Posted: Thu 29 Mar 2007 17:31 Post subject: Assimilation plays no part in this history lesson
Quote:
Assimilation plays no part in this history lesson
By Bob Sipchen (Monday's column, March 26, 2007)
The 400-foot-long mural decorating two outside walls at Theodore Roosevelt High presents a colorful depiction of the rape, slaughter and enslavement of North America's indigenous people by genocidal Europeans.
On the wall of a building inside the chain-link fence, an oversized image of the school's namesake monocled Roughrider waves a sword heroically.
It's an interesting clash of historical perspectives, and I'll use it to poke at the question of how we should be teaching history now that Los Angeles public schools are overwhelmingly Latino.
I stumbled on the beautifully painted call for the descendants of Aztecs and other native cultures to reclaim their continent while hiking around the well-secured Boyle Heights campus in search of an entrance. Now I stand drinking in its full effect with artist Nelyollotl Toltecatl and the man he credits with enlightening him to North America's true history, Olin Tezcatlipoca.
I tracked these two down through an odd little website, http://www.stolencontinent.org . The massive mural — it's more than 18 feet tall at its peak — is a project of "the Mexica Movement," a small but disproportionately outraged cadre whose rhetoric pushes hard against the boundary between political expression and bigotry. A note to a "European," for example, proclaims: "Your people are … inferior to us in your morals, ethics, and humanity — by your collective actions of the last 500 years."
The mural, like the website, offers a blunt assessment of history. If the hundreds of students who swarm by each day looked up from their iPods and cellphones, they couldn't help but notice the churning stream of skulls in the wake of Columbus' Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria. They would read that Europeans used smallpox like a WMD and that "Spaniards took babies from their mothers breast and smashed their heads against rocks." They would learn that the Aztecs and other civilizations of native North America were among the most successful on Earth but that "this greatness and wealth was stolen from us by Europeans."
Roosevelt High these days is 99.1% Latino. Not that the Mexica Movement has any patience with that term. "We reject the right of Europeans to define who we are," the website says. "We reject their occupation of our continent and their occupation of our DNA."
Roosevelt's principal, Cecilia Quemada, has not returned any of the messages I've left in many months of calling. Richard Chavez, with the local district office, was more polite. He said he had been an assistant principal at the school when a community member first floated the idea for a modestly scaled mural.
In 1996, Toltecatl, who then went by a name he now sees as a vestige of Spanish atrocities, set to work on an uncontroversial depiction of Chicano history, complete with a tribute to assimilation. He was perhaps a year and several dozen linear feet into the artwork when he attended a lecture by Tezcatlipoca, whose own views of history had changed late in life, when he began to read radical reinterpretations of the American conquest, including "American Holocaust."
That book, by David E. Stannard, teaches something most historians dismiss as egregious overstatement: that "95% of our people were killed by Europeans," Tezcatlipoca says. "I'm 57 years old. I grew up in East L.A. I didn't know any of this as a kid."
Under Tezcatlipoca's guidance, the artist spent the next several years working day and night to paint a less magnanimous vision of the past.
I tend to hear two types of complaints about how history is taught at this moment when Latinos (er, Mexicas?) are consolidating power in L.A.
On the one hand there's the father who called to say his son was humiliated when a teacher yanked down a map of North America and said any white students in the class should be ashamed of the atrocities their ancestors had inflicted on the continent.
Then there are the students, including many I met outside Roosevelt, who say that they've learned nothing in their years of public education about the accomplishments of people from Mexico or Central America.
Sal Castro helped lead the Los Angeles student walkouts of 1968, in part to protest the sense of inferiority schools instilled in non-white students. The retired teacher says history texts are barely more inclusive now than they were almost four decades back.
"We have no heroes," he says.
He rattles off dozens of Mexican Americans who deserve a place in America's official pantheon but remain largely ignored. He quotes the late Times reporter Ruben Salazar: "No man can find a true expression for living who is ashamed of himself or his people."
As my two strikingly pleasant Mexica guides and I buttonhole the high schoolers streaming by the mural, I'm struck by how few seem to have given it more than a glance, by how few demonstrate much grasp of any history — Latino, U.S., world, whatever.
