You see something absurd. You hear something absurd. You read something absurd = Yeah,TNTG. Posts tagged latino/a.
“Door pops open and I’m greeted by an immigration officer with the last name Sanchez. TRAITOR!”
The Poet At Obama’s Second Inaugural Will Be Gay And Latino. Richard Blanco will serve as the inaugural poet at the swearing-in ceremony on Monday, January 21, a selection that’s historic on a number of levels: He will be the youngest poet, as well as the first Latino and first LGBT person, to recite a composition during the ceremony.
“
From Indigenous genocides to women’s implication in the reproduction of patriarchy, it is important to examine not only historical events that codify violence as their strategy of citizen making. Also, we need to think about how violence is deployed in discourse and laws as systematic means of exclusion. Nowhere are we seeing more of this quotidian means of exclusion than in debates about the role of Latino/a children. Their precarity carries into ideas about Dora the Explorer’s privileged social mobility, which created quite a stir after the State of Arizona adopted SB1070. Passed on April 24th 2010, SB1070 “Requires officials and agencies to reasonably attempt to determine the immigration status of a person involved in a lawful contact where reasonable suspicion exists regarding the immigration status of the person, except if the determination may hinder or obstruct an investigation.”
Right at the moment this policy emerged, Latino/a social mobility as a crime was galvanized via the Arizona law. So even though Dora, as a figure, manifests a particular amount of privilege (social, class, and economic) that is most closely associated with whiteness rather than black or indigenous identities, conscious projections of her as a Latina/o after SB1070 constructs Dora as a universal Latina subject and potential illegal.
Immigration activists flipped the script with these images, seeing Dora as a means of expressing the absurdity and irony of suggesting that all Latina/os are like Dora and thus are all the same. They took America’s and the Nickelodeon Network’s goldmine of childhood innocence and turned Dora into a potential threat representative of what the Right would like us to believe are the invading brown hordes. The people who created these images draw on the fact that Dora’s creators purposefully did not specify her ethnic background, “preferring that she have a pan-Latino appeal.” (iii)
By doing so, those photoshop wizards play upon the fact that there is a common assumption about what Latinos “look like” which is both specific (the majority have brown eyes) and vague (brown eyes are a genetically dominant trait). They also play on xenophobic fears about brown bodies and immigration, suggesting that even a brown, 7-year old cartoon character might be illegal. In the case of Dora’s deployment in the anti-SB1070 and pro-immigrant reform movement, Dora is “the” representation of the universal Latina/o subject that I discussed in my earlier article. Yet despite these problematic constructions, U.S. Latinas/os and Latin Americans identify with Dora on a different plane, not just as consumers but now in ethnic and political solidarity as she represents version of their identities, cultures, in a new re-appropriated political role model for immigration activists.
In this poignant political moment, we see how Dora the Explorer intercedes not only into children’s self-identities, but those of adults in the immigration reform movement. In other words, people who identify with Dora as criminalized Latino/a or rather questioning illegality explicitly engage with the concepts of nation-space and citizenship when they use her image. Major news outlets including CBS picked up the story dramatizing what many of us already knew: Doctored pictures of Dora the Explorer are being widely circulated online and through text messages. As the caption states, “Dora the Explorer’s alleged crime? “Illegal Border Crossing Resisting Arrest.” (iv)
— Nicole Guidotti-Hernández, “The Precarity of Latino/a Child-Citizen Subjects: From Dora The Explorer To Child Deportees,” The Feminist Wire 10/8/12 (via racialicious)
“Soy Latino”
I wrote a poem and directed a video to go along with it. I wanted to address my perception of being a Latino student at Dartmouth College.
DISCRIMINATION: Wells Fargo to pay $175 million over lending practices against Latinos and African Americans.
Reminder that Wells Fargo employees bragged about how they gave “ghetto loans” to “mud people.”
Nah, racism doesn’t exist anymore, though. Just ignore it and it will go away. Stop talking about it and being sensitive.
This is an example of what people are saying when they explain racism as something that’s systematic and institutionalized. People feel because people aren’t running around lynching people and calling you nigger (some actually still do, but they say it with a accent or a little slang so it sounds like nigga and you laugh it up) that people are complaining over nothing. Racism has matured in a way that it’s unseen and affects people of color still, every day, making our lives and our pursuit of any kind of respect more difficult. We literally can’t live in peace.
But I’m sleep tho.
Photo by Santiago Forero
I love love love when people re-do ‘classic’ art. “American Gothic” re-imagined with latin@ subjects.
Use of the @ Symbol
With the virtual uses and changing of language online it’s important we note how we are using the @ symbol in our name and in the things we are creating and writing. For many of you this is “common knowledge,” but the reality is that some folks have not ever really thought about why this symbol is important.
We think the @ symbol is important because it represents gender neutrality, gender inclusion, and disrupts the misogynistic ways language privileges men, masculinity, and things that are considered “male.”As many Latin@ scholars have stated and argued, especially Anzaldua, “Language is a male discourse” (p. 54, Borderlands/La Frontera). In the Spanish language, grammatically, if there is one man present in a room or area filled with women (a man of any age, a boy, a child, etc.) instead of using the “feminine” form of the language often using an “a” (i.e. una or nosotras) a masculine “o” is used (i.e. nosotros or the absence of the “a” such as un).
Utilizing the @ in this way challenges these grammatical “rules” that are embedded in a legacy of privileging men, masculinity and maleness. It is also part of a legacy that includes and recognizes our gender queer and trans* community members versus erasing them by constantly using a language embedded in a gender binary/dichotomy.
The @ is useful not only in discussing Latinidad, but also discussing how Blackness and African identity intersects as well. Often when we see terms discussing LatiNegr@s in various ways and using other self-identifiers they are still using a masculine version of “Afro” such as “Afro-Latin@”. This is a preference by some, and I’d like to argue this is also a way of privileging men and masculinity in the English language. Afr@Latin@ is a valid term and form to use when discussing our identities as well. Just as AfraLatina is valid. Why must the African in us also remain masculine?
The questions still exist of how to actually speak the @ sign and this has yet to really be resolved. How have others negotiated this?
(written by Bianca)
Stopped, Frisked and Speaking Out
The Police Department stopped and questioned more than 684,000 people last year. Close to 90 percent were black and Latino. Civil liberties groups have protested, but rarely do we hear from the men who are so frequently stopped. Filmmakers Lindsey Groot and Robin Antonisse provide us with four such stories in this exclusive video.
