Interview transcribed by Chief Llabbe
This interview continues from a couple of weeks ago with Chief Leti of the Western Region of Black Hammer Organization. The last article went over the precolonial history of The Nahuatl nation. This article goes in-depth on the way that European colonizers colonized the Nahuatl people.
In the Mexican region of Colima, a homeland for a large group of Nahuatl indigenous people, the governance required masks to be worn in public.
This comes after months of the settler-colonial government mishandling the situation. Mexico is the 7th highest nation in coronavirus infections, with 500,000 cases and 56,000 deaths.
Violence between indigenous people and nations before the Spanish came
When the Spanish colonizers came thru they pitted us against one another, creating horizontal violence. The Aztec empire was not the same as the Spanish empire.
It might seem like there were old movements for Chicano liberation, but these were nothing more than chauvinistic takes on the colonizer’s ideology.
This started when the settler Spanish population came through and rebranded themselves as the “Viva la Raza” (Long live the Race) people. What’s the Raza? The Raza is nothing more than Mestizo (mixed race) supremacy. La Raza refers to mestizo people who are descendants of African, indigenous, and European peoples.
In many cases, people who talk of “la Raza” engage in anti-blackness and anti-indigenous culture because of the way white mestizo people were upheld in colonial society.
Oaxaca and Chiapas are two areas in the south of the so-called Mexico with many indigenous nations who struggled against colonization. They are called anti-indigenous slurs and not part of the Raza. The culture around Chicanismo causes a disease that dissolves unity among the colonized people of Mexico, rather than uniting to dissolve white power.
Chicanismo pushes for things like giving California to the Mexican Government, but this is a contradiction because Mexico is a settler-colonial government just like the Amerikkkan government. The Narco ruling class of white settlers and sellouts is the main contradiction between the colonized black and indigenous people.
Women and the colonial state of Mexico
Whether in Amerikkka or Mexico, indigenous people have to deal with wage theft, child labor, and sex trafficking of youths.
My state of Mexico has the number one rate of femicide, with the second-highest state has many African people, and the third-highest also having a large colonized population.
This is exacerbated by the Narcotics traffickers and settler governments.
Missing murdered indigenous women is a real problem by the colonizer government. White power wanted access to all of the cocaine and heroin especially the pure stuff, while Black and colonized areas get the tough stuff like meth, crack, and other more dangerous forms of drugs.
These huge drug dealers will use the drug trade as a way to recruit the poor and the colonized due to land theft and lack of economic power. Then the victims of the narco-traffickers are their women relatives.
These women are victims of an intense amount of the narco trafficker state and empires. The drug empires are working with the governors to create food scarcity to give crumbs to the people.
For example, these issues are a serious problem in Honduras, where an Obama-led coup put the Honduran president in power. They were there to do the work of the settlers and colonizer power block.
And all of these narcotics connections don’t make a distinction between the nations. We as dialectical materialists here know that money is only gotten from the theft of poor and colonized working-class people. Drugs have always been used to control colonized people, to divide and conquer. There is a lot of praise in Mexico of traffickers like El Chapo, but it’s praise for neocolonial sellouts. There is a common phrase among drug dealers which sums up this division.
“Por el amor a las drogas, al dinero, y a las mujeres” (“For the love of drugs, money, and women”)
How did the Spanish Colonize the Nahuatl people and specifically their mind and tongue?
White Mexicans hold a lot of territory in Mexico. In these places, there is a so-called “proper” way of speaking Spanish like from the heart of the old colonial empire.
My mom talks about not speaking “pocho”, or chopped Spanish because it’s seen as low class. The lack of access to colonizer education means indigenous people have more illiteracy in Spanish.
So, “de campo” Spanish and “del rancho” Spanish is considered poor working-class Spanish because working on farms, ranches, and in the fields is a stereotypical indigenous person’s job.
This makes the Spanish language classified based on poor and colonized versus rich and colonized.
There is no real creole language of Spanish in my Nation, but enunciation is a big part of the divide. The de campo Spanish will roll off the tongue more.
Indigenous people who speak a Native language and a colonizer language will often use Spanish words to mix in with other languages.
It’s important to note that there is a hell of a lot of history and people who speak different dialects. For example, there are many Afro-Indigenous peoples’ languages which I still want to learn about.
Ongoing work to address these issues
In the Black Hammer Western region and in my chapter, in particular, we are working to solve these contradictions with our plans of action (POA). We are doing outreach to the Mixteca people who are at risk because of colonial jobs and lack of education.
The colonized parents and children in my area struggle with colonialism every day and so it is imperative they get organized in Black Hammer to overturn these contradictions.
We also have a lot of contradictions around housing which we want to overturn by building a Hammer City where the colonized people can work for themselves and their community and not be forced into these colonial farms with dangerous chemicals.
The Thomas fire affected the segregated areas where colonized people lived and left many homeless and reliant on the amerikkkan government which wants to assimilate or genocide them.
Chapter Projects: We have many Mixteca people and a POA for outreach due to colonial jobs. Access to colonial education, these parent’s kids struggle in school and the colonial miseducation targets them. We are starting prison outreach to combat corruption in Oxnard so this is a direct way to combat incarceration! Also, housing issues are intense because of The Thomas Fire that caused a huge amount of homelessness in my area
We need everyone reading this to contribute to their liberation by joining Blackhammer.org/sign-up. We can provide for each other without being exploited by the neocolonialist sell-outs who make money on our colonization and bring in the Europeans to further colonize us.
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