La Negra Dura

A great title for a book. It's Mexican for a bad-ass black woman. A black woman who

1. Leaves her husband for cheating on her, even though it's 1965 and nobody does that.
2. Joins the foreign service and travels the world.
3. Let's a tribe of nomadic people live in her yard in Niger, as long as they send all their girls to school.
4. Is an alcoholic and dies an early death.

Or maybe a black woman who

1. Goes to an Ivy league school the year after it becomes co-ed.
2. Gets a law degree.
3. Marries a white man when it's still illegal in 15 states.
4. Rises to the top of a cut-throat law firm after the birth of her second child.
5. Becomes a law professor.
6. Quits law to become a world-famous artist.
7. Suffers her whole life from chronic depression.

Or a woman who

1. Is the first in her family to go to college.
2. Joins the local police force when most women still don't work outside the home.
3. Becomes a train engineer in the face of chronic sexual harrassment.
4. Marries a doctor, quits her job, has five kids, and gets left by the doctor for a younger woman.

What about a woman who

1. Overcomes racism and sexism to succeed in high school.
2. Becomes valedictorian of her class.
3. Is told by her parents that she cannot go to college because she is undocumented and was adopted illegally from a foreign country. She can't get a drivers license either, or fly in an airplane, or leave the country.

Or a 24 year old woman who 

1. Works her way into the WNBA as one of the incoming class of professional basketball players.
2. Is convicted of sexual misconduct with a minor because she messed around with a precocious 16 year old girl, and the girl's parents want to prosecute her as revenge. 
3. She gets sentenced to seventeen years in prison.

Damn, you have to be dura to be a woman in this world. It just beats you down.