Articles on Culture & Creativity.
Colonial narratives are rooted in colonizer religion, language, racial systems, and a mentality of submission as obedience rather than oppression.
Gabriel N Elizondo
“How do you not speak Spanish?”
For the growing 40% of Latin American descendants in the United States, this is a phrase that carries implied shame and inherited guilt. Every year, the growing portion of America’s largest minority contend with an underlying identity dilemma. It is the same cultural assimilation their ancestors faced when Spanish imperialists began to genocide their families centuries ago.
With every Spaniard that initiated colonial settlerism, forcing their heritage and bloodlines into the indigenous enslaved populations, a growing population of oppressed descendants had to assimilate or die. Six hundred years later, their modern descendant equivalents hear the same phrase their Spanish oppressors used to interrogate their indigenous ancestors, spoken from the mouths of their own people.
Current generations of oppressed descendants contend with a multi-front cultural identity dilemma. Familial relationships proactively work to reinforce colonizer narratives they were indoctrinated with as children while colonizer institutions work to influence nationalist culture to maintain the status quo. This internal and external conflict keeps the individual in a perpetual state of confusion that does not allow individualism or the challenging of colonizer power systems in modern society. Instead, this system of control is designed to create identity dissonance between an individual’s ancestral origins and the oppression induced by the colonizer.
Parents and grandparents of indigenous descendant individuals hold them to standards of cultural identity that were enforced by imperial design. Over the duration of colonization, every aspect of daily life is controlled and influenced by colonizer power. These changes lead to a foundational shift in perspective for indigenous and oppressed populations that results in a complete indoctrination by colonial narratives. Such colonial narratives are rooted in colonizer religion, colonizer language, colonizer racial systems, and a mentality of submission as obedience rather than oppression.
As one generation gives way to the next, these colonizer narratives are taught to indigenous descendants as “truth” and are reinforced by the mouths of the oppressed themselves. The credibility within familial structures are rarely questioned or challenged, resulting in a full assimilation of future generations to the colonizer agenda and superiority within the colonized nation.
In Latin American cultures, many of the younger generations of American-born individuals are reprimanded for not speaking Spanish. Countless conversations and lectures have erupted during family gatherings that end with the standard “How can you not speak Spanish? It’s part of your culture!” The misunderstanding resides in the colonial forces that have cemented their superiority over the origins of indigenous culture.
For Latin America, even the name itself is a misnomer due to colonizing forces, Spanish is a colonizer language. To be proud of speaking one’s colonizer’s language is furthering a power dynamic that enslaves the mind and erases identity with shame and guilt. Shame derives from being excluded from familial community and guilt arrives as the individual feels a sense of “failure” for having not appropriately assimilated like their oppressed elders.
Religion is often leveraged by older generations to maintain the bonds of colonizer control. Catholicism is covered in blood and conquest in nearly every part of its expanse across the world. Centuries of corrupt leadership have reinforced imperial interest with slavery, terrorism, sexual exploitation, theft, and genocide. The results of such mass corruption finds its way into the cultural memory of oppressed generations. The very notion that a descendant would practice any other spiritualism or ritualism is met with an extreme form of colonizer-shame on behalf of the older, oppressed generations. The rejection of Catholicism (and any other colonizer religion) is a direct challenge to the status-quo of colonizer control.
Empires understood the necessity of religion in their conquests as the only way to control mass populations beyond their initial language, ethnicity, and shared cultural practices. Religion is a social tool that is often called upon to “other” any enemy of an empire’s interest. Over centuries of colonization, generational indoctrination delivered modern-day descendants whose very identity is intertwined with their colonizer’s chosen weapon of mass genocide.
For several indigenous and Latin American populations, the inherited caste system initiated by the Spanish remains a major source of shame and contention in identity. The Spanish established their Casta system as a way to justify colonization, genocide, and enslavement, while simultaneously creating a long-term source of division within their enslaved populations. Devising a racist caste system that granted more power and accessibility to resources to lighter-skin individuals resulted in a split within the indigenous populations of stolen lands.
As time progressed, the caste system further instituted breaks in society, impacting financial, political, social, familial, and cultural practices that remain in place to the current day. The purpose of this caste system serves colonizer-descendants by maintaining colonizer belief systems based on ethnicity, appearance, hair-type, and language while keeping entire regions of populations divided based on stereotypes.
For newer generations of indigenous descendants, challenging these racists belief systems can lead to familial confrontations due to older generations believing they are better than their dark-skin counterparts or a resurgence of generational trauma and pain due to being oppressed for their appearance. Older family members most likely have experienced direct violence, abuse, oppression, and colonizer-induced trauma because of their appearance that stripped their identity of its own autonomy. This permanent trauma is so intense for the older family member, they teach younger generations to never challenge the system or they’ll have to endure the same pain.
It is the same mechanism but opposite effect for light-skin older family members who may have never experienced the trauma of racist violence but only seen the benefits afforded to them due to their appearance. Thus, the caste system incentivizes the light-skinned older family members to encourage the status-quo and show “gratitude” for such opportunities in their nation. This is a form of gas-lighting younger generations by dismissing their outrage at such racist systems and saying they’re “too sensitive” in modern times.
