Mexican Culture Quotes

Yo no soy mexicano. Yo no soy gringo. Yo no soy chicano. No soy gringo en USA y mexicano en Mexico. Soy chicano en todas partes. No tengo que asimilarme a nada. Tengo mi propia historia.

Part of the racialized sexism wants everyone to think that a 15-year old Mexican is not a girl, she’s a woman. We know she’s a girl. We can never emphasize this enough, because this is the fate of colored girls globally right now: the denial of their girlhood, the denial of their childhood, and the constant state of risk and danger they are living in.

And they drank heavily, partied with great enthusiasm, and relished the drug culture; they moved in and out and slept around, and this was okay because they defined their own morality. They were fighting for the Mexicans and the redwoods, dammit! They had to be good people!

The U.S-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country — a border culture. Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.

When asked whether or not we are Marxists, our position is the same as that of a physicist, when asked if he is a “Newtonian” or of a biologist when asked if he is a “Pasteurian.” There are truths so evident, so much a part of the peoples’ knowledge, that it is now useless to debate them. One should be a “Marxist” with the same naturalness with which one is a “Newtonian” in physics or a “Pasteurian.” If new facts bring about new concepts, the latter will never take away that portion of truth possessed by those that have come before. Such is the case, for example, of “Einsteinian” relativity or of Planck’s quantum theory in relation to Newton’s discoveries. They take absolutely nothing away from the greatness of the learned Englishman. Thanks to Newton, physics was able to advance until it achieved new concepts of space. The learned Englishman was the necessary stepping-stone for that. Obviously, one can point to certain mistakes of Marx, as a thinker and as an investigator of the social doctrines and of the capitalist system in which he lived. We Latin Americans, for example, cannot agree with his interpretation of Bolivar, or with his and Engels’ analysis of the Mexicans, which accepted as fact certain theories of race or nationality that are unacceptable today. But the great men who discover brilliant truths live on despite their small faults and these faults serve only to show us they were human. That is to say, they were human beings who could make mistakes, even given the high level of consciousness achieved by these giants of human thought. This is why we recognize the essential truths of Marxism as part of humanity’s body of cultural and scientific knowledge. We accept it with the naturalness of something that requires no further argument.

North Americans had two distinct ways of looking at food trends brought from other cultures: foreign and ethnic. Foreign was refined, upmarket, and expensive. Ethnic was exotic, downmarket, and cheap. French and Japanese were foreign. Chinese, Mexican, and Indian were ethnic. With ethnic, “people start to complain if a meal costs more than $10,

I am Mexican, and I am proud of it. I am also American, and that’s not a separate identity from my Mexican one. I don’t live between cultures. I am both cultures. I carry all of it in this gorgeous brown body. No matter how hard this country has tried to get rid of us, we are still here, flourishing. My hope is in us. In me. In you.

You know, I just... I just feel like it's unfair, that my whole life is unfair, like I was born into the wrong place and family. I never belong anywhere. My parents don't understand anything about me. And my sister is gone. Sometimes I watch those stupid TV shows, you know? The ones where mothers and daughters talk about feelings and fathers take their kids to play baseball or get ice cream or some shit like that, and I wish it were me. It's so stupid, I know, to want your life to be a sitcom.

As with outlaw figures, in diverse musical and oral cultures throughout the world- Mexican corridos and Egyptian shaabi music, for example- Hip Hop's irreverence toward dominant values and noncompliance with the status quo creates alternative, counterhegemonic spaces.

Someone should have the right to choose Mexican or Chinese food for dinner, or where to live, or what kind of car to drive. Of course we are pro-choice on these and thousands of other things. But we aren’t pro-choice about rape. And we aren’t pro-choice about burglary. We aren’t pro-choice about kidnapping children. So why should we be pro-choice about killing them?

The magnitude of these shattering changes can perhaps be grasped by imagining that the invasion had been in the reverse direction and that the Aztecs or Incas had arrived suddenly in Europe, imposed their culture and calendar, outlawed Christianity, set up sacrificial altars for thousands of victims in Madrid and Amsterdam, unwittingly spread disease on a scale that virtually matched the Black Death, melted down the golden images of Christ and the saints, threw stones at the stained-glass windows and converted the cathedral aisles into arms or food warehouses, toppled unfamiliar Greek statues and Roman columns, and carried home to the Mexican and Peruvian highlands their loot in precious metals along with slaves, indentured servants and other human trophies.

Language brings with it an identity and a culture, or at least the perception of it. A shared language says, 'We're the same.' A language barrier says, 'We're different.' .... The great thing about language is that you can just as easily use it to do the opposite, convince people that they are the same. Racism teaches us that we are different because of the color of our skin, but because racism is stupid, it's easily tricked. If you're a racist and you meet someone who doesn't look like you, the fact that he can't speak like you reinforces your racist preconceptions. He's different, less intelligent. A brilliant scientist can come over the border from Mexico to live in America, but if he speaks in broken English, people say, 'Hey, I don't trust this guy.' 'But he's a scientist.' 'Yeah, in Mexican science maybe. I don't trust him.' However, if the person who doesn't look like you speaks like you, your brain short-circuits because your racism program has none of those instructions in the code. 'Wait, wait,' your mind says, 'The racism code says if he doesn't look like me, he isn't like me, but the language code says if he speaks like me, he is like me. Something is off here. I can't figure this out.

Why do we need to be pardoned? What are we to be pardoned for? For not dying of hunger? For not accepting humbly the historic burden of disdain and abandonment? For having risen up in arms after we found all other paths closed? For not heeding the Chiapas penal code, one of the most absurd and repressive in history? For showing the rest of the country and the whole world that human dignity still exists even among the world’s poorest peoples? For having made careful preparations before we began our uprising? For bringing guns to battle instead of bows and arrows? For being Mexicans? For being mainly indigenous? For calling on the Mexican people to fight by whatever means possible for what belongs to them? For fighting for liberty, democracy and justice? For not following the example of previous guerrilla armies? For refusing to surrender? For refusing to sell ourselves out? Who should we ask for pardon, and who can grant it? Those who for many years glutted themselves at a table of plenty while we sat with death so often, we finally stopped fearing it? Those who filled our pockets and our souls with empty promises and words? Or should we ask pardon from the dead, our dead, who died “natural” deaths of “natural causes” like measles, whooping cough, break-bone fever, cholera, typhus, mononucleosis, tetanus, pneumonia, malaria and other lovely gastrointestinal and pulmonary diseases? Our dead, so very dead, so democratically dead from sorrow because no one did anything, because the dead, our dead, went just like that, with no one keeping count with no one saying, “Enough!” which would at least have granted some meaning to their deaths, a meaning no one ever sought for them, the dead of all times, who are now dying once again, but now in order to live? Should we ask pardon from those who deny us the right and capacity to govern ourselves? From those who don’t respect our customs and our culture and who ask us for identification papers and obedience to a law whose existence and moral basis we don’t accept? From those who oppress us, torture us, assassinate us, disappear us from the grave “crime” of wanting a piece of land, not too big and not too small, but just a simple piece of land on which we can grow something to fill our stomachs? Who should ask for pardon, and who can grant it?

To many persons around him, he appears too much the academic. There may be some things about him that recall his beginnings—his shabby clothes; his persistent poverty; or his dark skin (in those cases when it symbolizes his parents’ disadvantaged condition)—but they only make clear how far he has moved from his past. He has used education to remake himself. They expect—they want—a student less changed by his schooling. If the scholarship boy, from a past so distant from the classroom, could remain in some basic way unchanged, he would be able to prove that it is possible for anyone to become educated without basically changing from the person one was. The scholarship boy does not straddle, cannot reconcile, the two great opposing cultures of his life. His success is unromantic and plain. He sits in the classroom and offers those sitting beside him no calming reassurance about their own lives. He sits in the seminar room—a man with brown skin, the son of working-class Mexican immigrant parents.

Don Pepe was a Mexican man: a fatalist. He meant to impart much more than comfort. He meant that all good things would also end. All joy would crumble. And death would visit each and every one of them. He meant that regimes and ancient orders and cultures would all collapse. The world as we know it becomes a new world overnight.

