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I mean it could be. I for sure am never coming back to Venezuela, or at least I'm never resettling into Venezuela because I wouldn't commit my future children (if I ever have any) to all of the uncertainty that came with my upbringing in Venezuela. But I'm sure my opinion doesn't reflect that of the majority, and there is a significant portion of the Bolivarian disapora that wants to return to Venezuela once it starts showing signs of getting better. Anybody who had the foresight to, for example, buy real state at massively reduced prices due to the crisis, would see huge returns once the economy stabilizes... ...That is if it ever does. I'm not sure if you're aware of how thoroughly hosed the Venezuelan economy is. The GDP is expected to contract by more than 10% this year, it has in 5 years lost almost 30 years worth of growth. Inflation is stratospheric to the point where the bolivar may be impossible to save. Foreign reserves have been plundered. Incredibly important assets for the Venezuelan state have been sold off to the Chinese and Russians for a quick buck. Citgo is on the verge of bankruptcy, so is PDVSA, and this is all happening just as the world is trying to transition away from fossil fuels, which means that the price of oil will never be as high as it was under Chavez ever again. So not only does Venezuela have to reinvent its entire economy for it to be even remotely relevant again, it also needs to get rid of the highest crime rate and corruption rates in the entire world in order for foreign investment to even remotely consider to return, seeing how expropriations and the government's inability to allocate enough dollars in the currency exchange for transnationals has caused literally every large company that had an office in the country to shrink or shut down. For Venezuela to return its economy to early 2000's levels, which most expats would consider to be bearable, it will take decades, 20 years is being generous. There is far too much to fix, and while the crisis may have just cultivated a culture that is at last sick of debauchery and the easy life, like how many other countries have after wars and major crises, this is no guarantee that Venezuela currently has the right people to be able to lead it through such a painful and long recovery process. And expats are not going to trade the comfortable life they have now acquired for a life in that new healing country, not without a significant investment from the state and from companies that likely most of them cannot afford. The brain drain is very drat real, it's no myth, all it takes for you to see it in action is asking any Venezuelan university graduate what they're going to be doing next. I don't know a single one who's plans don't include leaving, even if they can't afford it. Maybe Venezuela will get lucky in its recovery and people will stop emigrating from it the second they get a chance, but its very unlikely they will return considering just how long it will take for the country to be bearable again. You can see examples of countries struggling to recover its expats even as their economies boom with Poland and Ireland.
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Sep 20, 2017 21:19
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fnox posted:I mean it could be. I for sure am never coming back to Venezuela, or at least I'm never resettling into Venezuela because I wouldn't commit my future children (if I ever have any) to all of the uncertainty that came with my upbringing in Venezuela. But I'm sure my opinion doesn't reflect that of the majority, and there is a significant portion of the Bolivarian disapora that wants to return to Venezuela once it starts showing signs of getting better. Anybody who had the foresight to, for example, buy real state at massively reduced prices due to the crisis, would see huge returns once the economy stabilizes... Venezuela has no future. Economic recovery is impossible in the context of a warming planet; it's too close to the equator, and the thermohaline circulation shutting down will broil the country. It's hosed forever.
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Sep 20, 2017 21:45
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fnox posted:
I don't think the idea is that people will "return" so to speak. I think it's the creation of a sort of trans-national class with sympathetic ties to the origin country with enough knowledge of its culture and society to effect greater investment and support for a fledgling society. My love for Venezuelans will last until my ashes disappear from this Earth. But I would never live in Caracas, even well after the establishment of a new government and social order, I'm far too Americanized to tolerate living in LA again. That being said, I think it's important to have a population in the US and Europe that is at least sympathetic to Venezuela and amenable to investment and reconstruction. There's too few Venezuelan-Americans in my generation to make much of a difference; but I suspect the next generation, the children of millennials, will have a significant enough population in the US and Europe to steer Venezuelan society. Reconstruction will be a multi-generational project. For sure, Venezuela will never be Saudi Venezuela again, as painful as that may be to consider; the air of Venezuelan exceptionalism is lost. But I don't think that means all is lost. This is definitely some big picture stuff though and the current situation is incredibly tragic so focus should definitely be on that first. Though I do feel powerless under current circumstances. Conspiratiorist posted:Venezuela has no future. Economic recovery is impossible in the context of a warming planet; it's too close to the equator, and the thermohaline circulation shutting down will broil the country. Yes, and then a giant "Category 6" hurricane caused by global warming will wipe out Miami, taking the rest of us with it, then finally the prophecy will be fulfilled. Gabo posted:for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth. elgatofilo fucked around with this message at 23:16 on Sep 20, 2017 |
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Sep 20, 2017 22:40
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That line of Trumps speech about 'Socialism being faithfully implemented' being the issue really reflects on how the government seizing all the means of production has flopped so much in venezuela. What good is saying that the government will control all production of every factory when there are no plans to keep running the place, and just let it sit and rot? Venezuelan agriculture was shredded by the poor implementation of the seizure and breakup of big agriculture farms and the aftermath.
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Sep 20, 2017 23:24
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elgatofilo posted:I don't think the idea is that people will "return" so to speak. I think it's the creation of a sort of trans-national class with sympathetic ties to the origin country with enough knowledge of its culture and society to effect greater investment and support for a fledgling society. What's interesting is that I have a cousin who just happens to be American born but raised by two born and raised Venezuelans, and he's also significantly more patriotic and more proud of Venezuela than I am, and I lived there my entire life. He's the one who brought a Venezuelan flag and a Vinotinto jersey to Sweden, not me. I can only explain it from my point of view, which is that those who have left more recently have seen the crisis in its full splendour, in its disgusting, horrifying glory, and they've for the most part, not actually communicated how bad it was to other people unless asked. I realise now that I've suppressed so many things about my life in the country, perhaps as a way to cope with my every day life there and to at least get through the day. I've also realised that I'm not the only one, I started talking about it more openly with Venezuelan friends and I've come to understand most of them have experienced true horror during their lives, even the most sheltered ones. I guess what I'm saying is that, your optimism may be stemming from the fact that you don't really get just how badly it deteriorated. I don't blame you for it, it is a legitimately very hard thing to appreciate, even for people who experienced it, but the extent of the damage that Nicolas Maduro and Hugo Chavez have inflicted on the country is so severe that even its culture may have been turned into something that is not quite like you imagine it. The country cannot be ran by people living outside of it, and it's been far too long for some of the best people of this generation to consider returning. Venezuela will have to create its own saviours.
