Jibaro, My Pretty N@#&

Se trata de un poema clasico de Felipe Luciano, co-fundador del Capítulo de Nueva York de los Young Lords.

Esto es para todos mis hermanos de piel clara y hermanas que niegan su identidad negro.

Paz!

We are who we are...

Our ways & actions reflect our perceptions, of people, places, things, and most importantly, about "self". What many do not know, or do not want to know, is that often times our perceptions are not our own. They do not belong to us. They are shaped by the education we recieve from family, friends, and most importantly society (school, media, etc). When we come in contact with a perception differ from our own, we naturally become defensive and deny that which we fail to understand.

Here is a wonderful poem about the so-called "Latino" identity. While the poem is centered around the "Puerto Rican" identity, the message rings loud as many of our "Latino" brothers & sisters deny their African roots & heritage due to systematic conditioning.

Peace!

Native & African: "Indivisible"

Who is Indigenous/Original? Simon says....

Peace! On this day of knowledge and understanding, I wanted to give a hat-tip to Angry Indian (www.angryindian.blogspot.com) for this article. It shows the continuing deterioration of our people's mindset and perspectives due to colonization. It shows how important our monetary relationship with the United states is and in all actuality reveals how much we are 'not' as sovereign as many of us claim to be, because we continue to divide amongst our own just to meet standards by the government. Of course, this "standard" being the ever popular and controversial 'blood quantum' ideology, introduced, undeniably by the oppressors in their quest to pull the rug (land) out from under our feet. It peeves me at times, however, I stand firm in my own understanding of my self and others like me whom are not officially 'enrolled' nor look for or need anyone else's 'thumbs up' approval of our identity. I recognize no 'master' over my self, other than self, and therefore do no give into 'tap dancin'' around for any 'massa' to look upon me favorablely. I am who I am. And for all my Original brothers and sisters still clingin' on to the book that was used to enslave us, I AM THAT I AM. What's even more interesting about this article is how it brings up the refusal to accept other tribal nations by other nations. You very well could be "mixed blood" with many different tribal nations but not be considered "Indigenous" by one, whom you share ancestry with. As well as the continued ignorance by some Northern tribes of the history and lineage of their Caribbean, Central and South American brothers and sisters, as being 'indigenous' men and women. I guess they feel we would be cuttin' in on their welfare checks (government funds). It's so unfortunate, as well as a testament to the necessity for a Pan-Indigenous movement.

From NPR....

As Requirements Change, Just Who Is An Indian?
by Brian Bull


Many Native American communities are struggling with a basic question: just who is an Indian? As tribal numbers dwindle, many are reexamining how they define what it means to be a member. But lowering the blood requirement for membership has both political and economic impacts for many groups.

At a ranch house in Wisconsin Rapids, about 100 miles from Madison, five generations of a Native American family gathered under one roof. Florence Camacho, an 89-year-old Potawatomi elder, helps her grandson Dontae make a traditional piece of neckwear. They've scattered red, yellow and brass beads all over the kitchen table.

"After you're done beading it, you have to tie knots right there," Dontae says. "Then my grandmother's going to have to leather it, right there."

Nearby, Camacho's other grandchild, Mareenah Poulin, cradles her son, Leeam, who is just two weeks old.

Leeam's soft brown eyes open for a moment, then he's back to sleep as Poulin's mom, Amber Malone, looks on. She wants Leeam to learn all about her tribe, the Prairie Band of Potawatomi. Only technically he's not actually a member. Most tribes, including the Potawatomi, require at least one-quarter tribal blood to become official — complete with enrollment card and number. Malone says she's worried how enrolled members will treat her grandson — who doesn't have that one-quarter tribal blood — as he grows up.

"I know of people that have asked for proof," Malone says. "If you don't have proof, then you're not an Indian. In the native culture, some people treat them as substandard individuals. As wannabes."

Malone says there's talk among the Potawatomi of lowering the requirement to one-eighth. That — in a stroke of a pen — could double the tribe's membership, but there's a lot at stake here. Enrolled members enjoy tribal benefits, including health care and education, and there are science and art programs, too. Malone would love that for her own family.

"Anything that's going to better enrich their lives — whereas you have children that are nontribally enrolled, you're kind of stonewalled as far as trying to get them the help and the tools to help better culture their minds," she says.

In recent years, some tribes have gone the other way. They've actually reduced membership. While leaders say it's a matter of legitimacy, critics say it's all about money — namely per capita payments based on casino revenues.

"And to be quite honest with you, I think with a lot of tribes it all comes down to the money issue," Malone says. "They lower the blood quantum, there's a lot more people that are going to be able to come onto the rolls. And that per capita is going to be cut right in half."

