My Basement Frida: College Admission Essay Sample

It is raining, and I am measuring the length of Frida Kahlo’s unibrow with a ruler – eleven inches and a half. When I was ten, my fifth grade teacher Mrs. Hoef said that ancient Egyptians had pharaohs and priests. My mother tells me that Frida was born in her hometown of Mexico City, but I believe my mother is lying because Frida’s eyes say she was a pharaoh.

The tapestry of Frida Kahlo hangs in my basement. The only wall décor my parents deemed necessary is this tribute to the famous Mexican artist. I like my basement Frida. Mrs. Hoef says we have third eyes, and I often wonder if Frida’s third eye can see out from behind her unibrow.

One day, my friend says “Why does that lady have a unibrow? Why is she so brown?”

I do not know how to reply to this because I had not wondered about the connection between the brow and the pigmentation of skin. I feel very much ashamed, the way I think the Egyptians would have felt had their pyramid angles been off. This becomes a ritual: the Frida-questions, the shame-turned-guilt-turned-disgust. I beg my mother to stop packing me quesadillas for lunch, to stop buying me books on the unibrow lady. I turn the music off in the car when I hear Ojalá by Silvio Rodriguez. I decide that I need to hate Frida Kahlo and that I need to put peanut butter on my sandwiches like the Americans.

This is how I hide for years: peanut butter, books on Van Gogh and acceptable white artists with separated brows, and music from 96.3FM that does not sound like Silvio Rodriguez at all.

One day, as I am washing the dishes with my mother, she asks me if I am ashamed of her. I drop a plate to the ground, and my gaze follows. The way she looks at me makes me feel like porcelain turned mush turned shattered mush.

I had never been ashamed of my mother. I was ashamed of where we came from: of a color I couldn’t see as beautiful – of the questions that made me feel less-human, more-alien – of the way peanut butter wouldn’t stop sticking to the roof of my mouth – of the way I stopped talking to my basement Frida priestess pharaoh. Like my basement Frida, my culture was still very much alive. Like my basement Frida, it had not died because I stopped paying attention. But the part of me that had stopped paying attention was losing vitality, rapidly.

I begged my mother to teach me our history. I ate quesadillas. I listened to Silvio Rodriguez and Mana and Luis Miguel. I stood in the DIA in the middle of the Diego Riviera mural (he was Frida’s husband) and allowed myself to be in love. And proud: like finding a pattern to rain. As I fell in love with my culture, I began to fall in love with my language again. I do not hide when my mother calls. I want others to listen to the silent treaties between the vowels and the consonants.

As I stopped caring what other people thought of me, I became confident in being a Latina. It is a process. I sometimes question myself. All I know is that no matter what people say, my culture is beautiful. My culture will survive.

I don’t talk to Frida anymore. We moved to a different house a few years ago. My mom wrapped her up in a box and wrote “Frida” across the top in sharpie marker and eligible handwriting. I liked to think she died and the box was embalmment and the writing was hieroglyphics, and I like to think that she will be reborn into a pharaoh again.