Opinion: Indigenous identities hidden by 2010 Census
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Filed Under:
Opinion
"It was when I first stood atop the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan, Mexico in 1976 that I was finally able to grasp something my parents first communicated to me when I was five years old; that my roots on this continent are not simply Mexican, but both ancient and Indigenous.
My red-brown face should have been enough to teach me this. However, that was not the message I received in school at the time, nor is it the message little red-brown kids receive today.
I experienced a similar kind of reaffirmation this past month when I stood in front of the world-renowned, ancient Mayan observatory at Chichen Itza, on Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula.
Upon my return to the United States, I received a message from a colleague regarding the U.S. Census Bureau. My mouth soured; another decade and another story about how the bureau paradoxically insists that Mexicans are Caucasian. I will have to explain to them again that Mexicans are the descendants of those who built the pyramids at Teotihuacan and Chichen Itza – that it was not Caucasians who built them.
The genesis of this nonsensical “misconception” goes back to the era when the United States militarily took half of Mexico in 1848. At that time, the Mexican government attempted to protect its former citizens by insisting that the U.S. government treat them legally as “white,” so they would not be enslaved or subjected to legal segregation. That strategy only partially worked, because most Mexicans in this country have never been treated as “white,” or as full human beings with full human rights.
That era is long over, yet the fear, shame, denial, and semi-legal fiction of being “white” remains, perpetrated primarily by government bureaucrats."
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