Years ago I was asked by a university history professor, a very dear friend of mine, to speak with his class on the internment (incarceration) of Japanese Americans that began in March of 1942, by way of Executive Order 9066, signed in February of that year by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Fellow American citizens permitted it, just as we continue to permit the egregious Jones Act. Not all internments come with barbed wire.
I showed students an old cartoon that was watched by children in 1942; one of many released that espoused hatred of the Japanese people. In it, the character of Popeye the Sailor sang an excerpt from the popular Carson Robison song: “We’re Gonna Have to Slap the Dirty Little Jap.” The students were stunned. This history had been previously unknown to them.
Like it or not, the political is personal, and reverberates through all of our lives. A legacy of patriarchal white supremacist entitlement condoned and encouraged an individual to brutally violate me. That same entitlement on a broader scale, contributes to the unchecked violation of our civil liberties and human rights by an increasingly despotic government. No “leader of the free world” has ever acted entirely on his own. In 1939, 20,000 U.S. Nazi’s gathered in hatred’s full regalia at Madison Square Garden, in New York City. I’ve attached the link to the footage below.
When I was twenty-three years old, I was held by an acquaintance against my will, raped and tortured for eighteen gruesome hours. The man who did this to me lacked empathy, compassion or any ability to see me as a human being. He was privileged, always well dressed in suits and ties, studying medicine and law. He made sure I knew that women, “even the little old ladies” found him irresistible and that any woman who did not welcome his sexual advances must surely be a “lizzie”, his southern drawl slang for lesbian. When I tried to get away he put a gun to my head and told me “Darlin’ who’s going to take the word of a spic washing dishes for a living over a man like me? I could kill you right here, leave you in the stairwell and everyone in this building will blame it on a junkie. You’re in my apartment, that makes you just another Puerto Rican whore.”
We knew each other from school. He invited me over for lunch. We lived a few blocks apart. I knew my neighbors; those were days of daily face to face interactions with the people we made it our business to know. Cooking meals together, talking politics, remembering birthdays and celebrating significant milestones was an organic part of our lives.
In all of my previous interactions with this man, which were public, he had always behaved like a “gentleman.” He held a well-paying job as a phlebotomist, aspired to a career where he could combine his interests in law and medicine, and was the “all American (white) boy”. In my naiveté, I perceived no threat, felt no sexual attraction, and simply believed I would be spending a quiet afternoon enjoying intelligent conversation with someone raised in a world very different from mine, who promised to make his specialty of Biryani rice.
It was the 1970’s, and rape was still seen as the victim’s fault, especially one who went to a man’s home. I would have been considered a “hot blooded Latin” who most certainly must have “asked for it.” I had male and female friends I visited all of the time. In fact, most of my friends at that time were men, and several of them are still in my life as dear and loyal friends. No matter; I was then and to many still am, considered a spic.
The rapist was right; he could kill me and get away with it. I was a nobody in the eyes of a society where religion had cursed women as “instumenti diaboli” and Puerto Ricans were represented in media as junkies, dealers, whores, welfare cheats and in general a worthless criminal element. Our globally relevant achievements in all fields, our vast literary contributions, inventions, arts, and s/heroes were denied, erased or buried and the very mention of “Puerto Ricans” in films, conversation, in the news, was nearly always tinged with the underscore of a disgusted sneer or filthy joke. It was a time when we had the lowest per capita income of any “hispanic” group, but scarce public dialogue about the predatory colonial relationship forced by the United States that caused it.
To date, even among the so-called “educated” in the U.S. we are referred to as immigrants. A recent New York Times article revealed recent polling results that only 54% of “Americans” know that Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens. In terms of mass public perception and sneering attitudes towards Puerto Ricans, little has changed. Our global celebrities, in particular those who are politically safe and lighter on the melanin scale, are doing very well. My thanks to those who are giving from their abundance. My respect to those for whom their giving is an act of love and sacrifice.
The rapist viewed the totality of my life as a soulless, meaningless body easy to dismiss, to brutally violate and just as easy to kill. Now, Puerto Rico gets the same treatment, with special abuse and neglect in locations where Afro-Boricuas, the poor and elderly reside. Puerto Rico has been raped since 1898, its just now in wider public view and the rapist comes with supporters who are looking the other way, silent, except for forcing on us their “Merry Christmas”, two words that disguise a deep disdain and disregard for difference; two words coined to obscure Pagan beliefs and that have evolved into commercial expedience. There is no Christ in Christmas; there never was.
Puerto Rico, Rich Port. Port for the Rich. The rapist changed my name too. He called me Madeline. This Magdalena is Borikua. The island of my mother’s birth is Borikén.
