in the words of the great Donny Hathaway – I love you more than you’ll ever know.

And with BLSA love, I thank you all.

I am halfway through my 1L year at Harvard Law School, and I can say without hesitation that this has been the most intellectually stimulating and academically rewarding experience that I have ever had. I am surrounded by brilliant, accomplished people every single day, and I thoroughly enjoy the class discussions in which I get to hear a variety of viewpoints. However, far too often, someone will make a comment so unthinkingly callous that I feel knocked out of the world of law school hypotheticals and into the real world. Sometimes, this is due to the speaker’s unawareness of, or refusal to acknowledge, her own privileged experience.  More often, however, these comments are born of the kind of abstract thinking that we have been encouraged to learn. I certainly did not pick up on every problematic classroom comment by a student or professor last semester, but when I did, my frustration was often shapeless: I felt that something was wrong, but could not precisely articulate what or why. Professor Montoya’s article describes how abstracting legal issues during 1L year served to reinforce the dominant (white, male) narrative. It provided me with a frame for thinking about the law school experience that I did not know I needed until I read it, and that I could not avoid seeing after I did so.

In a world where cold-calling and Socratic dialogue are the norm, it is unsurprising that we, the students, fall back on a variety of familiar arguments to fill in our thinking about the legal issues we are reading about. It is hard enough to tease out complex legal issues, much less to debate their relative merits, in front of 79 other students; to do so without the benefit of relying on arguments that we are comfortable making, in which we feel intellectually secure, would feel nearly impossible. However, because the law school classroom is one that is more often dominated by abstract hypotheticals than complex individuals, it is easy for those argument tropes to take the form of familiar narratives to fill in our expectations about the bare factual situations with which we have been presented. These narratives speak volumes about not only the speaker’s individual experience but also the persistence of cultural tropes that, when examined with a critical eye, are somewhat troubling.

One example of these troubling narratives arose during my Problem Solving Workshop. For 1Ls, the January term at Harvard Law School is a kind of reprieve from the pressure of first semester’s academic grind. The mandatory class purportedly trains students for the realities of legal practice. It is meant to be less abstract and theoretical than a normal first-year course. Over three weeks, teams of 5 students write memos, make presentations, and conduct mock interviews. The second problem in the series of six that we completed during the term was a landlord-tenant issue. The client is a landlord whose tenant has moved into an expensive hotel at the landlord’s expense and threatened to break her lease. The tenant’s complaint? Another tenant has been making sexually explicit comments to her and waiting in the hallways outside of her apartment. She also thinks he might be stalking her because she has been seeing him around town when she goes out. She moved out because does not feel safe and has demanded that the landlord evict the offender – who, in a twist, happens to be the landlord’s nephew.

In discussing the legal rights and liabilities of the involved parties, the most striking part was the dismissal of the legitimacy of the tenant’s reactions. Every student who participated in the first day of class discussion on this problem, regardless of what they argued the landlord’s reaction should be, agreed that she had acted inappropriately in moving out. Further, as the discussion progressed, the professor and students returned the conversation again and again to the possible defenses or explanations that the alleged harasser might have: perhaps it was a practical joke. Perhaps the two had previously dated. Perhaps the alleged harasser was socially awkward and did not know how to appropriately handle his crush on the tenant.

All of these explanations reinforce a social narrative that women who complain of sexual harassment are overreacting, and that the harasser’s behavior is somehow excused. Even more troubling was the “gold digger” narrative: that the woman was “making it all up” and using her vulnerability and sexuality as a tool to manipulate the legal system and score a free vacation. These narratives were irrepressible, even where we had explicitly been told that the tenant was not merely uncomfortable, but worried for her physical safety. It is a testament to the stubborn strength of the “overly sensitive woman cries sexual harassment” narrative trope that these explanations persisted in a room filled with women, many, if not all, of whom have undoubtedly experienced firsthand reasonable fear of encountering physical violence because of their gender.

These suggestions were not presented as narratives with which every student in the class was familiar by virtue of basic cultural literacy, although they were and we were. Students presented them as reasonable and genuine – even original – ideas about what the factual situation might look like (with the exception of one student who, two days into this discussion, finally pointed out that the victim was unlikely to have completely invented the story, since she actually moved out of her home). However, all of the suggestions easily turned the tenant into a character in a familiar story, one in which she has no credibility: the gold digger, the spurned girlfriend, the mean girl who would not give a nice boy a chance. Because the parties in the problem were thin characters for the purpose of illustrating a legal problem, it was easier to import stories onto them, and the stories on which we settled were ones that reinforce traditional power dynamics.

Being aware of this problem is the first step. The next is introducing narratives that challenge, rather than reinforce, existing power structures into class discussions. Professor Montoya describes introducing her unique perspective into the 1L environment, and I see how destabilizing the “traditional” narrative works to change the conversation.  Thank you, Professor Montoya, for giving me the words to describe this experience.