Latest / Tales From Aztlantis / Episode 78: How Conspiracy Theories Undermine Ethnic Studies!

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Episode 78: How Conspiracy Theories Undermine Ethnic Studies! · Tales From Aztlantis

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_01: You must excuse me.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: This hasn't been easy, I know.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: But you've learned a lesson.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: A lesson in honesty.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: Honesty to yourself, and honesty to others.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: That lesson will stand you in good step all your life.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: I think we've all learned a good lesson.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: I've always heard that honesty is the best policy.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_03: Now I'm catching on to why that's so, no, why that's so, no, why that's so, no, why that's so, no, why that's so, why that's greetings, dear listeners, and welcome to Tales from Ostlantis, where we take you on a journey through Chicano, Mexicano, and Mesoamerican history and archaeology, and we help combat the spread of disinformation about these very topics.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_03: I am your host, uh Curly Tlapoyawa.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_03: Recently, I had the pleasure of presenting at the inaugural Skepticamp New Mexico, presented by New Mexicans for Science and Reason.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_03: The event featured a variety of speakers, including Adrian Hill of the Skeptic Zone Podcast, Brian Dunning of Skeptoid, and Ben Radford of the Squaring the Strange podcast, among many other great presenters.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_03: Topics included Bigfoot, Internet hoaxes, UFOs, ghosts, and moral panic, just the name of a few.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_03: My presentation was called Course Correction: How pseudo history, pseudo-archaeology, and conspiracy theories undermine the goals of ethnic studies.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_03: I've had a lot of people ask me about this particular presentation.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_03: So we here at the Tales from Oclantis podcast thought that it would be an excellent topic for the show.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_03: So with that being said, I hope you enjoy the talk.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_03: I'm also the co-host of the Tales from Ostlantis podcast, where we uh examine pseudo-archaeology, pseudo-history as it relates to Mesoamerica, Mexican-American community, Mexico.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_03: And we we try to focus mainly on that, but we also include topics that we feel are relevant to our community.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_03: We uh my co-host, uh Dr.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_03: Rubin Ariano Tlacateca, is a uh a professor of history and I'm the archaeologist.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_03: So if you want to check us out, I ask that you do so at Tales from Ostlantis.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_03: So today I want to talk about this talk is called Course Correction, uh, how pseudo-history, pseudo-archaeology, and conspiracy theories undermine the goals of ethnic studies.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_03: And I say this as somebody who has taught ethnic studies classes.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_03: I work as a cultural consultant, I've written books, a product of the Chigano movement.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_03: So Chicano studies has had a huge impact on my life, and I see value in teaching the history of my people.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_03: But what I see sometimes is pseudo-history and pseudo-archaeology, conspiracy theory can make its way into these programs and affect how they're being taught.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_03: And I feel that this undermines the intent, the goals of ethnic studies.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_03: It takes away from the value of that that they can be given to people.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_03: And I want to start with this idea here.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know if you've ever seen this symbol right here.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_03: It's pretty popular.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_03: If you read the uh this slide, it says the philosophical foundation, right?
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_03: Inlaq etch, panchebe, and hunabku.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_03: So of these three concepts, I want to talk about this, hunabku, and as it relates to this symbol right here.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_03: This symbol is very, very popular in Chigano communities, in Mexican-American communities, and in Mexico as well.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_03: You'll see this symbol all over the place.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_03: And it turns out that the symbol has a rather interesting history behind it, and also how it relates to this idea of hunapku, which this is these slides are from a Chigano studies class.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_03: And the way that they defined hunapku is as movement and measure, the name the Maya gave to the equivalents of the supreme being or the grand architect of the universe.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_03: If that sounds very Freemasonry, it's because a lot of it is connected to Freemasons from the 1800s and the influence that they had on Mexico and Central America.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_03: This idea, this is from a website called Dissident Voice, and this individual, Roberto Rodriguez, he's a friend of he's passed away recently, but we were friends.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_03: We disagreed on a lot of things, but we we maintained our friendship.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_03: And he was a big proponent of this style of teaching.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_03: So this is an article he wrote called Inla et Chpanchebe and Hunabku, the philosophical foundation for raza studies or Chicano studies.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_03: And so this idea that these allegedly Maya concepts were the philosophical foundations for these classes is something that I want to get into.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_03: So if you've never looked up the image, if you Google Hunabku under Google Images, you'll get this wide variety of representations of it, right?
