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Throwback: The Whiteness of "Latinx" · Tales From Aztlantis

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: This episode is sponsored by Archeo Gato Tours.
• 0:04
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• 0:39
  SPEAKER_02: Or just follow the link in the show notes.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_02: Now, on with the show.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_03: You must excuse me.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_03: But you've learned a lesson.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_03: A lesson in honesty.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_03: Honesty to yourself, honesty to others.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_03: Lesson must end to another step in the mind.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_02: Yemen Otimen, and welcome to Tales from Mustlandis, the show where we explore Mesoamerican pseudo history, new age nonsense, and other stories of adventure.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_02: We are your hosts, Curly Tlapoyawa.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: And Ruben Ariano, also known as Tlacatica.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_02: A couple of years back, I came across a video online about the Chigano Moratorium March of August 29th, 1970.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_02: In case you've never heard of it, the march was a watershed moment in the Chigano movement, in which the Los Angeles police met a peaceful Chigana-Chigano-led protest against the Vietnam War with extreme violence.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_02: The ensuing police riot claimed three lives, most notably that of journalist Ruben Salazar.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_02: It remains an important chapter in Chicana-Chicano history.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yet the video claims that the Chicano Moratorium sparked a movement in defense of Latinx lives.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: It was 1970, it was the Vietnam War, and President Nixon had just intensified the war even after he said he would end it.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Thousands of American soldiers were returning home in caskets, and one community started to notice a pattern.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: Mexican Americans, who were just 10% of the population in southwestern states, were 20% of those killed in combat.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: This sparked a movement in defense of Latinx lives.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_02: Wait, what?
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_02: I have to admit, this bizarre rewriting of Chicana Chicano history caught me by surprise.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_02: While it may be in vogue to adopt trendy terms like Latin X in an attempt to be more inclusive, this video in effect erases a part of history that many consider very important.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_02: And I am not alone in feeling this way.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_02: The participants in the Chicano Moratorium most certainly did not identify as Latin X, and no amount of historical revisionism is going to change that.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_02: After watching the video, I had many questions.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_02: Why did its producers feel entitled to effectively erase an identity that so many fought to gain respect for?
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_02: Why did they feel the need to retroactively assign an identity to people who had never adopted it?
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_02: But mainly, I wondered why the promoters of the term Latin X felt the need to cling to such a Eurocentric anti-indigenous identity in the first place.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_02: The X in Latin X is an attempt to ungender the term Latino, yet it still pays deference to a Eurocentric ideology that actively denies the indigenous and African heritage of the people it claims to represent.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_02: If one is so serious about non-gendered terminology, why cling to a European language as the basis of one's identity?
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_02: Why not simply adopt an indigenous term?
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_02: Wouldn't this be more reflective of our cultural inheritance as Native people?
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_02: Now, personally, I prefer to identify as Macewali, a term in the Nahuat language that means indigenous person.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_02: Like many Mesoamerican languages, Nahuat is a non-gendered language.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_02: And as an indigenous man who descends from the Nahuat peoples of central Mexico, I think it is far more powerful and meaningful to my identity if I use a term in the language of my ancestors.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_02: Mexico is one of the most linguistically diverse nations on the planet, with 63 officially recognized indigenous languages still being spoken.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_02: Now, this is just officially recognized, right?
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_02: Who knows how many more indigenous languages are still actively being spoken today?
