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Irmgard Emmelhainz’s text Oɴ Bᴇɪɴɢ (ʟᴀʙᴇʟᴇᴅ) Wʜɪᴛᴇxɪᴄᴀɴ explores the complexity of working, thinking and living in solidarity with Indigenous peoples in Mexico and originary peoples globally, as a descendant of European colonizers. Beginning with a sharp analysis of a scene of privilege in a high-end restaurant in Mexico City, the text morphs to take the form of a letter to indigenous activist Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil. Emmelhainz interrogates the systems of privilege that labels her a ‘Whitexican’, in order to understand how those from colonizer and colonized ancestry might struggle together against neocolonial extractivist practices and politics.
The essay is an adaptation and translation of an earlier Spanish version written by the author, which was published on the Revista Común website in September 2021. It was translated to English for SFS by Irmgard, and to Indonesian by Fiky Daulay. For the Spanish text, visit: https://revistacomun.com/blog/on-being-labeled-whitexican/
Animal // Primal Scene
In red COVID-19 alert, to gain access to the packed restaurant at the corner of elegant Masaryk Avenue in Polanco, Mexico City, I have to pass a checkpoint made up of a well-built, brown skinned bodyguard and a curvy hostess wearing tight riding pants, boots and a cowboy hat. I extend my wrist so that the hostess can take my temperature as I tell her the name of the person who made our reservation. The hostess makes a call upstairs to verify the information I just gave her. Then, the bodyguard escorts me to the elevator where a second hostess accompanies me to the table where my friends are already waiting for me. They have been sitting there for a while and tell me that they ordered and ate sashimi, sushi, fresh oysters, a chicharrón snack, and that they didn’t drink more than a couple of the house cocktails. I observe the people sitting at the tables around us. It is Friday; people seem relaxed; they order food, drink, and talk. Bourgeois people, oligarchs, Whitexicans, narcos, people who are there on business, journalists from mass media conglomerates, a senator, a CEO: a sampling of the class in power that goes beyond racial markers and class origins. Today, the signs of status appear not only in dress and accessories like the bag, the shirt, the iPhone, the female companion, but also in attitudes, fit and slim bodies, helicopter rides (the shorter the ride the higher the status) and access to VIP luxury spaces. The restaurant’s decoration is eclectic and informal, although lavish and designed to be the perfect backdrop (like the entire city of Dubai) for IG images, which the guests do not cease to post. I notice four variations of chairs-table combinations, and plastic greenery that hangs from the ceiling and walls, emulating a tropical forest. Luscious multi-colored orchids drop down from huge wicker pots suspended from the ceiling. The waiters are more servile than in other places and do not cease to refresh empty glasses everywhere. Promptly, they announce the chef’s specialties and we order another round of contemporary dishes, each based on an atypical mix of ingredients (avocado and balsamic vinegar), cultures (rib eye on sushi), ingredients from remote places (Himalayan salted fish), and nouvelle cuisine techniques like liquid nitrogen used in our hydro-frozen berries dessert. At the table next to ours, three guests arrive: two of them form a couple and relentlessly kiss and touch each other, ignoring their female friend who distracts herself with her iPhone until a second man arrives, accompanied by a seven-year-old child dressed in a tiny suit adorned with a red bow tie. Hours go by and the boy, before exhaustedly collapsing on a makeshift bed improvised by pushing two chairs together, will spend most of the afternoon contemplating his dad’s phone while the adults flirt, kiss, eat, get drunk and offer the child everything except their attention. At our table, throughout the afternoon, we have been taking turns to discreetly flee to our screens and collect endorphins through likes, momentarily being absent from the conversation; face-to-face contact has become too exhausting. We do not cease to observe how the texture of the guests at the restaurant changes as time passes: attractive young men and women dressed in luxury brands start arriving by early evening. At the table across from us, we observe one older man and two younger ones. After a while, the older man gets up to greet two young women who are being escorted to the table by one of the hostesses. The man greets them by hugging their waists and kissing their cheeks. The younger men, however, seem a bit uncomfortable, but they also get up to greet the girls, who are dressed in skimpy clothes that reveal their cosmetic surgeries. Unlike the older man, the younger men are less familiar with the girls, and politely, they offer them their hands. Before engaging in small talk, the men nod their heads and point to the chairs next to them, inviting the girls to sit down. At my table, we exchange observations about our transient neighbors, about soporific banalities; who got a vaccine in the US and where, and reluctantly and bored, we also make fun of that morning’s presidential declaration. I suddenly feel the discomfort and stiffness of my body after having spent so many hours sitting down. It is time to call an Uber.