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_03: Some of them are made to look more uh so you see more um Mesoamerican-ish depictions of this alleged Maya symbol, you see it as tattoos, you see it on murals, you see this really awesome AI-generated image.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_03: But all of them say, right, the Mayan symbol for the creator, the enigmatic Hunapku, the Mayan god, Hunapku.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_03: And I could tell you this as an archaeologist.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_03: One of the main ways you could tell somebody is full of shit, doesn't know what they're talking about, is they use Mayan to describe the people.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_03: The people are Maya, the language is Mayan.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_03: This is one thing that we learn right off the bat in archaeology, and so we we could tell the hucksters immediately.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_03: And this symbol appears, uh, here it is on this cool mural, and it's a cool symbol.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_03: Like, I'm not gonna deny that this isn't a very cool-looking symbol.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_03: Some people get it tattooed on their bodies, making it like this indelible part of their existence.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_03: But where does this symbol come from and what does it actually mean?
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_03: And how is it tied to this idea of Hunapku?
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_03: Well, to answer that, we need to go back to the Spanish invasion of Mexico.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_03: And when we look at the invasion of Mesoamerica by the Spaniards, we have to understand that the Catholics who were coming were tasked with the responsibility of converting the native people, right?
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_03: But if you think about it and you're encountering people who have an entirely different cosmovision, an entirely different worldview, an entirely different language than you do, how are you going to make your concepts clear to them?
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_03: You don't even speak the same language.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_03: How are you going to explain the concept of the Holy Trinity?
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_03: How are you going to explain the concept of the blood of Christ, the body of Christ, if you don't even speak the same language?
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_03: And these people have no idea, there's no words in their language that even closely equate to the ideas that you're trying to give them.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_03: So what you do is there's this great book, if you're interested.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_03: It's called Maya in the Age of the Cross.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_03: I can't recall the author right now, but he calls it Maya reducido.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_03: And essentially, you need to invent words in the Maya language that transmit these ideas, right?
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_03: So, how are we going to get across the idea of a singular god, of a monotheistic God?
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_03: There's no concept that exists in the Maya language for that.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_03: So you have to invent new words.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_03: So you start asking people, like in your language, how would you approximate this idea?
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_03: And they'll start telling you.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_03: I refer to this as the vocabulary of conquest, and I have some examples here.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_03: You had to invent new terms and expressions known as neologisms in the indigenous language that could adequately carry the necessary meanings, right?
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_03: For example, in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs or the Mexica, the words teotlashkali, which means sacred tortilla, literally a sacred tortilla, teotlashkali, or istak tlaxhkalcintli, which means tiny white tortilla.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_03: These were both invented terms used to identify the Eucharist.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_03: So you had to come up with new words to describe these ideas, right?
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_03: And so one of the more notable examples of this practice comes from the invasion of the Yucatán, where the term hunabcu was invented by a Spanish friar named Antonio de Ciudad Real with the help of his Maya-speaking indigenous aides.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_03: Junabku was invented for his dictionary of Motu.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_03: It was invented as a way to introduce the Maya to the idea of monotheism.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_03: And here's the page from the actual uh diccionario de Motu, Junapku, right here, and the definition, the only living and true God, which sounds very Catholic, right?
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_03: Also, the greatest of the gods of the people of Yucatan.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_03: He had no form because they said he could not be represented as he was in corporeal.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_03: And we suspect that this was done because later Maya people would be like, well, if this God is so important, how come he's not represented in any of our codices, in any of our architecture, in any of our murals, in any of the stila?
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_03: Why is there no existence of this idea of Hunabku?
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_03: And the Catholic friars could say, well, I mean, he could not be represented, right?
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_03: You know, didn't you know this?
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_03: Your ancestors knew this, because hunabku is obviously the only living and true God.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_03: Hunabku, this idea, was re-popularized in the 90s by this individual, Domingo Martinez Paredes, a native speaker of Yucateco and a professor at UNA.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_03: In his book, Hunabku, Synthesis del Pensamiento Philosophico Maya, Synthesis of the Maya philosophical thought, right?
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_03: It's very new agey.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_03: He really pushed this idea as Hunabku as being the only giver of movement and measurement, which is again a very Freemason salut, a very Freemasony- idea that he was picking up.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_03: Paredes used to promote the idea that the Maya were monotheistic.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_03: And he was a member of an extreme nationalist organization called the Movimiento Confederado Restaurador de la Cultura de Anáhuac, or the MCRCA.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_03: And it was a very uh nationalistic group with the reputation for spreading pseudo-historical accounts of Mexico's indigenous history.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_03: So their idea was we're gonna elevate our people by saying, you know, we didn't believe in a lot of gods, that's for savages.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_03: We had one true God, and it was Hunakku, and we traveled across the ocean and we taught this to the Egyptians, and we, you know, descended from Atlantis and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_03: Well, it turns out that Domingo Martinez Paredes was heavily influenced by the writings of a guy named Augustus Leplanjan.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_03: And Augustus Leplanjan was a French occultist and Freemason and archaeologist who went to Mexico and he came up with a lot of these ideas.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_03: He wrote these insane books, and they're slogs.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_03: If you try to sit down and read one of his books, they're really, really hard to get through.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_03: But he came up with all of these ideas that were later basically cribbed by Domingo Martinez Paredes as like ancestral Maya knowledge, right?
