Two years ago, Victoria Mejías abandoned her slavish pursuit of sleek tresses – a common obsession in Venezuela where hair and race identity are closely intertwined.
By Africa News
Sep 15, 2021
After a near two-decade struggle with damaging chemical straighteners, she embraced her naturally curly hair and a bold, shoulder-length Afro style and says she feels “divine.”
From the age of 12, when her mother started relaxing her hair, “I felt obliged to present myself in a certain way, because straight hair gives you status,” Mejias, now 28, explained at a salon in central Caracas where she was treating herself to a moisturizing treatment.
Then, she had a change of heart.
“I was tired of salons (for straightening treatments), of not having the freedom to let my hair get wet (as it would frizz).
“It felt like a form of slavery,” she told AFP.
Changing to an Afro style was “like meeting me again. It was the best decision I could have made.”
Venezuela has a racially diverse population as a result of mixing between indigenous peoples, Spanish conquistadores who arrived in the 15th century and the African slaves they brought from the colonies.
The country also received an influx of Europeans escaping the ravages of WWII and people from other Latin American countries fleeing dictatorships and armed conflict over the decades.
Today, more than half the population identifies as mixed-race or “mestizo.” Yet, it is widely accepted that the darker your skin, the likelier you are to be poor in Venezuela, and to suffer from prejudice.
– ‘Not with that hair’ –
Despite a 2011 law against racial discrimination, the country has a complicated relationship with its cultural identity.
Racism is sometimes overt, often subliminal.
In Venezuela, “everything that comes from being Black we think of as bad or… as exotic, that is, not the norm,” sociologist Zulima Paredes, who has written about the aesthetics of Afro hair, told AFP.
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Read More: Africa News – Embracing the Afro in revolt against Venezuela’s ‘bad hair’ stereotype
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