- Mar 11, 2015
- 100,683
- 107,488
- 3,645
Seems that a number of whites here seem to believe that every other community of color are just happy with how things are and blacks are the only ones complaining. Lol!
The Spanish arrived from Europe in what would eventually become the United States nearly 500 years ago and began to mix with the indigenous people they met and conquered. Native Americans, Mexicans, Central Americans, South Americans, Caribbean islands, and other nations eventually meshed their native languages and cultures to become the population we now term “Hispanic” or “Latino.”
(NOTICE THE DIFFERENCE, NO SLAVERY)
Despite their large numbers, myriad contributions celebrated during this Hispanic Heritage Month, the fact that their ancestors built civilizations eons before the Europeans arrived, and their European DNA, Hispanics today face widespread racism and bigotry.
Racism against Hispanics is a complicated issue, noted now retired Distinguished Professor A. Gabriel Meléndez, former director of the Center for Regional Studies at The University of New Mexico.
First, one difference in terms of the experience of other groups in the U.S. is that Mexican-Americans were incorporated in the country as citizens en masse at the end of the U.S. Mexico War in 1848 and as a result of an international treaty. So technically, the group should have had all the rights of the American citizen, he said, adding that the other comparable group is Puerto Ricans, who have been citizens since 1898.
A. Gabriel Meléndez
Meléndez observed that despite what has been called “ascriptive citizenship” (ascribed but not always acknowledged) large sectors of the Hispanic community have continued to lag socially and economically due to structural inequities that go back for decades.
“Up until the Chicano Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Mexican Americans or Chicanos found themselves with limited opportunities to enter the professions, to access educational opportunities ̶ especially university degrees ̶ to move beyond established housing patterns or see their fair share of tax funding returned public schools or to improvement projects in towns and neighborhoods that were historically Mexican American," Meléndez said. "While individually it is not easy to draw a direct causal line between racism and ethnicity, discrimination is easy to see as an expression of the institutional insensitivity that has denied opportunity to Mexican Americans. It should be noted that we are talking about a very heterogeneous group, one that emerges out of the historical process known as mestizaje, that is the mixing of ethnicities, cultures, and classes over time that happened here in the border states but also Mexico and other countries in Latin American.
"The very idea of racial hybridity produced misunderstanding in earlier times and was borne of an irrational fear of miscegenation an idea built on faulty racist logic. I think that structural inequity is observable in a number of well-documented discriminatory practices. Economic segregation and educational disadvantages have all combined in a way that suggests that segments of the Chicanx or Latinx community have occupied a second-class standing the American life. This makes for a disproportion representation in negative categories of social life, such as shorter life spans, higher indices of health-related pathologies, higher numbers of incarcerations, lower educational attainment, and the like.”
“Colonization comes through with a sense of power to overtake another community. There is the idea that you have to overpower rather than coexist,” she observed. “In order to take over people you have to minimize who they are, and you do that by criminalizing and dehumanizing them. To justify expansion, you put down the people whose land you took over.”
Some racism is direct and hostile. Cervantes knows of UNM students who have been called names such as “wetback,” a derogatory term for Mexicans that refers to crossing the border into the U.S. by wading or swimming across the Rio Grande. However, students often don’t want to report such incidents.
Students will talk to each other about incidents like this, Cervantes remarked, “But they don’t necessarily want us to step in with a formal complaint.”
Racism isn’t always in hostile, face-to-face encounters, but rather subtle, what Cervantes termed “little things, micro-aggressions.”
“They will try to change your name,” she noted, by anglicizing Spanish names. “People try to call me Rose instead of Rosa.” Or some Hispanics are made to feel ashamed of their Spanish names and they try to change them to an English translation or equivalent.
news.unm.edu
www.theodysseyonline.com
www.pewresearch.org
www.nytimes.com
And then you have black hispanics...
www.nhpr.org
Hispanics progress against racism but have long way to go
The Spanish arrived from Europe in what would eventually become the United States nearly 500 years ago and began to mix with the indigenous people they met and conquered. Native Americans, Mexicans, Central Americans, South Americans, Caribbean islands, and other nations eventually meshed their native languages and cultures to become the population we now term “Hispanic” or “Latino.”
