Tarnished Flight
Tarnished Flight
Las Hermanas Mirabal,
Born in the region I too call home,
Brave women who could have been sisters to all,
And yet were robbed from us.
To the perpetrators of evil, we women are the most threatening.
The inherent feminine power we hold,
It was never meant to be caged in by a house.
It was meant to fly.
And so Las Mariposas flew.
They flew so that we could all sprout our wings without fear,
So that we could create a sky full of dreamers,
A sky full of capability.
It is a shame that the Eagles do not like to see the sky so full.
We will always mourn our sisters whose wings were bitten too soon, And we will always support those who are rising from cocoons,
All with wings so iridescent they must be made of heavenly steel. Our flights do not end with us.
Scarlett Cruz
Co-Presenters: Individual Presentation
College: College of Liberal Arts
Major: Psychology
Faculty Research Mentor: Nathalia Hernandez Ochoa
Abstract:
This poem, titled “Tarnished Flight,” is written to shed light on the efforts of the Mirabal sisters, revolutionary women who stood against the 31-year oppressive regime of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. It contains symbolism to emphasize the powers that stunted their efforts while also signifying that their mission did not end with them. His was one of many dictatorships to rise and fall in 20th-century Latin America, reflecting the extremes a nation built on patriarchy and racism can reach. The Mirabal sisters have become representative of the involvement of women in politics, particularly during the dictatorships that took hold of Latin America in the later 20th century. He made them such apparent targets because of the wound they created in his ego fueled by machismo; he considered and treated women as objects who existed to pleasure and benefit him. As a result, when one of the Mirabal sisters rejected his advances, he became much more watchful in retaliation, ultimately squashing revolutionary efforts they had been quietly spearheading. Women have long been targets of gender-based violence and abuse, and this only ever increases during wars and dictatorships. Since these perpetrators see women as the property of men, they target women to establish dominance over those men and their overall communities, instilling a sense of fear and disempowerment. The Mirabal sisters are a more well-known example of this targeted violence, and their date of murder is now the one designated to the International Day for the Elimination of Violence.