Latest / Tales From Aztlantis / Episode 85: Kurly's Latinx Adventure!

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Episode 85: Kurly's Latinx Adventure! · Tales From Aztlantis

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_02: You must excuse me.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_02: But you remember the lesson.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_02: Lesson and honesty.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_02: Honesty to yourself.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_02: Honesty to others.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: I've always heard that honesty is the best honesty.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: Greetings, dear listeners, and welcome to yet another episode of Tales from Ostlantis, where we explore Chicano, Mexicano, and Mesoamerican history and archaeology, and we push back against the misinformation about those very topics.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: I am your host, Curly Tlapoyawa, and I'm going to be running solo today because my good friend and co-host, Dr.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Ruben Ariano Tlacate, could not be with us.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: He has uh obligations that he had to attend to.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: So this episode is gonna be a little bit shorter in length than most of our other episodes, which might be a good thing, might be a bad thing.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: But last week we went really long.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: Our interview with Ken Fetter was way longer than our normal uh length.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, we're just trying to even things out here so you don't get sick of hearing our voices over and over again.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Well, for today's episode, I wanted to take you on a little trip back in time to something that I'm calling Curly's Latinx Adventure.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: So this started in December of 2022.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: I got an email from Jeanette Johnson Lycon of uh DePau University.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: And uh really, really cool individual, awesome Chicana from El Paso, Texas.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh she's got family in Chihuahua Qua Pemuk and Warez, so you know she's she's down.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: And she hits me up and asks if I would be interested in speaking at the Indiana Latinx Leadership Conference.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: So me being me, of course, I immediately assume that I'm being set up like this is some sort of trap or something.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: So I respond and I'm like, hey, how are you?
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, thanks for the invite.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: I would be interested in speaking, but you do know who I am, right?
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: Like I'm not exactly the biggest fan of the term Latinx.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: But um yeah, she was like, we would like you to come out and give the keynote uh address for this conference.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to read to you a little bit of the email she sent me to help put things in perspective.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: So she says the title of the conference, or at least the Latin X part, has its problems, as you've addressed on Medium.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: And rather than avoiding it, we want to invite speakers and students to talk about it openly.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: So this is really cool, and um, it's how things should be done, right?
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: Like people with differing perspectives and worldviews should be allowed to come in and express themselves at universities um in spaces like this in a in a way that allows for discussion because this is um, you know, it's something that people are still arguing about uh on the internet.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: So this was back in 2022.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: And uh so I went to DePaul University.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's a really cool campus, it's like in the middle of all these cornfields, it's pretty wild, and I gave the keynote address for the uh Indiana Latinx Leadership Conference.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought I would treat you, dear listener, to my uh rendition, my retelling of the uh the keynote address.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: Without further ado, here we go.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: I want to tell you all a story.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: A while back, I published a piece about the term Latin X, and in it I discussed why I, as a Chicano, do not identify with this term.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: The piece was picked up by magazines and websites and was even included in a college textbook on writing.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: So I felt pretty satisfied with the results and went on with my other work.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: Well, about a month later, a reporter from Univision reached out to me and asked if I wanted to be interviewed for a video segment he was producing on the use of the term.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: He told me that he wanted to have a different perspective on Latinx, and he thought that I would be a good fit, so I agreed to be interviewed over Zoom for the piece.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: But when the interview started, I noticed an underlying hostility in his questions, like a certain tone.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: What do you mean you don't support the use of Latinx?
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: he asked.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I responded, well, let me start off by saying that when a lot of folks hear that I am opposed to the term Latinx, they assume either one of two things, or possibly both.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: One, that I'm a bigoted, transphobic clown who detests the idea of gender neutral language, or two, that I'm some sort of dedicated defender of the supposed sanctity of the Spanish language, and that I view the X in Latin X as an affront to the language, neither of which is true.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: My problem, I told him, is not with the X, rather, it's the Latin that I take issue with.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: The reporter seemed a little taken off guard by my response, and that's when I realized that he had made the same assumptions about my position and had not actually bothered to read my article.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: What's wrong with the Latin?
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: he asked.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I was honestly a little surprised by this question, as indigenous and African descent people throughout the indigenous South have long criticized the colonialist nature of Latinidad.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: I told him, well, I view Latin and Latino as colonialist terms that prioritize whiteness while erasing those of indigenous and African descent, and that as a Chicano from New Mexico, a state with nineteen pueblos and the Navajo and Apache nations, I grew up with an identity rooted in indigenity and as far removed from Latin anything as you can get.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: But how is Latin colonialist?