We are no longer the positivists, neoporfirists1, the well-to-do-kids, the technocrats, the liberal cultural producers, the narcos, the beautiful. In Criollo2 Mexico, in the era of absolute hedonistic individualism and social Darwinism, power is now measured by the number of IG followers, the amount of luxury brand items owned, and by access to government contracts through privileges either inherited or stolen. The caste in power in the era of finance, digital communication and globalization is more diversified than it has ever been: finance-oligarchs, mass media or real estate tycoons, subcontractors of State projects, owners of neo-feudal monopolies, celebrities and influencers, cultural producers. Although a few families of the old industrial bourgeoisie survive by having transformed their companies into transnational monopolies, the constant in Mexico is the cyclical refreshing of the elites, following changes in government that anoints them with sub-contracted projects (known as “bone-handouts”). Another constant is the elites’ lack of medium and long-term vision beyond quick enrichment, no matter the environmental or human cost. This world, which ceaselessly reproduces this primal scene of depredation, is traduced to a political imaginary disseminated through social and mass media, its main political conflict being the confrontation between democracy and populist fascism. This confrontation veils the power of the one-percent, climate change and the imminent extinction of the systems that sustain life on the planet; the intensification of extractivism and the ongoing neo-feudal instauration. In the meantime, the “other Mexico” (also called “indigenous,” “underdeveloped,” “poor,” “Zapatista,” “Mestizo,” “victim,” “multicultural”) is still the fodder of the territory’s economy dressed in neo-folklore and embellished with populist discourses, flattered with the distribution of free cash and with racial and class polarization in a simulated public sphere on fire. The liberal utopia of building a new democratic order that is more just, plural and inclusive has completely collapsed before the unsustainability of an economic model that maintains a world divided between privileged and redundant populations inhabiting sacrifice zones. That is to say, power now lacks the possibility of legitimizing itself with the old Criollo or Whitexican status.
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Dear Yásnaya,
For years now, I have been looking for you, deconstructing myself from my origins and history, waiting to reach the sensibility and necessary intellectual maturity to be able to start a dialogue with you. I apologize in advance if you feel I am fetishizing you as an “indigenous voice.” I am addressing you because I consider that the conditions are given by the current historical moment so that we can begin a conversation from a temporal and fragile symmetric point of view. You’ll let me know if you think the timing is indeed right, and in the meantime I am throwing this invitation out there, from a place of profound humility and gratitude for the possibility of a true conversation.
I feel like such a conversation is urgent, but only possible if instead of speaking from a multicultural site of difference, which guarantees the hypocrisy of a power that legitimates itself on an imprecise discourse as well as neocolonial extractivist practices and politics; we speak from a place of deep incommensurability of our stories and perspectives. Starting from the fact that we are inheritors, I of the colonizers, and you of the colonized. And after the acknowledgment of the places where our history and origins locate us, it seems necessary to me to first underscore that colonial structures are still in place, predating, dispossessing and destroying originary populations and peasant Mestizos in order to maintain the privileges of “my tribe.”
I confess that my first impulse at the dawn of the Zapatista uprising was to grab a backpack and get on the road to Chiapas to fight on their side in solidarity, but fear and doubt about my capacity to express true solidarity stopped me dry. I felt like an impostor, as I felt unable to rid myself of my attributes as being of colonizer ancestry. I also felt ashamed of my own White Savior complex, because this complex is inseparable from my cultural genes’ capacity for predation. I also felt vulnerable for being a woman and for not having a foreign passport that could make me immune to repressive State power, as foreign passports make other Zapa-tourists safe.