In focusing on “cultural change” and “conflict between cultures,” these studies avoid fundamental questions about the formation of the United States and its implications for the present and future. This approach to history allows one to safely put aside present responsibility for continued harm done by that past and the questions of reparations, restitution, and reordering society.9 Multiculturalism became the cutting edge of post-civil-rights-movement US history revisionism. For this scheme to work—and affirm US historical progress—Indigenous nations and communities had to be left out of the picture. As territorially and treaty-based peoples in North America, they did not fit the grid of multiculturalism but were included by transforming them into an inchoate oppressed racial group, while colonized Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans were dissolved into another such group, variously called “Hispanic” or “Latino.” The multicultural approach emphasized the “contributions” of individuals from oppressed groups to the country’s assumed greatness. Indigenous peoples were thus credited with corn, beans, buckskin, log cabins, parkas, maple syrup, canoes, hundreds of place names, Thanksgiving, and even the concepts of democracy and federalism. But this idea of the gift-giving Indian helping to establish and enrich the development of the United States is an insidious smoke screen meant to obscure the fact that the very existence of the country is a result of the looting of an entire continent and its resources. The fundamental unresolved issues of Indigenous lands, treaties, and sovereignty could not but scuttle the premises of multiculturalism.

When you were talking about the caste system, I was thinking about how Mexicans still have to come to terms with this in our own culture. We spoke earlier about the castas paintings that were made during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Mexico. The Spanish, establishing a form of racial apartheid, delineate the fifty-three categories of racial mixtures between Africans, Indians, and the Spanish. And they have names, like tiente en el aire, which means stain in the air; and salta otras, which means jump back; or mulatto, a word that comes from mula, the unnatural mating between the horse and the donkey. “Sambo” is now a racial epithet in the US, but it was first used as one of the fifty-three racial categories in the castas paintings.

I often ask them why they chose Santa Muerte specifically. An overwhelming amount of the time they just shrug and say, “I'm drawn to her.” In recent years being “drawn” to something has developed into a sort of free pass for accessing indigenous culture and leapfrogging over important traditions folks just don't want to observe. I am drawn to Jason Momoa, but that does not mean he wants me in his house.

I believe we have reached a point where those of us who belong to this culture of la frontera in Ysleta and El Paso are not content to sit back and watch others tell us who we are. We know who we are, and we ourselves can tell others about what we love and what we fear and what we hate and what can save us. I believe our community has developed that confidence to step forward and start taking responsibility for the many images that are projected in the name of Ysleta and El Paso.

But, it didn’t matter that my mother suspected and knew that I was a writer. It was expected of me to take care of my share of the responsibility of making our way in the world as a family. In those days, also, it was unheard of, by us certainly, that to get any help, even from members of our own family, let alone from the government, which would have been disgraceful. Thank God that that kind of folly in thinking is obsolete. There is a temptation to feel, ‘Well, we all made it; why can’t these other poor people make it?’ And, of course, nothing is more than stupid than that attitude. I must confess that I find that attitude among many countrymen of my own who do find themselves taking undue pride in their own sense of ability — of being equal to any situation, and of seeing it through and improving it, and so on. And then, putting that against other people who don’t have that, and thereby implying that the other people are lazy. Not taking into account the whole different structure and identity and a people who have survived for centuries under very harsh conditions and members of a very great culture, and I am talking about the Indians, to begin with, in the Valley — the San Joaquin Valley, in Fresno, in Tulare, and the mountains, and there are many tribes of them, of different kinds, and I am talking about, also, the Mestizos, the mixtures of Mexican, Spaniards with Indians, making the Mexican. And I am talking about any minority which is considered by anybody as being innately of itself indolent. This kind of narrow thinking is a temptation to all sorts of people, and one has to be sympathetic with the people who are wrong, too, you see. It is not enough just to be sympathetic with the people who are belittled; it is necessary to be sympathetic with the people who belittle them. So, in worrying about the persecuted, one is obliged also to worry about the persecutors. I consider that a basic measure of growth.

The whole family had inherited the bizarre belief system of Antonio and América: instant coffee was some kind of miracle. Mexicans of that generation liked to stir a spoonful of coffee powder into a cup of hot water and tinkle it around with a spoon. As if something highly sophisticated and magical were happening. Nescafé. Café Combate. Then they poured Carnation canned milk into it. They thought they were in some James Bond movie, living ahead of the cultural curve. Or maybe they were just sick of coffeepots and grounds.

But whenever someone starts talking about authenticity and cultural appropriation, my mind begins to wander. I ask myself, What if my ancestors had traded places and pantries with yours? What would modern Korean food look like if a generation of Changs and Kims and Parks had arrived in Mexico five hundred years ago? What would Mexican food look like? I imagine both cuisines would be even more delicious, and I bet they’d still be wrapping meat and vegetables in tortillas and leaves. We humans are more alike in our tastes than we think.

‎"Such questions [about illegal immigration as 'a major threat to the state'], like the topics of slavery and Native Americans, are often met with a 'here we go again' attitude, an impatience with bringing up issues considered to be long gone (perhaps even resolved) and no longer applicable in America's here and now... Mexican and Hispanic cultures are part of the fabric of Americanness; to pretend otherwise is to invite more confusion and to fuel the xenophobic tendencies that have given strength to nativists and sanctioned violence.

These cultural generalizations, perhaps correctly, reduce the history of immigration to a binary. When immigrants come into this country, whether they join the labor force, like the Irish, Mexicans, and Central Americans, or they become small-time entrepreneurs, oftentimes in Black neighborhoods. Regardless of their choice, their economic asesion will depend on their relationship with Black Americans. If you accept this analysis, Black people are the only race in America. Everyone else is either white or on their way to becoming white. The new Asians, much like the Jews and the Irish before them, will one day be white, and their dream of generic Americanness will be achieved.

Peter, naomba nitubu kosa. Mimi si mtoto wa Mwanasheria Mkuu wa Serikali. Ni mtoto wa Rais wa Meksiko. Lisa ni mtoto wa Naibu Mwanasheria Mkuu wa Serikali,” Debbie alisema akitabasamu. “Hata mimi nilijua ulikuwa ukinidanganya. Lakini mbona Rais wa Meksiko haitwi Patrocinio Abrego?” Murphy aliuliza. “Utamaduni wa Meksiko ni tofauti kidogo na tamaduni zingine,” Debbie alijibu baada ya kurusha nywele nyuma kuona vizuri. “Hapa, watu wengi hawatumii majina ya pili ya baba zao. Hutumia jina la kwanza la mama la pili la baba; ndiyo maana Wameksiko wengi wana majina matatu. Kwa upande wangu, Patrocinio ni jina la baba yake mama yangu na Abrego ni jina la babu yake mama yangu – kwa sababu za kiusalama.

This New World utopia, this promised land, was soon buried under the ashes and cinders that erupted over the Western World in the nineteenth century, thanks tot he resurrection and intensification of all the forces that had originally brought 'civilization' itself into existence. The rise of the centralized state, teh expansion of the bureaucracy and the conscript army, the regimentation of the factory system, the depredations of speculative finance, the spread of imperialism, as in the Mexican War, and the continued encroachment of slavery-all these negative movements not only sullied the New World dream but brought back on a larger scale than ever the Old World nightmares that the immigrants to America had risked their lives and forfeited their cultural treasures to escape.

What it includes is what progressives call “history from below.” Typical of this approach is Howard Zinn’s classic work, A People’s History of the United States. Zinn purports to show the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, the Mexican War from the angle of deserting servicemen, the rise of industrialism as experienced by women working in the Lowell textile mills, the two world wars as seen by socialists and pacifists and postwar America’s role in the world as seen by peons in Latin America.4 Essentially Zinn uses the victim’s perspective to generate an anti-American narrative, one that is not confined to the academic sphere but has now spread virus-like through the culture.

Replace Sombreros with Dollar Street Children start learning about other countries and religions in preschool. Cute little world maps with people in folklore dress from across the world are intended to make them aware of and respectful toward other cultures. The intention is good but these kinds of illustrations can create an illusion of great difference. People in other countries can seem stuck in historic and exotic ways of life. Of course some Mexicans sometimes wear large sombreros, but these large hats nowadays are probably more common on the heads of tourists. Let’s show children Dollar Street instead, and show them how regular people live. If you are a teacher, send your class “traveling” on dollarstreet.org and ask them to find differences within countries and similarities across countries.

