Our Silence Was Never Ours to Begin With

In this installment of BoldLatina’s Community Essay series, author, award-winning filmmaker, and keynote speaker Denise Soler Cox whom we previously interviewed about language and Latino cultural identity in “Being Latino Enough” reflects on the rape case that has shaken the nation.

The Cornell 7 case didn’t create our silence, it showed us who benefits from it

Since the Cornell 7 case broke, I have been sending nearly three times as much time online I normally. Endless scrolling and deeply triggered. 

The rage is everywhere. So are the courageous women reclaiming something in the recounting of their assaults, some for the very first time. Countless women declaring I am also Jane Doe. Speaking up in numbers I haven’t seen since Me Too.

But in that wave of women speaking, I keep looking for us.

For the Latinas.

I’ve seen exactly one. 

I know we have stories because I’ve been listening to them for years. After screenings of my film and after keynotes. Women would wait to talk to me, not always about something I shared from the stage, but about something deeper that my work had given them permission to say. They’d lean in close, lower their voices and while never once losing eye contact say 

“I’ve never told anyone this, but I want to tell you.”

They needed somewhere safe to put it, and they knew it would be safe with me. 

Their secrets were almost always the same. Sexual assault.

Almost always.

I know why we are not in that wave right now. And I know it in my whole body. I know it the way you know something that was never spoken out loud but was passed to you anyway, in the silence at the dinner table, in the irritated look my mother gave me when I’d ask too many questions, in the way certain things were simply never discussed because de eso no se habla. 

The year before I started college in Boston, my brother David was killed in a drunk driving accident. A few years before that, I’d lost my father to stage four cancer. By the time I arrived on that campus, I was drowning in grief pulled down by the weight of having survived so much tragedy. My entire identity had been built around what I’d endured.

Boston was supposed to be a fresh start. A place where nobody knew my story. Where I could just be a girl, not a girl who had survived. 

Three weeks in, I went to an off-campus toga party and had too much to drink. A frat boy who’d noticed, swooped in and invited me to “lie down” upstairs in his room. I recognized the trap and left. 

I stumbled back to my dorm alone. Back to my floor and to my room which felt like the saftest place I knew. Got into bed and forgot to lock the door.

Sometime later, he came in. A new friend, someone who lived on my floor and someone I trusted. 

I woke up in the middle of it.

Not reporting it felt like protecting my mother. She was already carrying the weight of my brother’s death and did not need another crisis. 

Reporting it also increased the probably I’d have to move back home and be pulled back into the deep end of grief I had crossed state lines to protect myself from drowning in. I was also clear what reporting would likely cost my reputation. What would they say about what I was wearing, or how much I drank that night or what I was even doing at a fraternity party to begin with? 

Not knowing how to hold what had happened, I chose to bury it. And in that burying, I protected everyone but myself.

He moved on, and I carried it alone for decades.

After almost 10 years of listening to women hand me the same secret, I’ve come to understand something to my core. Our silence may sometimes keep us safe, but it also keeps the people who hurt us safe.

The 7 men in that room at Cornell, the 50 something more in the group chat, the university that looked away for two years. Every institution, every system, every person who has benefitted from a woman deciding that the consequences of speaking were hers alone to carry.

Who profits from our silence? Because it sure as hell isn’t us.

This is not a new question. It’s a very old one. And the answer was handed down, long before any of us were ever born.

My grandmother Georgina grew up in Puerto Rico in the early 1900’s. Her life did not fit neatly within the rules women were expected to follow. Her husband had abandoned her and the man she later built a life with, my grandfather, had a violent history and spent time in jail for committing a “crime of passion.” Read: he murdered someone. 

They could not marry. In that world, in that church, in that system, a woman like her learned to keep to herself, remained beyond reproach, and became, by every measure she was given, good. 

This goodness, her measured silence included, was passed down as a virtue.

Que van a decir. Los trapos sucios se lavan en casa. Protect the family. Be honorable and good.

These were not born as instruments of harm. At their root, they were about community and keeping each other safe in a world that offered women very little protection. But somewhere along the way, they were turned against us. And we’ve been passing them down ever since, without ever questioning who benefits from our compliance.

This is how it is. This is how we are. This is how you need to be. Period. 

The most effective systems of silence don’t have to silence us outright; they teach us how to silence ourselves.

We were not born silent, we were taught to be. And so was your mother and so was hers.

For a long time, I refused to believe that speaking up would yield anything but negative consequences. Every part of me had been trained to believe that secrets are meant to kept and that there was a kind of honor in keeping them close to my vest. Sharing would only bring judgement and chaos and the emotional tornado at home, I was determined to keep my distance from.

I was so wrong.

Because I’ve spent years watching what happens when women finally unburden themselves to a person who will not flinch. The weight shifts, the isolation breaks and the lie that had us all believing that we were alone, collapses.

Every woman who waited in line to talk to me after my keynote, the DM’s since the story broke, every post that starts with “I’ve never shared this before…” That’s the pressure valve opening. 

That’s us, waking up.

I’m afraid writing this. I was afraid writing my book. I’m sharing it anyway, because I finally understand how much our silence protects the people and systems counting on it.

Familia, we have been doing exactly what we were taught and it’s now time for something different. 

We will not all be ready at the same moment, we will not all be safe in the same way, but for those of us who are, it starts here. With one person and then more.

Our abuelas learned to stay quiet and stay “good” because they understood what it could cost a woman not to. 

We can honor what they learned without inheriting their silence.

They brought us this far. 

We get to take it from here.

Denise Soler Cox is the author of What Will They Say? (Simon and Schuster 2026), an award-winning filmmaker and keynote speaker. Her work examines the inherited cultural rules that shape what women believe they are allowed to say, want and become.  Learn more about Denise Soler Cox.