From Nun to Engineer

True Stories of Womanhood #1: A young Latina chases her American dream

Dear Readers,

I hope to make this the first in a series of women’s life stories. Many voices nowadays boil down male and female into adjectives and abstractions like “Women are gentle” or “Men are ambitious.” But real life is complex. Nobody fits the archetypes to a tee. One of the reasons this story is being published here (and not at a magazine) is that Carla’s life doesn’t push one narrative. Instead, it’s the honest recounting of some remarkable experiences from someone who doesn’t think she has all the answers. I’m hoping that if I can continue with these stories, instead of pushing one pre-approved narrative, they’ll form a starscape in which (if we pay attention!) we may discover constellations. Enjoy!

Yours,

Amelia

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At 5 ‘o clock a.m., the Sea of Galilee lay beneath the stars, its waters dark and still. The city of Tiberias was still sleeping, its streets silent, when Carla awoke to a loud banging at her door.

“Christ is risen!” a voice called out.

“And truly we with him,” she replied.

The banging stopped. Footsteps pattered away. Then, she heard the noise resume, more faintly, at the next door: “Christ is risen!”

Carla slipped out of bed. She set a small picture of Christ before her on her tiny desk, opened her heavy Bible, and began to speak in a weary monotone: “Grazie Signore per questo nuovo giorno…”

Other voices rang out around her, the noise traveling through the thin walls—singing, speaking, reading—punctuated by the occasional “beep” from their prayer timers, which signaled them to move from worship to gratitude to contrition.

Carla had taken vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience at the age of 19 and left her home in Guadalajara, Mexico to join a convent-parish compound in the Holy Land. The community was a tiny, mixed group of celibates—three priests, one brother, and five sisters—and tightly controlled.

Life as a nun was not what she had expected.

Each morning, she rose at 5:00. She would not return to her room until 10:00 at night, when she would end her day the same way she had begun it—exhausted, standing in her cramped room speaking mechanically to the picture on her desk.

She spent most of the fifteen hours of her day doing laundry for the convent-run hostel. The hostel was cheap, staffed as it was by unpaid nuns, and the visitors constantly streaming in and out its doors gave Carla piles and piles of bedding to wash.

When she first took her vows, she had imagined herself evangelizing to the lost, perhaps working charismatic miracles in the far-off corners of the world. Now, after six years in this environment, she could hardly remember who she had once been. She spent her days in the laundry room, scrubbing stains from sheets and clothes. Every day, as she worked, it seemed to her that she was scrubbing at herself, washing away, through sheer effort, every trace of her former life. Her femininity, her Mexican culture, her longings for beauty and love. She was scrubbing and scrubbing until everything was gone—until Carla was gone. This, she had come to realize, was the real work of a nun: to have one’s spirit broken.

Carla finished her morning prayer. “Santi Giuseppe e Giovanni Batista, pregate per noi Che ricorriamo a voi.”

St. Joseph and John the Baptist, pray for us.

A rim of orange traced the eastern horizon, promising sunrise.

First Vision: Nun

Today, Carla is no longer a nun.

This spring, she will graduate with her bachelor’s in Industrial Engineering and begin her professional career in the United States. But the journey to the present took many years and spanned many miles, from Guadalajara to Jerusalem.

Carla was 17 when she joined a choir run by an alcoholic law school drop-out. In a living room piled with hangover-relief electrolytes, a group of Mexican Catholic teenagers gathered once a week to sing pop songs much more exciting than the ones at church. This program was Carla’s first touchpoint with the organization Koinonia Giovanni Battista.

Koinonia Giovanni Battista was founded in the late ‘70’s as part of the New Evangelization, a charismatic movement within the Catholic Church. Unlike official religious orders, like the Benedictines or Dominicans, the Koinonia is canonically recognized by the Roman Catholic Church as a “private association of the faithful.” Private associations operate with very little oversight, basing decisions on private agreements within the group. Had Carla been older and less naive, this might have warned her to stay away.

But its founding values of kerygma (proclamation), karisma (signs and wonders), and koinonia (community) attracted Carla—especially the community part, which, in its most extreme expression, took the form of monastic life. From a young age, Carla had felt the sting of having a strict curfew while her male cousins roamed the streets of Guadalajara well past midnight. Monastic life had seemed to her a chance at independence.

Inspired, Carla took five of the Koinonia's Bible courses in one year. After her final “Paul” course, Carla went on a retreat in the countryside where she listened to nuns testify about their callings. At the end, the leaders told the students to write their dreams and aspirations on slips of paper. Carla thought about what dream she cherished most and wrote down “become an engineer.” The slips were collected and burned. Total commitment to God meant total sacrifice.

By the age of 19, she had decided she was willing to go all the way. She sat before a mirror surrounded by a small group of nuns, her severed locks lying limp on the floor.

For female members of the community, celibacy meant not only giving up their family and possessions, but also their sex. The consecrated sisters of the Koinonia cut their hair in a mannish style, close-cropped around their ears. They wore formless, ankle-length skirts and button-down shirts.

After chopping Carla’s hair off, the nuns handed Carla her new outfit, gleaned from the community donation bin. Carla held up a long skirt in military green and a black button-up three sizes too large. It was ugly. But, she repeated to herself, she must die to her femininity to be free.

