SBF homie Aimee Thorne-Thomsens latest post got some major love this morning on Twitter from folks like Afropolitan advocate Derrick Ashong and Univision! The topic? Policing Latin@ Identity. If youre looking for some late-afternoon reading, check this out: As a freshman I got a firsthand taste of the “I’m more Latin@ than you” competitions that seemed to plague our small community. Some classmates held rigid ideas of what made someone Latin@. Were you born here or [insert name of Latin American country]? Do you speak Spanish? Fluently? Or broken down Spanglish? Do you know how to dance salsa, merengue, cumbia? What about the food? Do you eat arroz, frijoles, tortillas, pupusas, or plátanos? Or better yet, do you know how to cook those dishes? When was the last time you were [insert Latin American country]? My classmates had lots of ways to check people’s Latin@ credentials, and they weren’t afraid to let them know whether they measured up. I escaped this policing for the most part. I’m brown. I’ve got brown-black super-curly hair. I speak Spanish. I dance salsa, merengue, bachata, and reggaeton. I spent a lot of time in Puerto Rico, learning my family history, my island history, learning the sounds and smells of life in Borinquen. I was born and raised in NYC to parents born and raised in Puerto Rico. For some that made me less authentically Puerto Rican. Despite others’ understanding of what it means to be puertorriqueña, I stuck to who I was, to who my family raised me to be. I was one kind of Puerto Rican; they were another. And that was okay, because who was anyone to define what it means to be Puerto Rican for all of us? Surely, Puerto Rican culture and identity isn’t so fragile that the slightest deviation from these narrow definitions would threaten its very existence, right? The rest of Aimees excellent post: squeezedbetweenfeminism.wordpress/2013/10/21/policing-latin-identities-a-k-a-who-is-the-most-latin/#more-308
Posted on: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 18:53:04 +0000
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