UCLA history professor emeritus Gary Nash, who directs the National Center for History in the Schools, is on an intellectual rampage to rectify this. He warns against teaching only "smiley face" view of the past.
"Do not try to skirt the dark, tragic episodes," he says. "If you do, you will only produce cynics. If you do, when [high school students] get to college and learn a more honest approach, they will say, 'Why did you tell all these lies?' "
He also warns, however, against teaching "victims' history … the story of people who are exploited…. We prefer to teach struggle and survival and getting American society to live up to its ideals, the agenda set down in the era of the American revolution. It's a much more honest and useful history."
I ask Tezcatlipoca about this shared struggle, if there's not something to teaching students that America is a melting pot — e pluribus unum — the one place where people from different backgrounds can live together and try to work things out without obsessing on the past.
He doesn't buy it. He notes that Jews haven't forgotten their Holocaust. He says Los Angeles remains horribly segregated.
"Not where I live," I say.
The homes on my small Mt. Washington loop are inhabited by three African American households, two Asian households, a Latino household and several families whose DNA is largely, for lack of a better term, "European."
We get along. Perhaps because of shared values learned in history classes.
I like our neighborhood. I hope we don't have to give it back.
I wonder how many of these mestizo, wannabe Aztecs (as if all their Amerindian ancestors were Aztecs) speak Amerindian languages? I wonder how many of them, despite their embrace of their Amerindian heritage at the exclusion of their Spanish heritage, believe the rest of us in the U.S. should speak Spanish?
Joined: 04 May 2005 {Posts: 2021 } Location: santiago, chile
Posted: Sat 14 Apr 2007 16:11 Post subject: Revenge of Moctezuma
G-Man wrote:
I wonder how many of these mestizo, wannabe Aztecs (as if all their Amerindian ancestors were Aztecs) speak Amerindian languages? I wonder how many of them, despite their embrace of their Amerindian heritage at the exclusion of their Spanish heritage, believe the rest of us in the U.S. should speak Spanish?
Welcome to Indigenism. It is the revenge of Moctezuma.
Why do you think I get concerned about the introduction of ethnic segregation ideologies in Latin America, like Aryanism and Afrocentrism?
Because we know them at fist hand.
Indigenism is not the fight for justice of the Amerindian peoples, that even myself not only support but encourage. Even more, Indigenists are usually mixed or white people that like to "play" Indian, like you say in the U.S.
Indigenism is the belief all foreigners should be thrown away from the Americas and theirs heritage erased. Those foreigns are all the people that does not have Indigenous blood, at least in part.
Even more, average Mexicans don't feel indigenous, because they don't speak an amerindian language, have an Hispanic culture, and many of them don't have enough "genetics"on them either. Average Mexicans usually discriminate "real" indigenous, like the people of Chiapas.
Since Independence, Latin America have swinged between an Indigenous and a European identity with extremists at both sides. Mexico, for instance, addopted an Indigenous identity by decree and developed a cult to the Aztec past. In the process every action of the Spaniards become evil, something that is far from being true, and the Aztecs become a pieceful people that were just victims of violece; which is also quite false.
The main symbol of that was the dissapearence of all the statues of Hernan Cortes from Mexico.
The consecuencies of Indigenism and political activism, particularly when manipulated by Comunism, have been dissastrous more than once. Just remember the Indigenist movement in Peru, called the Shinning Path, that took the lifes of hundreds of thousand of Peruvian peasants, mainly Indigenous.
There is another ideology that I preffer better than Indigenism: The "Cosmic Race". The idea of the melting pot. I believe it represent Latin American peoples better than Indigenism. The "Cosmic Race" is the same thing that your American ideal of multiculturalism and interracial marriages.
Now, for speaking Spanish in the U.S that shouldn't be a bad thing at all. Just remember that learning more than a language shows culture.
Joined: 04 May 2005 {Posts: 2021 } Location: santiago, chile
Posted: Sat 14 Apr 2007 19:31 Post subject:
Patience wrote:
...
When you are talking about hate with a basis in racialism, it is all about self-identity. That's where it starts.
