Mexico: “It’s Like Another Planet”
Those were the word’s my girlfriends mother used when she spoke about her two week trip to Mexico. Their family is from Guerrero, a small town in Mexico. It is a 3 day car drive away. That distance though is nothing in contrast to the different worlds those miles represent.
I was reminded of this story when Sarah Ahmed’s writing on “The Phenomenology of Whiteness”. She writes that we should view whiteness as “a category of experience.” This means that we should not approach whiteness as a skin color, like in the past, but as a representation of a type of living. This type of living is privilege. It is money. It is the envy of those who do not have it, those who are stuck in poverty. It is something that can be “performed” by putting on khaki shorts and a pink Ralph Lauren polo.
I bring up my girlfriend’s mom because I believe she can personify Ahmed’s definition of whiteness as an experience. In the United States, she is anything but. Her skin is as brown as a milk chocolate Hershey bar. She is a stay at home mom. She rarely uses English. My girlfriend has explained to me how her role is limited to the confines of their home. When she walks down the street no one sees her any different than what her social status represents.
But in Mexico, something is different.
She is an outsider. Her “whiteness” can be smelled by those around her. She explained to me that when visiting their small town they try not to reveal that they are from the United States. They avoid speaking English, and keep any reference to the United States tucked away. Still, she says, it is something impossible to completely hide. When they want to make a phone call, they pull out Iphones. When they pay for dinner they do not use pesos. Others wear sandals, they wear Nikes. My girlfriend’s little brother put the entire trip on Snapchat. Her mom summarized it best as:
“When we go shopping they attack us like wolves. Because they can smell the money in our pockets. We are treated as royalty.”
This story proved to me that living in privilege is a stench that stains you much deeper than skin tone. With that revelation I concluded that, as Jennifer C. Nash explains in her writing on intersectionality, we must consider the structure or “place” in which oppression is happening. It is a crucial vector in the spectrum that is too often left out. As my UCR Gender Theory professor once put it, “When asking for equality, women are usually referring to the white American male making eighty thousand a year. But would you want the same equality as a male making ten cents an hour in Mexico?”
This is all to say that we need to stop viewing inequality as something defined by a type of appearance. It is not defined by skin tone. It is the struggle of oppression, in all shapes and sizes. And with that mindset we can begin to take into consideration the oppression of everyone. All places, all genders; all colors.