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_02: But this means that there are a multitude of authentic, culturally specific labels we can use to describe ourselves which better reflect who we are.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_02: The very idea of a Latin America and Latin people comes from the French intellectual Michel Chevalier, who sought in the late 1800s to create an umbrella term that would unite colonial subjects under a generic Latin identity.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_02: In doing so, Chevalier hoped to assist Napoleon III in expanding the French Empire.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_02: Chevalier hoped that if he could convince Mexicans to adopt a Latin view of themselves, they would be more inclined to align themselves with French interests.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_02: In 1968, John Letty Felon, in his paper Pan Latinism, French Intervention in Mexico and the Genesis of the Idea of Latina America, explains Chevalier's intentions.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: In order to forestall such a dismal prospect, Chevalier had an emphatic answer.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: Only she, meaning France, can prevent this whole family, meaning the Latin nations, from being engulfed in the double inundation of the Germans or the Anglo-Saxons and the Slavs.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: 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.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_02: So, if Mexicans embraced the ideals of Latinism or Latinidad, the French would now be their Latin brethren, as opposed to the Saxons who also had interests in Mexico.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_02: As historian Thomas Holloway notes, 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.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_02: Unfortunately, the idea found a home among Mexico's ruling elite.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_02: The notion that indigenous people would be improved by transforming them into Latinos was a central part of Jose Vasconcelo's idea of La Raza Cósmica, a racial fantasy that promoted whiteness as the door to the future for indigenous Mexicans.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_02: In her book Seeing Indians: a study of race, nation, and power in El Salvador, author Virginia Q.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_02: Tilley breaks down the racism of Vasconcelos's La Raza Cosmica, thusly.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: Vasconcelos' cosmic race concept had, however, little or nothing to do with Indians.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: Although citing the admixture of indigenous and black blood, he saw the true value of La Raza in its European, Spanish, and French, hence Latin cultural racial roots.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: In La Raza Cosmica, his tone about Indians was indeed dismissive.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: Those Indians not already Spanishized, Espanolizados, had no other door to the future than the door of modern culture, nor any other future than the road already cleared by the Latino civilization.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: His goal was to eliminate Indianists by turning Indians into Latino Mestizos through cultural change, rather than truly to obviate and eliminate anti-Indian bias.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: Indeed, he believed that marginalizing, even eliminating the indigenous peoples was essential to Latin America's international security and standing.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_02: So I think it's worth mentioning now that Vasconcelos was also a Nazi sympathizer.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_02: So fuck that dude.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_02: Now, knowing the origin of the term Latino, I cannot bring myself to embrace it.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_02: No matter how you slice it, terms like Latin, Latino, Latina, and Latin X represent a racist colonialist mindset that actively erases people of indigenous and African origin.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_02: Why should we continue to promote a term that centers and privileges whiteness at the expense of brown and black people?
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_02: And I am far from being the first person to point out the colonialist nature of Latinidad.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_02: Volumes have been written by indigenous and African descent intellectuals who see the term as a colonialist tool of erasure.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_02: In the 1980s, the Afro-Brazilian scholar Lelia Gonzalez devoted much of her writing to exposing the Eurocentric nature of Latinidad and discussing how the term erases indigenous and African people.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_02: To counter Latinidad, she adopted for herself the term Amefricanidad in order to center her experiences as an African descendant living in the Americas.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: She noted, When I speak of my own experience, I am talking about a long process of learning which occurred in my search for an identity as a black woman within a society which oppresses me and discriminates against me because I am black.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: But a question of an ethical and political nature arises immediately.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: I cannot speak in the first person singular of something which is painfully common to millions of women who live in the region, those Amerindians and Amer Africans who are oppressed by Latinness, which legitimizes their inferiority.
• 12:04
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• 12:09
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• 12:13
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• 12:16
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• 12:29
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• 12:37
  SPEAKER_02: And now on with the show.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_02: You see, by appropriating and retrofitting the past for purposes of the present, those who are reframing the Chicano movement to fit the Latin X worldview are creating a false narrative that reeks of Orwellianism and historical revisionism.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_02: Well intentioned or not, this is dangerous.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_02: Now, let me be clear, gender inclusivity is absolutely important and deserves our full attention.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_02: But I don't think rewriting the identities of those who participated in historical events simply to appease current attitudes is the best way to do it.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_02: Some have begun to use the term Chicanex in order to engender the term chicano, and honestly, this term is far less problematic than Latinx ever will be, because Chicanex recognizes our roots as an indigenous people.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_02: After all, it's not the X that is the cause for concern.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_02: It's the Latin part that denies our cultural inheritance.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_02: I have noticed that for some reason the Latin X crowd, online at least, appears openly hostile to the term Chican X, which begs the question: is there an issue with gendered language or do they simply hate Chicanas and Chicanos?
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_02: So here's my tip to the Latinx folks.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_02: Allow us to determine our own identities and stop trying to erase those of indigenous and African descent.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_02: It's just a suggestion.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: But Curly, why are you trying to divide us?
