Oaxacalifornia October 13, 2022
It did not take long for reports from a Los Angeles newspaper to reach the front page of Oaxaca Post. Someone secretly recorded and leaked a conversation among members of the LA City Council, during which Council President Nury Martinez, a Oaxqueña-American, referred to the Zapoteca in her neighborhood as “ugly little dark people.”
“Tan Feos,” she said. This specific offense is emphasized by Oaxaca Post. Alfonzo Galindo has it breaking above all other stories, including the coming Mezcal Festival, which has both money and influence.
The American press, including NY Times, similarly has a field day with the story, although greatest indignation al Norte is reserved for her comments about a fellow Council member, who is white and gay, and his black son, who Martinez suggested should be beaten for misbehavior, like a “little monkey.”
“Parece Chanquito,” she said to her friendly Council members, or at least all but one.
This woman certainly checked all the boxes. In Mexico, prejudice against Amerindians is considered the worst kind of racism, whereas, north of the border, the the worst prejudice is widely perceived to be against Afro-Americans. In Los Angeles, these two persecuted groups happen to share the limelight, today thanks to the LA City Council President—and whoever surreptitiously recorded her (which still remains a mystery).
According to today’s LA Times, the largest population of Oaxaqueños in the world, outside of Oaxaca, lives in Los Angeles. Recent estimates put the population in the county at 200,000. Many, if not most, are of Zapoteca and Mixta origin.
Many of these Mexican-Americans reside in the immigrant enclave of Koreatown (another persecuted group), grandchildren and great-grandchildren from the great migration during the 1950’s, when California orchards and Texas cotton fields filled with legal workers through the Federal Bracero program. This is the part of Los Angeles that Nury Martinez ostensibly represents. Or at least she used to.
By evening, both the Mayor of LA and the President of the USA have weighed in, calling for Nury Martinez to resign, and no doubt she will. So will two other Latino Council members who participated in the same conversation. Such vile racist language, such hidden animus toward their constituency—this is all too much for diversity-loving Californians to bear—so the purge is necessary. The hatred will be removed, person by person, with extreme prejudice, and the cleansing will commence in Oaxacalifornia.
Almost lost in the outrage is the actual purpose of the infamous City Council meeting, which occurred about a year ago. It was a re-districting meeting, in which the Latino delegation was angling to reapportion voting-district lines in a way that favored Latino communities, at the expense of Black communities. This odd mechanism of American democracy, whereby winners of previous elections are permitted to change the playing field to benefit their own—a quaint Yanqui mode of disenfranchisement called gerrymandering—ensures that power remains entrenched. As such, it is corrosive to representational democracy. However insidious, it is only occasionally revealed in raw form, as with the unguarded comments of one unfortunate Oaxaqueña-American lawmaker when talking with her pals. Nury Martinez will have to go. So will her friends. The rest remains the same.