#chican@ problems

[opalprayers]

I'm going to take Spanish classes. I'm really fed up with being unable to communicate with parts of the community I'm from and left out of.

[opalprayers]

Just a heads up.

Spanish is a language from colonizers too. Don't give me shit about only knowing English, telling me I need to "decolonize" by speaking Spanish.  No, if I were to decolonize, I'd speak Yaqui or Nahuatl.

[offwhitelikeme]

Hispanicized Mexican Americans themselves often construct a "racial" gulf between themselves and "illegal aliens" and "wetbacks."

Neil Foley, Becoming Hispanic: Mexican Americans and Whiteness, (2002)

side note: I am very familiar this particular "gulf". Raised with an anti-minority minority narrative in the city of San Antonio, these sentiments and their rhetoric contributed to my moving to the Northwest. Articulating the pain of the internalization of a self-hating narrative. As well as, pinpointing where it originates, are a couple of things I address in my artwork.