Comment on Mexico’s first homegrown EV faces a bumpy road

amino@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

• astutemural@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Enh, it’s at least a little more complicated than that. Native or mestizo people are much more common in Mexico than the US. For example, Nahuatl has somewhere between 1.3 and 1.7 million speakers, mostly in Mexico. This is not counting over a dozen other languages that have hundreds of thousands of speakers apiece (wiki. By comparison, in the entire US there were only about 372,000 people that speak any indigenous language.

  Depending on how you want to look at it, this could be just…a normal name, or even a tribute to the Nahuatl community. Or just a cynical attempt to sell more cars by looking inclusive. How many people need to speak a language before it’s ‘normal’, after all? We don’t go asking Italians before we put stuff in Latin. Or the Irish before we sell St Paddy’s Day shirts. Etc.

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  • amino@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Native and mestizo aren’t the same thing. Mestizos are the people that assimilated and therefore enjoy privilege over indigenous people. identifying as mestizo is kind of the opposite of being indigenous because you’re adopting a colonial identity.

    We don’t go asking Italians before we put stuff in Latin.

    except Italians aren’t being genocided by any state for being Italian. Latin would be Spanish in this context, not Nahuatl. Latin was imposed through colonization around the world. And before anyone brings up the Aztec empire, it hasn’t existed in centuries.

    Mexico forces Spanish upon indigenous groups to bring them closer to the conquistador ideal of a good Mexican citizen. them appropriating Nahuatl words to seem cool is more akin to racist Republicans stealing words from Black American English to market their products or politics.

    Mexico is a bit different from America in their approach to assimilation in that they strive for mestizaje (making every Mexican mixed). You can see the ideology behind it in La raza cósmica.

    I think it should be obvious why erasing indigenous cultures through state violence isn’t a benign thing.

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    • astutemural@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Fair enough, I learned some things today. I was under the impression that indigenous languages were a lot more normalized than they actually are. I still think that using more indigenous language in everyday stuff is low-key a win, but for it to be commericalized while denying it elsewhere is just a slap in the face.

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      • amino@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        promoting indigenous linguistics is absolutely good, the nuance is that some of those languages are a closed practice so it would be disrespectful for outsiders to speak them. it all comes down to autonomy which i think you got towards the end of your reply

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