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_03: So he, this idea of Junapku was invented by Catholic priests, and then it was repopularized in the 1960s by this individual right here.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_03: Um then later, Junapku underwent another transformation thanks to this guy, New Age author and artist Jose Arguez.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_03: In 1987, Argüez published his book, The Mayan Factor.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_03: So once again, Mayan, it's like, eh, you don't know what you're talking about.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_02: So this guy, on the cover of his book, El Factor Maya, el Camino Massa de la Technologia, threw this image on there.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_03: And he called it Hunab Ku.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_03: And it's it's a neat image, right?
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_03: It's it looks sort of like the yin-yang.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_03: You could see how people would be drawn to this image.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_03: Again, I'm I'm not dogging on the image, I think it's kind of cool.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_03: But where did this image come from?
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_03: And what does it actually mean?
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_03: Well, the image isn't Maya at all, it is mexica.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_03: And these are pages from the Codex Magli Beciano, where it's described as a manta de agua, de araña, the mantle of the water spider, because the Spaniards thought it looked like a water spider.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_03: And then here it's described as a tilmat de sacar o besote del diablo, which means a librette of the devil.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_03: And that's because some of the Mexica deities would were depicted wearing these uh nose pieces and lip piercings with this design on it.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_03: And so this is the actual image.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_03: It's from the Magli Becciano.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of people still argue over the actual meaning of this image, but we could notice a couple of things.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_03: It's not black and white, and it's not a circle.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_03: This is how it's depicted.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_03: So, how did it become black and white and get turned into a circle?
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_03: Basically, Arguez thought if he turned it into a circle, it would look more like the yinyang, and that he could push this idea that it was part of this Maya identity.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_03: But we now know that it's not a Maya image at all, it's Mexica or Aztec.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_03: But how did it become black and white?
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_03: For the longest time, I thought Argüez turned it black and white to make it look more like the yinyang, like it made sense to me.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_03: But then I spoke to a friend of mine named Gordon Whitaker.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_03: Gordon Whitaker is an uh epigrapher, he wrote this great book on deciphering Mexica glyphs.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_03: And the story that Jose Argüez tells is that he was in the weaving communities in Teotiplan and Oaxaca, and he saw this image being sold in the marketplace on the blankets.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_03: And he's like, This image is beautiful.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_03: So he bought it and decided, well, this is gonna be hunapku.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_03: This is gonna be the image that I promote as hunapku.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_03: So Gordon was kind enough to uh send me an email, and I think this story is hilarious.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_03: He says, in the 1970s, I was preparing to write my dissertation for Yale, and I spent the summers of 1975 and 76 in the Valley of Oaxaca studying the inscriptions at Monteruan.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_03: In my spare time and to supplement my work, I collected folk beliefs in Teotitlán that seemed to relate in some fashion to pre-Hispanic Zapotec culture.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_03: While there I spent much time interviewing weavers and chatting with the people tending the stalls in the marketplace.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_03: When I returned in 1976, I brought with me my favorite Aztec design from the Codex Maglavechiano, which that right there.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_03: I had used this image as a mural motif in my dorm room.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_03: I had turned the yellow and black, original, into black and white for my mural, because he just thought it looked cool.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_03: This was the design I gave to one of the weavers in Teotitlán.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_03: I paid him and I would return to pick it up the following summer.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_03: Unfortunately, I was unable to return the following summer.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_03: And when I finally got back in 1978, I stopped in Oaxaca to discuss epigraphic matters.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_03: On a stroll through the market, I was surprised to see my adapted design on blankets being sold in the stalls at Teorgetlara.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_03: So at the conference in Bonn, there was considerable amusement over the history of this motif and my part in it.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_03: On returning from the conference and while surfing cyberspace, I discovered that Jose Argüez claims to have bought a blanket with this image on it in Teotitlán.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_03: So it became black and white, not because of Jose Argüez, but because this, like, you know, Gordon Whitaker painted a mural, turned it black and white, he had somebody weave it onto a blanket, and then the other weavers thought it was a cool design, so they made a bunch of blankets with this design on it.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_03: Jose Argüez pops in, says, oh, this is awesome.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_03: He buys it, and then he started pushing it off as this ancient Maya symbol, right?
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_03: So it's like this super convoluted, like sandwich of bullshit, right?