Language brings with it an identity and a culture, or at least the perception of it. A shared language says “We’re the same.” A language barrier says “We’re different.” The architects of apartheid understood this. Part of the effort to divide black people was to make sure we were separated not just physically but by language as well. In the Bantu schools, children were only taught in their home language. Zulu kids learned in Zulu. Tswana kids learned in Tswana. Because of this, we’d fall into the trap the government had set for us and fight among ourselves, believing that we were different. The great thing about language is that you can just as easily use it to do the opposite: convince people that they are the same. Racism teaches us that we are different because of the color of our skin. But because racism is stupid, it’s easily tricked. If you’re racist and you meet someone who doesn’t look like you, the fact that he can’t speak like you reinforces your racist preconceptions: He’s different, less intelligent. A brilliant scientist can come over the border from Mexico to live in America, but if he speaks in broken English, people say, “Eh, I don’t trust this guy.” “But he’s a scientist.” “In Mexican science, maybe. I don’t trust him.” However, if the person who doesn’t look like you speaks like you, your brain short-circuits because your racism program has none of those instructions in the code. “Wait, wait,” your mind says, “the racism code says if he doesn’t look like me he isn’t like me, but the language code says if he speaks like me he… is like me? Something is off here. I can’t figure this out.

The only thing I can’t figure out is why you still eat the food your captors fed you. Why don’t you hate it as much as you hate them?” Fila glanced down at her plate. It contained a strange mixture of Afghan and Mexican dishes. She held up a flatbread. “This isn’t Taliban food—it’s Afghan food. It’s my mother’s food. I grew up eating it before I was ever captured. To me it means love and tenderness, not hate and violence.” “Taliban, Afghan—it’s all the same.” She waved the bread. “No, it’s not. Not one bit. Afghan culture is over two thousand years old. And it’s a conservative culture—it’s had to be—but it’s not a culture of monsters. Afghans are people like you, Holt. They’re born, they grow up, they live and love and they die just like we do. I didn’t study much history before I was taken, but I know this much. America’s story is that of the frontier—of always having room to grow. Afghanistan’s story is that of occupation. By the Russians, the British, the Mongols—even the ancient Greeks. On and on for century after century. Imagine all those wars being fought in Montana. Foreign armies living among us, taking over your ranch, stealing everything you own, killing your wife and children, over and over and over again.” She paused to catch her breath. “Death is right around the corner for them—all the time. Is it any wonder that a movement that turns men into warriors and codes everything else into rigid rules might seem like the answer?” She still wasn’t sure if Holt was following her. What analogy would make sense to him? She wracked her brain. “If a bunch of Californians overran Chance Creek and forced everyone to eat tofu, would you refuse to ever eat steak again?” He made a face. “Of course not!” “Then imagine the Taliban are the Californians, forcing everyone to eat tofu. And everyone does it because they don’t know what else to do. They still love steak, but they will be severely punished if they eat it—so will their families. That’s what it’s like for many Afghans living under Taliban control. It’s not their choice. They still love their country. They still love their heritage. That doesn’t mean they love the group of extremists who have taken over.” “Even if those Taliban people went away, they still wouldn’t be anything like you and me.” Holt crossed his arms. Fila suppressed a smile at his inclusion of her. That was a step in the right direction even if the greater message was lost on him. “They’re more like you than you think. Defensive. Angry. Always on the lookout for trouble.” Holt straightened. “I have four sons. Of course I’m on the lookout for trouble.” “They have sons, too.” She waited to see if he understood. Holt shook his head. “We’re going to see different on this one. But I understand about the food. Everyone likes their mother’s cooking best.” He surveyed her plate. “You got any more of that bread?” She’d take that as a victory.

The Irish and Italian immigrants who came to New York in the same period didn’t have that advantage. They didn’t have a skill specific to the urban economy. They went to work as day laborers and domestics and construction workers—jobs where you could show up for work every day for thirty years and never learn market research and manufacturing and how to navigate the popular culture and how to negotiate with the Yankees, who ran the world. Or consider the fate of the Mexicans who immigrated to California between 1900 and the end of the 1920s to work in the fields of the big fruit and vegetable growers. They simply exchanged the life of a feudal peasant in Mexico for the life of a feudal peasant in California. “The conditions in the garment industry were every bit as bad,” Soyer goes on. “But as a garment worker, you were closer to the center of the industry. If you are working in a field in California, you have no clue what’s happening to the produce when it gets on the truck. If you are working in a small garment shop, your wages are low, and your conditions are terrible, and your hours are long, but you can see exactly what the successful people are doing, and you can see how you can set up your own job.”*

The essay had developed from there to meditate more generally on language barriers, class difference, Tony’s philosophy of teaching, and his first impressions of living in a foreign place; but to his detractors, the damage had already been done. A doctoral student in cultural studies (San Diego) was the first to tweet a link to the essay, writing ‘I can’t even deal with how much is wrong here’ and adding a trigger warning and the hashtags #whiteprivilege, #povertytourism, and #yuck. The fury spread from there. Tony’s name was trending in a matter of hours, and the more attention his essay attracted, the angrier his critics seemed to get. He was accused of colonialist condescension, of reinforcing harmful stereotypes, of sentimentalising violence, and of being yet another entitled white man presuming, in a way that somehow managed to be both predatory and insipid, that the most valuable aspect of a thing was always, and only ever, his experience of it. Disgusted tweeters demanded to know why, if Tony had travelled to Mexico in order to teach English, he had not learned Spanish before he arrived; they pointed out all the invidious ways in which his essay implied the inarticulacy of his native guide, as though it were Eduardo’s failure that Tony could not understand him; they asked what right he had to appropriate the fight that he had witnessed, to instrumentalise it, and to seek to profit from it in the form of cultural cachet; they analysed the inherent problematics of his rather florid prose style; and they invited him, in less than cordial terms, to apologise to Mexicans, renounce all forms of white supremacy, and go home.

We still talk a lot about ‘authentic’ cultures, but if by ‘authentic’ we mean something that developed independently, and that consists of ancient local traditions free of external influences, then there are no authentic cultures left on earth. Over the last few centuries, all cultures were changed almost beyond recognition by a flood of global influences. One of the most interesting examples of this globalisation is ‘ethnic’ cuisine. In an Italian restaurant we expect to find spaghetti in tomato sauce; in Polish and Irish restaurants lots of potatoes; in an Argentinian restaurant we can choose between dozens of kinds of beefsteaks; in an Indian restaurant hot chillies are incorporated into just about everything; and the highlight at any Swiss café is thick hot chocolate under an alp of whipped cream. But none of these foods is native to those nations. Tomatoes, chilli peppers and cocoa are all Mexican in origin; they reached Europe and Asia only after the Spaniards conquered Mexico. Julius Caesar and Dante Alighieri never twirled tomato-drenched spaghetti on their forks (even forks hadn’t been invented yet), William Tell never tasted chocolate, and Buddha never spiced up his food with chilli. Potatoes reached Poland and Ireland no more than 400 years ago. The only steak you could obtain in Argentina in 1492 was from a llama. Hollywood films have perpetuated an image of the Plains Indians as brave horsemen, courageously charging the wagons of European pioneers to protect the customs of their ancestors. However, these Native American horsemen were not the defenders of some ancient, authentic culture. Instead, they were the product of a major military and political revolution that swept the plains of western North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a consequence of the arrival of European horses. In 1492 there were no horses in America. The culture of the nineteenth-century Sioux and Apache has many appealing features, but it was a modern culture – a result of global forces – much more than ‘authentic’.

INTERNATIONAL LAW WAS CREATED DURING THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION BECAUSE a group of Mexicans—and one African American—gang-raped and murdered two teenaged girls in Houston, Texas.1 The crime made history in another way: It led to the most death sentences handed out for a single crime in Texas since 1949.2 Do you even know about this case? The only reason the media eventually admitted that the lead rapist, Jose Ernesto Medellin, was an illegal alien from Mexico was to try to overturn his conviction on the grounds that he had not been informed of his right, as a Mexican citizen, to confer with the Mexican consulate. Journalists have an irritating tendency to skimp on detail when reporting crimes by immigrants, a practice that will not be followed here. One summer night in June 1993, fourteen-year-old Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Peña, who had just turned sixteen, were returning from a pool party, and decided to take a shortcut through a park to make their 11:30 p.m. curfew. They encountered a group of Hispanic men, who were in the process of discussing “gang etiquette,” such as not complaining if other members talked about having sex with your mother.3 The girls ran away, but Medellin grabbed Jennifer and began ripping her clothes off. Hearing her screams, Elizabeth came back to help her friend. For more than an hour, the five Hispanics and one black man raped the teens, vaginally, anally, and orally—“every way you can assault a human being,” as the prosecutor put it.4 The girls were beaten, kicked, and stomped, their teeth knocked out and their ribs broken. One of the Hispanic men told Medellin’s fourteen-year-old brother to “get some,” so he raped one of the girls, too. But when it was time to kill the girls, Medellin said his brother was “too small to watch” and dragged the girls into the woods.5 There, the girls were forced to kneel on the ground and a belt or shoelace was looped around their necks. Then a man on each side pulled on the cord as hard as he could. The men strangling Jennifer pulled so hard they broke the belt. Medellin later complained that “the bitch wouldn’t die.” When it was done, he repeatedly stomped on the girls’ necks, to make sure they were dead.6 At trial, Medellin’s sister-in-law testified that shortly after the gruesome murders, Medellin was laughing about it, saying they’d “had some fun with some girls” and boasting that he had “virgin blood” on his underpants.7 It’s difficult to understand a culture where such an orgy of cruelty is bragged about at all, but especially in front of women.

