In the early 2010s, my sisters and I attended a cultish, non-denominational, hip Christian summer camp that preyed on children’s emotions. This is the only explanation I have for the sunburned evenings I spent listening to worship leaders whisper into headset microphones about all the ways we were sinful—how our evil, worldly hearts were responsible for the death of Jesus. We had blood on our hands—blood that could only be absolved by big, hot, salty tears. The more the better.

 

Crying on these nights meant you became very cool and interesting to fellow campers, almost mythical. Tears would be upheld by counselors as examples of your purity and dedication to faith. All I wanted was to leave chapel with tear stains on my cheeks—I wanted to bear a physical marker of my pure heart, my repentance for all my sins. It was good to cry in this instance. A crumpled tissue in hand was social currency, proof that you were a person whose soul could be redeemed. It wasn’t, however, cool to cry when homesick, when singled out for an immodest skirt or swimsuit, when bullied by other campers while in line for the waterslide; crying in these instances was met with bewildered confusion and encouragement to toughen up. We were asked to consider what Jesus went through when he died for us on the cross, how many tears, counselors would ask, did he shed?  

 

When readers open Ellie Lopez’s poetry collection Chillona, they are met with the following definitions: “In Spanish, ‘chillona’ can mean ‘crybaby’. It can also describe someone with a loud or shrill voice, or someone who is overly sensitive and prone to crying.” Paired with an image of the author as a crying child, these definitions center readers in the worlds of those who have been told—again and again—that their emotions are too much, too big, and too unreasonable. The poems in Chillona pay close attention to the difficulty of locating emotional freedoms lost to oppressive systems that require the development of steely dispositions. Shirking this requirement that often implicates women, Chillona reclaims the power of letting oneself cry, sob, and throw tantrums. This debut collection meditates on the wisdom of self-expression and remaining true to ourselves—even with reddened eyes and tear-stained faces.

 

Somehow, I did not realize crying felt shameful to me until I read Chillona. This collection thawed something within me. It forced me to realize how much of my life has revolved around the deep humiliation I associate with crying. I can’t think of my grandmother without feeling shame over the way I cried publicly at her funeral. A pit forms in my stomach when I think about the way I wept over my stress in front of peers and professors during the years it took to earn my MFA. The only memory I have from kindergarten is my teacher singing Fergie’s “Big Girls Don’t Cry” while I sobbed and snotted after receiving my one (and only) behavioral warning of the year. Supposedly, I loved my kindergarten teacher, but all I remember about her is this desperate attempt to get me to stop crying. 

 

As I struggled to learn the emotional language of our society, I learned that a person’s worth can be determined by their crying habits. How often someone cries, where they cry, and how they cry means something about a person’s personality, about the way they face and process issues and information. I am immensely guilty of making fun of the way my youngest sister cried as a child; the way her face shriveled until it was a raisin with a shrieking hole in the middle. I mocked her because I had learned to stop crying like that after the kindergarten incident. It was embarrassing and silly to be so vulnerable, so expressive with emotions. Later in life, when I learned my partner had never seen Interstellar or Titanic, I insisted that we should watch them together. During both viewings, I was thoroughly shocked when I glanced over and noticed tears streaming down my partner’s face. Somehow, in all of my watching and rewatching, it had simply never occurred to me that crying was an option while experiencing such classically heartbreaking narratives. 

 

The same thing happened while my partner and I watched Kit Kittredge, a movie based on the Depression-era American Girl doll. My partner cried off and on throughout the film; when Kit’s neighbors are evicted, when Kit finds a basset hound named Grace abandoned on the busy streets of Cincinnati, and when Kit’s homeless friends are mistreated. This movie, and the rest of the American Girl films and books, shaped my childhood. They contributed to my developing view of the world as a place filled with social injustices and cruelty. I remember every storyline, every sobering, historical fact, but I can’t remember ever allowing myself to cry over these stories. Even as a child, I was busy cultivating a stoic wall, a barrier that permitted me to decide what kind of emotional response I wanted to display. What would crying afford me? I wondered. Salvation? Pity? More often than not, crying would get me nothing but embarrassment or a look of disdain. I had been taught that crying, unless in specific circumstances, made others uncomfortable, so I rarely did it. 

 

In her hybrid collection The Crying Book, Heather Christle writes: “Tears are a sign of powerlessness, a ‘woman’s weapon.’ It has been a very long war.” As Chillona investigates and vocalizes what it means to be told to stop crying, to be brave and strong, a facet of this “war” comes into focus. Lopez demonstrates that policing, monitoring, and suppressing the emotions of women—particularly women of color—function as tools of oppression and empire. Throughout Chillona, Lopez reframes the “crybaby” as a figure embodying strength and emotional intuition, writing: “Mami doesn’t know that crying isn’t a sign of weakness / but a superpower from the Gods.”