I have thought about Gayatri Spivak’s question, “How to speak to the subaltern?”, to which she responds with an ethics of self-representation. But I am sure that if I followed Spivak’s line, we would enter a fruitless discussion about the pertinence of the concept of the “subaltern” in our shared context. For Spivak, subalternity is situated within the Hindu caste system in which Spivak, as a member of the highest caste, inscribes a space for self-representation in order to have conversations with untouchable peasants in India. From this space, Spivak operates the Pares Chandra Chakravorty Memorial Literacy Project, a foundation that offers basic education to children in rural India with schools in East Bengal, where Spivak herself has taken up the task to train teachers. But even though we could speak about the current caste system in Mexico, I do not feel comfortable to apply Spivak’s term to our context. What do you think?
It seems to me that there is more at stake than the question whether ‘subalternity’ is pertinent in our possible conversation. A dialogue between us could take place on a common ground, rooted in our cultural baggage, sensibilities, literary and popular culture references, Mexican (official) history as well as in our interest in the relationship between the “Nation-State” and originary populations. Yet, it is not enough. In order to begin to think about forging a common ground for our dialogue, I would need to recognize and declare that the Nation State is a consensual form of government that perpetuates the Criollo status quo of the country that comprises an invisible apparatus put into place 500 years ago and that reproduces racism and dispossession of the originary populations. This apparatus is misogynistic and relentless, and has been cynical enough to validate itself by demanding the Spanish monarchy to apologize for the damages that Spanish colonization has inflicted on Mexico. It is as if, with Independence, the European occupiers (or “Criollos”) were Mexicanized and with that, the occupied territories were given by Europeans and Criollos back ending the history of oppression of originary populations. The thing is, that current “Mexican identity” is based on the erasure of the distinction between criollo settlers and colonized originary populations, and this is why Mexicans consider themselves to be the inheritors of the archaeologized version of the territory’s pre-colonial past: of murdered cultures. As you point out, however, in your article in El País in February last year, the so-called Mexican “Independence” coincides with the beginning of the battle against linguistic diversity in Mexico.3 This means the start of forced “modernization” of native language speakers, the implementation of hierarchical structures and the creation of institutions that normalize homogenization and inoculation of forms of pedagogy which, as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui argues, were implanted in the bodies and common sense of originary populations with repressive force.4 A process, which you, in turn, describe as follows: “Mestizo es decir desindigeneizado por el Estado” [“Mestizo means the de-indigenizing by the State”].5 Now the dream of the Mexican elites materializes in the official discourse that the ancestors of “the Mexicans” (including Criollos and Mestizos) are the originary populations. That is why government officials appropriate dress, habits and customs (What do you think of the fact that Mexico City’s mayor performs “tequio” or communal work on Saturdays for the city?), ceremonies, histories and objects of the material lives of originary populations, transforming them into folklore and into the official image of the nation, adorning our modernity and distinguishing it from the rest of the world’s. Without a doubt, the heritage of originary peoples has on the one hand ceased to be a threat to the modernized identity of the Nation State and on the other, its appropriation facilitates the continuity of the machinery of dispossession, uprooting, forced displacement and death megaprojects. In spite of the current government’s cosmetic politics of repatriation of patrimony, and against the appropriation of designs by indigenous communities to create global merchandises (by Zara, Isabel Marant, Yves St Laurent), “patrimony” will never reach its original owners as contexts have been murdered. “Patrimony” now functions as a trophy for the State, contributing to the homogenization of the alleged “prehispanic” origin of Mexican collective identity.
For all these reasons, even though we could have a symmetric dialogue from within shared references, as equals, our positions are incommensurable and it seems to me very important to highlight this. As a point of departure, I timidly offer you an acknowledgment of the different places we occupy in the social and economic landscape of “the country”; from which we then part to establish the incommensurability of our positions as a means to draw fragile bridges.
It is possible that this conversation would be more honest if we could recognize ourselves as enemy sides in struggle. Beyond the war of conquest rooted in social Darwinism, which my side has won, leading to self-destruction: white supremacy is inseparable from the accelerated destruction of the planet. As if I would identify as an “Israeli” in Mexico, which is what my Palestinian friends helped me to understand during my prolonged visit to their occupied territories.