As Japan recovered from the post-war depression, okonomiyaki became the cornerstone of Hiroshima's nascent restaurant culture. And with new variables- noodles, protein, fishy powders- added to the equation, it became an increasingly fungible concept. Half a century later it still defies easy description. Okonomi means "whatever you like," yaki means "grill," but smashed together they do little to paint a clear picture. Invariably, writers, cooks, and oko officials revert to analogies: some call it a cabbage crepe; others a savory pancake or an omelet. Guidebooks, unhelpfully, refer to it as Japanese pizza, though okonomiyaki looks and tastes nothing like pizza. Otafuku, for its part, does little to clarify the situation, comparing okonomiyaki in turn to Turkish pide, Indian chapati, and Mexican tacos. There are two overarching categories of okonomiyaki Hiroshima style, with a layer of noodles and a heavy cabbage presence, and Osaka or Kansai style, made with a base of eggs, flour, dashi, and grated nagaimo, sticky mountain yam. More than the ingredients themselves, the difference lies in the structure: whereas okonomiyaki in Hiroshima is carefully layered, a savory circle with five or six distinct layers, the ingredients in Osaka-style okonomiyaki are mixed together before cooking. The latter is so simple to cook that many restaurants let you do it yourself on table side teppans. Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki, on the other hand, is complicated enough that even the cooks who dedicate their lives to its construction still don't get it right most of the time. (Some people consider monjayaki, a runny mass of meat and vegetables popularized in Tokyo's Tsukishima district, to be part of the okonomiyaki family, but if so, it's no more than a distant cousin.) Otafuku entered the picture in 1938 as a rice vinegar manufacturer. Their original factory near Yokogawa Station burned down in the nuclear attack, but in 1946 they started making vinegar again. In 1950 Otafuku began production of Worcestershire sauce, but local cooks complained that it was too spicy and too thin, that it didn't cling to okonomiyaki, which was becoming the nutritional staple of Hiroshima life. So Otafuku used fruit- originally orange and peach, later Middle Eastern dates- to thicken and sweeten the sauce, and added the now-iconic Otafuku label with the six virtues that the chubby-cheeked lady of Otafuku, a traditional character from Japanese folklore, is supposed to represent, including a little nose for modesty, big ears for good listening, and a large forehead for wisdom.

For abolitionists, who advocated the immediate emancipation of all slaves, and free-soilers, who simply opposed the spread of slavery into the western territories, the existence of such a group proved the destructive effect of slavery on social morals and human industry and the inordinate economic power of the planter elite. It also served as an implicit warning of the disastrous consequences of the spread of slavery into nonslaveholding regions and its debilitating effect on the work ethic of otherwise stalwart white farmers. For slave-holders, particularly those at the apex of southern society, the idleness of rural working-class whites justified the “peculiar institution” and made clear the need for a planter-led economic and social hierarchy. Planter D. R. Hundley wrote, for example, that “poor whites” were “the laziest two-legged animals that walk erect on the face of the earth . . . [and exhibited] a natural stupidity or dullness of intellect that almost surpasses belief.” To abolitionists and proslavery ideologues alike, therefore, southern poor whites utterly lacked industry, intelligence, social propriety, and honor, the essential ingredients for political and social equality and thus should not be trusted with political decision-making.7 Northern and southern middle- to upper-class commentators perceived this class of people as so utterly degraded that they challenged their assertion of “whiteness,” the one claim southern working-class whites had to political equality, “normative” status, and social superiority to free and enslaved blacks. Like Byrd and the author of “The Carolina Sand-Hillers,” journalists and travel writers repeatedly compared “poor whites” unfavorably to other supposedly inferior people of color, be they enslaved blacks, Indians, or even Mexican peasants. Through a variety of arguments, including genetic inferiority, excessive interbreeding with “nonwhites,” and environmental factors, such as the destructive influences of the southern climate, rampant disease, and a woefully inadequate diet, these writers asserted that “poor whites” were neither truly “white” nor clearly “nonwhite” but instead, a separate “‘Cracker’ race” in all ways so debased that they had no capacity for social advancement. This attitude is clear in an 1866 article from the Boston Daily Advertiser that proclaimed that this social class had reached depths of “[s]uch filthy poverty, such foul ignorance, such idiotic imbecility” that they could never be truly civilized. “[T]ime and effort will lead the negro up to intelligent manhood,” the author concluded, “but I almost doubt if it will be possible to ever lift this ‘white trash’ into respectability.”8 Contempt for working-class whites was almost as strong among African Americans as among middle-class and elite whites. Enslaved African Americans invented derogatory terms containing explicit versions of “whiteness” such as “(poor) white trash” and “poor buckra” (a derivative form of the West African word for “white man”). Although relations between slaves and non-elite southern whites were complex, many slaves deeply resented the role of poor whites as overseers and patrol riders and adopted their owners’ view that elite southern planters were socially and morally superior. Many also believed that blacks, enslaved and free, formed a middle layer of social respectability between the planter aristocracy at the top of the social system and the “poor whites” at the bottom. The construction of a “poor white” and “white trash” social and cultural category thus allowed black slaves to carve out a space of social superiority, as well as permitted the white planter elite to justify enormous economic and social inequality among whites in a supposedly democratic society.9

What a joy this book is! I love recipe books, but it’s short-lived; I enjoy the pictures for several minutes, read a few pages, and then my eyes glaze over. They are basically books to be used in the kitchen for one recipe at a time. This book, however, is in a different class altogether and designed to be read in its entirety. It’s in its own sui generis category; it has recipes at the end of most of the twenty-one chapters, but it’s a book to be read from cover to cover, yet it could easily be read chapter by chapter, in any order, as they are all self-contained. Every bite-sized chapter is a flowing narrative from a well-stocked brain encompassing Balinese culture, geography and history, while not losing its main focus: food. As you would expect from a scholar with a PhD in history from Columbia University, the subject matter has been meticulously researched, not from books and articles and other people’s work, but from actually being on the ground and in the markets and in the kitchens of Balinese families, where the Balinese themselves learn their culinary skills, hands on, passed down orally, manually and practically from generation to generation. Vivienne Kruger has lived in Bali long enough to get it right. That’s no mean feat, as the subject has not been fully studied before. Yes, there are so-called Balinese recipe books, most, if I’m not mistaken, written by foreigners, and heavily adapted. The dishes have not, until now, been systematically placed in their proper cultural context, which is extremely important for the Balinese, nor has there been any examination of the numerous varieties of each type of recipe, nor have they been given their true Balinese names. This groundbreaking book is a pleasure to read, not just for its fascinating content, which I learnt a lot from, but for the exuberance, enthusiasm and originality of the language. There’s not a dull sentence in the book. You just can’t wait to read the next phrase. There are eye-opening and jaw-dropping passages for the general reader as Kruger describes delicacies from the village of Tengkudak in Tabanan district — grasshoppers, dragonflies, eels and live baby bees — and explains how they are caught and cooked. She does not shy away from controversial subjects, such as eating dog and turtle. Parts of it are not for the faint-hearted, but other parts make you want to go out and join the participants, such as the Nusa Lembongan fishermen, who sail their outriggers at 5.30 a.m. The author quotes Miguel Covarrubias, the great Mexican observer of the 1930s, who wrote “The Island of Bali.” It has inspired all writers since, including myself and my co-author, Ni Wayan Murni, in our book “Secrets of Bali, Fresh Light on the Morning of the World.” There is, however, no bibliography, which I found strange at first. I can only imagine it’s a reflection of how original the subject matter is; there simply are no other sources. Throughout the book Kruger mentions Balinese and Indonesian words and sometimes discusses their derivations. It’s a Herculean task. I was intrigued to read that “satay” comes from the Tamil word for flesh ( sathai ) and that South Indians brought satay to Southeast Asia before Indonesia developed its own tradition. The book is full of interesting tidbits like this. The book contains 47 recipes in all, 11 of which came from Murni’s own restaurant, Murni’s Warung, in Ubud. Mr Dolphin of Warung Dolphin in Lovina also contributed a number of recipes. Kruger adds an introduction to each recipe, with a detailed and usually very personal commentary. I think my favorite, though, is from a village priest (pemangku), I Made Arnila of the Ganesha (Siwa) Temple in Lovina. water. I am sure most will enjoy this book enormously; I certainly did.” Review published in The Jakarta Globe, April 17, 2014. Jonathan Copeland is an author and photographer based in Bali. thejakartaglobe/features/spiritual-journey-culinary-world-bali