Families will often dismiss racist caste systems by mocking dark-skin relatives or shaming light-skin family members based on appearance alone. This is a residual source of control by colonizer forces, a reminder that invading imperialists from centuries ago can still torture indigenous families generations after they dropped the whips.
Twenty-first century America has seen a major shift in the numbers of multigenerational indigenous descendants. In the past, the nationalist agenda labeled Americans of Mexican descent as “Mexican” even though they were not born in Mexico nor have any relevant cultural ties to Mexico. This inaccuracy is part of the system that removes the indigenous ties to native lands that were stolen by colonizers and forces an alternate identity onto entire populations without their consent.
Beyond this, countless Americans descend from Latin indigenous cultures who pre-date European occupation by centuries. Yet, the colonizers of America maintain a racist system that labels these native descendants “Mexican” in order to easily categorize, stereotype, and marginalize with ease. The ripple effect of this influence compounds in the identity of American indigenous and latin american descendants.
American-born descendants of oppressed populations are continuously told a false narrative of American opportunity. Upon being born in the American empire, indigenous and oppressed population descendants are force-fed American propaganda that demands gratitude for being pulled from their mother within American-colonizer boundaries. As the individual grows up within American society, systemic racist institutions classify and influence their perceived identity with colonizer-centric propaganda, revised history, erased cultures, and a narrative that implies “be grateful to your colonizer for labeling you American”.
To challenge this colonizer status-quo invites vitriol from colonizer-descendant Americans, mislead “patriots”, and even the individual’s fellow oppressed descendants.
For 1st generation or later-generation Americans, the refrain is familiar anytime they voice a disillusionment with American colonizer systems:
“You should be grateful you were born here. It was so much harder where your grandparents lived.”
Even recent immigrants may find themselves lecturing American-born citizens:
“It’s so much easier here, in my country things are really bad.”
The argument is inherently flawed because a comparison of imperialist government actions yields no accuracy in the injustice that delivered their position of control. It is merely a comparison of the stage in which a colonizer is oppressing the population.
A more accurate statement:
“At least you don’t have to deal with heavy-iron chains here in America, you’ve got that comfortable mental-prison.”
This is a colonizer-narrative that has been carefully constructed over time to deceive populations into happily falling in line with oppressor systems. These oppressor systems coincide with direct control over an individual’s time, labor, source of income, residence, privacy, political representation, basic human rights, and the value of their life as determined by the nation-state.
For indigenous and latin american descendants in America, an additional source of oppression and gaslighting comes from their own families. Many American later-generation individuals are scolded when they challenge pre-existing racial and colonizer belief systems with aspirations to either break away from the colonizer systems or aspire to change the colonizer systems for social justice. Older generations are exponentially more critical of their children due to solidified colonizer-oppression that forged every aspect of their world. The notion that anyone of their family members could break these systems is inconceivable and often met with disdain, disbelief, shame, or guilt.
As social justice movements established their position in the culture of modern day nations, individuals are feeling more empowered to question the institutions that dictate their lives. Going beyond the initial colonizer narratives of nationalism and reaching past the neo-tech-feudalism that has replaced mercantile capitalism, individuals are acknowledging aspects of their existence that they were taught didn’t exist or should be ashamed of in the eyes of their colonizer oppressors.
Indigenous and oppressed population descendants are redefining colonizer narratives with their own lived experiences in the modern era. These modern-day experiences are not similar to oppression but are new versions of evolved colonizer oppression at the hands of national institutions. Greater and greater numbers of oppressed populations are breaking the bonds of colonizer mechanisms.
Oppressed populations are leveraging their numbers to challenge economic systems designed to exploit labor, political systems that maintain racist caste systems, media systems that misrepresent oppressed peoples, financial systems that destroy environmentally critical and sacred lands, education systems that reinforce colonizer history, and educating their fellow citizens on the corruption of colonizer systems.
This proactive awareness and advocacy for the oppressed within society has proven to be a long-term force that is reshaping culture. Modern colonizer powers once dismissed such movements but have now realized the legitimate threat they have on their positions in power.
Colonizers have launched their own counter-efforts to clamp down on resistance. Returning to the same imperial fundamentals as their colonizer ancestors: religion, ideology, political corruption, wealth allocation, racism, and division. The combination of these factors have recently aligned with tech-oligarch interest and military intervention in maintaining control. The manifestation of colonizer desperation has begun to roll out on American streets in the form of fascist terrorism known as ICE.
The unification of indigenous populations throughout North America and Central America have begun to create a source of inspiration and power for the future.
Throughout North America’s history of colonization, indigenous tribes were depicted as warring with Mexican nationals, Mexican indigenous tribes were depicted as enemies of tribes throughout the American Southwest, and into the modern era, Mexican-Americans were depicted as being racist against their native counterparts in North America. These depictions are not only skewed and biased colonizer narratives but have served colonizer agendas while preventing unification of oppressed populations.
However, in the United States Fascist Regime’s efforts to oppress and terrorize indigenous populations, a catalyst of unity and advocacy has emerged among the millions of oppressed individuals within colonial rule. The massive protests and united efforts to defend one another against Republican Fascism has created the origin of a new, indigenous narrative of cultural reclamation.
This cultural reclamation comes in a variety of efforts but starts with a single choice: to go beyond questioning colonizer authority, and actively participating in ancestral tradition. It is removing the mask of colonization and finding the indigenous truths reflected in the strength of the individual.
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