Mixtecos in California call Los Angeles council members’ comments disappointing, unsurprising

The racist comments made by three Latinos on the Los Angeles City Council regarding the Oaxacan Indigenous community are nothing new, Central Valley leaders of Mixteco origin said.

“This is not new,” Oralia Maceda, program director of El Centro Binacional para el Desarrollo Indígena Oaxaqueño, who is of Mixteco origin, said in Spanish. “We have always experienced discrimination and oppression from Latinos themselves.”

The comments — made public through a leaked audio recording — were part of a conversation between former Los Angeles City Council President Nury Martínez, along with Councilmembers Gil Cedillo and Kevin de León and Los Angeles County Federation of Labor President Ron Herrera. Martinez resigned from her city council position Tuesday.

In the recording, council members refer disparagingly to the appearance of immigrants from the state of Oaxaca, calling them ugly, short and dark-skinned.

California is home to some 350,000 Indigenous Oaxacans, who are mainly concentrated in the Central Valley, the southern part of the state and the Monterey area, according to a 2016 study by the University of Southern California and the Mexican research institute El Colegio de la Frontera Norte.

“We are in the commemoration of 530 years of resistance of our Indigenous communities and we are still experiencing those bad experiences that we have as (Indigenous) communities,” said Maceda, whose organization was created in 1993 by the Frente Indígena de Organizaciones Binacionales (FIOB) to serve Indigenous migrant communities in California from the state of Oaxaca, Mexico.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the October 2021 conversation took place during a private meeting. The group was discussing a dispute between council members Curren Price and Marqueece Harris-Dawson, who were at odds over which district would represent USC and Exposition Park once the new maps proposed by the city’s 21-member redistricting commission were finalized.

The council members in the recording sought to preserve Latino political power in the city’s once-a-decade redistricting while diluting Black votes. The most sensational comments came from Martinez, who referred to a white councilman’s Black as son as a “little monkey.”

She also referred to Oaxacan immigrants in the Koreatown neighborhood as “tan feos” — “so ugly.”

The audio of the approximately hour-long conversation was posted on Reddit by a now-suspended user and it is not known who recorded the audio or who uploaded it to the social network, or if anyone else was present.

“As an Indigenous Mixteco immigrant, to learn of a racist anti-Indigenous, anti-Black and homophobic conversation among prominent Mexican-American “social justice champions” — on the anniversary of (Christopher) Columbus’ march of colonization and genocide — is deeply disappointing, but I am not surprised,” said Hugo Morales, co-founder of Radio Bilingüe, who is of Mixteco descent.

“We Indigenous Mixtecos from Oaxaca, Mexico, experience racism in México and the United States,” Morales continued. “The remarks made about my Indigenous community confirm that the racism against Indigenous people remains deep within the Mexican-American community. This should be part of the past. Let’s elect leaders who genuinely stand for social justice and respect all communities, including the Black community and the LGBT community and the Indigenous community.”

Maceda called on the leaders to reflect on their actions.

“This is a public example that is made, but many of us have suffered that and for different reasons, because of language, our culture, and our dress,” she said. “Like things for which we are seen differently, our stature, and the Indigenous features that we have.”

“Those are the reasons why we have experienced this, but also at the same time, as a community, it gives us a lot of courage and strength to continue to do what we do,” she added. “And the only thing we want to say is that we are human beings and like every person living in this world we have feelings, we have our thoughts, and also our rights, right?”

Maceda said that these racist comments “are not a reason to bow our heads and say ‘we are poor, we are victims of everything they do to us, but on the contrary, to say that we also have the ability to move forward and being Indigenous does not make us less, on the contrary, it is an important value ... that we have, as they say, our feet on the ground, we have an origin, we know where we come from and that we continue with the strength that our ancestors have left us and in spite of these comments that have been made, they do not discourage us, on the contrary, it gives us the courage to demonstrate to these politicians and to the people that we have this value.”

Maceda said that the Oaxacan community works hard to move their families forward and contribute to the state and federal labor force. She added that many members of the Oaxacan community have relocated to California due to economic displacement and violence in their own communities.

“We are here in these places, not for pleasure, we are here because of the same thing we have been living, because of the bad policies that exist in our countries, and that officials like them have also made bad policies against our communities,” Maceda said.

Esta historia fue publicada originalmente el 13 de octubre de 2022, 0:18 p. m. with the headline "Mixtecos in California call Los Angeles council members’ comments disappointing, unsurprising."