I don't just like to observe the surface of the social phenomenon, I like to look deeper into the psychological catalyst behind it.
Self-identity?
In Latin America 95% of people HAVE an Hispanic (or Brazilian) identity. Depending on the country, there are just some small Indigenous minorities that preserve theirs own cultures and traditions.
What's going on is that certain groups of Latinos are trying to develop a racist movement against others. Most Latin Americans, although admire Native roots, and also love theirs Hispanic and others heritages, they usually keep in mind that we are a multi-ethnic, multi-racial people, blend by a common hybrid culture. We can't lost that. If we start to accept racist ideologies, our culture would break appart.
It is paradoxical, but the ideology known as "the Cosmic Race" is exactly the opposite than those racist ideologies. Most Latinos adhere to the idea we are a mixture of races and cultures with a common identity, that should respect our non-integrated minorities.
Joined: 13 Mar 2007 {Posts: 261 } Location: Canada
Posted: Sat 14 Apr 2007 20:58 Post subject:
Omar, my initial response was to the quote, "their occupation of our DNA." I understood this as referring to a recognition and abhorrence of their own European ancestry. That is not only a form of self-identity but a form of self-hatred also. They have not only tried to divide up their own homo sapien species in groups but also their own DNA stands. I see it as even more perverse and unnatural than just straight forward racialism.
Joined: 04 May 2005 {Posts: 2021 } Location: santiago, chile
Posted: Sat 14 Apr 2007 23:05 Post subject:
Patience wrote:
Omar, my initial response was to the quote, "their occupation of our DNA." I understood this as referring to a recognition and abhorrence of their own European ancestry. That is not only a form of self-identity but a form of self-hatred also. They have not only tried to divide up their own homo sapien species in groups but also their own DNA stands. I see it as even more perverse and unnatural than just straight forward racialism.
Well, there are many of those extremist Indigenist peoples who spit in the tombs of theirs European ancestors. No kidding. Some are even Whites, but don't want to know anything about Europe.
It is not self-hate. Is hatting their own fathers, and hating white people as you can't imagine. You hate more when you know they "other" is not far away. But that hate is not only against Whites, but any people that "colaborated" with Whites in the conquist of the Americas, including Blacks and Asians.
Read about the Azatlan and Reconquist movements, or the panphlets of the Shinning Path in Peru, and you'll have some idea.
That's why in Latin America we are always preached the mantra of the "Hispanic race" or "Cosmic Race", because those are non-exclusive ideologies but inclusive, and we are careful to not put one race on top of the other.
If these extremist Indigenist view dominate, it could be as dangerous as Nazism spreading on Europe. Just remember more than 90% of Latinos have at least one drop of Indigenous blood. And the requirement of entrance to that club is just one drop.
Joined: 13 Mar 2007 {Posts: 261 } Location: Canada
Posted: Sun 15 Apr 2007 11:57 Post subject:
Quote:
It is not self-hate.
I think on a deeper psychological level it would still translate into self-hate. How can a person who feels such deep hatred for some of their ancestors look in the mirror and not feel repulsed by their own reflection. And what of the poor children who would be born with some European phenotypes? How do they bear the burden of their parents hatred? It would be just completely dysfunctional.
Joined: 04 May 2005 {Posts: 2021 } Location: santiago, chile
Posted: Sun 15 Apr 2007 17:22 Post subject:
Patience wrote:
Quote:
It is not self-hate.
I think on a deeper psychological level it would still translate into self-hate. How can a person who feels such deep hatred for some of their ancestors look in the mirror and not feel repulsed by their own reflection. And what of the poor children who would be born with some European phenotypes? How do they bear the burden of their parents hatred? It would be just completely dysfunctional.
Well, you are hitting hard in one of the conflicts of Latin American identities.
Even more, you should remember that most mixings in Latin America were not the result of rape (like some historians prettend) but ratter of irresponsable passion. Deep inside the minds of some Latinos there is a disgusting image of theirs ancestors because of that.
But, as I say before, that way of thinking is not the common in Latin America, although it has surfaced once in a while, creating lots of problems. The common way a normal Latino see things is that we are just the result of things that happened. Europeans were not good or bad and Indians were also good and bad.
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