#Racism in Mexico

[feminegra]

"Hay que mejorar la raza" - Exploring Mexican Racist Slang

1. Hay que mejorar la raza (aka Let’s pretty up the family tree… with lighter branches) What’s the deal? This one’s like saying you should aim to marry someone super pale – because apparently, that’s “better”? Yikes. It reeks of that old colonial “white is right” attitude. Why it’s messed up: Imagine telling your kids the key to success is ditching their heritage for a whiter shade. Not cool,…

[decolonize-the-everything]

Housing insecurity is racist & violent

"Seventy-five national, state, territorial, and local domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking organizations filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) urging it to support the rights of people who are homeless, including unhoused survivors, in City of Grants Pass, Ore. v. Johnson. This case is one of the most important SCOTUS cases regarding homelessness in the past 40 years. The amicus brief, authored by the National Housing Law Project and Sexual Violence Law Center, argues that housing is extremely limited for gender-based violence survivors, often forcing them to make impossible choices between sleeping outside or suffering continued violence. Criminalizing survivors will only increase their and their families’ risk of violence, trauma, and housing insecurity."

Article from July 29:

Housing advocates across Indian Country say Native Americans and Alaska Natives likely will feel the full weight of a June 28 Supreme Court ruling that has cleared the way for cities to enforce bans on unsheltered people sleeping outside in public places. Native Americans experience homelessness at a disparate rate. Advocates say the housing crisis is a reflection of our society’s unwillingness to address systemic issues.

“It’s criminalizing poverty,” said attorney Caroline LaPorte, who is an immediate descendant of the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians. “We are much more comfortable with putting, and paying, for people to be incarcerated.” LaPorte is the director of the STTARS Indigenous Safe Housing Resource Center, a project of the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center, and she is the board chairman for the StrongHearts Native Helpline. STTARS focuses on the intersection of housing insecurity and gender-based violence. A lawyer, she said the Supreme Court’s decision was enraging. “Everybody belongs in our communities. They deserve to be safe, and it is our responsibility. We are required to make sure that those people have the things that they need,” LaPorte said.[...]

Announced on June 28 in a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, the court found that outdoor sleeping bans don’t violate the Eighth Amendment, which protects against cruel and unusual punishment.

[hussyknee]

(alt included in all images)

Another thread by Senator Ben Ray Luján here.

A book on the subject (haven't read it myself):

One of the sources in another one of Alisa's furiously impassioned twitter threads have been debunked, so I didn't include that. But she claims that her own family was caught in the fallout zone when her mother was a baby, which eventually led to her and large numbers of her community developing cancer. It's human for that kind of grief to be caught up in inaccuracies. People are already being ghastly and racist to Hispanos and Indigenous people criticizing the hype for the movie. They're not attacking Oppenheimer for being Jewish, they're criticising the erasure of the human cost of these bombs and the continued valorisation of the U.S military's actions in World War II as some kind of moral saviourism.

While Oppenheimer himself believed that the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were morally justified (they had planned to drop them on Germany except they surrendered before they could), he also felt had blood on his hands and regretted his role as the "Father of the Atomic Bomb". He spent the rest of his career vehemently opposing further development of thermonuclear weapons and the hydrogen bomb accurately predicting the concept of mutually assured destruction. This eventually made him a victim of Senator McCarthy's Red Scare and his clearance was revoked. I haven't seen the movie (Christopher Nolan is the kind of casual white racist I avoid on principle) but people who have seen it say that it doesn't glorify nuclear weapons and depicts the man himself with the complex moral nuance that seems to be accurately reflective of his real life.

The backlash to Indigenous and Hispanos people's criticisms and to people pointing out that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were genocides is also frustrating because...both world wars were a clash of genocidal empires. The reason they were world wars is because the countries colonized by Japan, China, the European powers and the US were all dragged into it, whether they wanted to or not. Jews were one of the many colonized peoples that suffered in that time, who were left to die by everyone until they could be used to frame the Allied powers as moral saviours, establishing a revisionist nostalgia for heroism that powers the US military industrial complex to this day.

As early as May 1942, and again in June, the BBC reported the mass murder of Polish Jews by the Nazis. Although both US President, Franklin Roosevelt, and British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, warned the Germans that they would be held to account after the war, privately they agreed to prioritise and to turn their attention and efforts to winning the war. Therefore, all pleas to the Allies to destroy the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau were ignored. The Allies argued that not only would such an operation shift the focus away from winning the war, but it could provoke even worse treatment of the Jews. In June 1944 the Americans had aerial photographs of the Auschwitz complex. The Allies bombed a nearby factory in August, but the gas chambers, crematoria and train tracks used to transport Jewish civilians to their deaths were not targeted.

(Source)

Uncritical consumption of World War II media is the reinforcement of imperialist propaganda, more so when one group of colonized people is used to silence other colonized peoples. Pitting white Jewry against BIPOC is to do the work of white supremacy for imperialist colonizers, and victimizes Jews of colour twice over.

