Narratives I Wish Would Die (Painfully)
Existing in the Latino arts and education space, which generates most online content involving Latinos, I have come across a number of ideas I fucking hate. I hate them because they are the sort of phrases that sound smart until you think about their internal logic for more than a few seconds. All of these ideas, when deconstructed, are stupid and/or misguided, and yet they are leading philosophical discussions amongst media, education, and non-profit elites. A source of these ideas is fairly simple, you can blame it on white supremacy or just general racism and in some cases, it is no more than intellectual laziness, but that is only part of the story. What is really at the heart of these ideas are excuses for Latinos to use so we don’t have to deal with thornier questions about our upbringing and our acceptance of the United States as the dominant and “best” country on earth. The narratives we create have their roots in a worship of whiteness that plagues our communities, but they also have a root in our unwillingness to take responsibility for our own bullshit.
- “This is something they don’t teach in history books” and its cousin “They don’t teach you this in school”.
Yeah, no shit. Do you really think that school is supposed to teach you 100% of the knowledge and the perspectives in the world? If you had to stay in school until you learned the detailed intricacies of every perspective of every situation throughout the 6,000 years of known human history, and millions of years of terrestrial history, you would die of old age in school, and still not learn everything. That’s the nature of knowledge. Stop blaming your ignorance on not learning something in a classroom.
But also, what do you think formal education is for? What it seems like from online discourse and discussions with academics, is that BIPOC people want their people’s perspectives to guide schoolbooks rather than American white perspectives (of course, the question nobody wants to ask is which BIPOC group’s perspective should take precedence over the others). Which is a different thing. What you are upset about is that the perspectives you care about are not being taught. But check it out, let me frame it this way — Let’s say you go to school in Nigeria, but you come from a Congolese family, and in that classroom you ask your teacher, Hey, why aren’t I learning Congolese history? Well, there is a simple answer to that, you’re not in the Congo! Or to be even more ridiculous, let’s say you’re Venezuelan, and your family is living in Nepal, and you raise your hand in class one day and ask why you aren’t learning about Venezuela. How does that sound when you say it out loud?
Well, a big problem with the United States is that it is a pluralistic society with a ton of different ethnic groups, but the history of the United States was driven by the descendants of various Anglo Protestant groups, whose militaries and churches conquered a continent of non-Anglo-Protestants. And then to add another layer of problems, the powers that be who are conservative, feel a pressure not to outright say that the United States was founded on English principles from the 18th century so they won’t be called racists, and liberals feel pressure to tell their multi-racial constituents that history should reflect them, even though elite liberals don’t know exactly what that means, they just want votes. The United States is a country based on Anglo-Saxon principles and history, but nobody will say that.
Is that racist? Yes, to an extent, but less because of malevolence and more because whether you are a liberal or a conservative elite, it has become politically disadvantageous to tell the truth. So everybody thinks they have a piece of a pie that isn’t theirs. Oh, why isn’t my country or ethnic group being represented in American schools? Simply, American education is based on the experiences of an Anglo-Saxon ruling class, so that’s the perspective you’re getting.
If you come from another country, you could learn your people’s perspective by staying in your country of origin, but even then, you wouldn’t learn everything.
The Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano wisely once said that the difference between the US and Latin American countries is that Latin American aristocrats tell poor people the truth, that the country doesn’t belong to them, but to the elites. And in the United States, aristocrats lie to poor people so they think they have ownership and power when they really don’t.
But even so! Formal education in any country is just a basis of knowledge. It’s meant to give you a base so you can learn a trade and make a career from it. That is why you go to school. It’s not so you learn everything there is to learn. And thinking that schools should teach you everything is profoundly stupid.
2. “My parents didn’t teach me Spanish.”
Hey, how much knowledge do you have that your parents specifically taught you? An even better question — After the age of three, how much do you know solely because your parents taught you?
It’s not much, over the span of a lifetime. But that is also the wrong question. The right question is, “Why do you keep blaming your parents for something you can fix?”