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Sep 20, 2017 23:33
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fnox posted:What's interesting is that I have a cousin who just happens to be American born but raised by two born and raised Venezuelans, and he's also significantly more patriotic and more proud of Venezuela than I am, and I lived there my entire life. He's the one who brought a Venezuelan flag and a Vinotinto jersey to Sweden, not me. I can only explain it from my point of view, which is that those who have left more recently have seen the crisis in its full splendour, in its disgusting, horrifying glory, and they've for the most part, not actually communicated how bad it was to other people unless asked. I realise now that I've suppressed so many things about my life in the country, perhaps as a way to cope with my every day life there and to at least get through the day. I've also realised that I'm not the only one, I started talking about it more openly with Venezuelan friends and I've come to understand most of them have experienced true horror during their lives, even the most sheltered ones. I am also the product of two born and raised Venezuelans. I wouldn't say I'm particularly proud or patriotic towards Venezuela (the current situation elicits feelings more like sadness and embarrassment.), I consider the US to be my home and my country and I've never presented myself as anything other than American (though technically I am a natural born citizen of Venezuela.) I am very much interested in hearing about the experiences of those who lived there and to that end I have spoken to many of the recent immigrants. I've seen there is a deep pain and grief associated with leaving and a sense of betrayal. Many have experienced significant trauma that's left deep wounds (physical and mental.) I am currently looking into pursuing a research project on the psychological aspects of the Venezuelan diaspora population (finding a big enough sample has been an issue though.) I know this second-generation patriotism seems strange, but I think it's a response to the current wave of anti-immigrant sentiment and racism towards latinos in the US, which has colored the experiences of second-generation immigrants substantially. For example, when someone asks me where I'm from (and white people always do), they're never satisfied with "California" and this will be followed with questions like "I mean, where are you REALLY from?" etc. I've also had people tell me I'm not a real American and to "go back to my country" (go back where?) And once they finally do figure out I'm Venezuelan, they want to talk about what they've seen on the news (as if I had some special insight into a situation I've never lived.) So I think that's something to keep in mind as far as our experiences being second generation in this country. I can't exactly hide what I am, porque quién le quita la cara de venezolanito a uno? I have found the Venezuelan people, however, to be a very friendly and welcoming community of generous people. I understand this is likely a feature of the diaspora community and not of Venezuelans currently in Venezuela. Still, preserving the culture even as a sort of "culture-in-exile", is important I think. I did live in Venezuela for a short period of time (1994-2000) before the "socialism of the 21st century" destroyed it. Even then, we lived in Colombia after, so I was not completely disconnected from what was happening. Having lived in Colombia is partially one of the reasons that I believe there can be some form of positive force wielded by outsiders. I have seen members of the Colombian diaspora exert some control over its internal affairs and some have even returned (not nearly as many as left of course, Colombia lost well over 2,000,000 to the diaspora.) Unlike Venezuelans, there are a lot of second-generation Colombian-Americans, and some of them do have the will and means to exert influence. So the optimism is more rooted in what I've seen in some other countries. Venezuela's situation is unique, of course, so I'm not saying that what happened in other countries will necessarily happen there or that it will happen in the near future.
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Sep 21, 2017 00:47
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elgatofilo posted:for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth. Man, I love that ending. I still re-read that book every year and it never disappoints. fnox posted:What's interesting is that I have a cousin who just happens to be American born but raised by two born and raised Venezuelans, and he's also significantly more patriotic and more proud of Venezuela than I am, and I lived there my entire life. He's the one who brought a Venezuelan flag and a Vinotinto jersey to Sweden, not me. I can only explain it from my point of view, which is that those who have left more recently have seen the crisis in its full splendour, in its disgusting, horrifying glory, and they've for the most part, not actually communicated how bad it was to other people unless asked. I realise now that I've suppressed so many things about my life in the country, perhaps as a way to cope with my every day life there and to at least get through the day. I've also realised that I'm not the only one, I started talking about it more openly with Venezuelan friends and I've come to understand most of them have experienced true horror during their lives, even the most sheltered ones. I agree with your sentiment and I'm one of those sheltered people you talk about. I've basically been half-hermit this past couple of years and once I leave, I don't have any plans whatsoever of coming back. I don't feel attached to the culture, the people, or even the place (maybe only arepas). It may be that nostalgia kicks in once I've been out for a while, but I don't think I'll miss Venezuela in the slightest. All of my friends are already scattered throughout the world, so the only contact I'll have with this place is the family that's staying behind, but they're adults and they're making a choice of their own. If they want to leave I'll help them, but that's it. It sounds callous, but I think a lot of people that leave have a very romanticized idea about Venezuela because they associate it with their youth of the happy moments they had here. I'm sure the current government will fall sooner than later, but we still have to deal with the amazing level of corruption and crime that's left behind. I'm literally planning to leave in a few months and my biggest worry right now aren't the logistics of where I'll arrive, but rather the national guard trying to rob me on my way out, which is all too common these days.
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Sep 21, 2017 01:46
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Pharohman777 posted:That line of Trumps speech about 'Socialism being faithfully implemented' being the issue really reflects on how the government seizing all the means of production has flopped so much in venezuela. That seems like poor implementation though. I don't think you are supposed to seize it and then do nothing with it but I'm not a scholar on socialism.