Grinding may look easy, and it is, for the first ten minutes. To grind a quantity of grain, though, as I found out when I tried, takes skill, control, physical strength, and time. I was quickly panting, sweaty, and dizzy, my hair in my eyes, and the mano slipping at awkward angles. Grinding is hard on the knees, hips, back, shoulders, and elbows, causing arthritis and bone damage. Grinding is lonely, too exhausting to allow for chatter. Kneeling to grind with the breasts swinging can be seen as submissive, demeaning, and sexually provocative, as lascivious eighteenth- and nineteenth-century illustrations of Mexican women grinding make clear. The heavy labor was relegated to women, convicts, and slaves, called “grinding slaves” in the technical language of seventh-century English court documents.42 Even today Mexican women in remote villages grind five hours daily to prepare enough maize for a family of five or six. For generation upon generation of grinders in the bread-eating parts of the world, the author of Genesis (3:19) had it nailed. “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

Brujería, which combines Aztec myth, European witchcraft, and Cuban Santería, has Mexican cultural and religious roots. In the sixteenth century, when Spanish priests declared the pagan goddess Toantzin to be a Roman Catholic, Toantzin’s priestesses went underground and became brujas.

OUCH "The arrabal (a term used for poor neighbourhoods in Argentina and Uruguay) and carpa (informal mobile theatre set up inside tents, once common in Latin America), with their caliente (hot) rhythms such as the rumba or the cha-cha-cha, were conquering audiences all over the world, a trend allegorised in song lyrics about their popularity among the French and other non-Latin Americans - "The Frenchman has fun like this/as does the German/and the Irishman has a ball/as does even the Muslim" ("Cachita") - even as they filtered in the presence of a blackness - "and if you want to dance/look for your Cachita/and tell her "Come on negrita"/let's dance" - denied in the official discourse of those Spanish=speaking countries wielding the greatest economic power in the region: namely, Argentina and Mexico, the latter of which would eventually incorporate Afro-Latin American culture into its cinema - although being careful to mark it as Cuban and not Mexican.

Like the photographs, the stories people told were full of such significant details, and perhaps the interviewers were told to keep their eyes on those details. Thus, Annette Hersh Thorp would describe the interiors of the houses in her narratives, and Lou Sage Batchen would inscribe every detail of a remedio (herbal remedy) and its use. In her book The Preservation of the Village: New Mexico's Hispanics and the New Deal, Suzanne Forrest claims that the New Deal was a cultural invasion far more pervasive than anything Hispanic New Mexicans had yet experienced. She believes that the interviewers romanticized the work and culture of the rural villages and "cleaned up" the Mexican heritage. In so doing, they invented a romantic Spanish heritage for the state. This was the beginning of a "Spanish" revival, the creation of a "utopic" arcadia of Hispanic village culture.

White terrorism and Jim Crow, 300 years of genocidal warfare against American Indians, repeated pogroms against Mexican and East Asian Americans, and the blinding, mind-boggling contradictions of American leadership - that many of the framers of American democracy, men held in nearly universal reverence by White Americans, owned Black slaves, and that the majority of White American leaders since the Civil War, at every level and in every social field, have been White supremacists and segregationists.

The domestication of grain was accompanied by an equally radical innovation in the preparation of food: the invention of bread. In an endless variety of forms, from the unleavened wheat or barley of the Near East to the corn tortillas of the Mexicans and the yeast-risen bread of later cultures, bread has been up to now the center of every diet. No other form of food is so acceptable, so transportable, or so universal. "Give us this day our daily bread" became a universal prayer, and so venerated was this food, as the very flesh of God, that to cut it with a knife is still, in some cultures, a sacrilege. Daily bread brought a security in the food supply that had never before been possible. Despite seasonal fluctuations in yield due to floods or droughts, the cultivation of grains made man assured of his daily nourishment, provided he worked steadily and consecutively, as he had never been certain of the supply of game or his luck in killing it. With bread and oil, bread and butter, or bread and bacon, neolithic cultures had the backbone of a balanced diet, rich in energy, needing only fresh garden produce to be entirely adequate. With this security, it was possible to look ahead and plan ahead with confidence. Except in the tropical areas, where soil regeneration was not mastered, groups could now remain rooted in one spot, surrounded by fields under permanent cultivation, slowly making improvements in the landscape, digging ditches and irrigation canals, making terraces, planting trees, which later generations would be grateful for. Capital accumulation begins at this point: the end of hand-to-mouth living. With the domestication of grains, the future became predictable as never before; and the cultivator not merely sought to retain the ancestral past, but to expand all his present possibilities: once the daily bread was assured, those wider migrations and transplantations of men, which made the country town and the city possible, speedily followed.

The Bible says that immediately before Jesus’s return, a mighty angel will come down from heaven crying out, “Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great!”2 Now that’s strange because historic Babylon has ceased to exist and according to biblical prophecy will never be rebuilt or inhabited again. So why harken back to a kingdom that’s already long gone? The answer is simple. Babylon is the personification of evil. Even at the end of human history, it will still represent to the angelic host the worst of the worst. Nothing will ever reach its depths of depravity. Not al Qaeda. Not Mexican drug lords. Not the Tower of Babel. Not Sodom. Not Gomorrah. Not even Nazi Germany.

Let’s be even more honest. While we might like to think we have smothered everyone with one tasty culture, what we have actually accomplished is closer to the Weird Way of making and eating a salad. We like ourselves, our way of thinking, our music, and our . . . our everything. So we separate all the difference and differents and scatter them across the towns and cities so that each group worships on its own. Churches for men and not really for women, churches for the wealthy and churches for the middle class and churches for the poor, churches for whites and Mexican Americans and African Americans and Asian Americans and Indian Americans. Churches for liberals and churches for fundamentalists, churches for those who follow Calvin, Wesley, Luther, Aquinas, Menno — or for those who follow Hybels, Warren, Stanley, Hamilton, Chandler, or Driscoll. Sunday morning then becomes an exercise in cultural and spiritual segregation, and this has a colossally important impact on the Christian life itself!

The VS program prohibited white Mennonite women from coming too close to Mexican American boys and instituted a policy that advised young women to “be friendly to everyone, but single boys.”59

The requirements of personal change, as historian Paul Barton has shown, reflected a moral code that was based on an Anglo cultural worldview perceived to be inherently necessary for the religious conversion of ethnic Mexicans to Protestantism.

more than a decade before the marriage between a black and white Mennonite, the church’s response to a marriage between a Mexican American and a white Mennonite was to suggest the couple relocate to a faraway place like Argentina where they would be out of the purview of most Mennonite communities.

The new “social arrangements of the farm order,” were clearly reflected in the substandard working and living conditions of many Mexican Americans, a reality that Mennonite missionaries saw as a consequence of living a Godless life.

The question of how Mexicans should be classified racially was decided in 1897 by Texas courts, which ruled that Mexican Americans were not White. In California, they were classified as “Caucasian” until 1930, when the state attorney general decided they should be categorized as “Indians,” though “not considered ‘the original American Indians of the US.’”13 In both Texas and California, Mexican Americans were confined to segregated schools, and in both states legislation was passed in the nineteenth century outlawing the use of Spanish for instruction in the public schools. During that time, Mexican families sought to preserve their culture and language by sending their children to Catholic schools or private Mexican schools where bilingual instruction was maintained.

the least informed about the extent of the physical and philosophical wounds produced in Prague by tanks that acted as more than threats, about the massacre of students in a Mexican plaza called Tlatelolco, about the historic and human devastation unleashed by our dear Comrade Mao’s Cultural Revolution,

In all cases, American English tends to rub out the migrants’ language within two to three generations. In the case of Mexican-Americans, however, it rarely takes more than one. In contemporary times, Mexican-Americans are the most enthusiastic seekers of the American Dream, not just economically, but culturally.