(NOTICE THE DIFFERENCE, NO SLAVERY)
Despite their large numbers, myriad contributions celebrated during this Hispanic Heritage Month, the fact that their ancestors built civilizations eons before the Europeans arrived, and their European DNA, Hispanics today face widespread racism and bigotry.
Racism against Hispanics is a complicated issue, noted now retired Distinguished Professor A. Gabriel Meléndez, former director of the Center for Regional Studies at The University of New Mexico.
First, one difference in terms of the experience of other groups in the U.S. is that Mexican-Americans were incorporated in the country as citizens en masse at the end of the U.S. Mexico War in 1848 and as a result of an international treaty. So technically, the group should have had all the rights of the American citizen, he said, adding that the other comparable group is Puerto Ricans, who have been citizens since 1898.
A. Gabriel Meléndez
Meléndez observed that despite what has been called “ascriptive citizenship” (ascribed but not always acknowledged) large sectors of the Hispanic community have continued to lag socially and economically due to structural inequities that go back for decades.
“Up until the Chicano Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Mexican Americans or Chicanos found themselves with limited opportunities to enter the professions, to access educational opportunities ̶ especially university degrees ̶ to move beyond established housing patterns or see their fair share of tax funding returned public schools or to improvement projects in towns and neighborhoods that were historically Mexican American," Meléndez said. "While individually it is not easy to draw a direct causal line between racism and ethnicity, discrimination is easy to see as an expression of the institutional insensitivity that has denied opportunity to Mexican Americans. It should be noted that we are talking about a very heterogeneous group, one that emerges out of the historical process known as mestizaje, that is the mixing of ethnicities, cultures, and classes over time that happened here in the border states but also Mexico and other countries in Latin American.
"The very idea of racial hybridity produced misunderstanding in earlier times and was borne of an irrational fear of miscegenation an idea built on faulty racist logic. I think that structural inequity is observable in a number of well-documented discriminatory practices. Economic segregation and educational disadvantages have all combined in a way that suggests that segments of the Chicanx or Latinx community have occupied a second-class standing the American life. This makes for a disproportion representation in negative categories of social life, such as shorter life spans, higher indices of health-related pathologies, higher numbers of incarcerations, lower educational attainment, and the like.”
“Colonization comes through with a sense of power to overtake another community. There is the idea that you have to overpower rather than coexist,” she observed. “In order to take over people you have to minimize who they are, and you do that by criminalizing and dehumanizing them. To justify expansion, you put down the people whose land you took over.”
Some racism is direct and hostile. Cervantes knows of UNM students who have been called names such as “wetback,” a derogatory term for Mexicans that refers to crossing the border into the U.S. by wading or swimming across the Rio Grande. However, students often don’t want to report such incidents.
Students will talk to each other about incidents like this, Cervantes remarked, “But they don’t necessarily want us to step in with a formal complaint.”
Racism isn’t always in hostile, face-to-face encounters, but rather subtle, what Cervantes termed “little things, micro-aggressions.”
“They will try to change your name,” she noted, by anglicizing Spanish names. “People try to call me Rose instead of Rosa.” Or some Hispanics are made to feel ashamed of their Spanish names and they try to change them to an English translation or equivalent.
Hispanics progress against racism but have long way to go
The Spanish arrived from Europe in what would eventually become the United States nearly 500 years ago and began to mix with indigenous people they met and conquered. Native Americans, Mexicans, Central Americans, South Americans, Caribbean islands, and...
news.unm.edu
10 Incidents Of Subtle Racism Hispanics Constantly Deal With
Subtle racism is something hispanics have had to deal with their entire life, and this list is only a few of the items we deal with.
www.theodysseyonline.com
Roughly half of Hispanics have experienced discrimination
52% of U.S. Hispanics say they have experienced discrimination or have been treated unfairly because of their race or ethnicity.
www.pewresearch.org
Opinion | A Hard Conversation for the Latino Community (Published 2020)
Racism is deeply rooted in America’s social system, putting Afro-Latinos at a constant disadvantage.
And then you have black hispanics...
‘Racism that knocks you out’: a conversation with an Afro Latina about identity
Yvette Modestin is a writer and activist. She founded Encuentro Diaspora Afro in Boston.
www.nhpr.org
