For her 27th birthday this past May, Lucia Allain traveled to the border. A citizen now, she’d grown up undocumented in New York City, a Peruvian immigrant whose mother worked so many hours and spoke so little English that it fell to Allain to attend parent-teacher conferences for her little brother. Birthdays weren’t really a thing. But this year, as part of the traveling she does for her job, she went to El Paso to collect the stories of asylum seekers who’d come to the United States for refuge. The people she met had been allowed in, for now—the fortunate few who would get to plead their cases. But with court dates far in the future, the migrants had been deposited at a bus station. These were stories not of the triumphant “good immigrant,” who’d started a small business or become a doctor or an engineer. Theirs were stories like her own, which so often go unheard.
Allain is the communications manager for RAICES, the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services. Founded in San Antonio in 1986 as waves of refugees migrated north, farther from the civil wars savaging Central America, RAICES provides legal services to immigrants in federal detention. It now has 11 offices across the state of Texas. The organization serves a range of clients—unaccompanied children, single adults, and families—but its employees are majority female, and women hold most of the leadership positions. Many come from immigrant families themselves.
Marie D. De Jesús
You know them. In April 2018, when the Trump administration instituted its “zero tolerance policy,” referring all adult migrants entering the country illegally for criminal prosecution, the Department of Homeland Security began separating them from their children and transferring children into the care of the Department of Health and Human Services. The nation erupted in collective outrage, and a new sense of urgency transcended borders both physical and political. When a Facebook fund-raiser was set up to help support RAICES bond out parents and reunite them with their children, the campaign took in more than $20 million in just over one week—that’s nearly three times the organization’s 2018 annual budget. It was the largest Facebook fund-raiser ever. Celebrities tweeted. Newspapers ran articles. Politicians took notice. Former San Antonio mayor and current presidential candidate Julián Castro, who’s made immigration central to his campaign, didn’t mince words. In an email he wrote, “At a time when immigrants and refugees are being vilified and attacked daily by the Trump administration, RAICES, and the women behind it, are ensuring the most vulnerable families are afforded their basic constitutional rights.”
It’s been a little more than a year since, and the administration’s assault on the nation’s immigrants continues apace, but so does the work of RAICES. On her birthday, then, collecting stories to help the world better understand that work, Allain wandered through the El Paso bus station, crammed with clusters of families forced into squalid conditions. There she met a young woman, tiny and vulnerable, holding a swaddled baby. Allain could see the journey in her face. The woman—let’s call her Luz—told Allain about the gang violence in Guatemala that she’d fled, and about how she had given birth five days before, on her own. With no one else to do it, she’d cut the umbilical cord herself. Now she needed diapers. She needed to wash. She was hungry but she had no food. Give me your tired, your poor… Allain gave Luz her lunch and held the swaddled baby so she could eat.
I grew up poor. Not broke, which isn’t poor, and not bohemian poor, like a gentrifier living in the ghetto but able to afford nice clothes. Undocumented-child-of-undocumented-immigrants poor, which means that even as I worked to g degrees from Harvard and Yale, delivering the American Dream at my parents’ feet, my mother and father are in a perpetual, worsening state of poverty because they are aging out of manual labor in a country that is trying to expel them. They’ve paid their taxes for decades but haven’t been able to put a penny towards their retirement. They do not qualify for public benefits. That kind of poor.
For my family poverty is like walking in a hurricane. I spend my money buying my parents umbrella after umbrella; each provides some relief, then breaks—cheap fixes, all of them. The rain has paused for now. But it will resume. In Spanish, we call that pause escampo. The rain has escampado. I have some discretionary income. Most of that goes towards my family, my reporting, or towards immigrants in my community who need it. It will not last forever.
But about a year ago, a curious thing happened. I walked into a Sephora and realized I could buy whatever I wanted.
I walked right out. That didn’t feel right. Later I went back in to Sephora with my mother and I told her I would buy her whatever she wanted. That felt better. She has studied fashion magazines since she was a kid in Ecuador and had her wishlist: Nars Blush in Orgasm. YSL Touche Éclat Radiance Awakening Foundation. A tube of Rouge Dior lipstick in deep red. A bottle of Byredo “Rose Noir” Eau de Parfum that Sephora didn’t have in stock. And on and on.
Up until that point, she had owned drugstore products. My mother was emotional and cleared her dresser bureau to organize the new makeup. The Chanel shadows never left their velvet sleeves with their trademark hot-stamped logo. I think she used her fingers to smudge on the shimmers not to maximize pigment, but because she didn’t want to stain the tiny applicators. The Byredo perfume would be spritzed twice (just twice) whenever she went to a graduation or a funeral. She never even removed the BeautyBlender from its plastic case to keep it clean. She kept purchasing drugstore bronzers so she wouldn’t have to deplete the Bare Minerals one I got her, the same one I use. It’s called “A Little Sun” and it’s golden brown with a slight red tint. I’ve never gone on a vacation, but I always liked the way white girls at Harvard looked in September after they’d spent weekends biking through the Cape.
For my mother, a top shelf is a magical cloud of luxury, a delicious feel-good fantasy.