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Sep 21, 2017 06:28
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Labradoodle posted:It sounds callous, but I think a lot of people that leave have a very romanticized idea about Venezuela because they associate it with their youth of the happy moments they had here. I'm sure the current government will fall sooner than later, but we still have to deal with the amazing level of corruption and crime that's left behind. I'm literally planning to leave in a few months and my biggest worry right now aren't the logistics of where I'll arrive, but rather the national guard trying to rob me on my way out, which is all too common these days. We left the country 20 years ago, and I think that there was a brief window during which we may have gone back if the country had suddenly fixed itself. I think that window was no more than 3-5 years, because after that we'd become so accustomed to living here. I would never move back to Venezuela, but my mother still has those romanticized ideas that you're talking about. She talks about how safe and clean Caracas was while they were growing up, how much fun she had with friends hanging out at any hour of the night, etc. I think that when people over a certain age say that they want to go back to Venezuela, what they really mean is that they want to go back in time to the Venezuela of their youth. For people like you, fnox, and me, the Venezuela of our youth isn't any kind of place to go back to. elgatofilo posted:It would seem that at the moment some of the more stable Latin American countries are those that have long-standing and significant diaspora populations: Mexico, Colombia and Chile. I don't believe this is simply a result of the "escape valve" hypothesis Mexico City is so fond of, where potentially subversive elements choose to emigrate, instead of incite social revolution. Some newer research (e.g. http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/IJM-08-2015-0116) seems to suggest that having a diaspora population in developed countries can help to significantly increase investment, improve living standards and increase the technical knowledge base of the country of origin. So quite the opposite of the "brain drain" myth. This makes sense, and I think we're even seeing a version of this happening right now with how many Venezuelans living abroad send food/money/medicine to relatives still in the country. Hopefully, the reconstruction era will be ushered in by a government that isn't openly hostile to Venezuelans living abroad, so we'll see an even greater and more organized level of cross-border/generation assistance. EDIT: Pharohman777 posted:That line of Trumps speech about 'Socialism being faithfully implemented' being the issue really reflects on how the government seizing all the means of production has flopped so much in venezuela. I think that there's a continuum, with "Expropriation" (seizing the instruments of labour to end capitalist exploitation of workers, etc.) on one end and "Theft" (I'm taking your stuff so I can make a quick buck) on the other. I think that what we've seen in Venezuela is much closer to the "Theft" side of the continuum. Chuck Boone fucked around with this message at 13:50 on Sep 21, 2017 |
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Sep 21, 2017 13:44
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Chuck Boone posted:We left the country 20 years ago, and I think that there was a brief window during which we may have gone back if the country had suddenly fixed itself. I think that window was no more than 3-5 years, because after that we'd become so accustomed to living here. I would never move back to Venezuela, but my mother still has those romanticized ideas that you're talking about. She talks about how safe and clean Caracas was while they were growing up, how much fun she had with friends hanging out at any hour of the night, etc. I think that when people over a certain age say that they want to go back to Venezuela, what they really mean is that they want to go back in time to the Venezuela of their youth. For people like you, fnox, and me, the Venezuela of our youth isn't any kind of place to go back to. My (now aging) parents have definitely softened in this way. But, the experience is a little different. They were always disaffected Venezuelans, they left over 30 years ago, after all. Some of it has to do with disappointment at the immigrant experience in this country. Both my parents are professionals with advanced degrees and so their expectations at how they should be treated are likely much higher than average. I think what they yearn for is a sort of golden age where they felt more respected. As for me and other older, millenial professionals. We definitely had very high expectations of how we would be treated in American society and those expectations haven't been met. I was at a conference last year and saw some very interesting preliminary research from Nancy Landale's lab at Penn on Latino diaspora communities. This is one of the few social science labs doing any research at all on Latinos in the US, much less second-generation Latinos (who might as well not exist to eyes of researchers.) Some of it has been published now (http://news.psu.edu/story/472701/2017/06/22/research/young-american-latinos-report-most-discrimination <- pub press blurb) and it confirms what many of us already knew, that second-generation Latinos experience the highest levels of interpersonal discrimination in the US of any ethnic group. Having lived in Latin America, I sometimes joke with people that I was white but ever since I came back people tell me I'm "ethnic" and "diverse" so I guess I'm un negro now. Chuck Boone posted:This makes sense, and I think we're even seeing a version of this happening right now with how many Venezuelans living abroad send food/money/medicine to relatives still in the country. Hopefully, the reconstruction era will be ushered in by a government that isn't openly hostile to Venezuelans living abroad, so we'll see an even greater and more organized level of cross-border/generation assistance. Remittances will definitely play a role (they do in Mexico, for example.) Another aspect, tying in to the above on discrimination, is that some second-generation Latinos are actually expressing a desire to move back. I have a friend from college, Colombian-American, now an MD, who is seriously considering moving back to Bogotá to practice there. The reasoning is along the lines of "big fish, little pond" thinking. It is difficult to be a professional with an advanced degree in this country and have to swallow the bitter pill of discrimination when you've worked just as hard as any white person your whole life to earn those degrees and that respect. A lot of people don't realize discrimination can actually get worse the higher up in society and in your career you move. I don't have this same "escape hatch" option other Latinos have (not that I'm sure I would use it even if I could, I do love this country for all its flaws.) But it does get me thinking about what the future might look like for the Venezuelan diaspora community as it ages and settles into their host countries. Additionally, many of us are now at an age where marriage and children are likely in our near future and some of us would like to start families in our same ethnic group. It sounds cheesy, but these third-generation immigrants are also likely to play a vital role as the old institutions of assimilation are undergoing dramatic collapse in the US and are being replaced with strong ethnic-political identities. Long gone are the days where an immigrant could come to this country and expect their second-generation children to be fully assimilated "Americans" with no further ethnic identities.
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Sep 21, 2017 15:25
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elgatofilo posted:Long gone are the days where an immigrant could come to this country and expect their second-generation children to be fully assimilated "Americans" with no further ethnic identities. Those days never existed.
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Sep 22, 2017 15:44
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Squalid posted:Those days never existed. It happened to English and Scots-Irish immigrants - because they were the core culture at work in America from the start (and also the ones most likely to identify as just "American" when asked ethnicity today). It also happened with German immigrants after the double whammy of the World Wars demonizing the whole ethnicity and severely crippled existing German identity in the US despite it being the largest single European ancestry group. Everyone else though, yeah never happened.
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Sep 22, 2017 16:46
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fishmech posted:It happened to English and Scots-Irish immigrants - because they were the core culture at work in America from the start (and also the ones most likely to identify as just "American" when asked ethnicity today). It also happened with German immigrants after the double whammy of the World Wars demonizing the whole ethnicity and severely crippled existing German identity in the US despite it being the largest single European ancestry group. You're making it sound like it is immigrant's fault for not trying hard enough to be "American" (or perhaps not having enough "Protestant" culture.) If only I had been a good little immigrant then maybe papi Trump will let me stay on this side of the wall and white people will stop asking me where I'm really from. Screw all those years I spent in college and grad school to get a profession. I'm starting my landscaping business today "El Gato Volador's Arepas y Lánscaping." We all know being Latino in the US sucks in 2017. I already did what I had to do and moved out of the West Coast to Florida (America's dysfunctional Quebec.) In any case, it is still infinitely better than being anyone in Venezuela right now and I would encourage Venezuelans to continue immigrating here.
