Gratitude 123

I am grateful for the many Latinos that I know, have known, and whose friendship I still enjoy.  Generally I have found Latin Americans to be warm, friendly, caring, courteous, humorous and positive.  There are variations of course, and I have known a few miserable Latinos, but the majority I have found to be very enjoyable.  I like them way better than the Spanish, whom I generally find to be thin-skinned, unreliable, selfish, arrogant and able to laugh at everyone except their own precious selves.  Which also suggests to me that not that much has changed really in five hundred years.

Courteous, kind and co-operative behaviour are traditionally recognized as signs of weakness.  Yes, I know, here in dear, kind and co-operative Canada where I was born, raised, still live, and where likely I'll die, these are hugely admired traits, in fact, these are the characteristics that define all that is best in Canadians.  My overwhelming negative experience of Spanish nationals in relation to my generally positive interactions with Latinos could also suggest that living in a prolonged socially oppressed reality over several centuries helped make Latin Americans in every way the moral superiors over their Spanish overlords. 

There is something about strength, or power, as we popular understand these concepts, that dehumanizes even more the oppressor than the oppressed.  Indeed, those who experience and live under oppression have to acquire qualities of friendliness and cooperativeness if only to cope, if only to last and survive one more day under the heel of their overlords.

When the Spanish and Aztec cultures first encountered each other, it was one stratified hierarchy meeting another.  Everything was socially vertical.  The kings and priests oppressed the aristocracy and military which oppressed the common people who oppressed the slaves and outcasts.  Those class structures were rigid, inflexible and brittle.  They also defined the development of the Latino character and I think also informed the collective experience of trauma.  My limited experience of the white Mexicans, the descendants of the ruling class would be roughly parallel to my impressions of the Spanish.  They are generally arrogant, spoiled little narcissists, pseudo-European racists with a huge sense of entitlement.  All the other Mexicans I have encountered I have found to be generally very kind and warm.  And caring.

I take exception with the Mexican character only in this detail: they are so averse to conflict and confrontation that they have raised passive-aggressive behaviour to a national virtue.  I have been lied to, stood up by, and studiously ignored by more Mexicans than I would care to number.  As I said, they hate and fear conflict.  It is too dangerous.  It is too ingrained in their national collective unconscious that to rock the boat is to court danger and to be hurt or even slaughtered by your social betters.

By the same token, as one can see from the current and recent drug wars, their capacity for cruelty and atrocity seems to be without parallel, except perhaps in Colombia, or Chile, or Argentina, or Uruguay, Peru, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala...

This to me is one of many examples of what I mean by collective trauma, especially in the Latin American character.