Erasure

 Driving up the Central Coast of Ca. from Santa Maria to Monterey yesterday, I saw sign after sign of street names and town names all with Spanish origins. San this, La that. After this area was Native American, it was Mexican. Now it is part of the United States. But its history clearly rings of a Spanish/Mexican Missionary history.

Members of the Rumson and Esselon tribes used to look out on the same hills I’m enjoying this morning. They gazed on the same stars with awe and made trails that became roads to help us.

The Spanish/Mexicans built missions and made the Natives eventually work the land. There was much work to be done, and historians slant the past in two different ways. There’s the Robert Louis Stevenson glorification of listening to the “Conversos” play music for masses with a greater joy and faith than he had ever before witnessed. There are also artistic and historical documents supporting the claim that the Natives were basically baptized and then enlisted into forced labor.

In both instances though, there was a lot of co-mingling. Regardless of the past power dynamic, the people here with histories dating back prior to statehood all seem to have Spanish Mexican or Native American heritage, and often a mix of both.

Today, we are living in an era that is dangerous for people who look different from the white make demographic supported by the current White House. Heck, there’s even a “Whites Only” town that is trying to get incorporated in the MidWest (private land, but a selective community based on race and ethnicity….)

I spend a lot of love and energy doing what I can to help people who are threatened by current and upcoming policies (and chaos.) The people I know who are most scared of detention, separation, deportation (even with documentation) are Latinx folk. Just a look at the news each day can indicate their anxiety is not unreasonable. In fact, it is most warranted. (Note on warrants: please make sure that everyone know you do not need to open your door unless there is a signed warrant.)

The dichotomy of deep rooted Mexican heritage here and the current hispanophobia in the current administration is blaring. The fact that California has become a major battleground for ICE to flex its muscles is even more blaring now that I’ve seen the road signs— both the real and the metaphorical ones.

MAGA isn’t trying to make America great again. It’s trying to make America white. It’s trying to erase the vastness of our history- or our histories- and put a whitewashed one, the easy reader version, on the shelves instead.

I will not be the eraser and I am happy to help highlight stories wherever, whenever and however the need arises.