My mother and I had disagreements about it. I could see that she rarely used her makeup, reserving it for special occasions or for church. Weeks passed, and she continued to venture into Manhattan barefaced. I panicked and pleaded with her to wear it whenever she encountered white people who determined her life or livelihood, like at work or at the doctor’s office. I asked her to wear a full face of makeup whenever I was not with her to serve as her interpreter, whenever my credit card could not communicate in a demented shorthand that we are human too. But she wouldn’t listen. For my mother, a top shelf is a magical cloud of luxury, a delicious feel-good fantasy.
But my mother doesn’t read the news in order to preserve her sanity and I have to for my job—I’m an immigration writer—so she doesn’t know about the Border Patrol agents who dump gallons of water that humanitarian groups have left in the desert for migrants. I do. For me, as a formerly undocumented young woman and the daughter of undocumented immigrants, makeup has become a talisman—an attempt to ward off evil.
PHOTO: Photo by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
A look at my mother’s vanity
I didn’t learn to use makeup from my mother, as I know many young women do. Growing up, my Latinx immigrant family followed strict traditional gender roles where my dad worked out in the world and my mom stayed home with me and my brother. My father had expectations when he came home from work—dinner, a clean house, the usual. But he also expected my mother to look beautiful. He expected her to do the work with her hair down, makeup on, in heels. Instead, she wore sweats, sunscreen, and her hair in a bun. I admired that about her, even when it ended in a fight. My mother made it clear she’d never wear makeup for a man.
Like she had, I learned about makeup from magazines, where the beautiful models and celebrities were mostly white. It wasn’t until Jay-Z said, “Put some colored girls in the MoMa” in 2011 that I stopped wanting to look like a French gamine. Jackie Aina on YouTube came to me like a revelation. I watched her videos and learned how to address hyperpigmentation, color correction, and a status quo that doesn’t want to cater to dark skin. It took a gorgeous black makeup artist who had been through hell and back to make me understand what it could mean to talk about makeup in terms of self care. Her looks were radical acts—declarations of delight and exuberance.
My mother is beautiful. Sometimes I attempt to conjure up what a racist person might see if he looked at her at her most glamorous and regal, with her fig-brown skin and a caravan nose straight out of a Renaissance portrait. I think about the tear-gassed toddlers on the border, their parents desperate for asylum. I wonder if he processes her as human.
I can’t protect my mother from getting fired from her job, or detention, or deportation. I can’t even protect her from daily encounters with racist abuse. But I can use the master’s own tools to prepare her to step into the master’s house.
I understand this is twisted.
I think a lot about an experiment I read about in Scientific American in which black and white participants in a mall were asked to determine how much to spend on a pair of expensive headphones. Half of the black participants were first made to review a list of racist traits associated with African-Americans. Afterwards, when the participants were shown photographs of the headphones, the individuals who had been forced to read the list offered to pay a lot more money than either the white participants or the black participants who hadn’t had to confront those stereotypes.
PHOTO: Photo by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
The author
I pay for nice makeup because I want to prove that I can—once a saleswoman at a department store asked too pointedly if I needed help and I ended up buying two Chanel lipsticks and a blush that I didn’t need—and because maybe it’ll make someone think twice before they assume who my mother and I are based on the color of our skin.
Earlier this fall, I bought the Tom Ford Shade and Illuminate. It costs $85, what my father earns for a full day of work as a salad maker. But the packaging is gorgeous. It contours and highlights, and I like to sweep it over Sonia Kashuk Undetectable Crème Bronzer to deepen my brown skin. A good dupe for it is the Wet n Wild MegaGlo Makeup Stick, which retails for $3.99. I use both. The truth is I like the Wet n Wild one even better because it’s dispensed in a stick, so I don’t need to use a brush, and the color is warmer.
But when I have to go into spaces where I know I will feel intimidated because of my race or when I have to talk to powerful white people whom I know do not see me as an equal—even if it’s on the phone, even if I’m just in a towel, right out of the shower, even if I have to drink a vodka soda to muster up the courage to voice my opinion—I wear a full face of makeup and every cream and powder that touches my skin is designer. YSL, Dior, Chanel, Tom Ford. My armor.
I feel beautiful when I am able to grit my teeth and get it done, when I can bite the inside of my cheeks and not cry, when I can show off a steely face to the world. Makeup helps me do that.
Some more enlightened women than I will tell me they feel beautiful when they are surrounded by the people they love, when they drink a lot of water, when they spend time with their children. I feel beautiful when I am able to grit my teeth and get it done, when I can bite the inside of my cheeks and not cry, when I can show off a steely face to the world. Makeup helps me do that.
I have nightmares about deportation and internment camps every night. But sometimes when I can’t fall asleep, I fantasize about meeting the President of the United States and I feel a surge of warm pleasure as I imagine step-by-step how I’d prepare. I’d line my lips in red liner then fill them in with multiple coats of MAC in Russian Red. Long, curled lashes coated in Too Faced Better Than Sex Mascara. If I needed to cry, I’d cry in the bathroom, silently. The formula is waterproof, so I’d be able to hide the evidence.
Makeup makes me feel beautiful and it makes me feel powerful, but it doesn’t make me feel like a pretty girl. Makeup makes me feel like a woman with a plan for survival. I don’t play with makeup. I unleash it.
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is a writer living in New Haven, Connecticut. She is an Emerson Collective Fellow. You can follow her on Instagram @kcornv.