 

Lopez chose to divide her book into parts, saying: “Chillona is split into three parts: Mexican, American, and Mexican-American. Because if society has taught me anything, it is that no matter where you go, you are always either what you present to the world or what is written down on paper.”As a result of this sectioning, identity and societal boundaries inform this collection. The compounded burdens of being a girl, an eldest daughter, an immigrant, and a woman of color are strong threads throughout each poem. These threads underscore the contradictory nature of tears—how they offer emotional release while also fueling feelings of shame and weakness. Commentary on money, health, family troubles, oppression, and discrimination is also woven into each piece, and issues seem to loom larger and larger until it feels that the only appropriate response is to burst into tears. Still, Lopez uses these tears to water seeds of happiness; reprieve and delight are found in inside jokes, music, self-confidence, and connections with friends and family. The speakers in her poems cry, sob, and scream, but they also let out laughter that “cracks the sky.” I think of the end of the movie The Florida Project, when Moonee bids farewell to her friend, Jancey, through unabashed, whole-body sobs. When the girls run through Disney World with their hands joined, they experience the joy of the “Happiest Place on Earth” through a filter of deep, devastating emotion. This film surfaces often for me; it reminds me of the strength of unrepressed emotion, and that there are moments in our lives that are powerful because of their melancholy. 

 

You might be able to get things by crying, but only if you are a certain kind of someone born into a lucky scenario. When my family’s dog uses a cry to signal his discomfort or desire for something, and my parents rush to get him a blanket, a treat, or to take him outside, I think of the dogs that were in the shelter at the same time as him. Do their adoptive families respond to their emotions? Or are their cries and whines—their means of communication—ignored? Were some passed over because of their vocality? How long do the whiniest, most sensitive dogs sit in cages, waiting for someone to take their sadness seriously? When do they learn that it’s all about the luck of the draw? I do not think, for example, that my tears mean as much as the tears of someone who is more of a traditional woman; someone who is conventionally attractive, whose tears contribute to her doe-eyed femininity and warrant handkerchiefs, cooing consolations. Tears are widely considered a humanizing factor, but humanity is compulsory for some and hard-won by others, often through sacrifice or compromise. 

 

While writing my graduate thesis, a collection of poems and stories about the various implications of water, I read and re-read Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.” In this fairy tale, the sea folk’s lack of tears contributes to their othering and their depiction as intriguing but soulless and godless creatures. According to Andersen, tears are inherently human, and a being’s ability to produce them indicates their level of worthiness. He writes that “mermaids have no tears, and therefore they suffer more.” I used the mermaid as a stand-in figure for myself in much of my thesis. In most of these narratives, the mermaid characters are consumed by their inability to be human, making poor gestures at becoming more like a regular person. In one narrative thread, a mermaid—shunned by her community and forced to live on land—joins a Christian megachurch and experiences a brief sense of acceptance, salvation, and human connection at the cost of her authenticity. This aspect of the story was inspired by the end of “The Little Mermaid,” when Andersen writes: “the little mermaid lifted her glorified eyes towards the sun, and felt them, for the first time, filling with tears.” Of course, this glorification is only won after the little mermaid has lost the life she knows. 

 

Nikki Giovanni’s poetry collection A Good Cry focuses on crying as a mechanism for making sense of and processing the inherent cruelty of the world, writing in her poem “Baby West:” “We always teach / The Youngsters / Don’t cry it will be / All right / But crying cleanses.” Crying, Giovanni argues, is a balm for those injured by trauma and struggle. She ends the poem by saying: “It will not be / All right / So I must learn / To cry.” Lopez approaches the topic of tears as healing in a related way, writing that Chillona is a “love letter to all the crybabies.” Fundamentally, this debut revolves around the power of unabashedly experiencing a full emotional spectrum; Chillona encourages readers to let tears flow in the face of loneliness, oppression, and apathy. These poems argue that allowing ourselves to connect with our feelings is one of the bravest, most healing things we can do in a world that wants to modulate, monitor, and mute us.

 

I want to admit that I have cried, unabashedly and naturally, over a recording of a children’s choir singing “Chiquitita” by ABBA, the story of Laika the dog, the end of Big Love, the end of Merlin, Brokeback Mountain, Philadelphia, and Fried Green Tomatoes. I have cried out of despair, grief, depression, and boredom. I have cried over editorial feedback. I have cried over the proliferation of artificial intelligence, climate change, war, and gun violence. During my last semester of graduate school, the only way I could get through teaching and attending class was by allowing myself time to cry in my car before walking through campus. Last week, I cried when another driver honked at me for turning right on red too slowly; I cried to avoid flipping him off and to acknowledge the casual kind of hurt that I have been taught to brush off. Crying, I’ve found, is a way to release the valve of the emotional pressure cookers that lives in my body. I have worked hard to dissolve the shame of emotion, to teach myself that the expression of frustration, grief, rage, and sadness is a crucial form of resistance in a society that wishes to ignore, deny, and gloss over the sources of our sadness. 

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