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Myriam Gurba

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magazine article

Believer.com: Chismosa Bitch

December 2, 2020 by Myriam Leave a Comment

“On vocabulary test after vocabulary test, Mrs. Braun dragged her red pen across nouns, gleefully deducting points for my ‘bad Spanish.’”

I wrote about Spanglish fluency and getting a B in Spanish for The Believer.

Several weeks into attending my graveyard-adjacent nursery school, my parents noticed something weird. When I got home from school, I’d grab Mom’s or Dad’s hand and take them on a tour, introducing them to household objects. “This is the television. This is a chair. This is a sofa. This is a plate. That is a lamp. This is its switch. The lamp is now off.” My behavior mystified Dad until he realized what I was doing and burst out laughing.

“Bebé,” he called out, “Myriam’s teachers think she can’t speak English! They’ve been trying to teach her! That’s why she acts like a parrot when she comes home! She’s parroting the ‘lessons’ they’re giving her.” He chuckled as hard as he did when he watched Saturday Night Live. While I find it funny that I mimicked these lessons, I also find it a little spooky. Were the “pioneers” posthumously colonizing my vocal cords? Were their ghosts speaking English through me?

Read it at believermag.com

Filed Under: News Tagged With: magazine article

New on Luz Collective: Racial Pretendians

November 18, 2020 by Myriam Leave a Comment

After taking a sip of wine, Dad explained that certain Americans like inventing stories, especially tales that turn them into native people. Dad’s thesis illuminated nothing. The girl’s behavior still made no sense.

“But why?” I demanded.

“They think it’s exotic,” Dad over-asserted the word exotic to heighten its vulgarity, “and, it eases their conscience. It makes them feel better.”

“Better about what?”

“About taking things.”

“Ooooooh,” I uttered as the puzzle pieces slid together. By things, Dad meant the lands called the United States of America. Still, I didn’t want to believe that my friend, or her family, were liars, and so, I did the work of whiteness: I continued to defend her innocence.

“But she really could be part Cherokee!” I insisted.

Dad replied, “Yes. Or she might be a typical Anglo American who insists that she’s 1/16 Cherokee and descended from a princess whose name nobody seems to know.” 

“HOW DID YOU KNOW THE PRINCESS PART?!” I yelled. “AND THE 1/16 PART?!!”

Dad sighed, exasperated. “Because it’s always the same damn story. Now eat your ejotes!”

Dad was on to something. The lies my classmate told me closely resemble the fabrications for which various racial and ethnic fakes have recently been held to account. Last year, Jeanine Cummins, a writer who had publicly identified as an unelaborated white lady, began announcing herself as both a “Latinx woman” and “boricua.” It was noted by many who followed her story that her attempt at claiming a spicy identity coincided with the publication of her highly anticipated novel, American Dirt. That book, a narco-thriller set in México, fetishizes immigration to the point of unintended satire. It’s a fun book to hate-read.

Cummins is perhaps the most prominent among this new crop of Dolezalitas. Others include BethAnn McLaughlin, a white woman and former assistant professor of neurology at Vanderbilt University. McLaughlin crafted a pretendian Twitter persona, @sciencing_bi. The persona remained unnamed but, over time, @sciencing_bi developed an elaborate identity, that of a Hopi anthropology professor working at Arizona State University. On July 31, McLaughlin killed her nameless invention, announcing on Twitter that @sciencing_bi had died of COVID-19. Shortly thereafter, an ASU spokesperson exposed McLaughlin’s hoax. The outing prompted McLaughlin to pander for pity. She blamed her bad behavior on an unnamed mental illness.

Read on Luz Collective

Filed Under: Luz Collective, News Tagged With: american dirt, luz collective, magazine article, race, racial faker

Remezcla: ‘A Harm-Reduction Strategy’: Biden Was Elected, Now What?

November 13, 2020 by Myriam Leave a Comment

‘A Harm-Reduction Strategy’: Biden Was Elected, Now What?
November 13, 2020
K Romero*, a Mexican immigrant living in Pennsylvania, remains vigilant. After the 2016 election, Romero became active with a local progressive organization, but a commonplace obstacle soon emerged. The organization privileged the needs of white Democrats above everybody else’s, leaving women of color, like Romero, out in the proverbial cold. Racial exhaustion triggered Romero’s flight from the group but because she understands that authoritarian threats linger, she feels pulled back to activism four years later.

“I’m not going to sit and watch as fascism continues to rise,” she tells Remezcla. “I’m ready. I want to organize with a network of like-minded women of color. I’m just clueless about where to start.”

Many people living in the United States share Romero’s activated yet disoriented sentiments. Four years of overt racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, religious extremism, anti-intellectualism, and anti-science policies have yielded a situation that mess doesn’t begin to describe. The forces strengthened by the Trump cult continue to endanger us and, while the election of Joe Biden signals some symbolic and material change, many activists and organizers understand a Biden administration not as a one-stop electoral solution but as a harm-reduction strategy. As historian Thomas Zimmer has written, the uphill battle of transforming the United States from a “white Christian nation, in which white Christian men are at the top” to “a multi-racial democracy that abolishes patriarchal rule” continues.

Read more at Remezcla.com

Filed Under: News, Remezcla, Uncategorized Tagged With: magazine article, politics, Remezcla

HOW THE TERM ‘ESSENTIAL WORKER’ OBSCURES THE COST OF RACIALIZED HUMAN LIFE

October 5, 2020 by Myriam Leave a Comment

farm workers

How the Term ‘Essential Worker’ Obscures the Cost of Racialized Human Life
October 5, 2020
“The Latino community is suffering a lot right now,” says Arnulfo Romero. The former field supervisor lives in Santa Maria, California, an agricultural community that, depending on which way its sea breeze blows, smells of strawberry, broccoli, or diesel. The town is small by California standards, populated by about 107,000 residents. Most, like Romero, are Latino of Mexican origin. Many are also Indigenous (primarily Mixteco).

While the Santa Maria Valley’s berry crops have sweetened the region’s reputation, its large concentration of COVID-19 infections now brings notoriety.

“Santa Maria’s number of coronavirus deaths has been higher than anywhere else in Santa Barbara County,” Romero laments. “The only place that looked like it was going to outpace Santa Maria was the prison in Lompoc. But it got worse here.”
remezcla.com

Filed Under: News, Remezcla Tagged With: magazine article, race, Remezcla

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