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Sep 22, 2017 17:50
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elgatofilo posted:You're making it sound like it is immigrant's fault for not trying hard enough to be "American" (or perhaps not having enough "Protestant" culture.) Nah what I'm getting at is that main groups who got that sort of thing were a) the people already in charge, so they don't even need to change anything, and then b) the people who got so hated they had to hide all of it - but were still able to blend in with "normal" white-as-hell culture. That's not something most other people have the ability to control for themselves, nor is it even desirable. For the Germans it was a last ditch effort when Germany itself had ruined their reputation hard enough for them to flee their identity and accept "American" as the one they're often still doing even today. Most other immigrant origins either can't do that at all (anyone of other races most especially, because of racism) or never bothered to do it as there was not much of a real reason to do it. 
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Sep 22, 2017 18:32
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This is pretty unrelated but I hate how America uses the word "Latino" to refer to literally all of Latin America, despite how no Venezuelan in their right mind would consider their culture to be similar to Mexican, Argentinian or Brazilian culture. It's such a narrow term for such a broad group of people I'm amazed that Latin Americans ever embraced it. I think a huge problem with America is that they'll try to put you into a convenient category no matter what, and that's where the stereotypes come from.
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Sep 22, 2017 19:53
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fnox posted:This is pretty unrelated but I hate how America uses the word "Latino" to refer to literally all of Latin America, despite how no Venezuelan in their right mind would consider their culture to be similar to Mexican, Argentinian or Brazilian culture. It's such a narrow term for such a broad group of people I'm amazed that Latin Americans ever embraced it. I think a huge problem with America is that they'll try to put you into a convenient category no matter what, and that's where the stereotypes come from. It's actually worse than that, Americans literally believe "Latino" is a race. I have had supposedly serious academics and social scientists argue this point with me. It's not so much that Latin Americans embraced the label, with the exception of some native populations of Mexican descent, who use it as a gloss for Mexican-American, which I find problematic. The label is thrust upon you by other people, you have no say in the matter. Depending on where you live in the US this labeling can get worse. In Florida, Latin Americans retain some degree of separate ethnicities. In California, we are all Mexican (I once had someone there tell me I was the "least-Mexican Mexican they had ever met".) Americans have also become hypersensitive to detecting "Latinos" and go out of their way to make sure you know what you are. Basically anyone even just a bit swarthy or with dark features is a suspected Latino or "Spanish" (this might catch some southern Europeans and middle easterners in their net, but why waste a good opportunity to be racist?) elgatofilo fucked around with this message at 21:26 on Sep 22, 2017 |
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Sep 22, 2017 21:00
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I mean if you want to break it down, it basically comes from adopting specifically Mexican racial caste systems into US usage during the time that the US was seizing huge amounts of Mexican territory and threatening to take a whole lot more, which naturally came with a bunch of the people already living there. Most of the ruling elite considered themselves fully white and "Spanish", often their descendants still report that way today. They treated the various levels of intermarriage with natives and/or Africans who'd mostly been imported as slaves as essentially another, lesser race. As time went on white American culture generally kept treating the mestizos and other related groups as an inferior race, often with less rights and all that, while the upper crust whites of the area and who would later immigrate kept treating themselves as just as white as the others and were treated the same in return. As other people from former Spanish Empire territories immigrated in large numbers, or got annexed outright in the wake of the Spanish-American War, these Mexico-inherited practices of discrimination against most of those populations were continued (as well as often being in place still when the places were annexed). So a a shared identity among those oppressed under this whole system really started to develop over the course of the 20th century and into the civil rights era when it basically crystallized and started to get picked up by those not particularly harassed by it, and even some who were benefiting from it. Like if you were a Puerto Rican of not absolutely pure Spanish bloodline immigrating to New York City in the 50s, you were likely to be getting shut out of things in similar ways to how someone of partial native Mexican heritage living in Los Angeles in the 50s in a place where your family had been living since well before the Mexican Cession would get. So with those growing links of solidarity against how anglo-white America had been treating them, you get a lot of advocacy groups developing and pushing to be recognized as a unified group. That's how you get things like the Census first half-assing a "do you consider yourself latino/hispanic" question in 1970, which was protested for only being part of a limited-reach additional form and not having an education campaign in Spanish to make people aware of it. The 1980 census would introduce it as a normal question on all forms in the race area. I've mentioned Mexico and Puerto Rico a lot here, but that's because they're by far the biggest. People who identify as Mexican are like 32 million people and then there's about 5 million Puerto Ricans who live in the 50 states + DC on top of all the Puerto Ricans who still live in PR - so between PR and Mexico you've got nearly 75% of those who identify as Hispanic/Latino these days. And note that in official terms it isn't marked as race, it's marked as ethnicity. Of course, racists are going to call them another inferior race, regardless. And it's not like race is much more than a fake idea in the first place.
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Sep 22, 2017 21:43
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Huh, I never knew that.
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Sep 22, 2017 22:13
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I have only met 1 Venezuelan in the world and he was my neighbour 7 years ago. Was a pretty chill exchange student but he had a bad trip with drugs and went crazy. The next day he fled the cops and went back to Caracas. His aunt was about to be pregnant and he was casually saying that all the Venezuelans just go to Florida to have babies. So I don't really know much about the culture. How is it different from Mexican culture? I guess it's as generic as asking what's the difference between Japanese and Koreans. Or Auzzies and Americans. I guess I'm really curious about the border regions, were people always Venezuelan or can switch to being Colombians? And with the shared language, how long does it take change your habits after immigration? Like if you do go to Venezuelan, how different will you sound? I'm curious how a naturalized Australian speak compared to a naturalized American
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Sep 22, 2017 23:11
