‘Giving thanks’ to colonialism for today’s racial class distinctions in the Americas

Any nation made up of diverse backgrounds – aka, any nation – has histories laced with inequalities that define our identities today

Thanksgiving break has passed and many of you returned to school from warm and toasty homes filled with family, friends, amazing food, and tons of holiday spirit.

Meanwhile, studying abroad in Argentina, I was thankful for a long phone call with my parents, a beautiful Spring day, and my first try dancing tango. A few days before, though, I was confronted with some of the extreme poverty that’s difficult to truly conceptualize while we’re feeling thankful for not being born into it, sitting around the Thanksgiving table.

I was in San Ignacio, Argentina, a small town that only exists for the Jesuit mission that once sought to evangelize the ‘Devil people’ who lived there – the Guaraní. Today the Guaraní people and culture persist much more than many other indigenous groups in the Americas, but like the rest, they suffered greatly when Europeans came to their land.

Since the missions served as the only real protection against enslavement, the Guaraní flocked there, only for many to be raided by slave hunters. The mission I visited was one of the few to successfully ward off slave hunters, but the livelihoods of the Guaraní residents were only guaranteed until the Jesuits were expelled, leaving the “Civilized Indians” abandoned.

The ruins of Mission San Ignacio Miní

Today the people begging in the streets here are clearly Guaraní. The only kids not dressed in uniforms and coming back from school, but rather waiting out the day or trying to sell knick-knacks to tourists along the edges of the ruins are the descendants of the people who the Spanish tried to “save” a few hundred years back.

What really hit me about these particular people in the street, compared to homeless people at home, was the noticeably high ratio of children to parents. And furthermore, how they didn’t even look up to ask for anything as we passed by. It was so clearly tied to race.

There is no question that the indigenous populations in Latin America live in conditions of extreme poverty and seriously lack access to education, public services, and good living conditions when compared to other groups. Paraguay, which has the strongest Guaraní presence and is considered bilingual between Guaraní and Spanish, and Bolivia, which is considered a ‘pluri-nation’ with 36 indigenous languages still spoken, are the poorest countries in South America.

The situation is not so different in the States where 28 percent of American Indians and Alaska Natives live in poverty. When it comes to indigenous peoples’ status today, there is only one America, stretching from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. All of them were equally screwed over by the colonization of this land, just some places acknowledge it more than others.

San Ignacio, Argentina

Every year, more are calling attention to how Thanksgiving shouldn’t be just a time to bask in what we’re grateful for, but also a time to grapple with the connection between our country’s foundation and the destruction of the nations in this land before. Efforts to commemorate preexistence and the scale of the invasion are growing, like with Melanie Cervantes’ art celebrating Indigenous resistance and the National Day of Mourning held on Thanksgiving Day, which was celebrated for the 45th time this year.

Any nation made up of diverse backgrounds – aka, any nation – has histories laced with injustices that define their identities today. Dealing with race and class requires a constant investigation and editing how we look at our past.

This year nine US cities recognized this by changing Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day. Many other countries across the Americas use this day to acknowledge how colonization and diversity have affected our national identities The names like Day of the Original Peoples and Intercultural Dialogue in Peru, Day of Intercultural Identity in Bolivia, and Day of the Encounter of Two Worlds in Chile.

Street art in Chile shows indigenous (Mapuche) influence

The US is not separate from the rest of Latin America in how colonization’s leftovers determine the way our society is set up – however, race distinctions in Latin America are less binary than in the US. Complicating the matter, there was much more mixing between colonizers and natives in Latin America, so today many cultural influences remain in ways people don’t even know about.

Most of Latin America’s elite, however, do not look like how Americans might imagine them; i.e. you guessed it, they’re white. Today racial prejudice as produced by the colonial period, has shaped class distinctions into a particularly resilient system. The injustice is so normalized that it’s easy to forget it is rooted in history.

You could visit Buenos Aires and, staying in the nicer neighborhoods, think that Argentina – an immigrant country similar to the US, with strong Italian, British and French cultural influence – is completely White. It wasn’t until going to marginal areas in more rural regions that I realized this isn’t the case.

A “Casta” painting, as commonly produced during the Spanish colonial period in the Americas. A depiction of the race classes and the hierachy.

Though it’s clear in places like San Ignacio that energy is not necessarily focused on lessening inequality, but rather on boosting the town’s one tourist attraction, it has been shown that with some policy changes major progress could be made here.

If policymakers were to concentrate on ensuring that indigenous people can obtain better schooling, training, and health services much of the income differential between indigenous and non indigenous people would disappear.

In the meantime, we students should concentrate on understanding why historical race distinctions translate into inequalities today – both at home and abroad – and how we can turn that understanding into a more equal tomorrow.

 

 

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