Hello and happy Saturday to you. In today’s newsletter, Julissa Arce writes about the ways white supremacy works in Mexico to denigrate Indigenous and Black Mexicans—and how her experience with white supremacy in the U.S. worked in tandem with that. It’s an excerpt from her forthcoming book You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation (out March 22), and believe me when I say I felt that when I read it. There’s still a misperception among U.S. Anglos—and some Latinxs—that racism and colorism does not exist among Latinxs (and it’s a perception that some Latin Americans are happy to perpetuate). But of course, one look at the mostly pale palette of Univision and Telemundo hosts shows how wrong that is. I’m so glad Arce wrote about this important topic, and how we should resist the insidious ways colonialism affects the world.

Before that, though, some news!

—Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

WHAT’S GOING ON 

• Russia bombed the Donestk Regional Drama Theatre in Mariupol, Ukraine, where over 1300 civilians were sheltering. Around 130 people have been rescued but the majority are still trapped beneath the rubble. Before the bombing, Ukrainians had painted the Russian word for “children” in two visible places around the theater to warn troops, according to Reuters.

• Brittany Griner, the WNBA star who was detained at a Russian airport for allegedly carrying cannabis oil in her suitcase, will be held there at least until May 15 as Russian authorities conduct an investigation. While she has an attorney and the U.S. State Department is “doing everything we can” to support her, the outlook is grim considering Russia’s track history with imprisoning foreign nationals, plus the diplomatic fallout from the war on Ukraine. And while some have noted that Griner’s situation hasn’t garnered enough media coverage, there’s a reason for this: the State Department, WNBA, and her family have deliberately withheld details from the public in the interest of negotiating her release. “Everyone’s getting the strategy of ‘say less and push more privately behind the scenes,’ ” WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert told the AP.

• Here’s a beautiful Instagram post (and caption) from Cherokee playwright and lawyer Mary Katherine Nagle: “Today the United States restored tribal jurisdiction and sovereignty over non-Indian perpetrated crimes of child abuse, trafficking, stranger sexual assault, and much more. And Indian Country was there to witness the United States wake up to history!” Which is to say: The Violence Against Women Act has been updated to (finally) include indigenous women, giving Tribal Courts the ability to arrest, try, and sentence non-Natives who perpetrate violence against tribal members. It’s a true win, and a step towards justice for the astronomical amounts of missing and murdered Indigenous women in the U.S. Native women are victims of domestic violence and physical assault at a rate of 50% more than any other group, and murder is the third leading cause of death for Native women, with the majority of perpetrators non-Native, and until now there has been little recourse.

• Lia Thomas, the U Penn swimmer who is enraging transphobes for being good at her job, has won the NCAA Division I national championship. This makes her the first known trans athlete to win that title in any sport. Hell yeah, Lia! Detractors should take some advice from one of her competitors, Lexi Cuomo, a champion swimmer at the University of Virginia: “Any hate is unnecessary,” she told ESPN. “We’re focused on ourselves and our team. Our first and foremost goal is to win a national title.”

• Angelina Jolie, who is just like all of us in that she has a day job for money so she can spend the rest of her time doing things she actually cares about, recently visited Yemen to raise awareness of the refugee crisis there—an important effort at any time, but especially prudent at a moment when the world seems to be waking up to the disparate treatment of refugees who are not white Europeans. As part of a UN Refugee Agency’s effort to raise $4.3 billion in humanitarian aid, Jolie met with locals, including children, suffering from food scarcity and other instabilities after seven years of war, and addressed a panel of humanitarians and aid workers. “The lack of solutions to conflict and insecurity globally is causing unmanageable levels of human displacement and need,” she told the panel. “You have an opportunity as governments to address this desperate human emergency and to seek an urgent end to the conflict.” If you’d like to donate to this important cause, you can do so here.

AND:

• The Black women lining up to defend Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson

• Loving this conversation with the queer ranchera artist San Cha (And bumping “Oveja Negra”)

• “The feminist campaigner telling the stories of murdered women” in the UK

• The CROWN Act, which would ban race-based hair discrimination in the U.S., has passed the House. Onto the Senate!

• Now playing: Rosalía’s new album MOTOMAMI. “I just want to hear something I haven’t heard before. That’s the intention always,” the inventive Catalan singer told the New York Times this week. (And, cough, if you’d like to read my review, it’s here.)

—JES

MUST-READ 

Julissa Arce On How Latinx Communities Have Been “Tricked Into Yearning for Whiteness”  

JULISSA ARCE, MATCHING HER LOOK TO HER BOOK. (PHOTO BY ARAYA DOHENY/GETTY IMAGES FOR PODERISTAS)

I was in middle school the first time someone told me, “You talk white.” It was an off-hand comment from a peer who wasn’t aware of all the implications behind that phrase, but I thought about it for a long time. I went through all of high school codeswitching between the jargon and cadence my friends used—peppering words like “brick,” “deadass,” and all types of Spanish slang into every other sentence—and the educated verbiage my mother expected of someone she was sending to private school. It wasn’t until college, surrounded by actual white people, that I realized my well-practiced, NPR-esque accent wasn’t fooling anyone. I was still “talking white” and yet it didn’t bring me any closer to my white classmates—one of whom would go on to write racial slurs on the door of my dorm room. 