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_03: You got the Catholic invention of the concept of Hunab.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_03: And then you have this symbol that was taken by a new age writer, but was actually invented by this other guy.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_03: And now it's showing up in Chicago studies classes as like this legitimate idea.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_03: It's being taught, and people are getting it tattooed on their bodies and t-shirts and all of these things.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_03: Here's a photo that Gordon sent me.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_03: This is the actual mural from his dorm that he this is the photo he took with him to Teotitlán to have the blanket made.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_03: And so we're able to track exactly where these ideas are coming from.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_03: And it's become so entrenched in some of these classrooms that when I bring this up, I'm seen as attacking the value of Chicano studies.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm like, no, I'm not attacking the value of these classes.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_03: I'm saying that my history is important enough to me to be told correctly.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_03: It doesn't need to be propped up with nonsense.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_03: It could stand on its own two feet.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_03: And we do our people a disservice when we teach them nonsense instead of teaching them their actual history.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_03: And two, the right, people on the right have a hard-on for attacking ethnic studies classes.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_03: And we make it easier for them to attack and dismantle if they could point out that, well, you guys are just teaching bullshit anyway.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_03: You're not even teaching real history.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_03: It's nonsense, it's all this new age stuff.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm not against DEI or ethnic studies or Chicano studies, African American studies.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_03: I'm just saying that it's it's worth teaching correctly.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_03: And so that brings me to my second point.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_03: On the podcast, a lot of people send us articles and videos and they ask us, like, is there anything to this?
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_03: Like, what is this?
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_03: And so this paper was published in an academic journal called the Urban Review.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_03: And the paper is called Early Pioneers of the Americas: The Role of the Olmex in Urban Education and Social Studies curriculum.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_03: And so we're like, oh, okay, let's let's check it out.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_03: Let's look into this into this uh this paper and see what's going on.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_03: And among the things this paper says is this paper seeks to answer the following research question.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_03: What are the educational implications of the OMEX and their civilization, the oldest in the Americas, not exactly, for social study standards and curriculum development processes.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_03: So I was like, oh, okay, cool.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_03: They want to teach about ancient Mesoamericans and social studies.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_03: That's awesome.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_03: I'm down with that.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_03: So then I read more.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_03: This paper provides primary source documentation as it addresses the omission of the OMEX in public school curricula.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_03: Fine.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_03: I'm totally fine with that opening statement.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_03: And then the paper goes on to say over 3,000 years since their arrival, the Omecs, early pioneers of the Americas, have left an indelible mark on La Venta, Mexico, where stone statues and steppe pyramids mark their pre-colonial presence.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_03: Period.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_03: Next sentence.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_03: Africans showed their brilliance as they utilized cutting-edge technology like those used to build pyramids when they applied their skills in shipbuilding, as well as their understanding of geography and trade winds, to cross the Atlantic Ocean, which was originally called the Ethiopian Ocean, and created a civilization and culture in La Venta, Mexico known as Olmec City.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_03: And that was, I was like, what the hell's going on here?
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_03: While many distinct Olmec societies existed in the Americas, apparently they're more than one, they all shared unique cultural practices, distinctive African art forms and language systems.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_03: Anthropological and archaeological research suggests that the original Olmecs were Africans who migrated to the Americas as early as 900 BCE and created a civilization in present-day La Verta Mexico.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_03: This was a journal article that was published.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_03: So we were like, well, hold on.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_03: And if if you read the paper, the purpose of the paper is to say how can we teach this better in schools?
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_03: Whether is any of this even accurate?
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_03: The starting position is that black Africans came over to Mesoamerica and taught the like birthed seated civilization.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_03: Birthed civilization taught the Mexicans, the ancient Mexicans, how to build pyramids, how to write, how to do this, how to do that.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_03: And we were like, well, hold on, hold on.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_03: None of this is even remotely accurate.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_03: So we responded.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_03: We wrote this open letter called Hijacking History, The Problem with the Black Olmec myth.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_03: We published it to our Medium site.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_03: And then we converted our open letter into a script that we used for the podcast.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_03: And we covered it in a couple of episodes.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_03: This one directly about that article, the journal article.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_03: And then we followed it up a little bit later to see where things were standing presently.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_03: And we concluded our letter.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_03: Like we weren't, like you were saying earlier, we weren't snarky, we weren't confrontational, we weren't saying, you know, ah, you guys are assholes.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_03: Like we weren't going off like that.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_03: We just wrote a very well-reasoned letter to the journal saying, look, this is why you might want to reconsider this paper that you've already published, by the way, interestingly.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_03: And we finished by saying, we certainly agree that the history and legacy of African peoples in the Americas is still not sufficiently taught in schools.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_03: But we do children a disservice by advancing opinions as facts.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_03: Promoting the idea that the Olmec, the Olmec were black is more than simply poor scholarship.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_03: It is an erasure of the accomplishments of indigenous Mexicans.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_03: Africa and Mexico are both home to fascinating civilizations, each with their own advancements in technology, linguistics, agriculture, and science.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_03: When we embrace the pseudo-history of Black Olmex, we trivialize and marginalize the legacies of both Africans and indigenous Mexicans.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_03: So we wrote this letter.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_03: And the response we got online was generally, you guys are racists, you guys are what are you talking about?