From the standpoint of decolonial studies, there is a difference between settler colonialism, as in the US, Argentina and Canada, where populations were displaced, dispossessed and besieged in “reserves” as their lands were being occupied by families of European pilgrims claiming ownership over their lands. In this regard, “settler colonialism” is different from Spanish colonialism, which was based on mestizaje (the rape of indigenous women by Spanish men). It seems to me that in the persisting colonial structures, however, colonialism (as globalization) has mutated to predominantly settler colonialism in the sense that populations now considered as redundant are still being dispossessed (of their territories, the commons) for the sake of sustaining the lives of (mostly white) privileged inhabitants of urban zones.
We live in a historical era in which denouncing racism, militancy for the visibility and recognition of originary populations, denouncing human rights violations or voting for progressive political platforms, is far from enough. The problem is systemic. That is why we should begin at the root of the problem: the erasure of the incommensurability of the histories of those who colonized the territory and its originary populations, and ask ourselves, Who do we descend from? I suppose that the so-called decolonial practices and studies in academia and the art world are a good start. And yet, they can be distracting from the current tasks: How to change everything? What privileges do I need to start giving up now? And what do I do before the enormity of the urgent task that I clearly cannot carry out on my own?
Yásnaya, I descend from encomenderos, from the thieves that were commissioned by the King of Spain to come to Mexico to build cities following the European model, to insert religion into the marrow of originary peoples and exploit them. My ancestors came to administer lands that they believed came with free labor hands and put them to work to advance the interests of the Spanish crown. My ancestors are self-proclaimed aristocrats with documents signed by the king to legitimize dispossession and land ownership. My ancestors gave women from their families away to convents, handed out charity, prayed long hours every day, wore cilices or metal belts around their legs, with tiny barbs cutting into their skin to feel closer to God, they avoided mixing with so-called “Indians” so as not to have “impure” offspring and above all, they sought to “improve the race” by adding more white genes to their own with the double mandate to de-judaize and to civilize. Their faith justified multiple epistemicides and exterminations. My ancestors were looked after, fed, relieved, cleaned and tended to by enslaved indigenous women. To me it is always important to underscore the paradox that the majority of the Mexican elite were educated and cared for by indigenous women on whom they came to depend, and later on, once they were grown up and understood the Mexican caste system, they learned to profoundly despise the women they depended on as children. My generation grew up in settlements called “colonias”, erected on cheaply sold or stolen indigenous communal lands. Their inhabitants were displaced to the margins of their lands and have lived in semi-urban settlements and inescapable futures of non-extant health and education services, and with limited possibilities of making a living as gardeners, drivers, cooks, laundry workers, masons and other kinds of badly paid employment.
One of the cultural traits of settler societies is to treat originary populations as if they didn’t exist or were disposable. This is how they came to feel so entitled to the territory. We indoctrinate ourselves with a historiography that allows us to convince ourselves that we have valid claims over “property” of the land we stole and occupied generations ago. The continued hubris of colonial exploitation and slavery legitimatized by this false historiography has given way to what is known today as “racialized capitalism,” until the extreme “necrocapitalism.” The latter implies that today, the lands inhabited by originary populations and mestizo peasants are worth more than the cheap labor that can be extracted from their bodies. A recent manifestation of necrocapitalism is, for example, the routine bombardment of agricultural lands in the state of Puebla (where my ancestors established themselves in the 17th Century) by transnational and national corporations that use clouds of chemicals in order to alter the natural rain cycle to benefit agroindustrial crops harvests of Driscroll’s Strawberries, Carroll Farms, Iberdrola. Also the companies of Heineken and Audi operate in this region; stealing and polluting the water of the Cuenca Libres Oriental, while small producers and communal landholders are denied permits to dig wells to irrigate their plots.6 In the Poblano village of Tlaxcalancingo, Junghans, a bottled water company extracts sixteen thousand liters of water a day from local wells to sell their bottles to city dwellers. The same goes for Coca Cola factories in Ocotepec and Cuautlancingo. Volkswagen has left the inhabitants of lands adjacent to the car factory waterless as it spends some four hundred million liters to make one single car.7 These are only a few examples of the continuation of Whitexican hubris. There are a hundred examples across the territory, including the sorrow for the water war being fought in your own community, Yásnaya, in Sand Pedro y San Pablo Ayutla in the State of Oaxaca. The future-present struggles are now: for energy, for water. These wars will not be justified by ideology but fought for territorial sovereignty and access to the commons. As is already the case in Israel-Palestine: the conflict is ongoing for the sake of the survival of the settler communities inhabiting Palestinian territories.
