Your speech and your mission have always been about the dignified representation and respect, above all, of the same opportunities for the brown people, for people of color, not only from Mexico, from all of Latin America — from all over the world, and now you’re here. You are K’uk'ulkan, you are Namor. You are a funko, you are all of this, so what do you expect it to mean for the representation in Latin America and in Mexico for everyone who is getting this important message?
Lo único qué quiero es qué la próxima vez qué los moritos y morritas se vean al espejo se sientan orgullosos de ese reflejo qué vean qué nunca hubo nada malo en ellos si no en los ojos qué los juzgaron si eso sucede estoy del otro lado.
TENOCH HUERTA at the Wakanda Forever premiere in Mexico
More dispatches from the front lines of the culture war aka Texas. The rage is never ending and exhausting
I’m not trying to be a shit about this but like we *need* solidarity over this because the alarm was being sounded almost 20 years ago when W let Texas (and other southwestern states) start cutting out Mexican and Chicano history.
As a reminder, Texas constitutes one of the largest textbook markets. Whatever they remove, smaller and/or poorer states will struggle to put back or compensate for when they make their textbook purchases.
That means how Texas goes a disproportionate amount of school resources go.
This is an extremely, extremely important addition ^
When it comes to almost any issue…Texas isn’t “just Texas.” The people in the notes that are like “Texas should just secede” or “can we just get rid of Texas already” are missing a critical point here. (And throwing the community activists who are trying to combat this stuff under the bus, but I digress.)
As I (and many others for longer and better than me) have tried to explain: Texas is a state of 29 million, and very powerful. The state government is NOT acting in the interests of the majority of the people, they are trying to maintain their decades long stranglehold on power, by doing everything they can, including miseducating youth with propaganda.
Even in the best of voter turnout years, only 52% of the eligible voting population casts a ballot in Texas. Communities of color, low income communities, disabled voters and all kinds of other marginalized folks have had their voting access nearly strangled to death.
What happens in Texas is coming for everywhere. We should be talking about national policies to curb this shit.
I worked in textbook publishing for ten years, and I cannot overemphasize how important Texas is to the textbook market. What Texas decides should be taught affects what the rest of the US teaches.
All this is pandering to a very specific audience, because if Texas doesn’t approve of a book–if Texas’s textbook review boards don’t feel that the book supports “American values” or if they see admission of racism as “inflammatory” and upsetting to (white) students and their families–that book will not, as a rule, be sold in Texas or the South. If it is, there will almost certainly be lawsuits over the “radical” nature of the book and how it could cause “unrest” in schools.
[Image description: A photoset of a white vlogger in front of a bookshelf filled with DVDs, with the captions: "How is it my responsibility, or even my place, to apologize for the actions of my ancestors? Because they did it in my name. They did it for the prosperity of their descendants. But I don’t want any benefits conferred through slavery. I know it’s impossible for me to shed every single advantage that my ancestry affords me, but the least I could do is examine it. Be critical of it, to be as proactive as possible when it comes to the whole ‘not being complicit in historical atrocities’ thing. As a person of considerable privilege, I consider it my responsibility because my privilege will try to make me complicit by default.“]