We are finally seeing that success doesn't have to happen outside our community or in spite of our heritage. We are rejecting the notion that success is found in whiteness because that kind of thinking has never led us anywhere good. The antidote for the poison of the oppressor is to embrace our brownness, because it is our culture that is propelling us.

In the early 1900s, while colonization continued, the original Mexican population of the Southwest was greatly increased by an immigration the continues today. This combination of centuries-old roots and relatively new ones gives the Mexican-American people a rich and varied cultural heritage.

We can look to Mexico, where a vision for social change has been powerfully affirmed by the Maya people of Chiapas. They named their vision "Zapatismo," in memory of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, and startled the world with an armed uprising on January 1, 1994. That day, and ever since, the Zapatistas have posed the basic problem: how to establish both identity and democracy? How to achieve a new life of dignity for indigenous people while also creating a Mexico of justice for everyone? Always the Zapatistas have said they do not want one without the other. At a 1996 meeting of Chicanas/os with some of the Zapatista leadership, Comandante Tacho began his presentation by saying: "We don't want power. What we want is decent homes, enough to eat, health care for our children, schools." At first I thought to myself: how can you gain those things without power? Then I realized that by power he meant domination. The Zapatista vision does not find the answer to injustice in the replacement of one domination by another, but in a vast change of the political culture from the bottom up that will create a revolutionary democracy.

...my racial identity is a concept that escapes intellectual conversations about race. My personal experiences contradict the idea that Latino is only an ethnicity and not a race. But suggesting that Latino should be a race confounds the situation even more, because we are all so different and experience the world differently, though the same could be said of any other racial group. When others state, 'Latino is not a race, it's an ethnicity,' they ignore that not all Latinos have the same ethnicity, either. And though we don't all share the same ethnicity, the exact language, religion, customs, culture, food, and so forth, and though we are not the only ethnic group in America, we are the only people who are singled out by our ethnicity.

There was a good reason for Oaxaca being unaltered, and unalterable. A few days after arriving in this colonial town in a high valley, justly celebrated for its beauty and its traditions, I was reminded again of how “the past of a place survives in its poor”—how the poor tend to keep their cultural identity intact. They depend on its compass and continuity and its pleasures for their self-esteem, while the rising classes and the rich tend to rid themselves of their old traditions, except in a showy or ritualized way, because they became wealthy by resisting them and breaking rules.

What do I miss? Food and friends. The diversity of culture,” José Miguel said. “And if you work hard, the money’s good. This isn’t true in Mexico. You can work hard here and still earn very little. What I don’t like about Mexico is the paperwork—and especially the poverty. In the States you have poor people, but generally they’re the ones who don’t want to work. Here we have poor people, but poor because they have no opportunities. It’s sad.

During the late 1960s and 1970s, Mexican American and Puerto Rican activists put forward a politically charged critique of American politics. Bringing together a paradoxical mix of cultural nationalism, liberal reformism, radical critique, andromantic idealism, the Chicano and Puerto Rican movements created a new political vocabulary, one emphasizing resistance, recognition, cultural pride, authenticity, and fraternity (hermanidad). The movements-organizations, issues, and events left a profound legacy.

My inspiration comes from many sources. Clearly, Mother Nature has always occupied an important position in this regard, which is tied up to my early experiences in Mexico. In addition, the patterns used in Mexican arts and crafts—ceramics, textiles, tiles, masks, etc.—also have been present in the development of my mental and artistic imaginary from the very beginning. Other elements that I can mention are indigenous myths and legends, the expressions of other artists from various cultures, iconic historical figures, and the works of poets and other writers, some of whom are my friends. Obviously, my surroundings are also a big source of inspiration, as my series of paintings on the Pacific Northwest clearly show. (Interview in Artophilia)

We have backed away from any vision of common ground; we have, instead, divided American life into a set of experiences—Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jewish; male and female, heterosexual and homosexual; Indian, Anglo American, African American, Mexican American, Asian American. For what were very good reasons, did we over-accent cultural differences?[214

Browness is a liminal legal, political, and cultural space that US Latinas and Latinos have inhabited since the US-Mexico War and the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo of 1848. In exchange for the benefits of land (nearly half of a Mexico), the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo reluctantly granted US citizenship to former Mexicans, and with it, an implied "whiteness." At the same time however, through legal and social convention ever since, the United States has denied full and equal membership to Latinas/os within the American polity. We have been wanted for our land and labor, while at the same time rejected for our cultural and ethnic difference. When economic times get tough, we become the disposable "illegal alien," and are scapegoated and deported. We are wanted and unwanted. Necessary, yet despised. We are Brown.

waving their Mexican flags while they blatantly glorify their disdain for acculturation and assimilation into our language and culture, need to be expelled IMMEDIATELY.

Smith v. Smith became the precedent in Texas for upholding Mexico’s marriage and inheritance laws. The legal and cultural arguments used in defense of the Smiths’ interethnic marriage were later found to be equally applicable to interracial marriages. That is, although immediately after independence the Texas Legislature passed a series of “antimiscegenation” laws prohibiting the marriage of whites and Blacks, this type of interracial marriage was deemed legal if it had been conducted during Spanish and Mexican rule, and the children born from these marriages were eligible to inherit.

Where does the word cocktail come from? There are many answers to that question, and none is really satisfactory. One particular favorite story of mine, though, comes from The Booze Reader: A Soggy Saga of a Man in His Cups, by George Bishop: “The word itself stems from the English cock-tail which, in the middle 1800s, referred to a woman of easy virtue who was considered desirable but impure. The word was imported by expatriate Englishmen and applied derogatorily to the newly acquired American habit of bastardizing good British Gin with foreign matter, including ice. The disappearance of the hyphen coincided with the general acceptance of the word and its re-exportation back to England in its present meaning.” Of course, this can’t be true since the word was applied to a drink before the middle 1800s, but it’s entertaining nonetheless, and the definition of “desirable but impure” fits cocktails to a tee. A delightful story, published in 1936 in the Bartender, a British publication, details how English sailors of “many years ago” were served mixed drinks in a Mexican tavern. The drinks were stirred with “the fine, slender and smooth root of a plant which owing to its shape was called Cola de Gallo, which in English means ‘Cock’s tail.’ ” The story goes on to say that the sailors made the name popular in England, and from there the word made its way to America. Another Mexican tale about the etymology of cocktail—again, dated “many years ago”—concerns Xoc-tl (transliterated as Xochitl and Coctel in different accounts), the daughter of a Mexican king, who served drinks to visiting American officers. The Americans honored her by calling the drinks cocktails—the closest they could come to pronouncing her name. And one more south-of-the-border explanation for the word can be found in Made in America, by Bill Bryson, who explains that in the Krio language, spoken in Sierra Leone, a scorpion is called a kaktel. Could it be that the sting in the cocktail is related to the sting in the scorpion’s tail? It’s doubtful at best. One of the most popular tales told about the first drinks known as cocktails concerns a tavernkeeper by the name of Betsy Flanagan, who in 1779 served French soldiers drinks garnished with feathers she had plucked from a neighbor’s roosters. The soldiers toasted her by shouting, “Vive le cocktail!” William Grimes, however, points out in his book Straight Up or On the Rocks: A Cultural History of American Drink that Flanagan was a fictional character who appeared in The Spy, by James Fenimore Cooper. He also notes that the book “relied on oral testimony of Revolutionary War veterans,” so although it’s possible that the tale has some merit, it’s a very unsatisfactory explanation. A fairly plausible narrative on this subject can be found in Famous New Orleans Drinks & How to Mix ’em, by Stanley Clisby Arthur, first published in 1937. Arthur tells the story of Antoine Amedie Peychaud, a French refugee from San Domingo who settled in New Orleans in 1793. Peychaud was an apothecary who opened his own business, where, among other things, he made his own bitters, Peychaud’s, a concoction still available today. He created a stomach remedy by mixing his bitters with brandy in an eggcup—a vessel known to him in his native tongue as a coquetier. Presumably not all Peychaud’s customers spoke French, and it’s quite possible that the word, pronounced coh-KET-yay, could have been corrupted into cocktail. However, according to the Sazerac Company, the present-day producers of Peychaud’s bitters, the apothecary didn’t open until 1838, so there’s yet another explanation that doesn’t work.

But even more egregious cases could be found. The worst, to local eyes, was that of people who had no right to be cooking the food they were cooking because their DNA was wrong. In 2017 there was the case of a couple who opened a food truck selling burritos. According to the new local rules, this couple were guilty of cultural appropriation – specifically of ‘stealing’ Mexican culture by selling burritos while not being Mexican.

