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imbabyj · Joined: 28 Nov 2004 Posts: 15 Location: mexico

I think I see it a little differently maybe because I grew up in California. There is a big difference between "nigga" and "n@#er". Nigga is used in an atmosphere of friends and is not considered rascist. A redneck rascist says the other. It also depends on who its coming from. Obviously, an older white male or female it would seem very strange and would be taken wrongly. Young people use nigga constantly in California. My younger brothers and their friends black,white, latin, chinese all use nigga constantly with eachother. They dont use it in a rascist context at all but to identify a friend. The most common being "hey whats up my niggaaaa" Watch any of the american pie type movies and you will see white college kids , chinese college kids , black college kids using it. The younger generation is caring alot less about being politically correct and maybe thats a good thing.

sarliz · Joined: 22 Feb 2006 Posts: 198 Location: Jalisco

MikeySaid · Joined: 10 Nov 2004 Posts: 509 Location: Torreon, Mexico

MO39 · Posted: Tue Mar 18, 2008 11:54 pm Post subject:

Speaking as a Jew, if a student of mine said that Hitler was cool because he wanted to kill all the Jews, I would not let it rest. Without getting too hot under the collar (and with some difficulty), I would endeavor to show this student how wrong this idea was. Just because people don't know members of a group personally, that doesn't mean that they can't harbor very negative feelings against them. And it is precisely because Mexico is a very Catholic country that anti-Semitism can grow roots here, even in the hearts of children. Until very recently, the Church taught that "the Jews killed Jesus", and this was taken seriously by most Catholics.

MikeySaid · Joined: 10 Nov 2004 Posts: 509 Location: Torreon, Mexico

It was definitely something I had a talk with the whole class about. Perhaps I should have further addressed it. However, the situation at that school hardly gave teachers time to to address coursework and make time for fun.

Note: a few weeks later I found the same student with some kind of flying paper device decorated with swastikas. He was reprimanded and spent the better part of recess learning why it wasn't cool or funny. A note then went home and it never happened again.

MO39 · Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2008 1:43 am Post subject:

GueroPaz · Joined: 07 Sep 2007 Posts: 216 Location: Thailand or Mexico

Here in Thailand, where we had a major fiasco including an entire secondary school staging a Third Reich march and celebration complete with brown shirts and swastikas, the children and their parents are almost completely ignorant of world war two and the Holocaust. They do not even admit that the Japanese Army invaded and occupied Thailand at that time. But national history curricula tend to be narrow in many countries, especially those unaffected by such huge wars. Mexico went through both world wars virtually unscathed, as I recall. Racially as well, Thais look down at their own people with darker skin, and hold negative prejudice against foreigners, generally.

But teachers of English, including the history of English speaking peoples, have little time to teach history and anti-Semitism. Hey, can you guys even teach the horrors of the conquista?

MO39 · Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2008 2:49 am Post subject:

leslie · Joined: 08 Feb 2003 Posts: 235

Linda T. · Joined: 02 Dec 2007 Posts: 49 Location: California

I'm with you, Leslie, 1000 Percent (don't worry . . . I'm better at Engilsh than I am at math . . . unless it comes to spelling English . . . in which case, I just default to my favorite quote by Mark Twain which said something to the effect that he has no use for anybody who can ONLY spell a word ONE way . . . too bad Mark's not around any more because he would, no doubt, find me VERY useful!!!)

I bet you're a great teacher . . . there's so much more to a language than the grammar and spelling and vocabulary, isn't there?

fimac · Joined: 27 Mar 2008 Posts: 16

This is a really interesting thread. Having studied amongst Mexican students at a wealthy Mexican university, I can relate to some of these points.

In my experience, Mexicans tell is how it is (in some respects, others- they REALLY don't, but thats another story.) An overweight person is called 'gordito', a skinny person, 'flaquita", a dark person, 'negrito' etc etc.

While in Mexico, I made friends with a darker skinned Mexican (who happened to be very wealthy, not like what he would have called an 'indio'). He referred to himself as 'Nigga' and 'negro' and various other forms of this as did all of his friends. They also refered to 'indios' as poor and uneducated. I found this quite shocking, as people don't usually openly say things like that in my country. In saying that, I don't believe they mean it in a racist way. Racism is only racism by way of context and meaning. They obviously don't understand how emotionally charged this word is for many people and in a historical context how offensive it can be. They, and many of my other Mexican friends, don't consider themselves racist, and don't consider that there is, in fact, racism in Mexico. They didn't believe that their statements which I, in my socio-cultural context would normally take to be racist.

Mexico has such a class based society that is very different to what I know from here in Australia. Wealthy people are often 'european' looking and white skin and blonde hair are considered beautiful. I will never forget walking through a Tianguis one day when I passed by promotion girls handing out skin whitening product. I was quite shocked and disgusted by this. It constantly surprised me how often people commented on how beatiful they thought my fair skin to be.

So what I guess I am getting at, like many others have demonstrated in the examples of their students, is that they do not fully understand the history and meaning behind these words and symbols. They don't mean it in a hurtful way, they simply do not understand the emotion and history that these words and symbols are charged with. Having an artist with a chart hit with the name of 'Nigga' obviously doesn't help with this lack of understanding. (I say lack of understanding and not ignorance because I think it is exactly that, a lack of understanding.) Pop culture has the ability to normalise and popularise things, another reason that the use of this word may be becoming more of a common occurrence. Do you think that along with this lack of understanding behind the term, that the star's use of the name makes it seemingly more acceptable to these kids?

On another note, I have never seen so many swastikas as when I was in Mexico. At markets, on T-shirts etc. I am not entirely sure why they are so common. One of my lecturers at uni did mention it once but I can't remember what he said. I'll look into it and get back to you.

chichifo · Joined: 01 Jun 2007 Posts: 29

In this discussion I have seen many issues. First, the words and images have different meanings; some words that can be offensive in English, in Spanish they dont have that sense. As fimac mentioned, Mexicans tend to describe people when they talk about them. This happened in my family all the time; my brother called my sister "flaca"; my parents called my brother "gordo". My auntie with a Chinese background was called "china". It happens all the time and they dont mean to be offensive. But if you call someone "estupido" and "mugroso" or "cerdo", I think these are stronger words in Spanish than in English.
About swastikas; I studied all my life in public schools and our history classes tended to emphasize Mexican history (from Mayas, Aztecas, Zapotecas, Chichimecas.... to the 1910 Revolution) and Roman, Greek and Spanish culture. We studied WWII as part of the world history course, but we did not go deeper into this topic. Mexico was not really affected by WWI and II. So I assume that people see these events as something "distant" from their reality.
Mexico got involved in WWII when fought against Japan almost at the very end of this conflict. To be honest, I dont think that many people associate swastikas with Hitler, maybe the average guy would relate them to the German (Nazi) army and that's it. I remember that my younger brother when he was a child he used to draw swastikas and my mum asked him if he knew what that symbol represented and he didn't know, he said that he had seen them on the German's soldiers uniforms. I think there's a lot of ignorance in Mexico in relation to WWII; but here again, many Mexican people find really offensive and racistthe Mexican stereotypes portrayed in Hollywood films; I'm not excusing ignorance, but certainly it can give grounds to lots of misunderstanding, especially when we talk about cultural differences.

About being white, I think it's more related to status. I think that for some people being whiter would mean improving their status as generally white people are better off than those who are indigenous looking. But also, there's a derogative expression "Gueros de rancho" to understand those who are white, poor and from the countryside. On the western and northern parts of Mexico you'll find many "Gueros de rancho" and they are generally looked down by the middle and upper class people. So here, skin color is not really an issue but social class, both get confused, though.