Latinos are bastard race of the world

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II. History


To understand contemporary aggressive nativist, racist, and authoritarian attitudes toward Latinos, specifically Mexican Americans, one must begin historically at the end of the Mexican-American War. In 1848, many Mexicans and vast stretches of their sovereign land came under the control of the United States. As a result, at least 75,000 Mexicans were forced to decide whether or not to become U.S. citizens. Of those who voluntarily consented to U.S. citizenship, any constitutional protection afforded to them by the final amended version of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848 was minimized because the full constitutional rights of Mexicans, as U.S. citizens, were to arrive at “the proper time [which was determined] by the Congress of the United States.” As a result, and in due course, Mexicans who opted for U.S. citizenship were denied the right to vote, the title to their land, political representation, and the status of anything other than second-class citizens.

Thus, after 1848, through the Anglo-American political, legal, and territorial conquest of Mexicans, a popularized racial, cultural, and religious sense of superiority took shape among A



This post first appeared at
Mother Jones.


Hiphop dance troupe at Pacific Northwest Black Community Festival, Seattle, 2010. (Photo: Joe Mabel/flickr CC 2.0)


“You’re not, like, a total racist bastard,” David Amodio tells me. He pauses. “Today.”

I’m sitting in the soft-spoken cognitive neuroscientist’s spotless office nestled within New York University’s psychology department, but it feels like I’m at the doctor’s, getting a dreaded diagnosis. On his giant monitor, Amodio shows me a big blob of data, a cluster of points depicting where people score on the Implicit Association Test. The test measures racial prejudices that we cannot consciously control. I’ve taken it three times now. This time around my uncontrolled prejudice, while clearly present, has come in significantly below the average for white people like me.

You think of yourself as a person who strives to be unprejudiced, but you can’t control these split-second reactions.

That certainly beats the first time I took the IAT online, on the website UnderstandingPrejudice.org. That time, my results showed a “strong automatic preference̶

Ileya





Image by Daniel Gordon

Why don’t we stop lying? Why don’t we deal with reality? Race is easy—class is hard. That politically incorrect, Mexican-excoriating bastard Edward Abbey told the truth: “The conservatives love their cheap labor; the liberals love their cheap cause. (Neither group, you will notice, ever invites the immigrants to move into their
homes
. Not into
their
homes!)” Immigration is so last century. But “illegal” immigration is still paranoiacally embraced in this country as a race issue. The “browning” of pristine white America. (Sorry, Crazy Horse.) Among my sisters and brothers bussing your lunch table, however, you will never see an Octavio Paz or the Mexican consul general of Dallas. You will see people of the lower class, running for their lives. Immigration was and is a class issue. Invisible people escape doom to serve us as extra-invisible people, made more invisible by language, skin color, and class. You can’t multiply a zero, but somehow they manage to become doubly nothing in the Land of Plenty.

I am an invisible man who refused to disappear.

It is one of the koans I wrestle with, seeking enlightenment. Like the Zen poet, I hope to row



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Camilo M. Ortiz



Camilo M. Ortiz , Latinos Nowhere in Sight: Erased by Racism, Nativism, the Black-white Binary, and Authoritarianism , 13 Rutgers Race & the Law Review 29 (2012) (150 Footnotes Omitted)

In May 2010, two weeks after the Arizona state legislature passed Senate Bill 1070 (SB 1070), Juan Varela was fatally shot in the neck by his next door neighbor, Gary Kelley. Prior to the killing, Kelley had repeatedly said to Varela, “Hurry up and go back to Mexico, or you're gonna die[!] ” It is uncertain what specific events led Kelley to shoot Varela in his front yard. However, it is known that Varela was not a recent arrival to the United States, but rather a second-generation, native-born U.S. citizen.

In the days that followed Varela's murder, local news reporters speculated that the shooting might have resulted from the numerous altercations that had occurred between Kelley and Varela, was the result of the intoxicated state Kelley appeared to be in at the time of the shooting, or even that the killing was just a sudden and unexplained act by Kelley, since he always got along with his other Latino neighbors. Other news reports s