I’m Haunted by Mexicans

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Clarissa

October 30, 2011

Whenever my students are writing about Cubans, Uruguayans, Spaniards, Dominicans, Argentinians, Venezuelans, Colombians, etc., I always know that by the end of the essay, all these people will be mysteriously transformed into Mexicans. Often, I read statements like, “Jose Marti was an important Cuban thinker and the fighter for Cuban Independence. He loved his country of Mexico and worked hard to make it independent from Spain.”

The culmination of this trend was achieved in the passage I read today: “Jose Enrique Rodo, a thinker and educator from Uruguay, hated the United States and Mexico. Mexico was part of the United States, which is why he hated it. As a Mexican, he hated his own nation and wrote critically about it.”

Is there a way I can politely bring to my students’ attention the Earth-shattering news that not all Spanish-speakers are Mexican?

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26 responses to “I’m Haunted by Mexicans”

nominatissima

October 30, 2011

A visual demonstration with a map?

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  October 30, 2011
  
  Believe me, I have shown the map as many times as I could. Still, this keeps happening. At least, we now know that Latin America is not in Africa. That’s progress. 🙂
  
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kinjal

October 30, 2011

I am also distressed by the way “Spanish” is often used to denote an ethnicity by a lot of people (in my experience they were all college students but that may be because this is the group I interact with most). example : “Are you Spanish?”

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kinjal

October 30, 2011

sorry, what I posted above is incomplete. They say “Are you Spanish?” when they mean, “Do you speak Spanish?” or “are you Hispanic?” , as in they are not necessarily asking you whether you are a national of Spain.

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  October 30, 2011
  
  Oh, I know! The same as all Russian-speakers are Russian. 😦
  
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David Bellamy

October 30, 2011

Invite guests from different countries, if you can find them locally, to speak to your classes? Maybe the individuals with different viewpoints, different accents in their Spanish, etc would help.

I am going to Mexico for a grad student workshop for a few days later this fall.

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  October 30, 2011
  
  This would be the perfect solution but finding a Spanish-speaker in this area is a very daunting task.
  
  I envy you for going to Mexico (in a good way). 🙂
  
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kinjal

October 30, 2011

One Puerto Rican guy told me how he was irked by mainland Americans thinking him Mexican. However I thought his annoyance had a racial tinge to it, as in he complained, ” how can they say that when we Puerto Ricans look very different from Mexicans!” ( I think, he was referring to the fact that , though I am not sure if this is correct, the average Mexican is more mestizo than the average Latino Cuban or Puerto Rican who have less of an indigenous component in their genealogy). This is why I was unable to fully sympathize with his rant.

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Isabel

October 30, 2011

While you’re at it please remind everyone that everyone with light skin is not “Anglo”. 🙂

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  October 30, 2011
  
  I never heard them use the “Anglo” terminology, thank God in heaven.
  
  One student talked about Yankees, though. I thought this term was mostly dead but apparently not.
  
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  1. Isabel
    
    October 31, 2011
    
    But Latin Americans (particularly activists that I have heard on the radio) do frequently use Anglos as a synonym for white person, or European-american. Revenge, perhaps?
    
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Spanish Prof

October 30, 2011

A map quiz?

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kinjal

October 31, 2011

You thought “Yankees” was extinct because you didn’t know baseball.

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  October 31, 2011
  
  Actually, I know it’s a name of a team, but referring to people this way? Is it still done?
  
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  1. David Bellamy
    
    October 31, 2011
    
    I know people in the south who use ‘Yankees’ to refer to anyone from further north than they are.
    
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    1. bloggerclarissa
      
      October 31, 2011
      
      I think this was the case, yes.
      
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Brittany-Ann

October 31, 2011

Rant. Slap the desk/lecturn, hard, for emphasis.

Or just threaten to reduce their grade by a letter. That usually gets students’ attention. 🙂

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llama

October 31, 2011

Put a list up with all these ‘sins’ listed and how many marks are deducted for each.

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Ol.

October 31, 2011

It has nothing to do (or does it) with this post, but I had to share:

student in an exam: the famous nineteenth-century Spanish writer X was a flaneur, to use the expression by the famous German philosopher Walt Whitman.

The Rodo quote is wonderful, by the way!

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annon

October 31, 2011

Tell them that in many parts of Latin America, people from the United States are referred to as Yankees. Ask them if they would like to all be referred to as Yankees.

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Anonymous

October 31, 2011

“Is there a way I can politely bring to my students’ attention the Earth-shattering news that not all Spanish-speakers are Mexican?”

You might try pointing out that not all mexicans are Spanish-speaking?http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=MX

In fact in Spanish when the term “mexicano” was applied to a language, it meant Nahuatl. These days of course there is a distinctly Mexican form of Spanish that can be called “mexicano” or more properly “espanol mexicano.”

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  October 31, 2011
  
  Believe me, we spoke at length about nahuatl and about the wide variety of regional variations in the different forms of Spanish is used different Spanish-speaking countries.
  
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Ol.

November 1, 2011

As a Yankee graduate student (of Spanish) said when a famous Colombian professor got the highest rank as a full professor in a very prestigious university: “Who cares? For us, s/he is just another Mexican.”

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  November 1, 2011
  
  Really? You tell scary horrors.
  
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Sunday Link Encyclopedia and Self-Promotion « Clarissa's Blog

July 22, 2012

[…] I’m haunted by Mexicans. […]

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Z

July 22, 2012

When I was a child, “Anglos” would say “Spanish” for “Mexican” because “Mexican” was an insult, like the n-word.

Since coming to live in the South I have started to identify Yankees and see them as a distinct cultural group. They resemble Americans as represented in some Henry James novels, and are from more or less the same region — the East — which I have visited but where I have never lived. Yankees, especially when Anglo, are unable to see subtlety and are very practically oriented, and they can be somewhat rude and egotistical.

Cubans and some Puerto Ricans I know refer to Latin Americans from countries where the indigenous peoples were not exterminated, call such Latin Americans “indios,” and look down upon them.

In California, I am technically Anglo because English is my native language and my descent is primarily from central and northern Europe. However, in fact I have very little Anglo-Saxon in me. For this reason, here in the South I am often taken for Hispanic or mulata clara, which amazes me … although I understand in a way because local white people are very pale indeed.

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