Literary Clusterfucks 2013

no judgement

I started turning this thread into an erasure poem, but I only got this far:

Beginning to think maybe a rolling thread might be
as complicated and volatile as the cowboy

damn I just actually read this shit

Beginning to think maybe a rolling thread might be
as complicated and volatile as the cowboy

damn I just actually read this shit
together we'll break these chains of love

a+

don't give up
don't give up

together jonchi and mordy break these chains of love

(dunno what that means, it just rhymed good, lol)

Also, I finally read her whole letter to the Los Angeles Times. It's a worthwhile read. It's much better than her detractors give her credit for. Here's the full text:

TO: Supervisors and selected colleagues of Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez

FROM: Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, staff writer

This is my resignation from the Los Angeles Times. My reasons for leaving the Times range from the personal to the political, but in the end it is all political. Even the personal. The following are my reasons for leaving.

Reason 1

I came to this newspaper as part of something called the "Latino Initiative." At the time, I was not awake enough as a person to understand the horror of such a thing. I was not enlightened enough to realize that in the name of "diversity" the newspaper was committing an atrocity.

Now I am.

In the process of covering so-called "Latino" issues, I have stumbled upon a simple and disturbing fact: There is no such thing as a Latino. I have also seen this newspaper -- and most others -- butcher history and fact in an attempt to create this ethnic group.

When the Los Angeles Times writes of "Latinos" it often characterizes them as brown. It happens several times a week, usually. Most people in this area accept this interpretation. I do not. After all, my Navajo cousins from New Mexico are often approached on the street and spoken to in Spanish. They don't speak Spanish. They are brown, and, I am sure, would "look" Latino to most of my colleagues at this newspaper. But recent colonial history dictated they be born north of the Mexican border. They, like most of the people we call Latinos at this paper, are Indians. . . .

After extensive study of history, I believe "Latino" -- as used in the Los Angeles Times -- is the most recent attempt at genocide perpetrated against the native people of the Americas. I also posit this new genocide is far more dangerous than the old fashioned murder and relocation efforts.

Now, we simply rob people of their heritage, and force a new one upon them.

They are no longer Indians, with a 30,000 year claim to these lands; they are now immigrants, and "Latinos." . . .

By referring to the brown Indians in the U.S. who happen to come from Spanish speaking nations as "Latinos" we eradicate their ethnicities entirely, and pin to them a new set of stereotypes and expectations that in most cases simply do not fit. By perpetuating the myth that Indians who bear Spanish surnames are simply "Latino" -- and that Latino does not refer to anyone else -- we also deny Indians from Latin America a natural kinship to American Indians. DNA testing and blood type have shown most of the "brown" people in the Americas -- whether they live in Montana or Mexico City -- are descended from a small band of people who came here from Asia tens of thousands of years ago. Yet the Times has convinced itself and the general public that there is a "Latino" race of brown people, separate from this nation's Indians. It's idiotic. . . . When I attempted to write a commentary about the animated film The Road to El Dorado in order to address its misrepresentation of the genocide committed by the Spaniards against the native people of the Americas, I was told by the film editor my comparisons to the German holocaust were unjustified. (By some estimates, the Spaniards killed 10 times more people than the Nazis did -- most of it documented in the Spaniards' own journals.) He told me "holocaust" was too strong a word to use when talking about American Indians, and told me the word pertained only to the German holocaust. Any dictionary would have shown him that "holocaust" refers to any genocide committed against any people. The Los Angeles Times is located in perhaps the nation's largest Indian city, yet we deny there are Indians here. . . .

I am now carrying a child whose father is a Native American. His ancestors hail from the U.S. Southwest and from Northern and Central Mexico. I cannot in good conscience work for an institution that denies my child's inheritance to this land. I will cringe to see my child labeled "Latino" or "Hispanic" by virtue of a colonial last name and a brown skin color. I can no longer pretend to believe in the existence of "Latinos" when common sense and logic and an understanding of history point out there is no such thing, especially not in the way the Times uses the word.