Second Vision: Wife

When Carla left the convent, she was debilitated for a year. The harsh lifestyle had taken its toll on her body, and she struggled with chronic illness. But after many doctor’s visits and many months of rest, she began to recover her strength.

As she reentered the world, Carla resisted her old school friends' matchmaking efforts. She didn’t like their lifestyles, which were heavily influenced by Mexican machismo culture. In most ways, they were the polar opposite of the nuns, but their lifestyles were eerily parallel. Instead of getting up early to pray and work, they would get up two hours early to don a full face of makeup and curl their flowing hair. They would use yet more time each afternoon to change into fresh outfits before their husbands returned from work.

“Everything they did was to please the man,” Carla said.

The women’s quasi-religious devotion to their femininity was a stark contrast to the nuns’ devotion to God. It reminded her of an encounter she had in the Holy Land shortly before she left—one that had inspired her to second-guess her vows.

One day, a short, caramel-complexioned woman had turned up crying on the Koinonia’s doorstep. The pastor of the convent told Carla, the only Spanish-speaker, to minister to her needs. The woman was distraught over her twin sister, who had left Colombia for Israel and converted to Judaism. She returned many times to ask Carla for prayer and advice as she tried to convince her twin to come back home.

Months later, Carla was riding the bus back from Hebrew lessons when she saw the Jewish twin. There was no mistaking her. They were identical, except that this woman had wrapped her hair in a colorful tichel scarf. Carla introduced herself in Spanish.

“You are the nun,” the Jewish twin said, immediately identifying her. “Do you know the three things that God will ask us when we die?”

Carla was too surprised by the question to think of an answer.

“First,” the Jewish twin said, holding up a finger. “Did you marry? The second thing—Did you have kids? And the third and last and most important thing—Did you send your kids to Torah school?”

When Carla returned home to the convent and described the encounter to her community, her pastor accused her of making up stories. Months later, when she announced she wanted to leave, he told her it was the Jewish twin’s fault. She had cursed Carla by planting a seed of doubt in her heart. The twin, by his logic, had been trying to tempt Carla away from celibacy by arguing that a woman’s value came from marriage and childbirth. This went against all the teachings of the Koinonia, which emphasized the “higher,” more spiritual calling of celibacy.

But for Carla, the woman’s belief was one lie that exposed another—the lie she’d been living. The Koinonia constantly implied that celibacy was the higher calling, that renouncing marriage made you holier and more valuable in the eyes of God. How was that any better than placing all your self-worth in marriage?

Carla had encountered two visions of womanhood in her life so far. Carla’s married friends found their value and purpose in their female beauty. The nuns snuffed out their sexuality and severed family ties to find self-worth in the rejection of their womanhood. The choice was clear: to be a proper woman, you had to either fit your femininity into a narrow box, or renounce it completely.

Carla felt trapped.

Third Vision: Engineer

But she would soon discover a third vision of womanhood.

When her cousin invited her to visit him in New York City, Carla eagerly accepted. He told her to stay as long as she liked and to fill her time however she liked. After six years of living under the strictures of monastic life, Carla struggled to do what he had asked.

Koinonia life was so heavily regulated that the nuns had to publicly request personal supplies from the male prior in a weekly meeting, including the size and number of menstrual pads they needed that month. It was hard to escape that subservient mindset. At first, Carla found herself asking her cousin’s permission for everything—to walk, to shop, to eat. But slowly, she began to assert herself through small acts of defiance, like taking herself out for ice cream in the middle of the day.

After Carla picked up a gig altering clothing for one of her cousin’s friends, the friend, a New York City PR executive, invited her to take a tour of her office in downtown Manhattan. Carla felt a sense of peace standing in the glass building overlooking the world. A new vision of womanhood began to form before her eyes—the self-made woman, defined not by her marital status but by her agency.

Nearly a decade earlier, before encountering the Koinonia, she had dreamed of one day becoming an engineer. Was it possible to start trying now?

In contrast to the other visions of womanhood Carla had encountered, the American one was not a monolith. For Carla, American women were defined primarily by their ability to find their own paths—to live the American Dream. The female executive with her $400 trousers was one instance of this. But even the “trad wife” played into this independent spirit by defying mainstream cultural expectations in pursuit of self-determination.

From Carla’s perspective, the women she’d encountered in America proved the American Dream was still alive. With her cousin’s help, she applied to engineering school.

Carla has had to fight to maintain this newfound belief in her own efficacy. As a female Latina engineer, she joined a number of professional development initiatives for minorities, including The Society of Women Engineers and conferences for people of color. While she enjoys the networking, she cringes when people, noticing the pigmentation of her skin, or the melodic lilt of her English, assume she’s oppressed. They don’t know how much she’s overcome.

Today, Carla bases her identity neither in celibacy nor marriage, but in her ability to take responsibility for her own choices. And perhaps it is this universal virtue that undergirds any healthy vision of womanhood—that we recognize our agency in whatever situation we are in and use it well.

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For Discussion

What do you think of these three visions of femininity? Which one, if any, do you believe is true? Can each contain a portion of the truth, even when they are mutually exclusive (like nun and wife)?¹

1. As a reminder, please be as civil in the comments as dinner guests, knowing that Carla and her loved ones also are reading this story.