On Racism And Assimilation And Being Chicana And Mestizo
valarhalla -
Fun Fact: Tenochtitlan fell in 1521. From 1603 onwards, large numbers of honest-to-god fricking Japanese Samurai came to Mexico from Japan to work as guardsmen and mercenaries.
Ergo, it would be 100% historically accurate to write a story starring a quartet consisting of the child or grandchild of Aztec Noblemen, an escaped African slave, a Spanish Jew fleeing the Inquisition (which was relaxed in Mexico in 1606, for a time) and a Katana-wielding Samurai in Colonial Mexico.
Also a whole bunch of Chinese characters BECAUSE MEXICO CITY HAD A CHINATOWN WITHIN TEN YEARS OF THE FALL OF THE AZTEC EMPIRE.
I am going to use this to go off on a tangent about racism and Mexicans.
I have posted several times before about how I am treated as white, which means that racist white people say racist white shit to me, assuming that I'm "one of them" and not realizing that I'm chicana.
I've also posted about the casta system, which stratified racism to a whole new level of granularity in Mexico that the US only wishes it could be as racist. It literally took elementary school geneology (because we didn't have genetic studies back then) and separated *each generation* of mixed ethnicity into *its own caste*. So, depending on how many generations back your full-blooded indigenous or African ancestors went (parents, grandparents, only 1 parent, only 1 grandparent, etc.), that is what marked you for your appropriate caste.
On top of that, the white colonizer's solution to the "brown people problem" in the New Land was "breed them out". As a result, the population of Mexico is basically ALL MIXED.
A genetic study of Mexico a few years ago showed that pretty much everyone has a mix of African, indigenous Mexican, and Spanish (white) in them. The study showed that pretty much everyone had indigenous and African genes from their matrilineal lines and European genes from their patrilineal lines, confirming the "breed them out" policy.
Even before genetics confirmed this, the population of Mexico knew this to be true and made it part of their political platform during the last revolution, overthrowing the casta system and uniting everyone together politically (not that it really did unite everyone in practice - there is still some ugly racism there).
I don't "look Mexican" for two reasons:
1) I am the product of assimilation. This is what a mere 2 generations of assimilation looks like. Middle and upper class Mexican immigrants tend to be in favor of assimilation and my Mexican grandparents were middle class. "Mexican" is legally classified as "Caucasian" in the US, which means that we have access to certain areas of privilege that other POC don't.
So middle and upper class Mexican immigrants see assimilation as a path towards upward class mobility, away from their lower class "immigrant" status. If you have the right accent, the right education, the right clothing, and the right political leanings (and light enough skin helps, which is also mostly inherited through class, thanks to the casta system), the US is the land of opportunity for Mexicans.
My grandparents did not speak English. My mother learned English in school. By the time I was born, she had married a white man who did not speak Spanish, and so Spanish was not spoken in my home. I have probably the whitest American accent possible - a cross between "valley girl" and "rural redneck Californian". Add to that my light skin and my cultural exposure to mostly white interests so that I know little of my own heritage first-hand, and I "pass" as white.
2) Mexico is one of the most diverse nations in the world, thanks to colonization. There are African-Mexicans and Chinese-Mexicans and Japanese-Mexicans and Euro-Mexicans and Filipino-Mexicans and everyone else.
I don't "look Mexican" because the US has been bombarding us for generations with popular media that show "Mexican" as the poor brown thugs living in the barrio with the chinos and tank-tops and flannel shirts buttoned only at the top and colored handkerchiefs signaling their gang affiliation and feisty abuelas wielding their sandals and wooden spoons in the air and spicy Latinas with too much eyeliner, short skirts and shorter tempers.
When the truth of the matter is that Mexico is a very diverse nation with every skin color in existence. It is neither the land of the drug runners and prostitutes, nor the noble jungle tribesmen and wise, wrinkled old tias sitting outside their huts. At least, no more so than the US is the Wild Wild West.
Mexico is a melting post where people came because it was the land of opportunity for them, or they came because it was the land of opportunity for someone else and they had no choice in the matter. There might be fewer Swedes and Norwegians there than, say, Minnesota, but it is still a culturally and ethnically diverse nation.
So I don't look like the stereotype of a Mexican that the US has been frightening all good little white middle class children with for generations. I look like the type of Mexican who is part of a vast, diverse heritage, made up of people from around the world, some of whom were native to the soil, some of whom traveled there to seek their fortune, some of whom fled there to avoid their fate, some of whom were brought there against their will, and who all blended together to create a new future for the land now known as Mexico.
This post was originally posted at https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/395278.html.
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