Reason 2

Race. . . . Every day the Los Angeles Times runs an article about races of people the dominant class consider to be "other": Blacks, Asians, Latinos. Even as several other newspapers and news magazines make strides towards thinking of "race" in a new way, the Times is stuck in an outdated modality. The Miami Herald and the New York Times now make an effort to state regularly that "Latinos" may be of any "race"; while not an ideal portrayal of humans, in my opinion, it is still light years ahead of the racialist view of "Latinos" perpetuated by the Los Angeles Times.

To me, it is telling that the Times rarely, if ever, writes of those people categorized as "white" while identifying them by "race" for the heck of it. While we endlessly profile "Asian" authors and "Black" celebrities, we never classify the "white" people we write about as "white" unless they have committed a hate crime, or are being compared in a poll or study to "others." . . .

I cannot continue to lend my brain and efforts to an institution that so readily and shamelessly discriminates, stratifies and needlessly classifies people based upon what I -- and many social and physical scientists -- believe to be a false paradigm.

I love my salary. My benefits. I love the prompt response I get from people when I call and say I am a writer with the Los Angeles Times. But I do not love any of these things enough to sell my soul any longer in order to get them. I have tried to inspire change and enlightenment from within the newspaper, and have been met with confusion and snickers at best, and fierce opposition at worst. So, as long as the Los Angeles Times paints a daily portrait of the nation in terms of race, I cannot work there.

Reason 3

Lack of support. At risk of sounding boastful, I can say I am regarded among my peers an excellent writer. Yet I do not feel I have been embraced at the Times for the talents I have. In fact, I feel an effort has been made in some instances to squash the one thing that sets me apart in this field: my voice.

Daily, I read columns by people who are simply not smart enough or talented enough to write them. . . . I read about these people's personal lives, the foibles of their children, their narrow and uninspired views on race and ethnicity -- and nowhere do I find Los Angeles, or the nation, or the world, nowhere in this newspaper's columns do I find insight, or epiphany. . . .

I am not an idiot. And I know a hopeless battle when I face one. To stay at the Los Angeles Times and hope that my talent and ability and accomplishments will be fairly acknowledged and rewarded is unrealistic. This newspaper continues to reward mediocre men while insisting outstanding women jump through more and more hoops before ever getting similar reward. To stay under such circumstances would be to set myself up for failure and battle, two things I am no longer interested in. . . .

Reason 4

Mortality. How does the cliche go? Life is short.

At 31, expecting my first child, my life has suddenly come into brilliant focus. Since I was 15 years old I have written in my diaries of my dream: To write novels and live in the mountains outside of Albuquerque. For 16 years this dream has never changed. . . .

Is it vain to say I was born to write? To say journalism, daily journalism, has nearly beaten the innocent sort of love for the craft from me?

I wrote my first poem at 8, my first short story at 9. I stumbled onto journalism because writing was the only thing I did well enough to be paid to do it. And now, every time I write a profile of a celebrity who doesn't need the publicity, simply because that's how things are done, or every time I write about record sales or the Grammy awards or "Latino" artists, I pimp the very most sacred part of me.

Will I get paid to write novels? Maybe. Maybe not. But at this time in my life, I would rather get paid to do something completely unrelated to writing -- say, wait tables -- and write for the pleasure of it, than to be paid to write the way the dominant class believes I should write, about a world I don't see but they do.

So, one month from today, I will no longer work for the Los Angeles Times. I will work for my conscience, my soul, and my heart, and my child. If that means I live in a small room in the back of my father's house, so be it.

I will be happier there, writing my truth in "fiction," than I am here, writing your truth in "fact."

i'm not sure what there is to like about that letter.

525,600 leeeeetterrrs

By perpetuating the myth that Indians who bear Spanish surnames are simply "Latino" -- and that Latino does not refer to anyone else -- we also deny Indians from Latin America a natural kinship to American Indians. DNA testing and blood type have shown most of the "brown" people in the Americas -- whether they live in Montana or Mexico City -- are descended from a small band of people who came here from Asia tens of thousands of years ago.

I'm pretty dumb sometimes and this isn't my field but that idea has never occurred to me and is v interesting.

Once you remove most of the florid language, she makes some solid points about race and gender.