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_03: You guys, and especially myself as an archaeologist, why are you hiding the truth?
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_03: What are you afraid of?
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_03: Why are you hiding these facts?
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_03: But to our surprise, the journal retracted the paper.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_03: So here's the headline.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_03: And like we're still pretty proud of this.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_03: This is like one of the best moments of the podcast is that we got this paper retracted from this article.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, this article retracted from this journal.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_03: Journal retracts paper claiming that group of indigenous Americans were black Africans.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_03: And this is what was interesting, though.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_03: In the announcement, it says the editor-in-chief has retracted this article following concerns raised by readers.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_03: After post-publication peer review, it was found that the theory that Olmecks were black Africans, it's not a theory, it's hypothesis.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_03: Anyway, on which the lesson plan is based is not substantiated according to current Mesoamerican archaeology and genetic evidence.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_03: The authors have been offered to submit a revised manuscript, updated with information based on current knowledge for further peer review.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_03: Author Greg Wiggins stated on behalf of all co-authors they do not agree to this retraction.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_03: But it was that line right there.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_03: Post-publication peer review, which kind of blew my mind.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_03: It's like, isn't that supposed to happen before?
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_03: So it makes me question everything else that this particular journal has published up to that point.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_03: Um, I haven't looked through this journal since this, but it's it's a little bit sus.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_03: Unfortunately, so this happened in 2020.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_03: And we thought the matter was pretty much settled with these authors.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_03: Well, it wasn't so, because we found out in 2023 that they just published it anyway, on their own, as a chapter in a book that they wrote.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_03: And the book is called Unbleaching the Curriculum, Enhancing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Beyond in Schools and Society.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_03: And it's chapter five.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_03: And basically they repurposed the article to work better as a chapter, but none of the content was substantially changed.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_03: None of the claims were readdressed, none of the science was re-evaluated, it was just published claiming the same stuff.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_03: And this book is used in some classes, in ethnic studies classes.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_03: So still, there's a fight, right?
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_03: There's still a struggle against this type of disinformation being introduced in classes.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_03: And we are not immune here in New Mexico because my good old Alma Matter of UNM put out this class, and they've been running this class for about 10 years.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_03: And the class is called It's Their Study Abroad, Exploring the African Presence in Mexico, which is fine.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_03: There is an Afro-Mexican presence, it deserves to be examined.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_03: People should know about it.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_03: There's a history there that is legitimate.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_03: But what we see is as part of ongoing efforts to build lasting academic ties with university and cultural centers in Mexico, Chicana and Chicano Studies has partnered with the Universidad Veracruz and Civil Association in Veracruz to sponsor a unique study abroad opportunity.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_03: This intercession trip explores the African presence in Mexico in three different epochs.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_03: OMEC, colonial slavery, and contemporary struggles of newly nationally recognized Afro-Mexican communities.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_03: Additionally, students will delve into San Arocho, Son Arocho, and meet cultural practitioners like Julio Padro and Maulo Zaro.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_03: So again, they're using in their promotional materials an Omec head, and then they straight up say, you know, African presence in Mexico, dealing with starting with the Omec.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_03: So this was at UNM.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_03: So once again, right, we spring into action, we get all these archaeologists and historians to write letters of concern to the university and say, why is this being taught at the school that I went to?
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_03: Like it makes me think twice about the value of my degree that I got from your university if you're teaching pseudo-history and pseudo-archaeology.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of people got wind of this.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_03: It became kind of a pretty big deal at UNM.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_03: Once again, I was accused of being a racist, of being anti-black, of being anti-ethnic studies.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_03: So instead, I even got a text from a friend of mine who was in a meeting, who's a professor at UNM.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_03: He sends me this text, excuse me.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_03: And he says, bro, I'm in a meeting right now, they're talking about you.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm like, why are they talking about me?
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_03: And he said, they're trying to figure out the best way to frame, you know, to frame you as somebody who is anti-black.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm like, well, you're defending me, right?