Edit: friends, there's been some doubt cast on the veracity of Alisa's claims. The human cost to the Hispanos population caught downwind of the nuclear tests is very real, as was land seizure without adequate compensation. However, there's no record I can yet find about Los Alamos killing livestock and Hispanos being forced to work for Los Alamos without PPE. There is a separate issue about human testing in the development of said PPE that's not covered here. I'm turning off reblogs until I can find out more. Meanwhile, here's another more legitimate article you can boost instead:

[whydidisavethistomyphone]

[alinahdee]

JUSTICE FOR ELIJAH HADLEY

This happened in June and I am just now hearing about it. There is no media coverage of it where I live.

Boost this information. Demand justice.

Elijah Hadley's name was released to the public before the OFFICER WHO SHOT HIM FOUR TIMES AND THEN 15 MORE TIMES WHILE HE WAS ON THE GROUND.

[princesssarisa]

I've now reached the last of the main list of Cinderella stories from Cinderella Tales Around the World. The book is nowhere near over, though: after this it goes into the various "subtypes" of Cinderella, such as Donkeyskin.

The last few "official" Cinderella stories in this book are from Mexico and Chile. I was disappointed not to see more South American versions, and particularly that there were none from Brazil for @ariel-seagull-wings. But the Donkeyskin tales later in the book do include a Brazilian version, which I look forward to sharing!

Meanwhile...

*As in the versions from the Philippines, the heroine is named Maria in all three of these Latin American tales.

*The Mexican version is called Maria Cenzia, or "Cinder-Mary." The title character is a homeless orphan who lives in an ash-hole belonging to a household of black Moorish witches. They eventually discover her, take her in as a servant, and send her to the river with a black sheepskin, ordering her to wash it until it's white. But a lady appears and magically does the task for her, then gives her a magic wand to grant her wishes and puts a shining star on her forehead. When the jealous daughter of one of the witches sees this, she takes a black sheepskin to the river too, but the lady puts an ugly growth on her forehead instead of a star. Maria later uses her magic wand to give herself finery to wear to church and to give herself wings to fly home before the witches can catch her. She loses a shoe, of course, which leads to her marriage to the prince. But then the witches turn her into a dove with a magic pin. Yet one day, her father-in-law the king finds her and takes out the pin, breaking the spell, and when all is revealed, the witches are burned at the stake.

*The two Chilean versions, Maria the Cinder-Maiden and Maria the Ash-Girl, are nearly identical to each other and very similar to Maria Cenzia too. Maria persuades her father to marry a seemingly-kind widow with a daughter of her own, but is abused afterwards. She has a pet cow, which the stepmother spitefully has killed, but inside its body Maria finds a magic wand. She then has to wash the cow's organs in a stream, but they fall in and are swept away. An old woman comes along and offers to get them for her, and in return Maria cleans her house and cooks supper for her; for this, the old woman gives Maria a shining star on her forehead. The next day the envious stepsister has her own pet cow killed, takes the organs to the stream, and loses them on purpose, but she shows the old woman no kindness, and so she receives a turkey wattle on her forehead instead of a star. Some time later, there's a ball at the royal palace. Maria uses her wand to give herself finery and a coach, and of course she loses a shoe, and the prince uses it to search for her. The stepsister binds her own foot with tight bandages to make the slipper fit, but either a dog or a parrot alerts the prince, and Maria is found.

*It's interesting that the motif of the heroine receiving a shining mark on her forehead (a star, a moon, or a jewel) is found in Cinderella tales from both Latin America and Iran, yet rarely seen elsewhere. My guess is that the motif originated in the Middle East, was brought to Spain by the Arabs, and then traveled from Spain to Latin America.

*This is probably as good a time as any to discuss another recurring theme I've noticed. While around the world it varies whether the heroine's abusers are punished, forgiven, or neither, it seems that when they are punished, the worst punishment usually falls on the (step)sister(s), not the (step)mother. Just look at the Grimms' version: the stepmother is Aschenputtel's main antagonist, and she abuses her own daughters too by forcing them to cut off parts of their feet, yet in the end she goes unpunished, while her daughters' eyes are pecked out by birds. Yet even in versions where the (step)mother does get a punishment, the more brutal killing, maiming, or permanent disfigurement tends to be reserved for her daughter(s). Some versions try to justify it by portraying the sisters as abusing Cinderella more than their mother does, but most don't bother. In many versions, the simple "crime" of being Cinderella's rival is treated as if it were worse than being her chief abuser.

@ariel-seagull-wings, @adarkrainbow, @themousefromfantasyland

[antinativefaves]

YOUR FAVE IS ANTI NATIVE: OTERO COUNTY POLICE

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Having just tucked his oldest son into bed on Wednesday evening, Sebastian Ibarra walked into his living room at home in British Columbia's North Okanagan district and saw a text from his spouse asking if he'd seen the news.