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: he asked.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: So I pulled up my article and I read him the following excerpt.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: This is from my article.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: I quote The very idea of a Latin America and Latin people comes from the French intellectual Michel Chevalier, who sought in the late eighteen hundreds to create an umbrella term that would unite colonial subjects under a generic Latin identity.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: In doing so, Chevalier hoped to assist Napoleon III in expanding the French Empire.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: Chevalier hoped that if he could persuade Mexicans to adopt a Latin view of themselves, they would be more inclined to align themselves with French interests.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: In nineteen sixty eight, John Letty Felon explained Chevalier's intentions in his paper Pan Latinism, French Intervention in Mexico and the Genesis of the Idea of Latin America.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: In order to forestall such a dismal prospect, Chevalier had an emphatic answer.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: France must reassert in a vigorous fashion that hegemony over the Latin world, which belonged to her since the time of Louis XV, Chevalier exhorted, only she, she being France, can prevent this whole family, the Latin nations, from being engulfed in the double inundation of the Germans or the Anglo Saxons and the Slavs.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: To France belongs the role of awakening the Latins from the lethargy in which they are now submerged in the two hemispheres, to raise them to the level of other nations and to put the Latins in a position where their influence can be felt in the rest of the world.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: This was from John Letty Fellon's nineteen sixty eight paper.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: So we learn from this that if Mexicans embraced the ideals of Latinism, the French would now be their Latin brethren as opposed to the Saxons who also had interests in Mexico.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: As historian Thomas Holloway notes, I quote, Napoleon III was particularly interested in using the concept to help justify his intrusion into Mexican politics that led to the imposition of Archduke Maximilian as emperor of Mexico, unquote.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: I told him about the noted Afro Brazilian feminist, Lelia Gonzalez, who in the nineteen eighties adopted the term amefricanidad for herself as a rejection of Latinidad and an assertion of her identity as an African descent woman living in the Americas.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: Just as Chicano identity is a rejection of Latinidad forged in the crucible of anti imperialist and anti colonial struggle in the indigenous Southwest.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: The interview went on for well over an hour, and it ended quite pleasantly with the reporter thanking me for my time and telling me that he'll let me know when the video segment is released.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: A couple of months passed and I still hadn't heard anything, so I did a quick Google search and I saw that the story had indeed been released.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: I watched it only to find out that I had been left out completely.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: I was not included in the video at all.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: The video presented a completely uncritical and overwhelmingly positive acceptance of the term Latinx and championing Latinidad, which is fine, it was his video after all, and he could present information however he pleased.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: But what I found interesting is that intracut throughout the video were short segments of the same reporter who had interviewed me wearing a variety of costumes, portraying characters who were vehemently opposed to the term Latinx.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: I realized that these characters were being used as stand-ins for the positions that he thought I would represent in the piece.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: When I didn't provide the transphobic or pro Spanish language position he assumed I would, he simply invented a character to make the arguments he had hoped I would make.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: And this was unfortunate, because it was a missed opportunity to present a nuanced, complicated conversation about identity, history, and indigenous erasure from a variety of perspectives and viewpoints.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: So I hope that all of you take advantage of this conference to engage in these nuanced and complicated conversations.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: Identity is extremely personal.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: The terms we use, how we see ourselves and how we present ourselves to others is important.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: And no matter what you call yourself, you deserve an informed opinion of where these ideas come from.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: Do not allow yourselves to be erased.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: So that was it.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: That was the uh the keynote address that I gave at the Latinx leadership conference.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: And to my surprise, my pleasant surprise, there was a great response to it.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the people who were there felt really engaged and they wanted to talk to me about these things.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of people came up to me and said, Thank you, thank you for saying that, because I don't call myself a Latino, you know.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Guatemalan, I'm from Honduras, like I don't feel comfortable with this term.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: And you helped uh clarify these these thoughts that I've been having.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so in all, it was a great experience.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: And this is, I guess, the point of this really short episode is we need to be open to having these sort of conversations.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: We need to invite people who we might disagree with on terms like this when it comes to identity to sit down and have a conversation and do it in a civilized and uh and good way and not just resort to immediately uh canceling each other or you know, talking shit about each other just right off the bat without even understanding the argument that the other person is trying to make.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: And in terms of that Univision video, I was a little disappointed to be left out because, like I said, I thought that was a missed opportunity.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um I would have provided a counterbalance because a lot of people were included in this video, but they were all being very supportive and positive about the term Latinx, right?
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: They were just behind it 100%.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: And there was no pushback.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I would have provided that.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: But instead, for the reporter to invent a character to fill in the gaps that he thought I was going to, that was a little disappointing.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: So there you have it.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: Curly's Latinx Adventure.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: I hope uh everybody here has a great week.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: Keep your heads up.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna be alright.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: And remember, the truth is like medicine.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't always taste good, but it is always good for you.