I wrote this blog post about 4 months ago. I meant to post it and given the recent assassinations in Tucson, it seems more important to talk about what part words play in this terrible event. The media will twist it to mental health, gun control and other issues. What no one will want to talk about is what this man’s environment was like to grow up with so much hate. As a mental health professional, I know that there is a real thing called “shared paranoid.” Let’s see if Jared Lee Loughner’s family and environment were part of his psychology and part of this political killing.
As an example, using gun play and words that imply violent acts, Sarah Palin is so out of touch that she is back tracking and saying that her map with the cross hairs was now a survey. Wow, I believe that. I will have more to say about this in another post later. My mind is with the families of the victims. Enjoy this post. Walk in peace.
I’m old enough to know how much our culture has changed and used words as a way to spin what may be real. Remember when bad was bad. Now, bad could be good or cool. Then there are words like “hispanic” which refers to people of color or people who have a Spanish surname. It’s a new race. The original purpose of this word was was formed under the Nixon administration to watch the Cubans and Puerta Ricans. Then it became a way to refer to Mexicans. If you look the word up in the dictionary, it says, “from Spain or Portugal.” None of these people are from Spain or Portugal. This word is a form of killing our culture.
The statistician in the O J trial said, “We use the word hispanic as a trash can for anything that’s not white or black.” Wow. I have met kids or teenager who say they’re spanish but not mexican. I remember when I was a kid being mexican was the same as being “INDIO.” If you see an old movie with Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor called “Giant,” the characters refer to the mexican girl married to the son of an oil giant as,”that breed and that skin.” Now, it’s a way that young mexican kids end up giving up their identities and identifying with Europeans or white people. Sad! That’s what happened to mestizo. The Spanish when they ran mexico taught that you could only own land if you were spanish. So the objective was to get to the place where you were light skinned and you could say that you were spanish. I remember mexicans saying in spanish, “Oh poor boy, he’s moreno,(brown), he will have a bad life. Then,”Oh he’s white, he will have a good life.”
Skin color matters in a racist society but its also a mark of history. I remember I gave a lecture at the university titled, “What every Native American should know.” When I finished, a native-looking women came up to me and with tears in her eyes said, “You have given me so much pride and taught me about who I am . No one teaches us who we are!”
A man at a meeting I was at referred to himself as hispanic and later, I asked him if he was mexican. He said, “I don’t like that word, my father was from spain.”
“Okay,”I said, “what about your mom?” He said, “She was from Mexico.”
It’s better to be something that sounds okay. But don’t we insult our grandparents when we do this? The words we use do matter.
Our names like Navajo (Spanish for newcomer) are not our names. Dine’h is the correct name. It means human being. Like most tribes, our names mean people or human beings. You have to remember the language of conquest was spanish not English. Indians in the southwest were conquered by the spanish. Our last names in our tribes are Garcia, Martinez or Velencia or some other name of conquest.
You know many native words, you just don’t realize it, like, OK (agree), kaka (deceased), Mazatlan (Valley of the deer), tamale (flat corn) or guacamole (bulls balls) funny. Look at a avacado and then look at a bulls scrotum. Funny!
What’s in a word? We need to know the origin and the history. Even if you’re native or not, it’s important to know what these words mean and what they do for us. And what they can do to us.