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caberham posted:I have only met 1 Venezuelan in the world and he was my neighbour 7 years ago. Was a pretty chill exchange student but he had a bad trip with drugs and went crazy. The next day he fled the cops and went back to Caracas. His aunt was about to be pregnant and he was casually saying that all the Venezuelans just go to Florida to have babies. So, the core difference between Latin American nations is that they all, for the most part, can trace back their heritage to one of four large indigenous groups: Mexicans and central Americans come from the Aztec civilization, countries along the Andes mountain range and some of the Southern Cone descend from the Inca; Brazil includes a couple thousand smaller tribes, but it does share Guarani heritage with Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay. Venezuela, and Colombia were instead settled by the Caribe, and the Arawak peoples who, unlike the larger civilizations of the Aztec and Inca, didn't leave major cultural artifacts, nothing in the scale of Machu Pichu or the Aztec pyramids. Note, this is a huge oversimplification, but it matters because these groups are racially very distinct. Latin America, unlike Asia, experienced a huge amount of race mixing between the natives, the white colonizers, and the African slaves they brought with them. This racial intermingling occurred in basically every Latin American country, but to widely varying degrees. While Brazil had a ton of African slaves and thus lots of race mixing happened with African peoples; in Bolivia colonizers didn't import slaves and instead enslaved the native population to mine for silver, which in turn resulted in the mixing being more skewed towards native peoples. This race mixing is further complicated by later waves of European migration, the largest of which went to Argentina. Venezuela experienced such a migration wave, but it also had a rather even split of Spanish, indigenous and African peoples already living in it. The end result is some Latin American nations being racially distinct, while some others are a clusterfuck of races like Venezuela and thus don't really have a racial identity. In terms of dialects, they are tremendously distinct and usually someone who knows what to listen to can tell where someone is from depending on how they speak. A native speaker can readily tell apart an Argentinian accent from a Mexican one as they developed completely differently. Separating a Colombian accent from a Venezuelan accent is a bit harder to someone who only knows a bit about the language, but they are distinct enough for a Venezuelan to notice it nearly immediately. As a matter of fact, there's 4 or so large accent groups within Venezuela, so you can even tell where somebody is from depending on how they speak. I'm of course excluding the centuries of modern independent culture all of these countries have. So in short, yeah, they're very different, different not only culturally but racially too, in fact. It's why putting everyone in the "Latino" label doesn't make sense. fnox fucked around with this message at 14:35 on Sep 23, 2017 |
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Sep 23, 2017 05:57
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fishmech posted:Fishmech whitesplains race to the browns. Coño, sé nos alzó la fishmech. That's an incredibly oversimplified and Americanized version of Latin American race relations. Latin Americans think of race in much more fluid terms than that. I am not denying there are forms of racism in Latin America, but it does not work the way you are describing it and using "race" to describe mixed heritage people is a misnomer for qualifying how Latin Americans (even "white" ones) think of this. It's also not applicable to Venezuelans or Venezuelan society. Your narrative ignores the fact that southern Europeans (which make up the bulk of what you're calling "upper crust whites") were not considered white at the time of the Mexican-American war. Nor did they "later immigrate" to the US and impose some racialist order; they never left Mexico and their descendents are still there today (e.g. the current president of Mexico.) Also, in Latin American diasporas that did have virtually all of their "white" people immigrate (i.e. the Cuban diaspora) most of those people are still not considered white. I don't know of any white person that seriously considers Marco Rubio white. The only time I've seen white people question someone's latinity is in the case of very Germanic/Nordic looking Latinos (very blonde, blue eyes.) This is not what most "white" Latinos look like; hell, it's not even what most Spaniards and southern Italians look like today. The current racism towards "Latinos" is an entirely white American concotion. It is clearly heavily influenced by early American racialist theories (e.g. "one drop rule") and has very little to do with the old Spanish "casta" system (which always had flexible, permeable boundaries and was never very strictly enforced) and everything to do with the American racial hierarchy system, which has rigid and unforgiving racial boundaries and is strictly enforced by Americans even today. elgatofilo fucked around with this message at 15:59 on Sep 23, 2017 |
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Sep 23, 2017 15:47
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fnox posted:I'm of course excluding the centuries of modern independent culture all of these countries have. So in short, yeah, they're very different, different not only culturally but racially too, in fact. It's why putting everyone in the "Latino" label doesn't make sense. People insist on calling me a European even though this is the continent of OG nationalism and legitimate races and I'm frankly insulted to be lumped in the same group as those race -mixing spaniards who don't even exist as a real natio... I suppose for Americans it's more of a race thing since race in the US is seen as some kind of immutable and inheritable status and not a form of self-identification. But besides that, me calling you a latino doesn't automatically mean I'm somehow denying you the right to identify as a member of a distinct nation or tribe or some other group, it's just a question of me noting (from my narrow point of view) that you're part of some group that shares certain cultural commonalities co-created by your shared history or whatever. As for south american cultural continuities before the time of colonization, I had thought the view that native cultures where pretty much obliterated and whatever populations left after the great plagues were forcibly assimilated into the colonial ruling cultures, barring those groups that managed to maintain their cultural identities as tribal members to this day, was the concensus view. Dunno if that's chauvinistic, but I had thought that distinct South American identities as members of different nations started conciously emerging only around the time of the Bolivarian Revolutions? lollontee fucked around with this message at 16:18 on Sep 23, 2017 |
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Sep 23, 2017 16:14
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caberham posted:I have only met 1 Venezuelan in the world and he was my neighbour 7 years ago. Was a pretty chill exchange student but he had a bad trip with drugs and went crazy. The next day he fled the cops and went back to Caracas. His aunt was about to be pregnant and he was casually saying that all the Venezuelans just go to Florida to have babies. By and large continental LATAM is culturally about the same - by way of comparison, the difference is more like between the different regions of the US, rather than the difference between the US and the UK. There are of course stereotypes like "Argentinians are proud and hate everyone, especially other Argentinians", which is true, but anyone who tells you how the people of X or Y LATAM country are just so warm and kind and welcoming and culturally distinct is really just jerking himself off. Accents, on the other hand, are very noticeable to native speakers: Puerto Rico sounds fairly different from Mexico sounds fairly different from further down in Central America and then past the Darien Gap and as you go further south along SA. And it's often a regional thing rather than a specific border divide, too, so in particular the larger countries can have multiple distinct accents. RE migrants, accents deform a bit but essentially never change, unless you're one of those weird exceptions that after a year or two is basically pronouncing things like a local. Culturally, as I said, it's the same poo poo so it's not like people adjust their habits really, beyond picking up local idioms for the sake of clarity
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Sep 23, 2017 16:14
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elgatofilo posted:Also, in Latin American diasporas that did have virtually all of their "white" people immigrate (i.e. the Cuban diaspora) most of those people are still not considered white. I don't know of any white person that seriously considers Marco Rubio white. The only time I've seen white people question someone's latinity is in the case of very Germanic/Nordic looking Latinos (very blonde, blue eyes.) This is not what most "white" Latinos look like; hell, it's not even what most Spaniards and southern Italians look like today. If Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz said they were white, nobody but pedantic racists would really disagree. As someone who lives in Florida, I know plenty of people of Cuban descent who basically are considered white by everyone unless they themselves make a point of saying otherwise. Maybe it's different in Miami where there's a greater concentration and greater likelihood of retaining the accent, but elsewhere second or third generation Cubans (at least those with relatively light skin) are essentially white, and intermarriage is ultimately going to do a lot to erase the distinction for a lot of the Hispanic population in general.