We are not in debt. We are owed everything, beginning with our name.
https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/542499/marshall-curry-nazi-rally-madison-square-garden-1939/
I showed students an old cartoon that was watched by children in 1942; one of many released that espoused hatred of the Japanese people. In it, the character of Popeye the Sailor sang an excerpt from the popular Carson Robison song: “We’re Gonna Have to Slap the Dirty Little Jap.” The students were stunned. This history had been previously unknown to them.
Like it or not, the political is personal, and reverberates through all of our lives. A legacy of patriarchal white supremacist entitlement condoned and encouraged an individual to brutally violate me. That same entitlement on a broader scale, contributes to the unchecked violation of our civil liberties and human rights by an increasingly despotic government. No “leader of the free world” has ever acted entirely on his own. In 1939, 20,000 U.S. Nazi’s gathered in hatred’s full regalia at Madison Square Garden, in New York City. I’ve attached the link to the footage below.
When I was twenty-three years old, I was held by an acquaintance against my will, raped and tortured for eighteen gruesome hours. The man who did this to me lacked empathy, compassion or any ability to see me as a human being. He was privileged, always well dressed in suits and ties, studying medicine and law. He made sure I knew that women, “even the little old ladies” found him irresistible and that any woman who did not welcome his sexual advances must surely be a “lizzie”, his southern drawl slang for lesbian. When I tried to get away he put a gun to my head and told me “Darlin’ who’s going to take the word of a spic washing dishes for a living over a man like me? I could kill you right here, leave you in the stairwell and everyone in this building will blame it on a junkie. You’re in my apartment, that makes you just another Puerto Rican whore.”
We knew each other from school. He invited me over for lunch. We lived a few blocks apart. I knew my neighbors; those were days of daily face to face interactions with the people we made it our business to know. Cooking meals together, talking politics, remembering birthdays and celebrating significant milestones was an organic part of our lives.
In all of my previous interactions with this man, which were public, he had always behaved like a “gentleman.” He held a well-paying job as a phlebotomist, aspired to a career where he could combine his interests in law and medicine, and was the “all American (white) boy”. In my naiveté, I perceived no threat, felt no sexual attraction, and simply believed I would be spending a quiet afternoon enjoying intelligent conversation with someone raised in a world very different from mine, who promised to make his specialty of Biryani rice.
It was the 1970’s, and rape was still seen as the victim’s fault, especially one who went to a man’s home. I would have been considered a “hot blooded Latin” who most certainly must have “asked for it.” I had male and female friends I visited all of the time. In fact, most of my friends at that time were men, and several of them are still in my life as dear and loyal friends. No matter; I was then and to many still am, considered a spic.
The rapist was right; he could kill me and get away with it. I was a nobody in the eyes of a society where religion had cursed women as “instumenti diaboli” and Puerto Ricans were represented in media as junkies, dealers, whores, welfare cheats and in general a worthless criminal element. Our globally relevant achievements in all fields, our vast literary contributions, inventions, arts, and s/heroes were denied, erased or buried and the very mention of “Puerto Ricans” in films, conversation, in the news, was nearly always tinged with the underscore of a disgusted sneer or filthy joke. It was a time when we had the lowest per capita income of any “hispanic” group, but scarce public dialogue about the predatory colonial relationship forced by the United States that caused it.
To date, even among the so-called “educated” in the U.S. we are referred to as immigrants. A recent New York Times article revealed recent polling results that only 54% of “Americans” know that Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens. In terms of mass public perception and sneering attitudes towards Puerto Ricans, little has changed. Our global celebrities, in particular those who are politically safe and lighter on the melanin scale, are doing very well. My thanks to those who are giving from their abundance. My respect to those for whom their giving is an act of love and sacrifice.
The rapist viewed the totality of my life as a soulless, meaningless body easy to dismiss, to brutally violate and just as easy to kill. Now, Puerto Rico gets the same treatment, with special abuse and neglect in locations where Afro-Boricuas, the poor and elderly reside. Puerto Rico has been raped since 1898, its just now in wider public view and the rapist comes with supporters who are looking the other way, silent, except for forcing on us their “Merry Christmas”, two words that disguise a deep disdain and disregard for difference; two words coined to obscure Pagan beliefs and that have evolved into commercial expedience. There is no Christ in Christmas; there never was.
Puerto Rico, Rich Port. Port for the Rich. The rapist changed my name too. He called me Madeline. This Magdalena is Borikua. The island of my mother’s birth is Borikén.
We are not in debt. We are owed everything, beginning with our name.
https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/542499/marshall-curry-nazi-rally-madison-square-garden-1939/
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