He did a quick online search and learned that the federal government was reimposing some visa requirements on visiting Mexican nationals to curb the number of asylum claims in Canada and stem the flow of people crossing into the United States.

Taken aback, Ibarra said he thought of his parents and brother — who are supposed to visit him from Mexico this summer.

Full article

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

[this-world-of-beautiful-monsters]

Considering that oppenheimer/oppenbarbie/barbenheimer has graced us with its presence during disability pride month, I want to give a shout out to all the Japanese, Pacific Islander, Indigenous, and Latine communities and families who have dealt with and are currently dealing with the physical injuries, birth defects/congenital disabilities, various severe illnesses, radiation poisoning, and psychological (including intergenerational) trauma as a result of the construction, testing, and use of atomic bombs. 

These are disabilities that deserve as much respect and recognition as any other, and I really hope people will remember stuff like that amidst all the memes and whatnot. Wishing the best to everyone who’s still suffering from this nightmare, and everyone who’s been experiencing very real, very painful memories and emotions in connection with this/these film(s).

I’d definitely recommend 

this post about the racist misdiagnoses and suppression surrounding the affects of testing on Navajo and Latine communities, 

this post with a link to an article about communities affected by the Trinity Test, with an additional link to a reblog about the effects of uranium mining on Congolese peoples that I didn’t even know about until reading this

this post quoting various military experts who criticized the bomb’s use around the time of detonation in Japan (opposing the narrative that dropping the bomb was an Unpleasant But Necessary act) that I reblogged with some other resources,

this post quoting M. R. O'Connor’s Wayfinding to discuss the violent bomb testing on Marshall Islands and the effects on the communities who lived there, 

and this amazing post listing a whole bunch of resources with audio/video/writing about Indigenous and Latine Downwinder communities, including valuable information about how to support the groups still struggling with these issues.

Edit: additional link to this post highlighting the nuclear violence and testing in the Marshall Islands and also having some good discussions about concerns with the Oppenheimer film in general

If anyone has any other recs/resources, please feel free to add on!

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

[haveyouseenthishorrormovie]

SUMMARY: Police raid a house in El Paso, Texas, and find one lone survivor of a brutal massacre. Taken into custody for questioning, the mysterious man starts telling them strange tales of other worlds, mythical creatures, demons and the undead.

[agentfascinateur]

Bravo Mexico for joining the ICJ case! To justice for Palestinians! 🇵🇸

[thingstrumperssay]

Some fucking psychopath saw the story about a six year old shooting his teacher and was trying to “inform me” that children in New Mexico are being “trained” to carry out school shootings in America, based on how many minority students of that district are there.`

Because of course gun nuts are going to go straight to racism every chance they get.

And course they’re going to ignore the fact that most mass shooters in America are white and have been born in America. (Y’know, because that’s how statistics works.) The one time the child could be Hispanic they’re going to jump on it.

People were calling for a total ban of immigrants crossing the border (specifically the brown ones) as soon as they found out that the Uvalde shooter from North Dakota has a Hispanic-sounding last name.

All gun nuts really are are bigots who hopes to have the opportunity to kill people and call it “self defense.”

Edit: I guess I misread what they were saying. I was thinking that they were saying a new Mexico compound, like it’s been recently made. Not that people are training children to commit school shootings in New Mexico, the state.

[yaristari]

Part 2 in my series of rewatching my favorite 90s/early 00’s shows. (click here to see Daria’s sketch)

Home Movies is such a delight. The dialogue is fantastic, and the vibe of making your own little cinematic masterpieces out of cardboard and dreams as a kid is spot on.

It’s made by Loren Bouchard and Brendon Small. Loren Bouchard then did Bob’s Burgers, which shares the voice actor of H. Jon Benjamin as Coach McGuirk here and Bob Belcher in Bob’s Burgers. Brendon Small (who is also the main character in this show, also named Brendon Small) went on to make Metaloclypse.

[shikai-the-storyteller]

Bruh it's been such a bad day for Mexicans 😭😭😭

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]

𝔏𝔞 𝔩𝔢𝔶 𝔡𝔢 𝔭𝔩𝔬𝔪𝔬 - 𝔭𝔬𝔯𝔱𝔞𝔱𝔢 𝔟𝔦𝔢𝔫

 𝔏𝔞 𝔩𝔢𝔶 𝔡𝔢 𝔭𝔩𝔬𝔪𝔬 - 𝔟𝔞𝔩𝔞 𝔱𝔢 𝔠𝔩𝔞𝔳𝔞

𝔅𝔯𝔲𝔧𝔢𝔯𝔦𝔞  -  𝔏𝔞 𝔩𝔢𝔶 𝔡𝔢 𝔭𝔩𝔬𝔪𝔬