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Sep 23, 2017 16:19
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Sinteres posted:If Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz said they were white, nobody but pedantic racists would really disagree. As someone who lives in Florida, I know plenty of people of Cuban descent who basically are considered white by everyone unless they themselves make a point of saying otherwise. Maybe it's different in Miami where there's a greater concentration and greater likelihood of retaining the accent, but elsewhere second or third generation Cubans (at least those with relatively light skin) are essentially white, and intermarriage is ultimately going to do a lot to erase the distinction for a lot of the Hispanic population in general. You know, the only people I can remember ever talking earnestly whether some dude or another was white or not, were Americans. This whole race thing you got going is a psychosis solely of your own creation, mate.
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Sep 23, 2017 16:22
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lollontee posted:You know, the only people I can remember ever talking earnestly whether some dude or another was white or not, were Americans. This whole race thing you got going is a psychosis solely of your own creation, mate. I thought Americans were obsessed with race until I talked to a Chilean girl who talked about how proud she was when she dyed her hair blonde and people thought it was really hers, and that all of her friends thought she was lucky for having a European last name. She refused to believe me when I told her being too pale is actually considered a bad thing here. I don't know if that kind of thing happens elsewhere in Latin America, or if Chile is a particularly egregious example, but denying that racial hierarchies based on skin color unfortunately exist in many parts of the world is ridiculous. My point was just that in the US, after two or three generations, the hierarchy tends to reset to black people and then everyone else.
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Sep 23, 2017 16:30
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lollontee posted:You know, the only people I can remember ever talking earnestly whether some dude or another was white or not, were Americans. This whole race thing you got going is a psychosis solely of your own creation, mate. Yeah as a Canadian, from Toronto, Rubio's looks just some random white guy. Considering how many Italians and Portuguese immigrants are here, what else would he be?
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Sep 23, 2017 16:32
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Sinteres posted:I thought Americans were obsessed with race until I talked to a Chilean girl who talked about how proud she was when she dyed her hair blonde and people thought it was really hers, and that all of her friends thought she was lucky for having a European last name. She refused to believe me when I told her being too pale is actually considered a bad thing here. I don't know if that kind of thing happens elsewhere in Latin America, or if Chile is a particularly egregious example, but denying that racial hierarchies based on skin color unfortunately exist in many parts of the world is ridiculous. My point was just that in the US, after two or three generations, the hierarchy tends to reset to black people and then everyone else. Jesus... well, I don't deny that people can't be racist shitheads regardless of nationality, I'm just saying that the only people I can think of that generally care about the exact definition of which race everyone belongs to have (in my experience) been Americans. It doesn't need to be malicious, but it is a bit of a weirdout for me at least.
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Sep 23, 2017 16:39
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elgatofilo posted:Coño, sé nos alzó la fishmech. For real, it's like Americans can't wrap their heads around the fact that, while there is subtle and not so subtle racism in Latin America, it manifests as a fairly individualized prejudice/bias directed towards people whose mixed heritage (and it is always mixed) leans towards the more distinct ends (nordic european, central european, african, indigenous, asian) of the ethnic spectrum. LATAM is classist as gently caress, though. In fact, the more overt examples of racism are directly related to that: the association that indigenous and african-looking people may come from poorer backgrounds, "uncultured", and on the other end, a more "european" look or even just a loving surname being aesthetically desirable or associated with wealth. But actual, real discrimination for race, just race, is idiocy that lies very firmly in the heads of people with more money than brains having a bad case of the First World Problems. lollontee posted:Jesus... well, I don't deny that people can't be racist shitheads regardless of nationality, I'm just saying that the only people I can think of that generally care about the exact definition of which race everyone belongs to have (in my experience) been Americans. It doesn't need to be malicious, but it is a bit of a weirdout for me at least. That's it. That's precisely it. In Latin America, unless you're a bona fide 1st or 2nd generation migrant from an ethnically distinct region, or from an out-of-the-way indigenous enclave, you're just part of the melting pot. But since we're dwelling in that particular anecdote, Brazil, Argentina and Chile do have a noticeably worse case of anal spelunking regarding the "European look" that I mentioned. Conspiratiorist fucked around with this message at 16:51 on Sep 23, 2017 |
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Sep 23, 2017 16:40
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Sinteres posted:If Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz said they were white, nobody but pedantic racists would really disagree. As someone who lives in Florida, I know plenty of people of Cuban descent who basically are considered white by everyone unless they themselves make a point of saying otherwise. Maybe it's different in Miami where there's a greater concentration and greater likelihood of retaining the accent, but elsewhere second or third generation Cubans (at least those with relatively light skin) are essentially white, and intermarriage is ultimately going to do a lot to erase the distinction for a lot of the Hispanic population in general. "Pedantic racists" is a bit of an oxymoron, most Americans who go through the trouble of acquiring racist attitudes take them very seriously. Just because in the Florida bubble Latinos have cowed the native whites into submission on our racial positions does not mean that's how they act elsewhere. White Floridians show a very high degree of circumspection in treating Latinos respectfully. On the west coast, white people home into Latinos like racist tomahawk missiles. I am not a dark skinned Latino (my father is Italian, born in Genoa and raised in Venezuela, and my mother is a very light skinned Venezuelan.) in Florida, I'm usually glossed as "Jewish" or occasionally Irish or Italian (nominally correct I suppose) by people who don't know me. Elsewhere in the country, however, I have been genuinely surprised at racist comments directed at me from out of the blue by people who know nothing about me other than my appearance (along with the perennial "where are you REALLY from?".) White intermarriage will eventually erase a lot of differences for some Latino populations. Personally, I believe the process of White/Latino intermarriage will result in the eventual latinamericanization of race in the US (as outlined in the excellent book Racism without Racists by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva.) As for America 2017, it is worth noting that white people are casting wider and wider nets as to what constitutes "non-whiteness" and that there are regional differences in the treatment of Latinos across the country.
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Sep 23, 2017 16:57
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lollontee posted:People insist on calling me a European even though this is the continent of OG nationalism and legitimate races and I'm frankly insulted to be lumped in the same group as those race -mixing spaniards who don't even exist as a real natio... That's the thing, the group shares less things in common than the average person thinks they do. The only reason we can understand each other is because, unlike many other languages, Spanish has a single language regulator (the RAE) which has been followed by every country in Latin America, otherwise, the language would have degenerated into mutually unintelligible regional dialects a long time ago. It's annoying to me to see how no American wants to be mistaken for a Canadian, or even how a Texan doesn't want to be confused for an Idahoan, but they won't extend the same courtesy to the more than a dozen Latin American countries, who have existed for hundreds of years. As for native cultures, they didn't completely disappear. Sure, the Inca and Aztec civilisations were nearly completely wiped out, but they didn't vanish. They weren't the same people all over either, even smaller tribes had split off from the larger ones by thousands upon thousands of years. I mean Caracas itself is named after one of those tribes. They're not completely gone from the heritage of Latin America, in some countries those tribes never actually died out.