In her new memoir, You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation, author and activist Julissa Arce shares her own experience of trying to squeeze herself into the box of whiteness, a box formed both by white supremacy in American culture and anti-Indigenous sentiments in Mexican culture. 

The book is a moving, infuriating, and at times funny overview of the ways Arce, like many Latinxs, was taught to see whiteness as aspirational; an idea that was reinforced by her time working at Goldman Sachs as an undocumented immigrant. But it wasn’t just the talks about Aspen and summer homes that made Arce second-guess herself, it was also the colonizer mentality of those closest to her, the ones who praised her European features and ignored her Indigenous heritage. (You know the ones, the “pelo malo, pelo bueno” tías.) 

Below is an excerpt from Arce’s book—just the tip of the iceberg in her touching and well-argued case for rejecting assimilation, no matter how alluring it might seem.

—Shannon Melero

IMAGE COURTESY OF FLATIRON BOOKS 

My nephew, a junior in high school in Mexico, was visiting me in Los Angeles a couple of years ago when I asked him if he knew that Vicente Guerrero, the second president of Mexico, was Black. “Are you serious?” he said. “In all the pictures he looks ‘bien blanquito.’” Because of his stature, he could not be ignored or erased from history, but his standing didn’t stop him from being whitewashed. Even when negating the history and importance of Indigenous and Black people simply can’t be done, we are not allowed to claim power alongside our Indigenous or Black identities—the identity must then be erased. This strategy is deployed from Mexico to the Dominican Republic to Europe.

Vicente Guerrero was the son of a Black father and an Indigenous mother. Inspired by the Haitian Revolution, Guerrero fought to end African slavery in Mexico some thirty years before it was abolished in the United States. Schools all over Mexico bear his name. It’s tragic to think that our people in Mexico died to gain independence, freedom, and equality for the Indigenous worker and for the enslaved African, but many haven’t been able to shake the colonizer in our heads. A document of twenty-three principles for the future of a free Mexico, called the Sentimientos de la Nación written by José María Morelos Pérez y Pavón in 1813, included the prohibition of slavery “forever,” as well as the abandoning of the caste system, and only “vice and virtue” making people different from one another. When John Quincy Adams was secretary of state, he wrote a letter to his brother in 1818 in which he described America’s independence as “a War of freemen, for political Independence,” and Mexico’s as “a War of Slaves against their masters.” Adams was right that Mexico’s independence—as well as the independence of other Latin American and Caribbean countries—was different. The independence of the United States was one where elites sought liberty only for themselves and for the protection of their land and property, which included African people. Mexicans won our independence from Spain to free the most oppressed, even if it hasn’t played out that way.

We’ve been so beaten down by white supremacy that we have yet to be truly free. Whiteness infiltrates Mexican institutions and life just as it does those of its neighbor to the north. It is a problem that plagues much of Latin America. In Bolivia, for example, the first and only Indigenous president came to power in 2006, 181 years after the county’s independence. Colombians have taken to the streets to protest racist police, because Black people are killed more often there, too. From Brazil to Mexico, Indigenous and Black people remain oppressed.

We’ve been so beaten down by white supremacy that we have yet to be truly free

When I go back to Mexico now, I am deeply saddened to hear the same everyday racist talk I heard when I was a kid. I often wonder if I had stayed in Mexico, would I see clearly how we’ve been tricked to yearn for whiteness so that we don’t strive for justice?

I often think of a brilliant line by author Domingo Martinez when I grapple with our own people becoming the oppressor when they’ve known the scourge of whiteness: “There is nothing more potentially hostile than the indigenous ego interpreting the laws of his conqueror upon his own people.” We become vicious to our own bodies, to our own souls. In our own home countries, we learn to view white as superior, as something we should aspire to. Then when we immigrate to the United States, we bring those sentiments packed in our suitcases. Those ideas are hardened on our hearts like a wax seal the minute we cross into the United States.

Mexico introduced me to the lies of whiteness, but it was the United States that taught me just how corrosive white supremacy truly is. Seeking whiteness is a matter of survival here: white skin in the United States means you exist. It means you matter. Some of us flatter ourselves white by virtue of our education, our job, or our bank account—despite the nopal on our faces, we introduce ourselves as “Spanish” at work. In the United States, whiteness didn’t just render me less than—it rendered me invisible. Here a Brown Mexican seems to have no past, no future, and no identity. I was further ostracized because I was undocumented. It was the ultimate layer of being alien. But here, in my new home, is also where I learned to fight it.

It’s fun to perrear sola but newsletters are always better with friends. Share this one with yours! 

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