Originally published on The Unapologetic Mexican by Nezua, April 30, 2010.
ARIZONA, the State of Denial, has spun into a legislative carnival of lunacy with the latest ethnic cleansing maneuver. Teachers with accents will be barred from teaching English, and Chicano Studies linked to terrorism/revolution and banned from schools.
THE USA WHITE SOUTH has always been a bit…collectively delusional. But you can’t blame that on the South. It’s long been the American way (as well as the way of a number of other countries and peoples throughout time) to blaze into an area, steal land through legitimized war, law, or other displays of naked aggression and then imagine it can be remade and the history and rights of those who lived there, forgotten.
I can’t quite agree with the characterization of the Ralph Waldo Emerson quote—I don’t see Mexican/Mexican culture as a negative, nor bemoan the fact that nature and reality tend to assert themselves despite humankinds’ persistent fantasies to the contrary—but I do appreciate, even as he was a member of the growing Empire, his grasp of the future:
“The United States will conquer Mexico, but it will be as the man swallows the arsenic, which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, prior to the American Invasion of México
He’s kind of saying…you can’t fool Mother Nature. Or…truth will out.
Either way, in this day and age and cultural mood, this sounds terribly dramatic and fearsome, but of course, coming from a member of an imperialist , colonizing nation the view makes sense. It is, albeit with some insight, and I’d like to imagine a dollop of moral foreboding—the very same lens that most the lawmakers in Arizona are seeing through. All while they and the GOP croak-soothy and tell us these sorts of bills are attempting to Protect America or some weird racist shit like that.
Read the entire post here.