Review: Rosie Molinary's Hijas Americanas: Former Latina Educator Tackles Body Image Issues in New Book

Big behind, small behind, caramel-complexioned, light-complexioned, mole, no mole; raven-haired, blond-haired. Like her other sisters, the Latina woman cannot stop comparing herself to others. On one side, there is the hot, oversexed Latina that could be from Argentina, Paraguay, Cuba or Venezuela, but who everyone seems to put in the basket. On the other hand, there's the plump, curve-rich Latina popularized by America Ferrera, Michele Rodriguez and Jennifer Lopez of late...she's becoming more and more mainstream these days. What's a Latina to do? Lock herself up in her cuarto and let herself boil into the highest degrees of self-hatred?

Rosie Molinary addresses practically all those things in her new book Hijas Americanas: Beauty, Body Image, and Growing Up Latina. Molinary, who is of Puerto Rican descent and a contributor to the book Waking Up American, picked the brains of hundreds of Latinas via face-to-face interviews as well as web interviews (welcome to the empirical method of the 2000s). The responses she received give a rather insightful look at the mechanics of LI (Latina Identity).

Above Left: Author Rosie Molinary, a hijita Americana