If you were a child of the 80s or 90s, your parents were continually told that bilingualism is bad. That it confuses children. That they can fall behind in school. This policy is based in white American exceptionalism, wherein post-World War II, Americans came to believe that due to their military and political power, that the rest of the world needed to accommodate them. It is a racist policy based on inconveniencing and disregarding non-English language cultures, and yet in the Latino sphere, being monolingual has become a virtue. Especially amongst progressives. As a bilingual person it is confusing, and once again, it seems to me to be based on not being honest with ourselves.
First, bilingual people can often be incredibly judgmental and unsupportive. Monolingual Latinos won’t want to learn Spanish if bilingual Latinos are dicks to them.
Second, bilingualism is harder after you get past the age of 5. This isn’t cultural, it’s biological. When a person is born, the human brain is capable of processing any sounds in the world. Language, at its core, is a collection of sounds with an agreed upon meaning by a group of people. So, your brain processes the sounds it needs to know to survive, and discards the rest. Also, in order to make those sounds, your tongue, as a young child, forms the shape of the top of your mouth, aka the palette, and there are certain languages, like French, where if your palette is not formed to fit French when you are a toddler, you will never be able to make certain sounds perfectly. This is also disadvantageous for learning Mandarin or Cantonese, since those languages are highly phonetic, and requires the ability to make intonations that if you didn’t learn them at an early age, become incredibly difficult to impossible to learn due to needing your mouth to be shaped a certain way.
Once a brain gets to be about 15 or 16 years old, it has largely locked in the sounds it needs to survive, and so to teach your brain a new set of sounds, along with their vocabulary, is increasingly difficult. (I learned all of this as an undergrad taking linguistics courses) Therefore, learning a second language as an adult has numerous biological roadblocks on top of social ones. To learn a new language, you need to practice it daily. You need multiple visual and audio references that you repeatedly view. Language is one of those things that if you don’t use it, you lose it, even if it was your first language. I know several Latinos who learned Spanish first and then fell out of practice with it, so English might as well be their first language,
Third, speaking multiple languages is mentally exhausting. Even being bilingual, sometimes I default to English because it’s my first language, solely because I’m tired. But then other times, weirdly, I default to Spanish when I’m tired. It’s a mind fuck, but I love speaking Spanish. I love knowing Spanish. I continue to study and improve my Spanish. Maintaining this language matters to me, and that dedication is why I’m bilingual, and that would be the case whether or not my parents taught me when I was a kid!
I grew up hearing Spanish, and I knew basic conversational Spanish as a kid, but I wasn’t fluent until I was 21, which coincidentally is also when the famed Boricua singer Marc Anthony learned Spanish. And that famed Boricua singer was born and raised in New York, but try telling that to any Puerto Rican, even those with exclusionary perspectives on what makes a ‘real’ Puerto Rican. They will fight you.
The point being, stop blaming your parents. Raising your kids to be bilingual in any language is incredibly difficult. It requires an insane amount of dedication. I only speak to my kids in Spanish, and at this point, they don’t like me talking to them in English, but that took years to develop, and without them pushing me to continue, I may have faltered. Many, many times I have been tempted to switch to English, but I stuck with it. So I know how hard it is. I also have the mentality of not giving a fuck when someone would make those “monolingualism is better” arguments, but I’m also contrarian and argumentative.
Maybe your parents aren’t. Or maybe your parents viewed monolingualism as the cost of living in the US. Regardless, don’t blame them. Of the thousands of decisions they had to make for your life, this is just one of them, and its completely understandable. It is especially understandable if you don’t have the discipline and drive to teach yourself and go to classes and do the multiple things you need to maintain and learn a second language. If you can’t do it, why would you expect them to?
Regardless, you need the passion for it, and if you don’t have it, be gentle with yourself. It is okay if you don’t know it. Realize also it is okay that your parents didn’t teach it to you.
