Introduce yourself!

[EFerrari]

This forum is moving much more quickly than it has since its inception and, that's great.

I thought it might be helpful if we could say why we're interested in Latin America as a way to facilitate our conversation.

For myself, my family was a political one in El Salvador. Although I was born in California, my first language was Spanish. My introduction to family and community was much more tied to and typical of that remote culture than "American" culture -- a situation that I'm very grateful for.

I'm not sure why Latin America is so important to me but I know that social justice is important to me and perhaps, those genes and this attitude go hand in hand.

There are posters in this forum that know much more than I do about Latin America. Thank you.

ETA: and while you're at it, rec this thread in appreciation of Judi Lynn:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=405x2488

[msedano]

1. Where are you from?

As a kid this is the first question white people, whom we called "Americans", would ask me. I speak English quite well, something most anglos in that time found amazing. I knew their game and gamed them back. "But where is your father from?" Same answer, "here." One of my grandmothers was born in Pomona CA, her mother was born in Watsonville. No matter how these tipos pushed me, I wouldn't answer their desired answer. They tried the language tact. "What language do you speak at home?" English. My granma spoke English and Spanish, as did we in the home, so I could torment these pendejos by answering truthfully "English". They finally had to stomp their foot and ask directly the forbidden identity, "Are you Mexican?" Of course I am. I'm a chicano, but they wouldn't've understood that.

My interest in Latin America begins in my front yard, since the Americans wouldn't let us Mexicans be from here. When Fidel's revolu hit the papers I was in Jr. High, and he captured my imagination and wholehearted support. Once he started lining up innocent people and firing squaded them for being teachers and shopkeepers, I learned to adopt a more critical stance to my Latin American studies.

It used to freak me out when my grandmother would return home from Michoacan and tell me how, when she displayed the school photo of me to her old comadres back home they'd exclaim to granma's pride that tan mediana clase I appeared. Equally freaky was the superintendent of schools in Redlands. I played a tune on the violin when he came to visit the classroom in 4th grade. He patted my head and declared "you're a credit to your race." My parents went ballistic when I proudly recounted the incident.

My interest in Latin America begins in my bone marrow.

Final anecdote, stop me if you've heard this one before. My cousins and I were gamboling back from a movie in downtown San Bernardino to their home near the Mt. Vernon area. We'd stopped near a corner when this white Chrysler Imperial pulled over to the curb alongside us. Curious, we stopped and focused our attention on the car. The driver rolled down her passenger side window, leaned toward us and screamed, "You filthy little Mexicans!" then sped away. We stood there stunned momentarily then burst into laughter. Gad, our stomachs hurt from laughing so much at what the old white woman said. Of course we were! From that day on my cousins and I greeted one another with "you filthy little Mexican!"

Today I enjoy reading and writing about chicanarte. Check out the links in my sig.

[EFerrari]

2. LOL!

:rofl:

[Judi Lynn]

3. It's interesting discovering how many DU'ers are keeping track of Latin American events, isn't it?

We have lived in a complete news blackout on Latin America, when you really sit and look back as far and as hard as you can.

Any news we ever got showed events in such fact-free starkness, as when Venezuelans attacked the official car of Richard M. Nixon on his trip there, or the repeated views recyling endlessly of an American reporter getting shot in Nicaragua (I think), and there has NEVER been any historical background available to put things in perspective.

The result has been a lot of ignorant, xenophobic Americans have come away with the belief that Latin Americans are hot headed, cranky, poor, murderous, explosive, ungovernable animals. As long as the media continue to keep that focus on Latin America, it will continue to be easy to mold, bend public perception in any direction the military/industrial complex wants to take it, available at all times to wildly support war on any leader the U.S. doesn't like, without knowing a damned thing about him/her, infused with the mistaken belief in American superiority at the personal level, keeping an image of the "foreigners" to the South as crazy, superstitious, and uneducable, and important to keep down. Playing the old "Domino Theory" trick, while denying Latin American people have any right to real democracy.

I "tuned in" to trying to educate myself for the first time in my life on Latin American matters in 2000, and I "dropped out" of my ability to stumble along with the crowd who swallow everything they are told from the U.S. media. This happened when I became a witness on the U.S./Cuba Relations message board at CNN which is gone, now. I watched as truly rabid right-wingers who choked up the message board day in/day out, raging against people who supported Elián Gonzalez's father as he tried to get his son back home.

I have NEVER heard such grotesque levels of hatred and disrespect for one's fellow man/woman as the language I saw day in/day out spilling out from those Miami "exile" posters. Their ability to whirl around and start accusing others of being "communists" who disagreed with them was astounding. There was no end in this life of their absolute vicious hatred of everyone who didn't support their opinions.