What the fucking fuck is up with you border bandit cholos and Old English fonts? They’re ugly, just like everything about your culture and people. REALLY ABHORS CALIFORNIA-INVADING STUPID TOMATEROS Dear RACIST: The popularity of Old English script is a prison phenomenon that transcends race—just check out some of the tats on your white-supremacist cousins the next time they show up at your family picnic, pit bull and all, or the signs in a town’s historic district. But what’s up with the gabachos who appropriate gangster fashion for their designer labels?

Many such ethnic groups influenced the formation of the Mexican nation. Before the Conquest, major indigenous languages such as Nahuatl, Zapotec, and Totonac featured a whistled-only dialect. After the Conquest, migrants from the Canary Islands, home of the world’s most famous whistled language, Silbo Gomero, were among the first settlers of Texas. And since the past is ever present for Mexicans, it makes sociological sense to argue that the Mexican propensity to whistle-talk, like our obsession with death and Three Flowers brilliantine, is a (literally) breathing cultural artifact.

Showing Christ as African, Asian, or Central American underlines the universality of his humanity. The depiction of the Holy Spirit as a hummingbird rather than a dove on the Mexican cruz de ánimas (Fig. 9.2) is a modest but striking instance of using meaningful visual language for a particular culture.

It’s about corporate America, the rich and the super rich are taking money from the poor and the middle class and giving it, with the help of the Republican party, to the rich, to CEOs who earn a hundred and forty million dollars after they’re forced out of a company when it’s losing money. It’s about defending pensions from corporate bankruptcy tricks and your private property from eminent domain to put up Wal-Marts. It’s about immigration reform which puts an end to the senseless death of the poor but ambitious in the deserts of the southwest, it’s about recognizing the importance of the contribution of Mexican Americans to our national culture.

Charlie Hammer, an American manager in the textile industry living and working in Mexico City, offers this example: I was really taken aback when one of my Mexican employees gave me his resignation. I had given him some negative feedback in a meeting, but I did it in a way that sounded to me almost like a joke. The mood in the room was light, and after giving the feedback I quickly moved on. I felt it was no big deal and I thought everything was fine. But apparently it was a big deal to him. I learned later from one of the team members that I had seriously insulted him by giving this feedback in front of the team. He felt humiliated and worried that he was going to get fired, so he decided it would be better to quit first. It took me completely by surprise.

Carlos Gomez finds managing a team of workers from Holland terribly frustrating because of the enormous gap between Mexican and Dutch cultures when it comes to power distance.

While the choice of such a genre may seem like a radical departure for Anaya, in many ways Zia Summer, and the following books in the Sonny Baca series, Rio Grande Fall (1996) and Shaman Winter (1999), are concerned with many of the same issues Anaya tackles in previous works. Detective Sonny Baca, who appears briefly in Alburquerque, solves his first crime in Zia Summer, and his professional development is closely tied to personal revelations about his culture, history, and family. The fictional Sonny’s great-great grandfather is real-life New Mexican hero, Elfego Baca. A Robin Hood figure who was the sheriff of Socorro

In this essay, I explore how domestic cats form a distinctive cultural group as they engage with human and nonhuman animals, yet maintain their distinctiveness in subtle ways. It is as if cats get on with the business of life without judgment.

The complex processes and secrets that are inherent in Mexican cuisine, one of the most exquisite and sophisticated in the world, are part ritual and part transfer of cultural knowledge through generations.

He felt the burden of being their living witness. Somehow the silliest details of their days were, to him, sacred. And he believed that if only the dominant culture could see these small moments, they would see their own human lives reflected in the other.

It was a place where it wasn't bad or dangerous to be Native, and so she no longer hid her heritage. She told people that she was Native American. I imagine there was a spark of pride in being able to say it out loud after a lifetime of being ashamed or secretive about it. But people didn't believe her. They told her that it was okay to be Mexican, and that she shouldn't be ashamed. These friends, most of when White, tried to be the best allies they could. They swore they wouldn't hate her for being Mexican, and every time she claimed her true identity they dismissed it. No matter how hard she fought, people refused to believe that she was Native.

I guess I can't blame my parents for trying to hold on to our Mexican culture. I understand why they're afraid and why they want to protect us by keeping us close and demanding that we follow their rules. The world can be a terrible place, and they don't want us to get hurt. They don't want us to get lost. But no matter how much they want to keep us safe, we have to go out into the world and live our lives. I know they crossed a desert for me to have opportunities. So how can I just sit here?

As per your request, all the chocolate we have on offer." There were pandan cheesecake brownies, red bean brownies, ube chocolate chip cookies, ube Oreo mochi Rice Krispie treats, brown butter chai chocolate chip cookies, Mexican hot chocolate cookies, and a champorado parfait, the last of which was still in the experimental phase. I didn't usually make so many chocolate offerings in one day, but I guess subconsciously I felt the need for chocolaty comfort as much as Marcus did.

The postmodern notion of "appropriation" is not a good fit. In New Mexico, the "indigenous" is a syncretic fusion of Native American and Hispano American. Just as Pueblo people who are Catholics embrace their traditional religions, Nuevo Mexicanos who wear Metallica T-shirts also attend mass and clean the ditches. The fact that both good and bad aspects of the larger pop culture are welcomed with open arms in New Mexican villages and pueblos does not belie the passion with which local ethnic culture is embraced.

The European prosperity driven by silver and Atlantic trade was the context of the rationalizing assertions of Enlightenment thinkers.

The Mexicans have a fervent appreciation of poetry and make regular use of it. It occupies a high and ancient seat in the Mexican culture. The Aztecs called it “a scattering of jades,” jade being what they valued most, far more than the gold for which they were murdered in great numbers by invading Spaniards. They felt that the more profound aspects of certain concepts, whether emotional, philosophical, political, or artistic, could be expressed only in poetry.

Mexico has lost hundreds of thousands of jobs to China. U.S. Department of Commerce data reveal that from 2002 to 2003 Mexico lost market share in thirteen of its top twenty export industries, nearly always to China. With fewer jobs at home, Mexicans are finding it all the more compelling to cross the border into the United States in search of work. No fence is high enough to bar workers desperate to feed their families.

In the last analysis, this stereotyped image of American culture as “sick” owed its existence to critics from the New Left.* America now displayed all the characteristics of a decadent modernity, or Zivilisation , as well as a decaying Faustian empire. Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Richard Barnet, and Richard Slotkin all explained that American culture glorified violence, imperialism, and genocide. It practiced a vicious form of capitalism and technological repression (described by Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden), a bankrupt liberalism (scathingly criticized by Roberto Unger), a manipulative consumerism (laid bare by Christopher Lasch and William Leach), as well as racism and a hatred of all minorities and subordinate groups. Not only blacks but American Indians, Jews, Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Hispanics, and women suffered unendurable humiliations at the hands of mainstream American society.

Social fields" are "real" enough that, as psychologists have demonstrated, people react visibly when you come within their "personal" space: they become defensive or nervous. "Social fields" are not "real" enough to remain constant, as physical fields do, or usually do. They vary from culture to culture. An American reacts nervously when you get within one foot of him, but a Mexican wants you that close and becomes nervous if you stay further away.

And Mexican regional specialties had originated in other cultures anyway---pan dulces were influenced by the French, and al pastor was based on lamb shawarma from the Lebanese. Cooking was about experimentation and innovation.

Todo Cambia" by Mercedes Sosa. I became obsessed the first time I heard it. Everything in the sound is true - everything changes, for better or worse, whether we like it or not, sometimes it's beautiful, and sometimes it fills us with terror. Sometimes both. Cambia el más fino brillante De mano en mano su brillo Cambia el nido el pajarillo Cambia el sentir un amante Cambia el rumbo el caminante Aunque esto le cause daño Y así como todo cambia Qué yo cambie no es extraño

As is jalapeño—though according to psychologist Paul Rozin, Mexican dogs, unlike American dogs, enjoy a little heat. Rozin’s work suggests animals have cultural food preferences too. Rozin was not the first academic to feed ethnic cuisine to research animals. In “The Effect of a Native Mexican Diet on Learning and Reasoning in White Rats,” subjects were served chili con carne, boiled pinto beans, and black coffee. Their scores at maze-solving remained high, possibly because of an added impetus to find their way to a bathroom. In 1926, the Indian Research Fund Association compared rats who lived on chapatis and vegetables with rats fed a Western diet of tinned meat, white bread, jam, and tea. So repellent was the Western fare that the latter group preferred to eat their cage mates, three of them so completely that “little or nothing remained for post-mortem examination.

