The process of defining a subhuman class and institutionalizing discrimination and violence against that group is not new. How quickly and conveniently some of us allow our collective memory to cover its own tracks. Parasite, diseased, leeching, dangerous, over-breeding, vermin. These terms and this imagery have been deployed for ages, on various groups of people, on various pieces of land, in the service of various endeavors; and always to bring about the same ends. To demonize and dehumanize a group of people so that other people come to understand that the social compact with the demonized group is broken; that discrimination and violence against the dehumanized class now carries no moral consequence. That is the meaning of this latest ruling by an all-white jury in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania. Racial murder of a Mexican carries the same consequence as walking up to a white person and punching them in the belly: simple assault.
May 25, 2009
The Sanctuary:: The Luis Ramirez Murder: A Logical Step in the Process of Establishing a Subhuman Class
The death of Luis Ramirez
Via an e-mail from a friend:
Dear Friends and Family,
After they had beaten Luis Ramirez to death, the white teenagers who attacked Luis sent an ominous message to his friends:
“Tell your f**king Mexican friends to get the f**k out of Shenandoah or you’ll be f**king laying next to him.”
Just over a week ago, two of Ramirez’s killers were acquitted of all serious charges by an all white jury, with the jury foreman making it clear that justice for Ramirez had no chance in the town of Shenandoah, PA:
I believe strongly that some of the people on the jury were racist. I believe strongly that some of the people on the jury had their minds made up maybe before the first day of trial…And I believe the four boys that were involved the most are racist.
Thanks to the hard work of MALDEF (Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund) and others, the Department of Justice is now looking into Ramirez’ death. But that’s only part of what’s needed. Where are the leaders in the State of Pennsylvania? Why has the governor had nothing to say? His silence is shameful.
Until elected leaders speak up, we can expect more stories like Luis’—not just in Shenandoah, but across the country. Pennsylvania Governor Rendell owes it to the people of his state and to Latinos everywhere to speak out and condemn what’s happened. I’ve joined Presente.org in demanding that he does. Please click the link below to add your voice and ask your friends and family to do the same. We need to speak out and let folks across the country know we won’t tolerate hate and violence towards our communities. It starts with demanding that the Governor of Pennsylvania make clear that anti-immigrant hate has no place in Pennsylvania (or anywhere else). It’s time for him to show leadership now. Join me in calling for Governor Rendell to speak out:It takes only a moment.
<http://presente.org/ref/23143/campaigns/ramirez>
Thanks,
JJ
References
August 2, 2008
Che, el Argentino – Tráiler Español
July 31, 2008
Huehuetlahtolli for the nations leaders
Please check out Roberto Rodriguez & Patrisia Gonzales’ informative site Column of the Americas by clicking on the image.
July 25, 2008
Revisiting Anzaldua’s Borderlands
by Gloria Anzaldua.
San Francisco, CA : Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987.
203 p.
This most influential book explores, performs, and exhibits the experience of living simultaneously in two places, cultures, languages, realities at once. Probing autobiographically into the mystical perceptions, strategic possibilities, sexual pleasures, and gender displacements of being a lesbian chicana or border person living and working in the anglo culture of the modern United States, Anzaldua brings assumptions about the rigidity of sex, gender, language, fiction, and identity into question. Mixing lyric and prose, myth and autobiography, spanish and english, past and present, Anzaldua crafts a collage which invites its reader to experience the clash of cultures, the uncertainty of position, and the wealth of alternative border people must contend with to live their lives. Because Borderlands undertakes an examination of a position which seems to undercut or defy most of the binaries–gender, race, class–of modern Western culture, its figure of the borderland was adopted by many feminist critics in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a way to bring such binaries into question and offer a site from which to begin to think a world differently organized.
Reviewed 30 April 1998 by Judith Roof.
See also:
Anzaldúa, Gloria, ed. Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1990.
Anzaldúa, Gloria and Cherríe Moraga, eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Watertown: Persephone, 1981.
Anzaldúa, Gloria and A. Keating. This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Anzaldúa Biography
When Gloria Anzaldúa described the United States and Mexico border as “una herida 
abierta” (an open wound), she spoke from her lived experience as a native border dweller. Born in the ranch settlement of Jesus Maria in south Texas, Anzaldúa grew up in the small town of Hargill, Texas, and later wrote and taught in Northern California. She received her B.A. from Pan American University and her M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin. In her poetry, fiction, essays, and autobiography, she wrote eloquently of the indignities a Chicana lesbian feminist overcomes as she escapes the strictures of patriarchal Chicano traditions and confronts the injustices of dominant culture. She died on May 15, 2004 at her home in Santa Cruz, California from complications due to diabetes. She was within weeks of completing her dissertation and receiving her doctorate from the University of California at Santa Cruz.
(Adapted from Sonia Saldivar-Hull, “Gloria Anzaldua,” Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter. 5th Ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006)
For more information see the University of Santa Barabara’s Race & Pedagogy Project.
July 24, 2008
Revise your styleguide: On usage of ‘La Raza’
Here’s an interesting post by writer Daniel Hernandez that raises a debate in semantics re: the terms “Chicano” and “La Raza”
His BLOG is Intersections:
A little Mexico detour, because I’m wondering: Do news media outlets refer to the NAACP as “The Colored People” or the AJC as “The Jewish Committee”? No, they don’t. Yet while covering this month’s NCLR conference in San Diego many outlets including the L.A. Times, Washington Post, and other generally reputable sources like RealClearPolitics felt it okay to refer to NCLR as “La Raza.” This means that the mainstream press has adopted the semantics tricks of the right-wing propaganda machine to conflate together two very different things: NCLR — the largest and most middle-of-the-road, big-money-backed, non-partisan Hispanic (their word) advocacy organization in the United States, and the codeword for reconquista hallucinations advocated only by an extremely small, extremely fringe, and extremely irrelevant batch of Chicano nationalists.
Doing this plays directly into the ignorant fears of paranoid immigrant-bashers. The double-standard is unacceptable. Because there are real dangers of coding and bigotry at play here: look at what just happened in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania. Another hate-fueled illegal immigrant lynching. Listen to the story at Free Speech Radio News. A week later, still no arrests.
July 17, 2008
nericcio collage
cool online collage by cultural studies prof william a. nericcio
Here’s his book, and here’s his BLOG @ http://textmex.blogspot.com/
July 8, 2008
The Clinic
Una serenata plays before she gets there
an accordion accompanies the words Yo no quiero nada
businessmen and young girls wait at bus stops
dayworkers pray and write letters in their heads at W. Martin, Salinas, and Frio St.
The Appraisal District and jail are death-rattles
in the steam of a July rain
and in a small cluttered office nearby
old fruit stinks up the corners
as an economist sniffs Good Will thongs
his cleaning woman wears a loose brassiere and shakes her head
At the doorway, a gringo with an eye patch says, spare a dime
still walking, she lies, I don’t have any cash on me
June 26, 2008
June 22, 2008
Mexican-American
In July 1846
Many Mexicans drowned themselves in the Rio Grande
They had been terrorized by gringo war volunteers
who desecrated their churches
and burned their homes
This was about land of course
and in a letter to Julia Dent
General Grant wrote of the war volunteers:
How much they seem to enjoy acts of violence
I would not pretend to guess the number of murders
that have been committed
The number would startle you