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it's it's funny because Um a while back, uh probably about a month ago, I was interviewed uh by Telemundo as part of this new English language show that they have going on.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_02: I I'm not sure what the show is called, but the the topic of this episode was Latinx, right?
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_02: Like what does it mean?
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_02: Should we use it?
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_02: Should people say it?
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_02: You know, is it a good term, etc.?
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_02: And so I went through the interview, and um I could kind of tell that the interviewer thought that it was going to be like a confrontational interview.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_02: Somebody must have just told him, like, yeah, this guy's against the term.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_02: You should interview him for the show.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_02: And so I could tell that my my responses to his questions weren't adversarial or confrontational.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_02: I was just like, look, when people hear that I am against the term Latinx, they assume one of two things, right?
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_02: It's either that I am upset that the integrity of the Spanish language is being threatened, which anybody who knows me knows I don't give a shit about the Spanish language.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: Or don't say curly.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_02: Or they think that I'm like transphobic or against gender-neutral language in general.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, neither of those things are true.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_01: Those are the only two paradigms that exist in these people's minds.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_02: So I think I threw them a curveball because I was like, neither of those things are why I am opposed to Latinx.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_02: And then I just laid it out, you know, Latin, Latinidad, these are it's a Eurocentric concept, it robs us of our cultural inheritance, and it wound up being a really friendly conversation.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think it's what they were looking for, and so when the episode finally aired, you know, I watched it and I was left out entirely.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: That's because you didn't supply the foil element that they were looking for.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_02: I I think that's really true because every single person who was interviewed was just like 100% pro, you know, this is why it's a great word.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_02: They, you know, never once did anybody evaluate or interrogate the origins of Latino.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: Well, no one ever does.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's always assumed that it's a term that people agree to call themselves down in Central and South America and possibly even Mexico, and that somehow it's just okay to use it without question.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and so when I raised these issues, like look, man, it's it's a Eurocentric term, it's a colonialist term, I kind of deflated their tires, right?
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_02: So I was left out of it entirely.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_02: And I and I watched it, and you know, I'm I'm gonna be honest, it wasn't a great show.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_02: So part of me feels like fortunate that I was left out.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: What a relief, right?
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but then but then another part of me is like, well, they could have used my uh perspective, I felt, you know.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um obviously I was the only one who felt that way at the time.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, I know in in in in the article that that we just went over, it's one that you posted a few years ago, and uh you mentioned um the Brazilian scholar, which I had never heard of before until you brought her to my attention, who was doing this stuff going back to the 80s.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_01: In the 80s, yeah, here in the US, most people, as far as uh at least the by neck of the woods, uh, most people, I mean, you did have some people that would occasionally throw out the word Latino or Latin in in its archaic sense, not in the the current sense that it that it came to be known in by the 90s.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and but most talking about Caesar and shit.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: Well, not only that, but like you know, the Latin lover that you know that that kind of idea, right?
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: But most people, if they didn't call themselves by their uh either um ethnic background or nationalist background, they called themselves Hispanic, right?
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: You were you were either a Chicano, mexicano, guatemalteco, salvadoreño, etc.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: Or you know, you went by the catch-all term Hispanic, which was something that you only saw really in applications that related to government uh documentation or for school or applications for work, that sort of stuff.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it wasn't until maybe the late 80s into the early 90s that the word Latino be began to sort of uh assume the the role that Hispanic had taken in the 80s, because now it became by again inclusivity, that's the key term here, right?
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_01: Let's be more inclusive, let's include people who aren't necessarily Spanish speaking or descend from Spanish speakers, i.e.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_01: Brazilians and by extension Portuguese.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: And and that's all great.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: You know, being inclusive is all great, but if it's at the expense of someone else's identity who never agreed to call themselves that specific term, then you know, respect that and don't lump them into your ideology.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: Don't don't lump them into your terminology.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh in fact, Chicanismo was uh sort of a a rejection of Hispanidad.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_01: It was a rejection of being lumped into these categories that didn't represent who we were as a people, right?
