rnatot:
Submission from a Contributor
While it’s great that I see more and more Mexicans embracing their Native roots, it’s important to remember that this doesn’t give you the right to forget that there are many Indigenous people still living in Mexico.
There are actual Indigenous peoples/communities living in Mexico and in Central and South America who have an actual language and culture. People who still speak their own Indigenous language and live in their traditional ways. These people have done so since the arrivals of the Europeans and they still do this today.
These are not people who are just now embracing their native roots or their one Native ancestor and they are not people who have fully embraced the non-indigenous Mexican culture. They are not just people who speak Spanish only or people who are Mestizos but have no knowledge of their Native roots. Indigenous can be defined in many different ways and it’s often used too freely. In order to be Indigenous or recognized as Indigenous you need to understand what that truly means.
Consider this: if you are i.d.ing yourself as Indigenous what is your indigenous language? What is you indigenous tribe? People who are indigenous belong to a community, they have an actual language and culture/customs. These are the true Indigenous people of Mexico. It doesn’t make sense to equate someone who has one Native ancestor to a whole group of people who live in their indigenous communities, still speak their Indigenous languages, and actually belong to a specific Indigenous group.
Not everyone can be Indigenous or can say that they are Indigenous.
This is a really interesting post. I travelled through Latin America a lot when I was younger, and eventually married a Chilean. At the time, I thought my own culture was shit, and I was fascinated with Latin America…but not in the sense of wanting to be from there. The classism was shocking to me, because it was so obvious and accepted, whereas in Canada we pretend that it doesn’t exist. But it’s more extreme in Latin America.
Another really common thing is how everyone both loathes and admires indigenous people at the same time. The darker you are, the ‘lower’ you are on the social scale but a lot of Latinos like to talk about how they are part native too.
I fell in love with the Cancion Nueva movement, particularly Victor Jara, Violeta Parra, Inti-Illimani, Illapu etc…all Chilean bands. And it was this revival of folk music, with ‘native’ aspects in the instruments and themes and such. But if people did that here in Canada I’d side-eye the shit out of them. It makes me rethink what they were doing.
My ex liked to talk about how his paternal grandmother was Mapuche, but he knew nothing about them but surface details. People pull out their ‘native’ relations in this tokenistic way, just like they do in Canada. And I have never seen such open racism as I did in Bolivia. My god. Indigenous people make up the majority of the population, but when I went in the late 90s, Indians were lower than dirt there. The self-hate among the mixed populations was surreal.
I know there are large latino communities in Canada and the US, and there is a horrific history and current reality of oppression and colonialism in Latin America and directed against ex-pat communities. But there is also a lot of internal oppression in Latin American countries against indigenous peoples. I’m not sure where I’m going with this, but I do know that there have been a lot of linkeages made between indigenous peoples in the Americas, and even beyond (especially with the Maori). This highlights for me how indigenous issues cannot be subsumed or split up into ‘feminism’ and ‘anti-racism’ and other ‘isms’. I have more in common on so many levels with a Mapuche Indian fighting encroachment, than I do with my neighbours, however anti-racist they may be.