The water disputes in the State of Puebla and in your community are taking place in the context of the intensification of dispossession of the commons and extractivism due to economic policies based on selling resources on the global market. Its collateral effect is the destruction of the environment as well as the communal and natural web of life that sustains human life. In order to facilitate extractivist projects, a war is waged against men and women defending their territory mistakenly known as the “War against Drugs.” Clearly, extractivism is not only an economic policy dressed up as populism, but it is also a political regime grounded in sexual violence and in policies designed to strengthen the spoliation machine.
For obvious reasons, it is extremely difficult to undo the knot of the system of privileges inherited from previous generations, which is made invisible, based on the normalization of dispossession. In the world that we share, the same last name can be linked to a predatory scheme of commodity acquisition through debt, as well as to militancy and the honest and engaged work to create visibility for the history and political project of Marichuy (María de Jesús Patricio Martínez), candidate to the 2018 Mexican presidency for the National Indigenous Council. These kinds of contradictions exist because the social and political imaginary predominates the inheritance of secular European modernity that encompasses a culture of emancipation, Enlightenment, human rights, freedom, social justice, even feminism. That is to say, the rule of European culture includes an internal mechanism of emancipation that promises individual freedom, social justice and solidarity. Even through discourses like Marxism and the Left, European reason was able to place itself in a site of privilege, culture, reason and Enlightenment ahead of the rest of the peoples of the world, inciting them to follow in their footsteps, towards “progress”, and become part of Western civilization. In one of your texts, Yásnaya, you point out that one of the aspects of European progress implied criminalizing indigenous languages that began to be called “dialects.” And that even though legal reforms have recently been enacted to protect linguistic diversity, the education system is in fact still centralized by the government, negating the autonomy of the originary populations. In this regard, European rule works as a pharmakon: a poison that comes with its cure of hiding the hidden face of coloniality, which is the result of the racialization of the world by the Europeans.
I have learned that colonialism goes beyond the simple occupation of land: it is a power operation, in which one cosmology is extinguished to be replaced by another. In this procedure of replacement, an ensemble of interpretations about the place of humans in the universe is displaced, erasing identities, languages, cultures, radically transforming life forms and livelihoods, relationships to others and to the territory. This is how colonialism (and its derivative, racialized capitalism) have fundamentally altered non-westernized relationships to the web of life. And we are all living with the consequences in our inflamed, sick bodies. I have also been able to understand that colonialism is not a singular event but a long and continuous process of consolidation and exercise of power through violence, coercion, the manufacture of consensus and maintenance of the status quo. It is the normalization of the control of the reproduction of society: biology has everything to do with hegemony. This is why the processes that reproduce the capitalist colonial order are concentrated in the subjugation and control of women’s bodies, which bear the marks of colonial violence. Every chunk of stolen land and act of dispossession of originary peoples is also an assault on their knowledge systems and the interweaving of social reproduction, linking humans to the web of life, to a particular territory, which gives them their identity. Dispossession is followed by new laws, education, culture and medicine.
The elites that descend from the Criollo caste negate this history and above all, they negate that this history of colonization is ongoing because it involves us as the dominant pole of a colonial axis. The academy and cultural industries are faithful reflections of that forgetting, those topics pertain to the world of the unspeakable. That is why we allow ourselves to carry the flag of multiculturality and decolonization, to commission a white male to make a statue to honor Mazahua women to replace Colón’s,8 or to make art projects like singing to rivers, recuperating traditional knowledges or proposing schemes of “sustainable development.” To erase ourselves as Criollos (Mestizos) in the imperial scheme that considers us “Latinx”, to become guarantors of prizes, projects, visibility and exoticism. Because it is easier for us to remain blinded by coloniality, instead of listening to and supporting autonomy, we allow political identities to be tied to a kind of wounded moralism as a premise for political subjectivizing. We are keen on celebrating communality and reciprocity as utopias rather than accepting the reality of racialized capitalism, our complicity with it and the unsustainability of the progressive aspects of modernity such as energy consumption based on burning fossil fuels. That land defenders and community leaders have been prosecuted, murdered and forcibly disappeared for decades, while we ignore the obscenity of the “cultural revolution” in course by the current government through populist cultural and economic programs, while we ignore the true historical claims of indigenous populations in continuity with colonial and hetero-patriarchal structures represented by the Mayan Train project9, new refineries and more death megaprojects. We contemplate with a mix of disgust and resignation the simulacra of national identity in a fragmented and polarized social landscape, of militarized police and a contention wall for Centro American immigrants, keeping our hopes up that we will be thrown a “bone”.10
Discursive hubris continues while the idea of a country made up of “two Mexicos” continues to be promoted, which means that “One Mexico” diagnoses problems and manufactures solutions, and determines what culture is, thereby appropriating and determining the needs of the “other Mexico”.