Some of this might be sour grapes aimed at editors who made non-biased decisions about her writing. Some of this is likely valid.

i thought the word latino comes from latin america, ie a place where latin romance language (spanish, portuguese + french) are primarily spoken

(By some estimates, the Spaniards killed 10 times more people than the Nazis did -- most of it documented in the Spaniards' own journals.)

Even assuming she only means "Jews killed in the holocaust" (6 million) and not "people killed in the holocaust" (something like 11 million), and not "Innocent people killed by the Nazis during WWII" (I don't even know how many) -- that gives you 60 million indians "by some estimates" killed by the Spaniards. Most estimates of the entire Indian population of the Americas at that time are not that high.

The U.S. Government has defined Hispanic or Latino persons as being "persons who trace their origin [to] . . . Central and South America, and other Spanish cultures."[12] The United States Census uses the ethnonym Hispanic or Latino to refer to "a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race."[13] The Census Bureau also explains that "[o]rigin can be viewed as the heritage, nationality group, lineage, or country of birth of the person or the person’s ancestors before their arrival in the United States.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latino

xxxp To the extent that that is true, it's also a post-colonial imposition of language & culture and then of naming, in that it erases the ppl and culture and language that were there before...which were the same people and their culture and language who lived on the US side of the then-non-existent border, which if I understand this stuff was the Hopi and pueblo peoples (iirc "anasazi" is considered an insult).

Latino points to Spain and Portugal. I can understand why people of Native American descent are unhappy with the name.

The United States was formed by English speaking former British citizens. For obvious reasons, we don't refer to American-born citizens as Anglos.

I take that back. I forgot we're a part of the Anglosphere.

a lot of people from those spanish speaking countries dont even speak spanish as their first language, latino in that sense is a sloppy bullshit term, but so is cultural holocaust

the skin color type hierarchies that exist within these cultures is a lot more of a problem than english speakers using the word 'latino'. people either have a good grasp of the history of the region or don't, and people who don't aren't gonna be making assumptions based on the etymology of the word 'latino'.

i dont even speak latin

like the fact that the language is called 'spanish' is actually a lot more problematic because some people actually confuse latin america and spain as places...that exist... the word latino? who cares. you either know why there's a huge skin color spectrum in south america or you don't.

Rolling Afro-Latin music thread 2013 < good thread despite the cultural genocide title

xxxp To the extent that that is true, it's also a post-colonial imposition of language & culture and then of naming, in that it erases the ppl and culture and language that were there before...which were the same people and their culture and language who lived on the US side of the then-non-existent border, which if I understand this stuff was the Hopi and pueblo peoples (iirc "anasazi" is considered an insult).

― grossly incorrect register (in orbit), Friday, January 11, 2013 1:11 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I get this, but (1) pretty much every cultural/ethnic/natural descriptor has an extremely problematic history and is imperfect at best if not downright arbitrary (2) her navajo cousins not withstanding, the vast majority of today's "latino" identified people can probably not easily trace their heritage back to a single indian group, and many have at least some spanish ancestry

I did know about native ppl in South America, I just never connected the shared heritage between them and southwestern US-ian native peoples and thought that it might be a problem to create some arbitrary distinctions and erase others. Like I said I'm pretty dumb sometimes.

From: http://escalatingidentity.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/who-is-oakland-anti-oppression-politics-decolonization-and-the-state/

No individual or organization can speak for people of color, women, the world’s colonized populations, workers, or any demographic category as a whole – although activists of color, female and queer activists, and labor activists from the Global North routinely and arrogantly claim this right. These “representatives” and institutions speak on behalf of social categories which are not, in fact, communities of shared opinion. This representational politics tends to eradicate any space for political disagreement between individuals subsumed under the same identity categories.

the vast majority of today's "latino" identified people can probably not easily trace their heritage back to a single indian group

i think this is less true than you think

actually that was my impression too. there are discrete ethnic groups in south american like the mayans who trace their heritage directly back to a historical native group but the vast majority does not.

i dont have any figures but at the very least i object to the 'vast'

anyway this is kind of a funny digression to this thread

yeah there are tons of regions at least in mexico but i think this is true of all of latin america where a lot of the people living there part of a culture that stretches back to pre colonial times and they still speak the language and do a lot of the stuff, its an ongoing situation

then there are a lot of people of mixed heritage, and people of spanish etc decent

like the fact that the language is called 'spanish' is actually a lot more problematic because some people actually confuse latin america and spain as places...that exist... the word latino? who cares. you either know why there's a huge skin color spectrum in south america or you don't.