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_02: And so Yeah, yeah, it was staking out our own identity, you know, carving out our own space.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: And so um the first time that I mean I I I had a sense of this growing up because growing up I didn't really call myself, you know, most people that I knew, at least in my neck of the woods, didn't call themselves Hispanic unless they had to.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: Most people call themselves uh Mexicanos, even the word Chicano by the time I was growing up, you know, you knew people who called themselves Chicanos who were older generation folks, but we just called ourselves mexicanos.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_01: And and so it wasn't until until I began to become part of, you know, the Red Road, Mexicayot, and I met people like you that uh I began to to understand what what that thing was that I I felt uncomfortable with with the term Hispanic uh all my life.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: I never knew how to express it until I read an article that you had written that was published originally in the Fort Worth Star Telegram.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_01: Remember that back in was it 1999 or something?
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_01: Can you tell us a little bit about that, but uh how how you came to express those words and that idea?
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_02: So I think um what was that article called?
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_02: Uh do Hispanics know who they are?
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_02: I think so.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's what it was called.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_02: And and I I just go into like, look, you know, these these words like Hispanic and Latino rob us of our indigenous heritage, and they're very Eurocentric, and we need to assert our identities as indigenous people because this is far more meaningful to us.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_02: And what's cool about that article was it wound up getting picked up by the AP and then tran uh translated into Spanish and run in Mexican newspapers.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_02: See, I didn't know that.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so it got uh it got play like all over the place.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: And um it was like one of my earliest attempts at uh at writing a uh I guess an op-ed piece, right?
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um and and and it got spread pretty far and wide.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_02: And what's funny is there was a um a a talk radio person out of uh Dallas, and she was infamous for being like super confrontational, and I get this phone call from her.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I don't remember her name, but yeah, I get this phone call from her out of the blue, and she's like, What do you mean we're not Latinos?
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_02: And so I explained my position to her, and she's like, Well, I want you on my show.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_02: We need to, we need, we need to talk about this on the air.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_02: I think I know who you're talking about.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_02: I asked a few people about her and they warned me not to do it.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_02: They were like, Well, what she likes to do is shut off your mic and then just talk over you.
• 22:58
  unknown: Yeah.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_02: And uh I decided that it was probably for the best if I didn't uh go on.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_02: But um, yeah, that was like it's just funny because like just the the the hatred in her voice, right?
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_02: Calling me, like, what do you mean?
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_02: And what gets me is people, you know, when that that article first came out, I had you know a lot of the same questions that are asked of uh to me today were asked about that first piece that I wrote like back in 2000.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_02: And it's like, well, then what are we supposed to call ourselves?
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_02: Like, like we need an umbrella term.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_02: Like, what's the umbrella term we should use to group everybody together?
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, do we need an umbrella term?
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_02: Like, what's wrong with indigenous?
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_02: Because I see my cultural cousins, I live in New Mexico, my cultural cousins are the Pueblo people, you know, and the Navajos and the Apaches and the other native indigenous people from this region.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_02: Like, I don't feel some sort of kinship or connection to you know white Argentinians, you know?
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_02: That's that I I just don't feel connected to them, and that's one of the problems with the word like Latino as sort of an umbrella term, is it's totally centering whiteness.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_02: Because it's uniting us in our experiences, and it's like our what experiences?
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_02: Our experiences with white people?
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_02: Like, that's what we're gonna use is the foundation of our very identities, like the cornerstone of who we are is gonna be whiteness.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: I think a more generous explanation would be that people are trying to unite under this idea of a shared ancestry based on language and based on colonial experience, which is odd if you think about it, given that a lot of these same folks that go on and on about Latinidad and Latinx are kind of the same people that are, you know, currently also um talking about anti-colonialism and decol decolonization.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm thinking, well, how can you do that if you're also subscribing to this identity that is tied directly to the aftermath of the colonization and the genocide and the exploitation of indigenous lands and indigenous peoples?
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's you can't have it both you can't both be out of one side of your mouth talking about decolonization and anti-colonialism, and then out the other side you are going on and on about unification through Latinx.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's either if you're gonna talk about decolonization and and how that is directly tied to who you are as a person, as an individual, and how and how much that means to you, then perhaps maybe you need to, and if you must have an umbrella term, perhaps maybe adopt an indigenous identity and perhaps begin to identify as Native American or Indigenous American.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, if you must going back to what you were saying about this person that asks, or these people that ask you all the time or used to ask you, what do we call ourselves if we're not Latino or Latina?