Across the room, Malone's dad, Fred Camacho, is watching a ballgame on TV. He says many tribes are considering lowering their blood quantum and that it's inevitable.

"Understanding that if you maintain a quarter-blood quantum, at some point the tribe will disappear," he says. "Unless, and I have seen the argument, you marry another one of your tribe."




The Struggle For Identity

That issue, marriage, is a contentious one among Native Americans. In Madison, Melissa Lompre tells a story: She was looking for a new church and recalls enjoying the services at a local Native American church, until "a man got up, and he made a comment: 'Our Native American brothers and sisters, here, they're not married to or with other Native American people.' I was going to stand up and say, 'Well, I'm here as a Native American person praying with all of you, what does it matter who I'm living with, who I'm married to?' and I just didn't go back to that service anymore."

Lompre's part Menominee, Ojibwe and Delaware, but two of her kids are half Puerto Rican, from their father's side.

"They're less than 25 percent Menominee," Lompre says.

The struggle for identity among Native Americans isn't just about outsiders; Lompre says other natives have looked down on her for not growing up on the reservation.

"I wish there was a magical mutt nation that you could put people in that could have that identity given to them, but there's not," she says.

Even if someone is enrolled and lives on a reservation, that's still no guarantee they'll be considered Indian, as Denise Hobson-Ryan knows — she's half Navajo and half Irish.

In a dry, scrubby park in Phoenix, Ryan swings then hurls a round metal weight across a field. It's all practice for an upcoming Highland Games tournament. As her dad measures the distance, Ryan recalls how other kids on the reservation where she grew up teased her for her lighter complexion.

"Well, they would say 'billagona billasaana' because it rhymed really nice, and billagona means white person, and billasaana means apple," Hobson-Ryan says. "So it was, 'billagona billasaana' I heard that all my life growing up. But I lived with my Indian grandma for awhile when I was little. And she'd tell me some things in Navajo to say back to them. So I would say some pretty mean things back. Probably not something you can say on the radio!"

Hobson-Ryan later went to Dartmouth College where she says the upper-class Indian students routinely questioned her identity.

"I mean, I'd never been to a powwow, I had really nothing to add to the conversation," she says. "I think that was sort of where they drew their traditional ideas was, 'Well, you don't do powwows, then you're not an Indian'."

Vying For Status

In central Wisconsin recently, the Brothertown Indians held a powwow of sorts. The only problem? According to the federal government, they're not technically Indians. Dressed in their finest beaded and feathered regalia, attendees look and sound like other natives. But the Brothertown aren't federally recognized, which limits them in many ways, like their land.

"The parcel of land that we're standing on here is about a three-fourths acre piece of land that was purchased by the tribe a number of years back, in the process of the federal acknowledgment effort," says tribal member Darren Kroenke, as he walks across tribal property in snow and freezing rain.

The Brothertown are among 300-some Indian tribes seeking federal recognition. A storage garage is the only building. Kroenke says tribal members are anxious for a place at the table, with Wisconsin's 11 federally recognized tribes.

"The issue that I raise is that federal acknowledgment is used as a qualifier," Kroenke says. "But it shouldn't have anything to do with that, it shouldn't prejudice or substantiate history or culture."

Kroenke says it's just a fact that the Brothertown Tribe has a long history in Wisconsin. But after decades, they're still waiting for the government to make them official.

Original source: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103938042

The Internal Struggle for Outward Acceptance

Peace! Tau!

As we move forward we continue to struggle against the condition and brainwashing that has been perpetrated against us in the name of colonialism. As we struggle for freedom, justice and equality, our people still continue the struggle against the internal chains of bondage that we clapped on our brains throughout this journey for cultural liberation. Our mindstate still bears the scars of the internal slavery we ignore because we have become accustomed to. We still struggle to be excepting in a white man's world (society) despite how much we make others believe otherwise. In the strategy of 'divide and conquer' the issue of racial and ethnic identity still presents itself as a sufficient tool to keep our people blind to themselves and from uniting with those more like them than not. We can not move forward and extend our hands to the oppressor and his agents, in an effort to mend the sacred hoop of life, if we do not mend it within us first. And embracing our roots, our ancestral trees, especially as Afro-Indigenous people, as a extension of Pan-Indigenous solidarity, is a path in the right direction.