3. “We need to decolonize (fill in the blank)”
De-colonization and colonization are increasingly hot topics. Which is funny, because colonization barely exists anymore. Saying this as one of those few colonized people, I recognize that Puerto Ricans make up a small number of humans on the planet. I heard an open mic the other day where the poet was saying Senegalese and Nigerian people are still colonized, which would be news to them, since they have been independent countries for over half a century. But the fact is, “colonization” has become a catch-all term for things we in the west don’t like. It has become an American Progressive boogie man, and needs to be corrected.
Colonization is when a more powerful nation dominates a weaker nation and exploits them economically, as well as manipulates its local politics and culture. This is enforced usually through military means to protect economic interests. If a situation does not involve that, it isn’t colonization. Plain and simple.
In Puerto Rico, the United States military and government literally dictates our laws, our elections, our economic policy, and our ability to negotiate with other countries. We are clearly a colony.
Latin American countries are in a funny situation, because many Latinos in the US view their home countries with a mix of self-racism and ignorance about those country’s histories. With the exception of Puerto Rico, the rest of Spanish-speaking Latin America are independent countries. They have their own governments, own sovereignty, and while the US might have varying degrees of influence, it doesn’t control them to the point of colonization. When US Latinos talk about colonization, they usually talk about Spain, which hasn’t controled Central or South America in over 200 years. Stop blaming Spain. At this point, you are self-governing, and whatever racial and ethnic mix that looks like, the governments of Latin America aren’t colonial governments.
That being said, there is such a thing as “neo-colonialism” which is really what people are talking about. Neo-colonialism as a concept was created in the 1960s by African scholars on the eve of their country’s gaining independence. The basis of the philosophy was a fear that the former colonial overlords would continue to control their governments after independence through economic influence. This has absolutely happened, and the US has had neo-colonial policies in several countries, especially during the Cold War in the 1970s and 80s. Cuba was a de facto colony of the US until the Revolution in 1959. Panama, whose Canal the US built, was under neo-colonial policies until the 1990s.
Neo-colonialism is also a fun concept to talk to immigration activists who promote migration to the US. Neo-colonial theory advocates for the people of the global south to only migrate to other formerly colonized and small nations as a sign of unity against imperial nations. To migrate to former empires and colonizers, let alone marry people from those countries, is a betrayal to one’s class and race. The “de-colonize” movement largely borrows from Neo-colonial thinkers from the 1960s and 70s, who were incredibly militant, and looked down on things like intermarrying with whites or even befriending whites. Advocates for this philosophy were part of the Ugandan government in the 1960s that expelled all non-Africans, which decimated their economy for thirty years.
Spain, the boogie man of Latin America, did something similar, after being colonized by North African (Moors) for 800 years, in 1492 the Spanish crown expelled Jews and Muslims back to Africa and the Middle East (this is where Sephardic Jews come from), the only problem is that Jews and Muslims ran all of the important economic, educational, and political positions, and so a by-product of this “de-colonization” was that from 1492 to 1512, Spain had no doctors.
Listen, I am all for empowering the powerless, but as we speak of “de-colonizing” we should keep in mind that if you really want to de-colonize things so society reflects what you want, you have to take far more extreme measures, like excluding, marginalizing, killing, and even expelling the so-called “colonial forces”, and it is predictable that so many of the advocates for “de-colonization” do not practice this component of it. De-colonization, if we take the example of post-colonial societies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, requires a level of brutality and discrimination where the oppressed becomes the oppressor. That’s history, and when I hear Palestinian supporters wanting to expel Jews from Palestine, it seems that we continue to have a blindspot when it comes to the groups we like and what we allow those groups to do to meet their goals.
4. We are stuck in the Conquest of the Americas.
Why? Why do we still continue to obsess over an event that happened half a millenium ago? Hey, other people in the world do it too. Serbian nationalists will go on and on about the empire they had in the 1300s, and the pursuit of re-establishing this empire was a major factor in the Bosnian Wars of the 1990s. Armenians will talk about the kingdom they had in the 800s and much of their fighting with the Turks over the last century is from a desire to reclaim that land. Benito Mussolini rose to power in Italy in the 1920s through his desire to resurrect the Roman Empire. Russia just invaded Ukraine because they trace back their origins to Kiev in 862. Israel exists because Jews claim to be the original inhabitants of Palestine 3,000 years ago, and Palestinians say they are the original inhabitants after Rome destroyed the Jewish kingdoms and Islam rose up in the 6th century, so you have two people claiming the same land. We all see how that has gone. The Khmer people of Cambodia had a great empire from the 800s to the 15th century, when the Thai people (then called the Siamese), took over. Yet the memory of the Khmer Empire led the dictator Pol Pot in the 1970s to slaughter 1 million Cambodians in order to revive the long-lost empire.