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_03: He's like, well, yeah, yeah, I got you back.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_03: You know, like, not everybody's going for it, but like this is gonna be a problem.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_03: I can tell.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_03: And sure enough, I started getting some hate mail from students uh at UNM.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_03: So this caught the eye of uh Jason Colovito.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_03: I'm I don't know if you all know who Jason Colovito is, but he wrote a piece about it.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_03: And he said the University of New Mexico came under fire online from anthropologists, archaeologists, activists, and skeptics after a flyer for an upcoming study abroad trip sponsored by their Chicano Studies Department caused outrage by promising to help students learn about the African presence in Mexico during Olmec times.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_03: It was the decision to follow the Afrocentric claim that Olmec society had an African component that set off alarm bells.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_03: So the way that the class was described, and I already showed this to you on the flyer, but once again, our trip explorers, African presence in Mexico for three different perspectives, all my colonial slavery and contemporary Afro-Mestical communities.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_03: So this right here is the original description for the class that appeared on the UNM website.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_03: So after we wrote all these letters and this big, you know, wave of concern happened, they revised this description to be much longer.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_03: And they say, you know, we delve into the roots of Olmec culture and we examine all but a few of the colossal Olmec heads of Las Pushlas, La Venta, and San Lorenzo.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_03: Our purpose is not to claim that these heads reflect a pre-Columbian African presence, but to help our students understand how and why many people of African descent have come to revere these magnificent heads.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_03: Acknowledging concerns of anthropologists, it is important to note we do not claim that the Olmec are of African descent beyond the notion that all of humanity finds its origins in Africa.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_03: That's weird.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_03: For more than a decade, we have allowed UNM students to view these magnificent works of art in person and visit with anthropologists in Mexico about their origins.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_03: And then this sentence, we discussed the visceral and often hostile response to Jose Melgar's and later Ivan van Certima's suggestion that the OMEC reflect a pre-Columbian African presence.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_03: We make sure that our students know that research offers no credible evidence that proves a pre-Columbian connection to Africa.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_03: This seems highly disingenuous to me.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_03: And it also did to Jason Colovito, because he he noted in his paper that there is, of course, this is from Jason, there is, of course, some irony in the Afrocentrist acceptance of the idea that the Olmec stone heads represent black Africans instead of actual Maya people of the region whom they so clearly resemble.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_03: The original claim that the heads were of Africans was made in the 19th century as a racist argument that Native people of the Americas were so racially inferior that they even accepted black Africans as their superiors, even though the black Africans themselves were slaves of white Atlanteans.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_03: So that's where this idea stems from.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_03: But it's interesting to see how defensive the trip organizers are in their discussion.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_03: It is implausible that they have spent 10 years visiting the Olmex heads and explicitly stated that there was no evidence of an African presence in Mexico without really meaning it.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_03: Now they claim that their importance lies in how Afro-Mexicans have used American Afrocentric pseudoscience to create a false culture history tied to indigenous Mexico.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_03: So we did manage to get them to change, at least on paper, the description of the class, of how they said they were gonna present the class to students.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_03: But we don't know, I mean, because then COVID happened, and the class hasn't happened since.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_03: So we have no idea what their intentions actually were, and we won't until this study abroad program, if it ever does, happens again, and we're able to somehow find out if they're still teaching that the Olmex represented a black African presence in the Americas.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_03: And I want to quote from Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis, the antediluvian world, because he's the one who really put forth this idea to begin with.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_03: And what he said was the features are unmistakably Negroid, as the Negroes have never been a seagoing race.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_03: The presence of these faces among the antiquities of Central America proves one of two things.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_03: Either the existence of a land connection between America and Africa via Atlantis, obviously, as revealed by the deep sea soundings of the Challenger, or commercial relations between America and Africa through the ships of the Atlantean or some other civilized race, whereby the Negroes were brought to America as slaves at a very remote epoch.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_03: So, like, just the pure racism that lies at the heart of this idea, and then to see it picked up and promoted in journal articles and at the university that I went to as some sort of empowerment idea, right?
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_03: Like African Americans should know about this because it shows this connection between their ancestors and central.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_03: And if that were true, that would be amazing.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_03: I would have no problem with exploring that.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_03: But it's not true.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_03: It's rooted in racism.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_03: And these ideas, like I said, when they make their way into ethnic studies classes, into the classroom, into textbooks, it's a problem.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_03: And what we've found through the podcast is that a lot of professors, historians, anthropologists who are not people of color are afraid of addressing this stuff because the response, just like we got, the response was to call us racists, to call us anti-black, to call us anti-ethnic studies.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_03: And this onslaught of attacks, a lot of people just don't want to deal with it.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_03: They're like, look, we know it's nonsense, but what am I gonna do?
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_03: There's nothing I can do about it.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_03: There was a mural that appeared in San Antonio about it, it was a Juneteenth mural, so it highlighted African American history.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_03: It was a beautiful mural, but smack dab in the center was an olmec head.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_03: And we were like, come on, guys.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_03: So we we spoke to the artist and we spoke to historians in the area, and all the same, it's the same feedback we got from the professors and historians in the area were we don't want to touch it.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_03: We don't want to deal with it.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_03: We did finally get the artist, an African-American muralist, to look at all the data and be like, oh, okay, yeah, you know, I see how that could be offensive.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_03: And they changed the mural.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_03: So small victories, right?