I continued to lurk, not daring to post, as some of the posters were indicating there were people trying to hack their computers during this time, and I even saw one Miami "exile" on a Delphi message board (Path to Freedom) try to threaten another poster physically, I started wanting to find out more about why they were bouncing off the walls.

During that time, amidst all their whining and howling about how they had "escaped" from Cuba, I saw it written in George magazine, (now defunct, of course.... (It was the one John F. Kennedy, Jr. started)) by a reporter who went there to research the Cubans involved in Elián's situation, that the drunken great uncle in Little Havana (Miami) had originally "met" Elián when he went to stay with the kid's father, his nephew, on a vacation in Cuba.

Lázaro crashed there, slept in Juan Miguel Gonzalez' bedroom, while Juan Miguel himself slept in his car, to make room for him. The article said that during the day the old clown used his time to go fishing, and at night he spent his time in the bars, and repeated it all, day after day after day. He bought them a goat as repayment. After he had his fill of fishing and boozing, he went home. He did this two different times.

When I heard this, I realized Americans have been lied to in spades. You can't both claim that Cubans "escape" or "flee" from Cuba on one hand, and then try to cover up the fact that Cubans go to Cuba on vacation with no fear of being thrown in jail, unlike the whoppers they've been telling us, on the other. You just can't fit both realities into one coherent story.

If you are escaping, and you live in fear that if they catch you before you can get to the States, they'll kill you or imprison you, you do not go back and whoop it up at a later time. Now that's just not possible.

Yet Cubans have been returning time after time after time for years until _{George W. Bush} decided to bear down and apply some heavy pressure and informed them that they could only go to visit immediate family, like parents, or children, and even then, only once every 3 years, meaning, you dare not go now, if you believe you could have to go there for any emergency any time in the next 3 years, which comes down to saving your visit for that one time you fear you absolutely HAVE to go in case of illness of a family member who needs to see you before dying, etc.

On top of that, Florida Cuban Senator David Rivera, trying to also apply as much pressure as he could to the situation, introduced a bill in the Florida Senate to cut off food stamps and other benefits from the government to Cubans if it was learned they had made a trip to Cuba, for a period of six months. He was trying to threaten to remove financial support the U.S. Government gives them all (courtesy of the U.S. taxpayers, and ONLY for Cubans) so they would give up going home, which undercuts the image they want to project.

Having come to that startling discovery, and then reading discussions out in the open from Cuban "exiles" to each other like the one from an old hag named "Marinao" at the Delphi message boards, (she also currently participates in the Miami Herald Cuban subject message board) discussing the fact her sister had just gone back to Cuba after a nice long vacation with her here in the States, I knew how deep and how bad the lie is about Cuba. It's a LIE. It's a steenking lie.

Then, the next step is natural: you start reading everything you can on the subject. You finally work your way into discovering a whole new world of information, information which changes EVERYTHING, which has been withheld, has been covered up, has been denied from the first.

If you look back at what you've read in our own media, what you've seen on tv from childhood you have to admit, you'd almost think that the U.S. was the only country in the Western Hemisphere, with just some stuff north and south. The first time you pick up a magazine and see a large photo of a street in Brazil, Chile, Argentina you may go into shock, having had no idea there were ANY towns of that size south of the border. You'd never know it from the ordinary stuff we've been raised to believe.

Why is that? It's because if Americans continue to see their neighbors as strangers, it's easy to tell them anything about those neighbors, and they'll believe it. They don't personally know anything different. How do you change that? Become aware you've been lied to, and start looking for the truth.

We have been played. It has been deliberate. There are ways to combat this insult by trying to find out as much as you can from now on, for the rest of your life. Don't take it lying down! More specifically, don't take anyone's word for things, go find out as much as possible on your own and don't stop.

Especially, don't take D.U. TROLLS' WORD FOR ANYTHING!



Another right-wing troll, and one possible response.

[struggle4progress]

4. First became interested in Latin America after Leletier was blown up on the streets of DC

It was the post-Nixon era, and a fair amount of info leaked about what Nixon-Kissinger had done to Chile. I read sporadically for a few years, but Reagan's foreign policy finally required more attention: I started paying closer attention in the early 1980s, I was really shocked to discover the predictability and systematic dishonesty of US policy. I belonged to a small group in a small town that did public outreach on the situation in Central America and South Africa.

The themes remain surprisingly unchanged today: I remember the Reaganites fulminating about Aristide while he was still a parish priest, and a high light of the 1988 Republican primary season was a complaint launched by one of the other R candidates against GHWB that Noriega had been on his CIA payroll