Black Denial: Latins And Their African Heritage

Why do so many Latin people deny their African ancestry which is so obvious ? That is a question that many people wonder about. It’s pretty much a no-brainer and very sad. Black people are the most hated people on this earth because of the images that have been associated with being black over the years. People come to this country from many different nations day in and day out and they all have one thing in common, a feeling of dislike towards and superiority over blacks. An insider who worked for the Census bureau in Florida during the last one conducted several years ago found that not one out of hundreds of thousands of Cuban Americans the insider and his staff handled checked black as their race. The Census asks you specifically what your ethinicity is and hispanics have a second choice of being white or black. Did any of you guys see the Cuban Olympic team ??? I guess all of those players were white right ??? The Miami Herald did a very in depth investigation into why latins are so much in denial. This is part one of the article:

Nearly all Dominican women straighten their hair, which experts say is a direct result of a historical learned rejection of all things black

By Frances Roblesfrobles@miamiherald.com

SANTO DOMINGO — Yara Matos sat still while long, shiny locks from China were fastened, bit by bit, to her coarse hair.

Not that Matos has anything against her natural curls, even though Dominicans call that pelo malo — bad hair.

But a professional Dominican woman just should not have bad hair, she said. “If you’re working in a bank, you don’t want some barrio-looking hair. Straight hair looks elegant,” the bank teller said. “It’s not that as a person of color I want to look white. I want to look pretty.”
And to many in the Dominican Republic, to look pretty is to look less black.

Dominican hairdressers are internationally known for the best hair-straightening techniques. Store shelves are lined with rows of skin whiteners, hair relaxers and extensions.

Racial identification here is thorny and complex, defined not so much by skin color but by the texture of your hair, the width of your nose and even the depth of your pocket. The richer, the “whiter.” And, experts say, it is fueled by a rejection of anything black.

“I always associated black with ugly. I was too dark and didn’t have nice hair,” said Catherine de la Rosa, a dark-skinned Dominican-American college student spending a semester here. “With time passing, I see I’m not black. I’m Latina.

“At home in New York everyone speaks of color of skin. Here, it’s not about skin color. It’s culture.”

The only country in the Americas to be freed from black colonial rule — neighboring Haiti — the Dominican Republic still shows signs of racial wounds more than 200 years later. Presidents historically encouraged Dominicans to embrace Spanish Catholic roots rather than African ancestry.

Here, as in much of Latin America — the “one drop rule” works in reverse: One drop of white blood allows even very dark-skinned people to be considered white.

LACK OF INTEREST

As black intellectuals here try to muster a movement to embrace the nation’s African roots, they acknowledge that it has been a mostly fruitless cause. Black pride organizations such as Black Woman’s Identity fizzled for lack of widespread interest. There was outcry in the media when the Brotherhood of the Congos of the Holy Spirit — a community with roots in Africa — was declared an oral patrimony of humanity by UNESCO. “There are many times that I think of just leaving this country because it’s too hard,” said Juan Rodríguez Acosta, curator of the Museum of the Dominican Man. Acosta, who is black, has pushed for the museum to include controversial exhibits that reflect many Dominicans’ African background. “But then I think: Well if I don’t stay here to change things, how will things ever change?”

A walk down city streets shows a country where blacks and dark-skinned people vastly outnumber whites, and most estimates say that 90 percent of Dominicans are black or of mixed race. Yet census figures say only 11 percent of the country’s nine million people are black.
To many Dominicans, to be black is to be Haitian. So dark-skinned Dominicans tend to describe themselves as any of the dozen or so racial categories that date back hundreds of years — Indian, burned Indian, dirty Indian, washed Indian, dark Indian, cinnamon, moreno or mulatto, but rarely negro.

The Dominican Republic is not the only nation with so many words to describe skin color. Asked in a 1976 census survey to describe their own complexions, Brazilians came up with 136 different terms, including café au lait, sunburned, morena, Malaysian woman, singed and “toasted.”
“The Cuban black was told he was black. The Dominican black was told he was Indian,” said Dominican historian Celsa Albert, who is black. “I am not Indian. That color does not exist. People used to tell me, ‘You are not black.’ If I am not black, then I guess there are no blacks anywhere, because I have curly hair and dark skin.”

THE HISTORY

Using the word Indian to describe dark-skinned people is an attempt to distance Dominicans from any African roots, Albert and other experts said. She noted that it’s not even historically accurate: The country’s Taino Indians were virtually annihilated in the 1500s, shortly after Spanish colonizers arrived.

Researchers say the de-emphasizing of race in the Dominican Republic dates to the 1700s, when the sugar plantation economy collapsed and many slaves were freed and rose up in society.
Later came the rocky history with Haiti, which shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic. Haiti’s slaves revolted against the French and in 1804 established their own nation. In 1822, Haitians took over the entire island, ruling the predominantly Hispanic Dominican Republic for 22 years.

To this day, the Dominican Republic celebrates its independence not from centuries-long colonizer Spain, but from Haiti.

“The problem is Haitians developed a policy of black-centrism and . . . Dominicans don’t respond to that,” said scholar Manuel Núñez, who is black. “Dominican is not a color of skin, like the Haitian.”