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Sep 23, 2017 17:08
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fnox posted:Here's a fun little topic that came up when talking about the future of the country with fellow Venezuelans: dollarization. Could wrestling control of monetary policy away from inept and corrupt Venezuelan politicians serve as a way to incentivize foreign investment and speed up the recovery of the country? It would certainly prevent nefarious schemes like CADIVI from ever being formed in the future, and the country is already de facto dollarized as most products can only be found being sold at their US price at black market exchange rates. A lot of these products are very literally resold items from Amazon. Of course, on the downside, this would immediately mean that the poor would start realising just how poor they are when they start actually making 10 dollars a month. The only way this could ever be implemented would be by having humanitarian aid for years in order to feed half of the population. Well I don't think the Bolivar is going to able to hold up even in the medium term, confidence in it is dead. As for simply using dollars for long periods of time may put Venezuela in an awkward position in the future, since it would not longer have an independent monetary policy. It may feel like a good thing initially due to how poor the PSUV handled affairs but it very well backfire. The problem Venezuela is going have in the future, is probably pretty giant debt payments and without its own currency (and very little reserves), the only answer would be to take further loans or try to sell off what little is left. Ultimately, dollars would be more transparent and it would take power out of the hands of any government...but then you have the consequences of a relatively powerless government that can't pay its bills. Also, there would probably be pretty strong capital outlows (although Venezuela is already pretty decapitalized at this point). Foreign investment would almost certainly be directed mostly to petroleum production in either case.
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Sep 23, 2017 18:44
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Ardennes posted:Well I don't think the Bolivar is going to able to hold up even in the medium term, confidence in it is dead. As for simply using dollars for long periods of time may put Venezuela in an awkward position in the future, since it would not longer have an independent monetary policy. It may feel like a good thing initially due to how poor the PSUV handled affairs but it very well backfire. The problem Venezuela is going have in the future, is probably pretty giant debt payments and without its own currency (and very little reserves), the only answer would be to take further loans or try to sell off what little is left. If the Venezuelan government remains the same, then yes, they will have no option but to sell everything until they run out and collapse. If we're talking a total regime change to a government that promises to strictly adhere to neoliberal policies, then Venezuela will have many options to restructure its sovereign debt. There are already many serious economists and lawyers working on this what if scenario (it involves a lot of international and corporate law "creative accounting") https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3006680 . Investors have notoriously short memories when it comes to sovereign debt. Frankly, the media image that Venezuela projects and the overall health of the global debt market following a regime change will play a far bigger role in determining Venezuela's future access to debt markets. Investors will 10000x over prefer to lend to a country with a high debt load that super duper promises to forever adhere to neoliberal IMF policies and has "corporate friendly" laws (regardless of how sincere that statement may actually be) than to a "socialist" country with a low debt load but hostile to foreign corporations and embarking in what investors consider to be unfruitful social experiments.
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Sep 23, 2017 21:32
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Re: racechat, second-generation patriots, and diaspora identities: Do they/you identify with the pre-columbian ethnic backgrounds of various Latin American countries, or use them to differentiate between different kinds of Latin Americans? Are these patriots big on a bourgeoisie contruct of being from "the political entity of Venezuela" or do they identify with the/a population of Venezuela? Somebody said that there aren't real cultural differences between even major regions, but identity often has very little to do with actual differences. Are there people who try to underscore what differences there are as a form of exceptionalism? E.g. I've seen US-Americans here claim fully in earnest that US states are more culturally distinct from each other than European nations. Do you get people claiming that, say, Venezuela and Colombia are like night and day? If so, what sort of people are they, politically or culturally? I'm also a "second-generation patriot", but in Europe and I don't give a rat's rear end about the polity, and rather identify myself with the ethnic group of my ancestors. That's an entirely unproblematic identity for me, as I don't have to mentally associate myself with any part of the actually existing old country that I don't like. It seems like the Chinese diaspora, for example, is divided between "ethnically Chinese", comparable to me, and "from the P.R. of China" cliques - I understand this to be a breakline between old Chinese communities in e.g. Southeast Asia and recent emigrants. I take it that pretty much nobody in this thread is for the government of Venezuela, so what are the building blocks of "being Venezuelan" for you? I'd go for ethnicity first, e.g. Arawak background, but I understand Venezuela and the New World in general to be too much of a melting pot for that to make sense for many or even most. Bourgeois patriotism seems like it'd require an attachment to something from decades ago and be irrelevant to young people. What's left? Family and social ties? Regionalism?
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Sep 23, 2017 23:33
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elgatofilo posted:If the Venezuelan government remains the same, then yes, they will have no option but to sell everything until they run out and collapse. It is up to Russia/China/vulture funds to agreeing to restructure, and while they may lengthen loans and Venezuela maybe can get bonds at higher prices/lower yields...I think don't think Venezuela is going to get around the debt itself. Also, I think both the Russians and Chinese know if there is regime change, they are almost certainly going to be protected and thats precisely why they seem to be buying as much as the country they can now when it is dirt cheap. That said, the fire sale is also keeping the regime in power. I do think there likely will be some type of stabilization when price controls are lifted, and Venezuela improves its credit rating but there is going to be a long over hang of debt that is going to be compounded by a severe revenue issue. Also, the IMF is going demand most of the subsidies go, especially fuel subsidies. Eh, Ukraine followed most of the rules on the macro-level and it didn't help them that much in broader economic terms. While Ukraine isn't as bad off as present-day Venezuela obviously, there has been very few signs of improvement.
