Re:How Children in a Maya Village Do Chores
by wavefunction on Monday June 11, 2018 @12:21PM
(#17285600)
>new opportunities for immigrants, such as for Salma Hayek
Of course she was getting pigeon-holed by Harvey Weinstein and the Hollywood machine who were trying to limit her opportunity to take on roles that didn't rely solely on her beauty and ethnic background.
It is still a country of some opportunity but much of that opportunity comes from fighting against the existing power structures.
I was talking about the Lebanese diaspora in Latin America, in case that wasn't clear. They were aiming for "America" and landed in Mexico, Colombia, Brazil and the rest of Latin America. Well, this is America too, they thought, let's make a new life here.
There is ambiguity to me, because I consider myself as American as the US does. What does America mean to the US? It usually means things like the beauty that Luis Miguel sings about,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SL3u7qU_09w
new opportunities for immigrants, such as for Salma Hayek's or Shakira's ancestors, and freedom, such as when Morelos wrote "prohibit slavery forever, as the distinction of caste, being all equal and only vice and virtue distinguish an American from the other."
The good associations that the US has with "America" are also associations that the rest of the continent has with the term too. Thus, I want to share the broader term. I and all Mexicans are American first like the US, and more specifically Latin American. A Latin American is a kind of American, not something completely different.
I use the term American more broadly to point out our shared affiliation, not to exclude the US. But to someone who wants a shared term all to themselves, asking them to share feels like exclusion to them.