― iatee, Friday, January 11, 2013 10:33 AM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hell the fact that the language is called 'spanish' is problematic because of ethnic and linguistic nationalisms within Spain. Do you think the Catalunyans like that castellano is now known mostly as español? Not to mention the Basques.

but again you either know about this stuff or you don't but the word 'latin america' doesn't make you know about this stuff or not make you know about this stuff xp

I'm getting the impression that a substantial part of the reason native-descended ppl from Latin America & South America may not have strong ties to their ancestral native group is bc of Spanish conquest that broke up, displaced, erased, and recombined groups, so it's shitty to say NOW that they're not closely enough tied to it to "count" for something.

nobody is saying that, it counts for whatever they want it to count for

That was in response to the vast majority of today's "latino" identified people can probably not easily trace their heritage back to a single indian group, and many have at least some spanish ancestry.

I'm getting the impression that a substantial part of the reason native-descended ppl from Latin America & South America may not have strong ties to their ancestral native group is bc of Spanish conquest that broke up, displaced, erased, and recombined groups, so it's shitty to say NOW that they're not closely enough tied to it to "count" for something.

― grossly incorrect register (in orbit), Friday, January 11, 2013 1:50 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm not saying it doesn't "count" for something! I'm just saying I don't quite understand how she thinks the LA Times ought to identify people (unless she's just saying ethnicity isn't relevant at all in which case I don't know why it matters that her cousins are "Navajo" either).

Sorry guys, I wasn't trying to start a [REDACTED] with that post.

seems clear she prefers "native american" or "american indian"

race peace?

seems like the simplest thing to do would be to just call yourself CAUCASIAN [LATINO] as per so many job applications, government forms, and beauty pageant entrance packets

many ppl called 'latino' arent 'caucasian' tho. i think this is part of her point.

i don't think she has a point

about anything

ever

she has at least 4 points in her la times resignation letter, she numbers them and everything

tbf i haven't read anything in this thread since the last time i posted

seems clear she prefers "native american" or "american indian"

― max, Friday, January 11, 2013 1:55 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ok, but this wouldn't describe a lot of people who are described as latino today who are of mixed european-indian descent. And it would also suggest that we shouldn't refer to people as "Cuban" or "Mexican" or "Guatemalan" because those are all imposed by colonialism too. In any case, this is a debate that has been going on for decades and I think it's kind of ridiculous to call out the LA Times as being complicit in some kind of cultural genocide for using the prevailing term, a term that seems to have been arrived at for the moment as the result of an ongoing debate and not just imposed by some racists.

I see we've kinda moved on from the original clusterfuck, but according to someone on Twitter who contacted her, the original blog post was taken down at the request of her agent, not publisher. I hadn't remembered to consider the influence of the agent in all this, another party whose self-interest complicates things.

Ok, but this wouldn't describe a lot of people who are described as latino today who are of mixed european-indian descent.

i think if a person is of mixed euro-indian descent its "okay" by most standards to refer to them as native american or american indian

And it would also suggest that we shouldn't refer to people as "Cuban" or "Mexican" or "Guatemalan" because those are all imposed by colonialism too.

i dont really see why

In any case, this is a debate that has been going on for decades

yes

and I think it's kind of ridiculous to call out the LA Times as being complicit in some kind of cultural genocide for using the prevailing term, a term that seems to have been arrived at for the moment as the result of an ongoing debate and not just imposed by some racists.

yeah i mean i guess but i also dont feel all that compelled to condemn her for her at-the-time private resignation letter. i mean she made her views clear, she quit, the la times still calls people latino. she lost, im not gonna kick her while shes on the ground.