De Colores Means All Of Us

Author Elizabeth Martínez is the Chicana voice for her book "De Colores Means All Of Us." She has more than thirty years of experience in the movements for civil rights, women's liberation and the empowerment of Latinos and Latinas in the United States. 

Reading through her first two chapters I can say that yes, too many Americans only see recent Hispanic or Latino immigration arrivals, forgetting about earlier roots and their significance to the people...but once again, I have to say that the job of governments around the world was to always move people from one place to another, sometimes wanting to change their cultures to keep up with their policies. Those actions always create conflict among the people involved within the new territory lines. Look at the Middle East for example. 

I´m not Mexican or identify myself with the majority of the Latino population in the U.S because in South America, the way of thinking is very different, but I do see a lot of discrimination here in the U.S. It seems that everybody needs to have some type of label attached, and I consider that very wrong.

But going back to the book, I can say that yes, identity continues to be a major concern of youth in particular, and as Martínez writes: "with reason." 

She explains that "obsession with self definition can become a trap if that is all we think about, all we debate."

She goes on to explain that "People of color were victimized by colonialism not only externally but also through internalized racism_the 'colonized mentality.' On the poverty scale, African Americans and Native Americans have always been at the bottom, with Latinos nearby."

But a 1997 U.S census found that Latinos have the highest poverty rate, at 24 percent.

The Black-White model was based on the need for the primitive accumulation of capital with the enslaved Africans as a crucial labor force (as the author explains), and to serve as the foundation for the very idea of whiteness, with the concept of blackness as inferior. A very wrong and inaccurate concept. Martínez also listed three other reasons, such as numbers, geography and history. But she also explains that while "people who learn at least a little about Black slavery remain totally ignorant about how the United States seized half of Mexico or how it has colonized Puerto Rico."

There is a lot of ignored history portrayed when the author explains that "the average citizen doesn't have the foggiest notion that Chicanos have been lynched in the Southwest and continue to be abused by the police, that an entire population has been exploited economically, dominated politically, and raped culturally."

Another point that she makes and that I never understood until now is why the United States calls itself  "America" when America is a continent, and besides that, the dominant languages are Spanish and Portuguese, and not English. Martínez answered my question as simple as this: "The nation lacks any global vision other than relations of domination." "It arrogantly took for itself alone the name of half the western hemisphere, America, as was its 'Manifest Destiny,' of course."

To get more information on the biography of this controversial author, you can go to:

http://world.world-citizenship.org/wp-archive/2532