Dictator Rafael Trujillo, who ruled from 1930 to 1961, strongly promoted anti-Haitian sentiments, and is blamed for creating the many racial categories that avoided the use of the word “black.”

The practice continued under President Joaquín Balaguer, who often complained that Haitians were “darkening” the country. In the 1990s, he was blamed for thwarting the presidential aspirations of leading black candidate José Francisco Peña Gómez by spreading rumors that he was actually Haitian.

“Under Trujillo, being black was the worst thing you could be,” said Afro-Dominican poet Blas Jiménez. “Now we are Dominican, because we are not Haitian. We are something, because we are not that.”

Jiménez remembers when he got his first passport, the clerk labeled him “Indian.” He protested to the director of the agency.

“I remember the man saying, ‘If he wants to be black, let him be black!’ ” Jiménez said.
Resentment toward anything Haitian continues, as an estimated one million Haitians live in the Dominican Republic, most working in the sugar and construction industries. Mass deportations often mistakenly include black Dominicans, and Haitians have been periodically lynched in mob violence. The government has been trying to deny citizenship and public education to the Dominican-born children of illegal Haitian migrants.

When migrant-rights activist Sonia Pierre won the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award in 2006, the government responded by trying to revoke her citizenship, saying she is actually Haitian.

“There’s tremendous resistance to blackness — black is something bad,” said black feminist Sergia Galván. ‘‘Black is associated with dark, illegal, ugly, clandestine things. There is a prototype of beauty here and a lot of social pressure. There are schools where braids and natural hair are prohibited.”

Galván and a loosely knit group of women have protested European canons of beauty, once going so far as to rally outside a beauty pageant. She and other experts say it is now more common to see darker-skinned women in the contests — but they never win.

CULTURE PULL

Several women said the cultural rejection of African looking hair is so strong that people often shout insults at women with natural curls.

“I cannot take the bus because people pull my hair and stick combs in it,” said wavy haired performance artist Xiomara Fortuna. “They ask me if I just got out of prison. People just don’t want that image to be seen.”

The hours spent on hair extensions and painful chemical straightening treatments are actually an expression of nationalism, said Ginetta Candelario, who studies the complexities of Dominican race and beauty at Smith College in Massachusetts. And to some of the women who relax their hair, it’s simply a way to have soft manageable hair in the Dominican Republic’s stifling humidity.

“It’s not self-hate,” Candelario said. “Going through that is to love yourself a lot. That’s someone saying, ‘I am going to take care of me.’ It’s nationalist, it’s affirmative and celebrating self.”
Money, education, class — and of course straight hair — can make dark-skinned Dominicans be perceived as more “white,” she said. Many black Dominicans here say they never knew they were black — until they visited the United States.

“During the Trujillo regime, people who were dark skinned were rejected, so they created their own mechanism to fight it,” said Ramona Hernández, Director of the Dominican Studies Institute at City College in New York. “When you ask, ‘What are you?’ they don’t give you the answer you want . . . saying we don’t want to deal with our blackness is simply what you want to hear.”

Hernández, who has olive-toned skin and a long mane of hair she blows out straight, acknowledges she would “never, never, never” go to a university meeting with her natural curls.

“That’s a woman trying to look cute; I’m a sociologist,” she said.

Asked if a black Dominican woman can be considered beautiful in her country, Hernández leapt to her feet.

“You should see how they come in here with their big asses!” she said, shuffling across her office with her arms extended behind her back, simulating an enormous rear-end. “They come in here thinking they are all that, and I think, ‘doesn’t she know she’s not really pretty?’ “

Maria Elena Polanca is a black woman with the striking good looks. She said most Dominicans look at her with curiosity, as if a black woman being beautiful were something strange.

She spends her days promoting a hair straightener at La Sirena, a Santo Domingo department store that features an astonishing array of hair straightening products.

“Look, we have bad hair, bad. Nobody says ‘curly.’ It’s bad,” she said. “You can’t go out like that. People will say, ‘Look at that nest! Someone light a match!’ ”

‘IT WAS HURTFUL’

Purdue University professor Dawn Stinchcomb, who is African American, said that when she came here in 1999 to study African influences in literature, people insulted her in the street.
Waiters refused to serve her. People wouldn’t help Stinchcomb with her research, saying if she wanted to study Africans, she’d have to go to Haiti.

“I had people on the streets . . . yell at me to get out of the sun because I was already black enough,” she said. “It was hurtful. . . . I was raised in the South and thought I could handle any racial comment. I never before experienced anything like I did in the Dominican Republic.

“I don’t have a problem when people who don’t look like me say hurtful things. But when it’s people who look just like me?”

Originally from: http://www.zimbio.com/Erasmo+Lara-Pena/articles/3/Black+Denial+Latins+Their+African+Heritage