I’m La Tía Loca & I Won’t Be Shamed Into Submission

Calling people crazy is not acceptable as we move toward destigmatizing mental health struggles. To pejoratively call someone crazy is to ignore very real systemic problems and further stigmatize real mental illnesses. I will use this word in that awful context to frame this tía’s reality among her family because as much as that word is discouraged in specific spaces, it is still freely used in many communities. This article is not about a literal mental illness. This is about someone who is an intentional agent of chaos, which makes her fodder for being famously dismissed with a simple four‑letter word: loca. Someone who disrupts the status quo must be shamed into submission. In using this word, I am seeking to reclaim what has been used against me since I was a little girl, and especially now that I am an adult woman. 

Tu tía loca is the outcast. The tía who has been rejected. Some say she invites the shunning. I think the shunning is part of the package; being that free means people will try to shackle you into a box any chance they get. She walks into spaces where people snicker at her without doing much to hide it. And she does not appear affected, meaning she does not seek to change how she is treated. Words do not seem to alter her posturing. She allows the snickers to steer her away from people who do not have the range. What she wears is unconventional, and what she says is beyond what some people might consider acceptable.

She is an easy target, someone blatantly disruptive, all while harming no one. But she challenges people’s ideas of who they have allowed themselves to become. She actively sits in the discomfort people want to ignore. She feels the discomfort. She does not try to ignore it or soothe it with something that will take her away from feeling it. 

Once upon a time she may have been closer to being la prima perfecta. She might have done what she was told and reshaped herself for approval. She adjusted her expectations to mirror what was expected of her, and she told herself she had agency, that it was her choice all along. She almost believed it.

My world crashed and burned one year. My womb could not hold pregnancies, despite years of being told that my purpose as a woman was to bear children. So I got angry. The marriage I entered to respectfully leave my parents’ home crumbled. And I began to seethe. I started failing in my classes at the school I was accepted into after believing the myth of meritocracy as fact, and then I realized that my hard work could not compare to white privilege. My blood began to boil. And then something snapped within me, and I became what had been scripted for me many years before I decided I was going to divest from being “good.” I became la loca when I experienced deep heartbreak, and not in a romantic sense, but in a spiritual sense—a deep break in my spirit. Sometimes la loca is born out of nurturing parenting and encouragement to be their own person. And sometimes la loca is made out of friction and pain, and in the end, the one who emerges is out for revenge.

Today mi mami says she does not recognize me; she does not know where I came from, but I look oddly like mi papi’s clone, so birth family deniability is out of the question. However, if she paid any attention to how people spoke about me growing up, if she dared to put those pieces together, she would know that I was always this person. A wild woman, someone who cannot be restrained. As a kid I was called la tocadita al mal, the black sheep. I was reminded constantly that I was different because I kept insisting and I kept asking for too much. And one day, I spun myself out of their reach.

Your tía la loca might give off the impression that she is strong. This all might make you believe that she is unbelievably durable. She is not. No one is. She hears all the jokes at her expense. She hears all the comments. The eye rolls when she begins to speak make her own skin crawl; it all makes her want to hide. It has the effect it is meant to have; it is meant to shame and force someone to bend the knee. But transforming herself into someone more palatable feels like dying, and she rebuffs this because she has witnessed her own lifelessness before, and she does not want to return to that form. 

She feels very alone sometimes. The amount of energy put into not getting sucked into gender performance and the male gaze takes up brain space that could be used elsewhere. Yet she is the secret friend with whom you freely share your actual thoughts. She is the person who has been publicly shunned by her church but gets direct messages from the señoras asking her about the things she has said.

She understands the secrecy, but it is wounding. Being nice to those who’ve been forsaken by others is dangerous. She understands that it is safer for both parties if she stays discarded, even if in their imagination. 

I have been banned access to my nieces because I dare to want to hold their dad accountable for the harm he has administered freely toward the women in our family. I have been told I do not watch my tongue around children enough, like I do it by accident. It is not an accident. I speak freely because children should see at least one adult woman living differently, if only to provide a model for them that they deserve to see. They need an alternative to saying less and invisibilizing ourselves for the comfort of men.

Tu tía la loca conjures fear. She touches the red button. She jams her finger into unknown holes. Like a witch, often depicted as living outside the town, in an old shack in the woods, outcast. She is a nightmare to most adults who have chosen a life laid out for them before they were even born. A life that maintains the status quo. A life often copied and pasted from their parents’ lives.

The irony is that her life is not safe because they have insisted on the rules applying to us all. If they had to yield, then so should she. She pays for daring to want a different life. People slowly shun her out of public spaces. She exists in the margins, in texts, and in secret phone calls and girls’ nights, but not in your wedding parties, baby showers, baptisms, and family reunions. And when she is invited, it is to stand in ridicule for not having done her due diligence and played her role. In my loca era I was single and over thirty, and I was treated like a threat, like I was there to steal someone’s man. As if any man is worth that effort and energy. I have found that marriage to a man has pacified the indignation; the label of loca is less easily brandished. In another lifetime I am sure I would have been burned at the stake. In this lifetime, I could have been killed at some club or even found dead after one of my many one‑night stands. I think ultimately, my marriage has been what has made me acceptable. Not my partner, specifically, but the fact that I am married to a cis hetero man. The legitimacy that a man offers me is still of value, even as much as we like to think of ourselves as beyond that. Other facts come into play also, but ultimately, between husbands I experienced a fear‑binding existence because being la tía loca who is single was dangerous, and my entire body sensed it. That thought haunts me. The idea that a heterosexual relationship is my “saving grace” sends shivers down my spine.

If tu tía loca is single or in a non‑heterosexual relationship, trust that she is told about the prayers for her salvation — often. If she is childless and single, she is considered a pariah, and she is treated as such. How dare she take up so much space when she has done none of the items on her female‑assigned checklist? 

Being la tía loca means a lack of true connection in public spaces with women who perform a heteronormative femininity. Women claim their distance from your tía loca, almost as though on autopilot, out of fear of being lumped alongside her. She makes people afraid, and in turn she feels that fear. That fear pushes her; it pushes her to follow the rules in public to have access to her family. Everything in her body rejects this new path she is forging. She has years of socialization under her belt telling her she is wrong for doing anything other than what she was taught.

She knows what is expected of her because of her gender. She has been taught how to behave like a “good woman” her entire life, and it might still be second nature. Tu tía la loca might experience her own body trying to push her toward what she has known. She might experience hives or other similar responses when she behaves in ways that go against what she has been told is “proper.”

But she defies everything anyway, and that is precisely why it is lunacy. She is fighting years of girl‑rearing, but one day there will be more defiant years under her belt than programmed ones, and it will all feel easier. It has to feel easier. At some point, the reward of true freedom outweighs the burden of burning bridges that lead to respectable womanhood. She cannot imagine ever finding happiness being who she is supposed to be instead of becoming lo que le dé la regalada gana.

To the tía loca, do not let their world become your preoccupation. Living should be your preoccupation. You have figured out how to live a dream many of the women in your family have only ever imagined, and it is important that you live that life you have so fearlessly fought to live. 

To the family of tu tía loca, try to keep her around. And when you think you are done trying because she has pushed your buttons one too many times, try again. Because by her existing as she does, she is creating a universe of options for everyone who witnesses her. By existing, and being allowed to exist, she is showing a newer generation what is possible and what can be.