Margrethe Mather, a photographer from Los Angeles, came to his studio in Glendale, California called Tropico, where Weston asked her to be his studio assistant. It didn’t take long before the two developed a passionate, lustful, relationship. Both Weston and Mather became active in the growing bohemian cultural scene in the greater Los Angeles area. She was extremely outgoing and artistic in a most flamboyant way. Her bohemian sexual values were new to Weston’s conventional thinking, but Mather excited him and presented him with a new outlook that he found enticing. Mather was beautiful, and being bisexual and having been a high-class prostitute, was delightfully worldly. Mather's uninhibited lifestyle became irresistible to Weston and her photography took him into a new and exciting art form. As Mather worked and overtly played with him, she presented a lifestyle that was in stark contrast to Weston’s conventional home life, and he soon came to see his wife Flora as a person with whom he had little in common.

Just about the only serious argument anyone tries to make in favor of diversity echoes Jonathan Alger, a lawyer who has argued before the Supreme Court in favor of racial preferences: “Corporations have to compete internationally,” he says, and “cross-cultural competency is a key skill in the work force.” This argument assumes that people get along best with people like themselves, that Koreans, for example, can do business most effectively with other Koreans. Presumably, if the United States has a large population of Koreans they will be a bridge between Korea and the United States. For that to work, however, Korean-Americans should not fully assimilate because if they do, they will lose the qualities that make them an asset. America should give up the ideal of Americanization that, in a few generations, made Englishmen, Dutchmen, Germans, Swedes, the Irish, and all other Europeans essentially indistinguishable. Do we really want to give up the idea of assimilation? Or should only racial minorities give up on assimilation? More to the point, is a diverse population really an advantage in trade or international affairs? Japan is one of the most racially homogeneous nations. It would be hard to find a country that so clearly practices the opposite of American-style diversity, but it is one of the most successful trading nations on earth. If diversity were a key advantage, Brazil, Indonesia, Sudan, Malaysia, and Lebanon would be world leaders in trade. Other great trading nations—Taiwan, Korea and China—are, if anything, even more closed and exclusionist than Japan. Germany is likewise a successful trading nation, but its trade surpluses cannot be attributed to cultural or racial diversity. Only since the 1960s has it had a large non-German minority of Turks who came as guest workers, and there is no evidence that Turks have helped Germany become more of a world presence or even a better trade partner with Turkey. The world’s consumers care about price and quality, not the race or nationality of the factory worker. American corporations boast about workforces that “look like America,” but they are often beaten in their own market by companies whose workforces look like Yokohama or Shanghai. If we really took seriously the idea that “cross-cultural competence” was crucially important, we would adjust the mix of immigrants accordingly. We might question the wisdom of Haitian immigration, for example, since Haiti is a small, poor country that is never likely to be an important trade partner. And do 32 million Mexican-Americans help our trade relations with the world—or even with Mexico? Canada is our number-one trading partner. Should we therefore encourage immigration from Canada? No one ever talks about immigration in these terms because at some level everyone understands that diversity has nothing to do with trade or influence in the world. The “cross-cultural competence” argument is artificial.

Harvest Bread Bread is the quintessential harvest food. Its civilizing influence trails beer. It is almost a cultural universal. Europeans have bread loaves, Mexicans and some Central and South American countries have tortillas, the southern United States has corn bread, India and Pakistan have naan—the varieties, shapes, and forms bread comes in is infinite, as is the artistry in creating it. Ingredients: ¾ cup warm water 1 package active dry yeast 1 teaspoon salt 1½ tablespoons sugar 1 tablespoon vegetable shortening ½ cup milk 3 heaping cups all-purpose flour 1 stick softened butter Preheat oven to 375°F. In a large bowl, add the warm water. Slowly stir in the dry yeast. Continue to stir until the yeast dissolves. Add salt, sugar, shortening, and milk to the bowl. Stir well. Mix in the first 2 cups of flour. If needed, begin adding more flour, one tablespoon at a time, until the dough chases the spoon around the bowl. You do not need to use up all the flour called for in this recipe, or you may need more flour than is called for. The amounts vary depending on many factors, including weather, which is why most bread recipes only give an approximate amount of flour needed. Turn the dough out onto a floured board and knead it, adding small spoonfuls of flour as needed, until the dough is soft and smooth, not sticky to the touch. Use the softened butter to butter a bowl and a bread pan. Put the dough in the buttered bowl, and turn the dough over to grease all sides evenly. Cover and let rise in a warm spot for 1 hour. Punch down dough. Turn out onto floured board and knead again. Form dough into a loaf and set it in the buttered bread pan. Cover and let rise for about 30 minutes. Before baking, score the dough by cutting three slashes across the top with a sharp knife. Then, put it in oven and bake for about 45 minutes or until golden brown. Turn the bread out of the pan, and let it cool on a rack or a clean dishtowel.

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inner-tube journey across the Rio Grande. She suddenly capsizes, is rescued, and then has adventures on the opposite bank. Makina is a Mexican of the present moment: constantly on the move, in space, in time, in cultures. That aspect of its being cosmopolitan seems to me the book’s value. Though the novel is portentous and incoherent in the way it chronicles the stoical Makina’s travels, this blurring also accurately represents the incomprehension of a Mexican migrant in the US. Herrera is deft in rendering the insights of an alien. The brother, reluctant to return home, admits his migrant confusion: “We forget what we came for.” Authority figures and officialdom are a menace throughout the book, with the paradox of Makina needing help in the strange land: “And what was the point of calling the cops when your measure of good fortune consisted of having them not know you exist.

But Potosí was poor, and Potosinos were oppressed by the weakening peso and the high cost of living, and in such a situation—I had noticed this all over the American Deep South on my previous road trip—people hold on to their culture.

A young Mexican student in Paris—the unknown and yet to be published Octavio Paz—approached Beckett with a proposal to translate one hundred poems by thirty-five Mexican writers. This would be financed, as a worthy cultural project, with funds from UNESCO.

Here is where anyone who does not look white or black will find me ridiculous. Such people are asked all the time where they are from. People ask the question of persons whose physical or cultural presentation disrupts the questioner’s intuitive understanding of race. Black people do not have blue eyes—where are you from? Asians are from China and Japan, but you are brown—where are you from? You are blond but you are speaking Spanish, which is what Mexicans speak—where are you from? The question is not strange for its being asked, but for its being asked of me. My entire life I have had absolutely no gap between how I perceive myself and how the world perceives me. I identify as exactly what I look like I am. It is a kind of privilege in a world where conforming to somatic expectations of race, gender, and sexuality minimizes invasions of your privacy and property. But it is a complicated privilege

Israel is being forced to self-destruct by setting indefensible borders with an entity that has sworn to destroy her. No other country on earth has been, or is being, forced to do this. India will not grant political independence to eight million Sikhs, despite the Sikh terror campaign which included the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Sri Lanka will not allow an independent state in the north for the Tamils, in spite of Tamil terrorism. Iran, Iraq, and Turkey will not grant the Kurds autonomy despite the ongoing revolts. The Flemish and the Walloons, ethnically different, are in a cultural struggle in Belgium but no one suggests dividing the country. Look at the Spanish and the Basques, the Rumanians and the Gypsies, etc. Only Israel must divide in two. Only Israel must give its enemies the means to destroy her. There has never been a case of a nation winning a defensive war and then ceding territory to the vanquished. Only Israel is expected to put this absurdity into practice. No nation in the world would ever agree to such a thing. The United States never considered returning California and New Mexico to the Mexicans. England is still laying claim to the Falkland Islands off the coast of Argentina, thousands of miles away from Great Britain.

Porque, digo yo, así como hay de personas a personas, también hay de muertos a muertos, ¿qué no?

The colonization of Texas during the nineteenth century, to the people's of Mexican and Indian descent who live there, is more than a historical fact. Symbols like the Alamo in San Antonio, now established as a tourist attraction, continually revive painful recollections of the process by which the United States appropriated half of Mexico's territory. (Essay by Shirfa M. Goldman in book Santa Barraza: Artist of the Borderlands)

By a decade after the 1521 fall of Tenochtitlán, the Mexican natives had already adopted a new set of flavors into their existing large assortment. There seemed to be an “absence of strong cultural resistance to the introduction and use of foreign plants,” as one researcher found recently when he tried to discover what had become of so many of those pre-Columbian crops in modern Mexico.11