Departing from the false claim of “State forgetfulness” pointed out by you, Yásnaya, in a text published in El País two years ago, is allegedly the source of poverty and backwardness of indigenous peoples in general and of the Mayan peoples in particular, and serves as a justification of the Mayan Train megaproject. As you put forth, “it has not been the exclusion of these peoples from the ideal of development set forth by the Government which has itself impoverished them, but the violent processes of inclusion.”11 I think that what the capitalist system determines as “scarcity” results in a false notion of poverty. True poverty is the incapacity of dispossessed peoples to practice their cosmology and ancestral knowledges (they can change of course) and to sustain the interweaving of communal ties to reproduce life. But that “scarcity” and “underdevelopment,” which are concepts elaborated by the colonial modernizing gaze that imply, as you have already stated, the continuous imposition of national projects and an economy that benefits a privileged minority and transnational interests. Originary populations have never even been consulted on whether or not they want to be part of the Mexican state.
In our present reality of imminent mass extinction, the remains of the material cultures of originary populations contained in ethnographic and anthropological registers along with what lives and is reborn, return an image of my (modern, Western) culture as archaic and toxic. Based on the fantasy of individualism, on the negation of the interdependency between humans and non-humans, on the violence of depredation, on the chimeras of civilization, development and universality. Chimeras in this century and the past justified the use of violence from a position of power to sustain the myth of a society constituted beyond ethnic or racial markers. Chimeras that have also resulted in fragmented worlds of inequality and in the impossibility of drawing a world in common, a shared future.
Through the erasure of the continuity of colonial hubris and based on the fact that we confer to originary peoples in Mexico and elsewhere voices in multicultural forums to denounce racism and linguistic dispossession, I must highlight that solidarity gestures with their struggles to defend their territories and their commons are scarce. In the context of the hubris of condescendence that celebrates voices such as yours, Yásnaya, for “going beyond impositions and violence,” for being “new, fresh, sincere, modest, intellectually honest,”12 the hubris of our inability to understand that with the threat of the erasure of native languages, there is colonial violence along with erasure and forgetting of other worlds of sensing and making meaning. A silencing that comes with the un-worlding of non-Western worlds of meaning and sensing.
I am convinced that we need to become conscious of our status as settlers and from that point of view, adopt non-modern values that will allow us to live together in incommensurability as opposed to generating more dismemberment, detachment, destruction. I have in mind here the term “resurgence” by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, which implies (explained in western terms) the mapping of colonial thought that embodies indigenous forms of life or alternative ways of inhabiting the world; a form of renaissance that is resistance, at the same time.13 (You may accuse me of appropriating ideas from an indigenous thinker here, but I feel that my culture falls short in tools to imagine a shared future). I read in your insistence to save the language of your community a form of renaissance and resistance. An attempt to transcend the modern episteme as a field of experience of the colony. I want to keep on deconstructing and learning from the reflection of my culture and history that could offer me the mirror of your own culture. I am grateful for any dialogue we could have in the near future. All best wishes.
Endnotes:
1 Neoporfirists, or those who believe in reviving Porfirio Díaz’s 19th century policies to Europeize Mexico and implement a program of modern development.