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_03: Small victories that we're able to get.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_03: But what we've done as part of the podcast is we've started, we're starting, we haven't started it yet, something called Aslantis Academy, because we learned that a lot of professors are using our podcast in their classrooms and they're creating uh you know study guides to go along with our podcast episodes.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_03: And so we're taking advantage of that, we're collecting all of this material material from professors who are using them, and we're gonna make them available free online so that other teachers can access them in their ethnic studies classes, right?
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_03: Because we're not anti-ethnic studies.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_03: We're we're against teaching our history incorrectly and trivializing our history.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_03: So we do this where we've created, in addition to our podcast, we have a publishing house, we put out books, we do YouTube videos, we do Instagram videos, we've done a couple of documentary films.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_03: So we're putting all of this out there as a way to sort of counteract the misinformation and hopefully preserve what ethnic studies is supposed to be about and keep it on the on the right track, basically.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_03: So, as part of that, if and this is the sales part, if you guys want to support us, please check this out online.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_03: We take donations, we also sell books.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_03: We just put out this book called The Four Disagreements.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_03: Um, it's a take on the book, The Four Agreements, the Toltec Wisdom book, which is not Toltec Wisdom, but it's letting go of magical thinking.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_03: And we've been sending these out for free to ethnic studies classes to hand out to their students.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_03: We also try to send them out to prisons and other places so that people have access to just how to think more critically and how to use scientific literacy and skeptical inquiry to get at the root of problems.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_03: So thank you.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_03: That is my short talk.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_04: So is the Yeah, yeah.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_03: So there's this really interesting thing happening online right now.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_03: So you have like the Afrocentrism of the 1950s and 1960s, right?
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_03: Where they were really promoting this idea that you know Africa and Egypt were you know the sources of all world knowledge, that the uh Egyptians, that the Greeks stole all of their philosophy from from black Egyptians, and like there's all of these Afrocentric literature that came out of this era.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_03: And with the idea being that it was empowering for black youth to hear these things.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_03: And it very well could have been, but if it's wrong, if it's inaccurate, like we have, I think black kids have enough to be proud of without making stuff up, right?
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_03: But right now, what we're seeing online, and it's very small, but they're increasingly more hostile and vocal about it, is there's a movement, and they call themselves aboriginalists.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_03: And they push this idea that who we know as Native Americans, that the Native people of the Western Hemisphere are pretenders, that the Native people are fake, that they're not really Native people, and that this is a conspiracy, that this is a hoax perpetrated by the so they call this, the so-called Native Americans and the white man to hide the fact that the original Native Americans are black people.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_03: And so it's becoming really, really hostile online, where the way that they approach Native people is like I've been called uh a half-breed, mongoloid, five-dollar Indian.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_03: They call us five dollar Indians because they claim that we paid the government five dollars to be recognized as Native people, and that we're hiding this history.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_03: And one of the most bizarre aspects of this aboriginalist conspiracy is that the slave trade never happened.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_03: So they claim that slavery is a myth, and there's even memes that are like, where are the slave ships?
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_03: If slavery was real, where are all the slave ships?
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_03: How come we don't have any slave ships?
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_03: And it's like hashtag where are the slave ships.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_03: And so, in their efforts to promote this bizarre racist idea, they're like even erasing African American history.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_03: They're like, all of this is fake, and we're the real Native people.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_03: Recently, groups of these individuals have gone to MMIW marches, murdered and missing indigenous women's marches, and physically attacked the people there saying that they're fake, that they're fake Indians.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_03: They'll show up to powwows and start fights claiming that we're the real Native Americans, what you're doing is fake.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_03: And what's really insidious about it is I've seen some college professors start picking up on this and sort of like dropping hints that they support this idea and that this is something that that they can get behind.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_03: It's not a lot.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not saying that it's like all these, but one or two is too many, in my opinion.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_03: And so, yeah, this we refer to it as Afrocentrist extremism, but they don't like being called that because they don't even consider themselves Africans.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_03: They're like, no, we're aboriginals, we're we're native from here.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_03: We are not Africans, we are not black Africans, we are the original black Native Americans, and so it's bizarre.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_04: Yes, I just want to say that it'll never stop being funny that History Channel made an entire series called The Mayas.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_04: All of that work happened without a single person having enough topic knowledge to even know that the title of their show was the most basic grammatical error.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and and I just got done working with Maya communities.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_03: They get they were bugged by it.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_03: Like, like I told them, like, how do you guys feel when they call you Mayan instead of Maya?
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_03: And they're like, man, that just pisses me off.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_03: And they said in English because I was in Belize.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_03: If you want to experience something unusual for me in a Central American country, it's like having everybody speak English around you.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_03: It was pretty, pretty interesting.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_03: On off-subject, but one thing that blew me away was the favorite movie in all of these Maya communities was Apocalypto.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_03: They love that movie.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_03: They love that movie.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_03: Archaeologists hate that movie, right?