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: Well, how about Indigenous American?
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_01: Just like you have African American, Anglo-American, Indigenous American?
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we're indigenous people, you know, our ancestry is not just only tied to Europe.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: Sure, you can continue to identify as a Latino or Hispanic if you're of an older generation, but does that fully represent who you are?
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_01: Does calling yourself an indigenous person not have any value in that uh mestizo identity of yours?
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: And it just happens that people like me and you we reject the Latino, Latina, and now the Latinx identity, not because of some phobia or some bigotry against people who call themselves that but because we don't uh subscribe to a Eurocentric view of ourselves, we have an indigenous view of ourselves, and I think that's something that's missing in this conversation when people they look at us and they wonder why it is that we don't get with the program, right?
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, why aren't you jumping on board?
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I'm sorry, not doing it.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_02: And and getting back to what you were saying about having an indigenous view of ourselves, it's one of the things that I I like to bring up to people is like, well, okay, so you you call yourself Latin or Hispanic or Hispano, but what about your cultural inheritance?
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_02: Like, what's the culture that you inherited from your grandma, from your grandparents?
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_02: Because I didn't grow up eating fucking paella, you know?
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_02: Like I grew up eating indigenous foods, like, you know, with an indigenous identity, so I don't know the first goddamn thing about Spain or or any of that or Europe.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_02: I I have a an indigenous view of myself, so that's how I choose to identify.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_02: But one of the more, I guess, mundane problems with promoting words like Latin and Latin X is that it it tends to obfuscate um, you know, people when you're trying to speak about a specific people and you just you know gloss them as Latin or Latin X, it's like, well, wait a minute, who the hell are you talking about?
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_02: Because as a historian, I want to know, like, well, you say Latin, but are you talking about Puerto Ricans?
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_02: Are you talking about Mexicans?
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_02: Are you talking about Mexican Americans?
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_02: Like, what the hell are you even talking about?
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_02: And I bring this up because uh the Los Angeles Times, just recently, May 10th, 2021, published this uh column called California Has a History of Racist Lynchings 2.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_02: Ignoring that fact is mass delusion.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_02: And it's it's a pretty good article, right?
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_02: Like it gets to the nitty-gritty of it opens up with the story of uh a Mexican woman named Josefa who um she killed a man in self-defense and then was hung later.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_02: She was lynched in Downeyville uh for doing this.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_02: But in the story, it's talking about you know all the different people who were lynched in California and it kind of it it really drops the ball because it's like uh you know, and and I'll quote it directly, it says uh in a state where Gonzalez Day found at least 350 people, the majority of them Latinos, many killed as much for their race as for their alleged crimes, were lynched in California between 1850 and 1935.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_02: So 350 people, that's not an insignificant amount of people who were lynched.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_02: But when it says the majority of them were Latinos, I'm like, what does that even mean?
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_02: I I assume they're talking about Mexicans, but Well, I would assume so too.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_02: And then, you know, uh the author interviews this Gonzalez Day and quotes them, and Gonzalez Dei says, uh, this fragmenting of Latin X bodies and history doesn't resonate with some communities.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, well, what communities are you talking about, bro?
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_02: Like what's the what's the context for that quote?
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_02: Why why were they asked that question?
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it says Gonzalez Day has approached local governments across California for over a decade to volunteer his services in case any ever want to erect a monument to tell the stories of the lynched.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_02: None has taken up his offer.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_02: And then he goes on.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_02: This fragmenting of Latinx bodies and history doesn't resonate with some communities, he said diplomatically.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_02: So it's like, why didn't he just say Mexican?
