[IBARW] Red and Green and Mostly White.

[tablesaw]

I'm going to just start writing things for International Blog Against Racism Week (ibarw), and hope it all comes out in the end

Comments

[duchez]

I think raising kids bilingually is very much a "new" trend, that it's become much more important to people to try to do it now. While we were kids, it was more important to focus on English, because English is what America speaks. My parents got a *lot* of flak from my teachers and other relatives here after we moved because they refused to stop maintaining a bilingual household. The teachers made dire predictions of how my brother and I would never learn English properly or succeed academically. (My parents don't gloat, but I am sure they are pleased we've proven that theory wrong) My family all told my parents that they would just "confuse" us with too many languages. My friends who are of Chinese descent but born here also say the same thing - that their parents were told by teachers to stop speaking Chinese at home or that they would never learn English. They are bitter to some extent about how they missed out on a huge part of their background

[tablesaw]

I can't recall when it was, but it was certainly after several years of posadas and naciemientos with my abuelita. But by that time, I bellieve my thinking was that my family was from Mexico, but those people were Mexicans.

[duchez]

Huh. That's an interesting distinction.

[feministyogini]

here from IBARW myself :)

I remember from my "borders and boundaries" course that Mexicans were legally classified as white when the US invaded/annexed parts of Northern Mexico. US policy was like, "well, if they aren't black or 'Indian', they must be white". I've always found that complicated understandings of Latino/a racialization in the U.S.

[tablesaw]

My own remembrance of the issue is that it was an unintended byproduct of treaties stipulating that Mexicans could become citizens and policies stating that only white persons could become citizens. Later, that standard of legal but not social "whiteness" was used to deny Mexicans the legal protections afforded to other minorities.

[feministyogini]

Yes, now I'm remembering too - you're right, it was tied to citizenship claims. It's a great example of the shifting definitions/social construction of whiteness.

[ladykinbote]

Re: "Mexicans": I grew up in South Florida, which has large Hispanic population -- mostly from the islands and Middle/South America. It's fairly obvious to anyone with any basis in the languages and cultures that the population is mainly not from Mexico, but whenever it comes up in conversation, practically everyone I've spoken to here in Atlanta and about half the people I've spoken to in South Florida call the Hispanic population there Mexican. And it makes my brain shudder.

For the record, I'm white -- Irish, English, and French on my mother's side and German, Polish, and Western Russian on my father's side. The only weirdness I've ever gotten about "race," in quotey marks 'cause it doesn't fully count as racial, was from people who seemed to find it an unpleasant surprise that half my family is Jewish.

[queen_elvis]

I think maybe people in our parents' generation learned to Anglicize everything to avoid prejudice. Then, ironically, our generation was taught to embrace our different backgrounds. (Though as someone with nothing very interesting to embrace, I've always felt a bit disappointed by that.)

[tablesaw]

You might be interested in this IBARW post about "non-ethnics".

[queen_elvis]

Oh, he/she is absolutely right, and I'm definitely guilty of assuming white=standard to some degree. But when your heritage is your country's baseline heritage, there's still nothing exotic or unusual to celebrate. (I mean, if I wanted to try to find something different about my heritage, I'd have to reach generations back into Celtic or Germanic cultures that I in no way own. I have no sense of otherness aside from the personal otherness of being kind of weird.) I think it'd help to spend a lot of time in another country where it WOULD be exotic, although then you get into the political anti-Americanism overseas and that's a whole different issue.

I've always been annoyed by those grocery-aisle divisions. Mexican and Asian foodstuffs are in no way exotic or unusual in Southern California.

[queen_elvis]

On further reflection, it could also be that I don't really identify with stuff that's considered canonically American by our culture. Jazz, football, big chunks of meat for dinner, superhero comics, pickup trucks. That stuff is ours, but my gut reaction is that it's not mine. Maybe I should be celebrating my Californian heritage, or my heritage as part of some other specific US subculture.

[devjoe]

If it makes you feel better, the stereotype of Mexicans going to get drunk is not limited to the United States. It's apparently considered a core enough part of Mexican culture that one of the 54 cards in the Mexican game Lotería is El borracho, the drunk.

[cnoocy]

I don't think the existence of El Borracho in Loteria indicates that drunkenness is part of Mexican culture any more than the existence of The Fool in the Tarot indicates that the English are culturally prone to walking off cliffs.

[tablesaw]

No.