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Forum nameOkay Activist Archives
Topic subjectRE: natives/hispanics
Topic URLhttp://board.okayplayer.com/okp.php?az=show_topic&forum=22&topic_id=22123&mesg_id=22128
22128, RE: natives/hispanics
Posted by DJ_scratch_N_sniff, Sun Aug-20-00 04:47 PM
That's a good question/issue. I myself am part Puerto Rican and also part Cherokee with a whole lot of other seasonings in the broth. I think what Blackalicious is trying to say is that Blacks in Jamaica, Brazil, and Ghana share a cultural history and a similar history of oppression as Blacks in the US. That's not to say that they're all the same. So you're not Hispanic (that word means linguistically Spanish). But ethnically, Amerindians should support each others' causes across borders. Our peoples are disappeared in the Caribbean and all but in North America. There are still some in South America like the Yanomami who haven't had their cultures stolen from them, but they're threatened. Activism for Natives and human rights in general should be respected across borders.

But a Choctaw is probably not Hispanic. And a Mayan probably doesn't use the term Native American.

Incidentally, many Mexicans in the US have ancestry from Native tribes from areas of what is now the US. After the Mexican-American War a lot of natives and mestizos were forced south of the border. Ironically, a lot of those people are considered immigrants on land their ancestors were driven from.