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_03: Historians hate that movie for all of its inaccuracies.
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_03: But I would talk to the Maya men on my crew, Apocalypto.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_03: And I would talk to the men on my crew, and I'm like, really?
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_03: You like this movie?
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_03: And they're like, well, it's an action movie with Maya people in it.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm like, yeah, but they got all this wrong.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_03: And they're like, bro, it's a movie.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_03: Like, we we know, yeah, yeah.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_03: They're like, we know it's wrong, but it's it's we're kicking ass in it.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_03: Like it's an action movie with Maya heroes.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_03: And like, why wouldn't we love that?
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_03: Also big on Namor on uh Wakanda Forever.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_03: They're like hearing these guys in the field like yelling uh Likig Tabocan, and I'm like, eh, that's wild.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_05: But yeah, any so of course the first uh Atlantean, is that specifically to Atlantis?
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_05: Atlantic regions.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, to Atlantis.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_04: Atlantic, Georgia.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_04: I think maybe it was your revised UNM description that mentioned some scholars.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_04: Let's see.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_03: Is there any connection between those and the recent urban publication?
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_03: So Ivan van Surtima, definitely.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_03: Ivan Van Surtima.
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_03: No, no.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_03: Ivan van Surtima, I think his book came out in the 70s.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_03: It was called They Were Here Before Columbus, I think is the name of his book.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_03: And he really promoted this idea that the Olmec were either black Africans or that the Olmec were Native Americans who worshipped black Africans and that the heads, the colossal heads, represented like the black gods that they had worshipped.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_03: So this individual, Ivan van Surtima, his work's long been discredited.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_03: He was using old racist, outdated stuff from the Inks to back up his claims.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_03: But Afrocentric extremists really glom onto his stuff because he was a college professor, he published a lot of books, he was very eloquent and well-spoken.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_03: So he carried this era of respectability and of authority, right?
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_03: So when you see Ivan van Surdema brought up in any context, like your radar should go up and be like, oh man, this is probably some nonsense I'm about to hear.
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not familiar with the other writer, with Jose Melgar, but Ivan van Surdema definitely has a long, long history tied into these movements.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_03: And the modern movements always draw from his work.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_06: So I find it a little ironic, right, that um Mexican Americans are also indigenous Native Americans and now um we're having our history kind of washed over.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_06: And so our Native Americans, uh do you think it's because there's a little bit of shame to how historically our country has treated Native people?
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_03: Oh yeah, absolutely.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_03: When the Mexican-American War happened and half of Mexico became part of the United States, one of the main reasons that New Mexico, it took so long for our state to become a state, was that they said that there were too many Indians here.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_03: And they were counting Mexicans as part of the Indian group.
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_03: And they said, you know, what we're seeing right now is the greatest uh migration of Indians into the United States that we've ever seen now that we've taken this part of Mexico, because now we've got this in, they called it the Indian problem, because we've just conquered an Indian country and took half their Indians.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_03: We hate Indians, so we want their land, but can we like get rid of them?
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_03: And one of the ways they did this here in New Mexico specifically was they made it so rough to have any native blood.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_03: They made uh New Mexicans so ashamed that they created this narrative that New Mexicans are like direct descendants of Spaniards.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_03: That you'll hear a lot of New Mexicans say that.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I'm I'm Spanish, I'm not Mexican.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm like, really?
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_03: Where in Spain were you born?
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_03: Like, well, you know, my 15th great grandmother was born in Spain.
• 51:55
  SPEAKER_03: I'm like, okay, so you're obviously a direct descendant of Spain.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_03: But so yeah, there's like there's a great book called The Language of Blood that goes directly into that self-same and how it manifested itself in this in this identity of shame and and anti-Mexican, anti-Indian sentiment in the United States.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_06: It used to make my mom really upset because she didn't want anything to do with Nigerian Indian.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_03: And then now you have all these New Mexicans taking DNA tests and like freaking out, right?
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_06: No, I loved it.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_06: I think I didn't have time.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, for sure.
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_03: In fact, we have a couple of podcast episodes that directly addressed New Mexico in particular and how that carried out.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_03: Are there any other questions?
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_05: I got one quick question.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_05: Um, what was Lincoln's response?
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_05: Uh obviously they were given a chance to revise their piece to make it conform to you know scholarship.
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_05: They're like, oh no, no, thanks, but they must have had how did they reply to your cruise?
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_03: They I was never able to find like a public response.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_03: So if they did respond, it was only two amongst themselves, and then they rejected the opportunity to resubmit.
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_03: So that's all we know is they said we're not gonna resubmit, and then three years later, they republished the same article in their book.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_05: All right.