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_02: Like, I I don't understand.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_02: You're you're, you know, this is a history that actually happened, but you're using like these vague, bizarre generalizations to describe a very specific event.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_02: And I think the the impact of the story gets lost when you just use these nonsensical, Eurocentric fucking umbrella terms to describe Mexicans.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think it would be fair to say that maybe not all people who were lynched, who were non-Anglo, uh, who happened to have a Spanish last name, perhaps, were necessarily uh ethnically Mexican.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_01: Because at this at this time in California, you had people coming from all over the world, you had Chileans coming in.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's that whole controversy about uh the the folk hero in California, Joaquin Murieta, how some people claim that he was from Chile, and because of I think uh Pablo Naruda wrote something about it once or something, and then you have Mexicans say, nah, he was uh Son Sonora, I believe, I think that's what they the claim is.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_01: I forget.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_01: So so it it in in in to be fair to this this uh de Gonzalez, I think what what they're trying to say is that it's not necessarily correct to just say that it was Mexicans, which I okay, I'll give them that much.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_01: But the majority of the people that were in California who were quote unquote of Spanish descent or Mexican descent happened to be ethnic Mexicans, whether Californios who had been there before the takeover by the US or people who immigrated afterwards, the vast majority of those people were ethnically Mexican.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_02: So perhaps in in their effort and that that gets lost, all of that gets lost when you use it this genetic.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_01: Well, sure, and and and perhaps, you know, if these people they're gonna continue using the word Latinx, that's not going away.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_01: Uh this little podcast isn't gonna have that kind of effect.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_01: But I would right, but I would hope that at least they would offer a little bit more of an explanation as to and provide some context to when they use these terms, especially in terms of lynching and things that happened historically, especially given the fact that you know it's always been the case that ethnic Mexicans have been the largest group within that umbrella um category of whether it's Hispanic or Latino.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I should also add that the word Hispanic and the word Latina, Latino or or now Latinx, those are not racial categories, and people always use them as if they're a racial category.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_01: They're an they're a categorization based on government standards to be able to keep track of people who come from or descend from a certain um part of society that is either non-Anglo, uh non-African American in their view, right, and and also non-Native American in their view, because we would argue otherwise that we are native people, whether the government and whether Latinx people want to admit it or not.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_01: And that's part of this conversation too.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_01: That just because you're using the term Latinx as a category doesn't necessarily mean that you can also use it as a racial category because ethnic categories and ethnic and ethnic identity and racial identity and national identity and all these identities are not the same, and they often get conflated.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I've heard people call themselves, you know, the or say say things like, I'm I am racially uh Latino.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what does that even mean to be racially Latino?
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_01: I have no idea what that means.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_01: I have no idea what that means.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and then you get all of this bizarre confusion over, you know, you could get a native Nahuatl speaker from Central Mexico living in Los Angeles, together with a native uh Mixteco speaker, together with uh an Afro-Cuban, together with a white Argentinian, but they're all lumped in uh under this generic term.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_02: And then it's like, well, what's the thing that unites them?
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, it's whiteness.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_02: So it's their relationship to whiteness that's used as the barometer of determining what this identity is going to be.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_02: And like you said, all these people are talking about, oh, we're anti-colonial, we're down with decolonization, but they cling desperately to these colonialist labels because I don't think they really want to surrender that relationship to whiteness.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's something that they need to deal with.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, perhaps, perhaps.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_01: But also, let's be generous, maybe they just don't know.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe they just don't know the difference.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_01: They've never been taught that what they're doing, that these identities that they're using are actually not favorable to people who are indigenous or who are um, as the lady from from Brazil calls herself, uh, Africans, right?
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_01: People who are of African descent but were born in is she trying to say with that term that it's uh uh like indigenous and African?
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_01: Amafricans?
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_01: Is that what it refers to?
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_02: I I think she means it as an African descent person who lives in the Americas.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_02: That's how that she's using it.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I'll I'll give you that point.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe it's just because they don't know, right?
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_02: It's um I forget what it's called, uh, Hanlon's razor.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_02: Don't attribute to malice that which can be explained by ignorance.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_02: So that's yeah, that's a good point.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_02: You know, maybe they just don't know.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe they've never heard the other side of the coin.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the problem becomes an issue when these people, even after you've explained it to them, are insistent that you should continue to use this term that they are partial to because of some political uh agenda that is supposed to be, you know, a positive gain for the group as a whole.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_01: And you have those those people as well that will tell you to your face, yes, I understand what you're saying, but like, no, there's no but there's no but after that, but it makes them feel good, man.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's like we've said, it makes them feel good.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_02: But you know what I like to say the truth, it's like medicine, it doesn't always taste good, but it's always good for ya.