I’m angry.
I know that isn’t surprising considering the state of the U.S. these days, but I need to get it off my chest all the same. We have a racist Administration running what, in my opinion, amounts to a state sponsored domestic terrorist organization in ICE. They’ve killed scores of people already, locked up thousands without due process, and deported U.S. citizens. Because ‘fuck brown people’ is this administrations only real platform.
It’s like the Constitution isn’t worth much more than the paper it was hand written on.
The part that makes me the most angry?
Motherfucking lowercase l latinos.
“But Rudy, you’re a Chicano, no?”
I am. Uppercase. And I will never simp for ICE.
Betrayal from within has been happening since 1492 so this is nothing new. Except it’s not quite so simple as that.
Two days ago someone shared a post that soon (no specific timeframe) ICE will be majority lowercase latinx. My dumbass commented that the Mexica have been doing this since 1492.
Fucking moron.
I know better because I fucking know our history. Could the Spanish have defeated the Mexica without help? Hell no (An argument could be made that if it weren’t for smallpox even all the help from other indigenous groups wouldn’t have been enough, but that’s a conversation for another day).
In one comment, with one sentence I was guilty of the same sin I see society making today: I painted all of us with a broad brush. Like Latinos today, the natives to what we now call Mexico were not a monolith.
There were Mexica who were themselves made up of multiple tribes under one umbrella. There were Tlaxcalans, Texcocans, and Totonacs who sided with the Spanish – each with their own reasons for doing so – whether that be to throw off the yoke of Mexica oppression, improve trade deals, or simple revenge for battles lost. And each of them saw themselves not as a part of the whole of some group or nation, but as individual tribes with their own governance, religion, and identity.
The point is they didn’t betray their own. They didn’t see the Mexica as their own any more than the United States sees Greenland as their own.
Oh, wait.
And while the joke is: if you’re in California, they’re Mexican; if you’re in Florida, they’re Cuban, and if you’re in New York, they’re Puerto Rican, the reality is much more interesting and far richer than that.
Jokes aside, Meso-america wasn’t made up of one gigantic group of people anymore than today’s Latinos are made up of any one group (or even two or three groups) despite what the U.S. Census would have us believe. We Latinos come from so much diverse stock that the reality is we look the way the world is trending towards – a delicious mix of browns of every shade. And we come from all over the western hemisphere – South and Central America, the Caribbean, and yes, even the United States and Mexico.
That is not to say that ICE joining latinos get any sort of grace from me. Nah. Fuck those putos. No, my point is simply to own up to my own mistake of clumping us all into one monolithic group. Meso-americans weren’t betraying their own kind because there was no one kind. They saw the Spanish as an ally against a completely different group from themselves working toward a common goal.
We Latinos today? Some of us were lucky enough to do nothing more than be born on the right side of an imaginary line because we have someone in our family history that did something so courageous we can scarcely comprehend their actions and just how blessed we are as recipients of their choices. And if you have brown skin the chances are really good that you are carrying DNA of the peoples who populated the americas long before a white man ever set eyes on the continent.
Within that heritage you also hold the history of conquest, of enslavement, of identity erasure. You carry the history of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to Jim Crow (yep, it applied to our brown asses, too); from repatriation to the Zoot Suit Riots; from Operation Wetback to what is happening now. We have always been othered no matter how hard we work, no matter how much we assimilate.
Today’s latinos are betraying us all because the reality is that no matter how much they do the dirty work of a racist Administration they will always, always, ALWAYS be less than. And when they get to the last deportation of the last immigrant it will be their turn.