So Latin Americans and Latinos are practicing a mindset that haunts people around the world, and which always leads to bad things. The fact is, the various indigenous kingdoms, empires, and clans that existed when the Spaniards arrived from 1492 to 1533, and later when other European nations conquered other parts of the Americas, no longer exist, and will never exist again. That’s the reality. Tenochtitlan is not coming back, Cuzco will not see a revival of Incan supremacy, the Mayans will not reestablish an empire that died off long before the Spaniards even arrived, nor will the Puebloan peoples of the American Southwest or the Mississippian peoples ever return life back to the 1700s and 1800s when they still had power.
A big reason why none of this would happen is that the times and people have changed. There has been so much mixing of different groups that new cultures have arisen and replaced the old ones. Also, this is modern times, why are we harkening back to medieval and ancient societies?
Think about how ridiculous the average person views participants at Renaissance Fairs. The vast majority of people laugh at them, they’re considered weirdos and geeks trapped in the past. Yet how is that any different than watching indigenous people doing a rain dance or people dressed up as Aztec warriors? It’s not different, and if you think that the United States collapsing will automatically bring about the rise of a united indigenous empire, you are delusional.
First of all, there are hundreds if not thousands of indigenous groups, and most of them don’t like each other (which is how they were defeated in the first place). Which groups takes precedence? Don’t you think there would be a lot of warfare over land and technology and other resources? Or do you think indigenous people are somehow not like any other human beings in the history of humanity? And what about non-indigenous people? Where do they go? Or if they stay, how are they going to be treated?
Online, on both the left and the right, there is often talk of revolution and changing the whole system that runs society, with little to no discussion of the consequences of doing that. There is no such thing as a bloodless, chaos-free revolution (just ask the Ukrainians, who did gain independence with no blood shed, but then Russia systematically manipulated the government for thirty years, annexed different parts of the country in the 2010s, and now it’s a full-blown war). And thinking that just because you put someone non-white in power that everything will fall into place is dangerously naive. Americans talk about the idea of a non-white president as if nowhere else on Earth has them (and many of those Americans didn’t like when the US had a black president either, since he wasn’t the ‘right’ type of black president). In fact, most national leaders on the world stage are non-white, and their countries aren’t utopias. Online activists keep looking for superficial, idealized solutions to things without considering the reality of those solutions.
Do you even know how indigenous civilizations were run? They were all different, and considering modern sensibilities, many of them (like the Aztecs and Incans) you wouldn’t have liked. You can idealize them because a European army defeated them, but actually read up on how their societies worked. They were as complicated, as ugly, as corrupt and hypocritical as any other nation. They had beautiful things too, like any other nation, but you’re not even thinking that deep. You are stuck in a dream-version of 1491 instead of the real version of 2023.
Stop thinking that history got it wrong and if only this or that had happened instead everything would be right with the world. We need to deal with the reality we have, not this fantasy land that never did and will never exist.
But I understand where the impulse comes from. There is massive, global dissatisfaction with the status quo, but the answer isn’t the past. Every time people look to the past for solutions, someone or some group is massacred, or displaced, or some other horrible thing happens. Stop looking for 15th century solutions and start figuring out what is the world you want to live in today. Nobody seems to be able to agree on that but it's because we’re too busy being stuck in the past. Knowing our history has importance, but only to give us context. The solutions come from taking a hard look at the world as it is and at our people as we are.
And it also requires the humility to recognize that the future we and our friends want, will not be what others will want. That’s where cooperation and diplomacy and compassion come in. Without that, nothing will ever change for the better.