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Sep 24, 2017 03:24
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Osama Dozen-Dongs posted:Re: racechat, second-generation patriots, and diaspora identities: To an extent, potentially yes. But most Latin Americans treat their mestizaje as a given (understanding we all have widely varying levels of it.) I wouldn't say it forms a big part of my identity other than knowledge that it's there and is a component of being Venezuelan so to speak. quote:Are these patriots big on a bourgeoisie contruct of being from "the political entity of Venezuela" or do they identify with the/a population of Venezuela? Somebody said that there aren't real cultural differences between even major regions, but identity often has very little to do with actual differences. Are there people who try to underscore what differences there are as a form of exceptionalism? E.g. I've seen US-Americans here claim fully in earnest that US states are more culturally distinct from each other than European nations. Do you get people claiming that, say, Venezuela and Colombia are like night and day? If so, what sort of people are they, politically or culturally? I'm not sure what a "bourgeoisie construct" is (is it a really snobby, high class construct that oppresses proletariat constructs?). Culture is, by definition, a social construct; it is real but artificial. As a result, there's no way to measure how "different" one culture is from another in any objective way, it is always qualitative and relative to what is being compared. There are many people that argue that Colombian and Venezuelan cultures are like night and day (there's been a few in this thread.) Social science research tells us that people who tend to magnify cultural differences are, overall, more conservative, higher in social dominance traits and highly value in-group loyalty. Basically, the same type of people that go around in your country saying "Oh, we're nothing like X, our way of doing Y is better" are present here (and in every human society since time began.) quote:I'm also a "second-generation patriot", but in Europe and I don't give a rat's rear end about the polity, and rather identify myself with the ethnic group of my ancestors. That's an entirely unproblematic identity for me, as I don't have to mentally associate myself with any part of the actually existing old country that I don't like. It seems like the Chinese diaspora, for example, is divided between "ethnically Chinese", comparable to me, and "from the P.R. of China" cliques - I understand this to be a breakline between old Chinese communities in e.g. Southeast Asia and recent emigrants. I take it that pretty much nobody in this thread is for the government of Venezuela, so what are the building blocks of "being Venezuelan" for you? A culture doesn't have to be around for millennia in order to be valid. I suppose my identity is similarly constructed to yours, I feel a connection to a long-standing ancestral homeland and to its history. Part of the Venezuelan identity is that we are a melting pot of many "races", we don't have to subscribe to specific ethnic-racial theories for this to work as a fully encompassing "ethnic identity". It's great if that's part of your identity, but it is not a necessary part of a person's identity, and this is the idea white people have trouble wrapping there heads around. When people ask me what ethnicity I am I simply say "Venezuelan", the same way you would say "Chinese." I don't go through some artificial racial-genetic elaboration of "well I'm 10% Arawak, 30% Spanish, 40% Italian...." because that would not be a cohesive Identity for me. If someone really presses the issue ("But you don't look like an X!?" which is "Where are you REALLY from?"s problematic brother) I might elaborate that my father was born in Italy, but this in itself already feels chintzy and overconstructed to me.
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Sep 24, 2017 06:17
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elgatofilo posted:To an extent, potentially yes. But most Latin Americans treat their mestizaje as a given (understanding we all have widely varying levels of it.) I wouldn't say it forms a big part of my identity other than knowledge that it's there and is a component of being Venezuelan so to speak. That's really interesting to me, because I hadn't considered that it might work like that at all. There isn't any reason the line has to be in prehistory, after all. elgatofilo posted:I'm not sure what a "bourgeoisie construct" is elgatofilo posted:I don't go through some artificial racial-genetic elaboration of "well I'm 10% Arawak, 30% Spanish, 40% Italian...." because that would not be a cohesive Identity for me. It's outside of the theme of this thread, obviously, but I wonder why US-Americans are so keen to do that racial breakup thing. I know that in the early independence period they had a very Old-World-bound identity where they saw themselves as a new Germanic group (or some specifically a new Anglo-Saxon group), so that you'd have Danes, Germans, Dutch and then English and American. I recall an article pointing to writings up to either the first or the second world war with this kind of thinking, but since then it's gone out of the window. As an outsider it seems like they feel very strongly about the idea of citizenship, but not enough to actually build their identities on it. Osama Dozen-Dongs fucked around with this message at 09:23 on Sep 24, 2017 |
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Sep 24, 2017 09:20
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re: racechat, both my parents were born and raised in Colombia but I was born stateside a couple years after they emigrated. We moved to South Texas when I was five and even with my Catholic school upbringing my class always skewed towards >50% Latino of some kind. Lots of third and fourth generation kids of lawyers, doctors, and other upper middle class professions thrown in with some army brats because I grew up near a military base. Plus, there were always the kids in my class who would deny being of Mexican descent to death but somehow understood (but couldn't speak) Spanish because of their abuelita who took care of them the first couple years of their lives. Even so, growing up everyone would mistake me for being run-of-the-mill whiteboy because I'm light-skinned and with no particular facial features "associated" with the swarthy "messican." I have an atypical last name that is either from Galicia or some archaic form of a Catalan last name, so in South Texas I was for some reason Canadian, because Texans think Canadians have weird last names or something. One time I corrected a redneck guy from my church, telling him my last name is Colombian, and he replied "You mean like Ohio?" After the correction would always come the follow up question "And your mom's white, right?". "Nah, my mom acts a lot more Colombian than my dad, but she's lighter skinned," which always confuses the hell out of people, because my dad has always been a weirdo by any standard and my mom is a living, screaming stereotype of a santanderiana. I used to get teased a lot growing up because everyone thought my dad was a drug dealer, thanks Miami Vice. Then I moved to Central Florida and actual Colombian immigrants would have the same reaction, which I found fascinating. Then I moved to Colombia and the same questions continued, with the same confusion, so I guess I'm a huge loving weirdo like my father before me. Now I live in Spain and I get mistaken for a Spaniard every day until I open my mouth because I refuse to pronounce the letter z like the th in "the." So yeah race and Latino/Hispanic might be a particularly American concept, but people have been pigeonholing other people since before they invented holes for pigeons. I remember one time I was in a taxi in Bogotá with my uncle who's ex-Colombian military and a very reserved and conservative kind of guy and he launched into this racist tirade against Afro-Colombians and how you can never trust them for anything, always smoking weed and disobeying orders, all because a black guy jaywalked in front of the cab. He didn't have any choice words for the menagerie of ethnicities that also crossed the street illegally at the same time, it was just because un negro did it that triggered him. Finally, I think this discussion is better suited for the general LATAM politics thread, because as we've established here a couple times, race doesn't come into play in Venezuela as much as other countries in the region.
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Sep 24, 2017 15:35
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DXH posted:Finally, I think this discussion is better suited for the general LATAM politics thread, because as we've established here a couple times, race doesn't come into play in Venezuela as much as other countries in the region. I think the threads, like all nations, should be merged and united as one. Separating threads into distinct entities serves the interests of bourgeoisie oppressors of the Forums Poster.
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Sep 24, 2017 15:48
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lollontee posted:bourgeoisie oppressors That reminds me, what's currently going on with the Constituent Assembly?
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