2 Criollo is a term to describe people of European descent born in the colonies in Latin America.
3 Yásnaya Elena A. Gil, “Kumä’äy. Mensajes desde un futuro multilingüe”, El País, 20 February 2021. Available online via: https://elpais.com/mexico/opinion/2021-02-21/kumaay-mensajes-desde-un-futuro-multilingue.html
4 Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Un undo ch’ixi es posible: Ensayos desde un presente en crisis (Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2019), pp. 38.
5 Yásnaya Elena A. Gil, Ää: manifiestos sobre la diversidad lingüística, edited by Ana Aguilar Guevara et. Al. (México: Almadía, 2020), pp. 48.
6 Gabriela Hernández, “Agricultores en Puebla protestan por bombardeo de nubes”, Proceso,August 18, 2021. Available online via: https://www.proceso.com.mx/nacional/estados/2021/8/18/agricultores-en-puebla-protestan-por-bombardeo-de-nubes-270143.html.
7 Arturo Contreras, “De planta de Bonafont a casa de los pueblos: comunidades toman embotelladora en Puebla,” Pie de Página, August 9, 2021. Available online via: https://piedepagina.mx/de-planta-de-bonafont-a-casa-de-los-pueblos-comunidades-toman-embotelladora-en-puebla/.
8 See Valentina di Liscia, “In Response to Backlash, Mexico City Reverses Decision on Artist to Replace Columbus Statue,” Hyperallergic, September 15, 2021. Available online via: https://hyperallergic.com/677199/mexico-city-reverses-decision-on-artist-to-replace-columbus-statue/
9 Sally Jensen, “Mexico’s Mayan Train Suspension Divides Community,” Al Jazeera, April 21, 2021. Available online via: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/4/21/tren-maya-suspension-fuels-indigenous-community-rift
10 “To be thrown a bone” is known as a common practice in Mexico of landing a government commission and making a lot of money, earning prestige.
11 Yásnaya Elena A. Gil, “Que ningún Dios recuerde tu nombre”, El País, 10 March 2020. Available online via: https://elpais.com/elpais/2020/03/10/opinion/1583849731_517412.html
12 Federico Navarrete, “Prólogo,” Yásnaya Elena A. Gil, Ää: manifiestos sobre la diversidad lingüística, edited by Ana Aguilar Guevara et. Al. (México: Almadía, 2020), pp. iv.
13 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson with Edna Manitowabi, “Theorizing Resurgence from within Nishnaabeg Thought” in: Jill Doerfler, Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair, Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark (ed.), Centering Anishinaabeg Studies: Understanding the World through Stories (Michigan State University Press, 2013), pp. 279-293.
About the author:
Irmgard Emmelhainz is an independent translator, writer and researcher based in Anahuac Valley (Mexico City). Her work about film, the Palestine Question, art, culture and neoliberalism has been translated to fourteen languages and has been published in an array of international publications. She has presented it in international venues including the Graduate School of Design at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts (2014), the March Meeting at Sharjah, the Walter Benjamin in Palestine Conference (2015), the New School and Americas Society (2016), SBC Gallery, Montreal (2016), The University of California in San Diego, ArtBo, Bogotá, School of Visual Arts, New York, Curatorial Summit (2017), University of Texas at Dallas (2018), The Munch Museum (Oslo, 2018), the Feria Internacional del Libro (Guadalajara, Mexico 2018) and MUAC (Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City 2019), e-flux (New York (2019), Academia Portuense de Belas Artes (Porto, 2020), University of Texas El Paso (2020). “The Sky is Incomplete: Travel Chronicles in Palestine” was published by Taurus Mexico (2017), “Jean-Luc Godard’s Political Filmmaking” came out with Palgrave Macmillan in 2019. “Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures: Feminist Living as Resistance” (Vanderbilt, 2022) and “The Tyranny of Common Sense, Mexico’s Postneoliberal Conversion” (SUNY 2021) are her most recent publications.
© 2021 the author
This text is an adaptation and translation of an earlier Spanish version written by the author, which was published on the Revista Común website in September 2021. For the Spanish text, visit: https://revistacomun.com/blog/on-being-labeled-whitexican/
For more texts as part of Struggles for Sovereignty’s “Writing” programme please visit: https://strugglesforsovereignty.net/the-world-is-our-household/writing/
