Too Much, Too Little, Too Grey

the history of hair in mexico is also a history of pressure.

Beauty under colonial rule

Colonial systems did not simply introduce new hairstyles alongside existing ones. They introduced a hierarchy, one that treated Indigenous styles, textures, and adornments as lesser while rewarding proximity to European ideals. Straighter hair, styled in European fashions, became associated with status. Indigenous braiding, natural texture, and traditional adornment were recast, often violently, as backward or improper.

This was not an abstract shift in taste. Indigenous women who kept traditional hairstyles could face social exclusion, and in some periods more direct forms of coercion, as colonial and later national institutions worked to enforce assimilation. Hair became one of the quiet everyday sites where a much larger project of control played out, alongside language, dress, and religion.

Hair and social hierarchy

Respectability, in the colonial and later post-colonial context, often meant visible distance from Indigenous identity. Straightened hair and European styling became a kind of social insurance, a way to move more easily through institutions built to reward assimilation.

That is the exhausting, quiet politics many women still describe: the sense of needing to fix their hair before certain rooms, certain jobs, certain occasions. It is a direct descendant of a system that once made the calculation explicit.

The echo that reaches us now

Many women know the particular sting of being told their hair is too coarse, too frizzy, too grey, too thin, too much, too little. The specific language shifts with the era. The underlying message stays remarkably consistent: make yourself more acceptable, more manageable, more like the standard someone else set.

Which is why, after forty, the decision to stop translating your hair into someone else's language of acceptability is not really a reinvention. It is closer to a refusal, and usually a long overdue one. What that refusal actually looks like is the next letter in this series. If your hair is greying, changing texture, doing something it did not do at thirty, the useful question is not how to correct it. It is what it actually needs now: more moisture, gentler handling, less heat, more patience.

Resistance in plain sight

Throughout all of it, resistance persisted in the most ordinary places. Families kept braiding hair the way their mothers had. Communities kept wearing traditional styles for ceremonies and festivals regardless of outside judgment. Cultural memory was carried forward not through declarations but through the unremarkable act of continuing to do things the way they had always been done.

What colonisation tried to erase was never fully erased. It survived in braids still being tied, in oils still being passed down, in the stubborn continuation of care that predates and outlasts any standard imposed from outside.

With love from Bali,
Myrah