#just mestiza things

[sephirajo]

I really really hate James Cameron’s Avatar series.  I really hate that racist POS is popular.  I hate that white people make indigenous people into aliens and then talk about how they didn’t fight hard enough to live, obviously.  It’s right up there with Road to el Dorado for things i fucking hate that gringos fucking love for no other reason than being racist shitbags.

[puppyeared]

filipina miku!! my mom helped me with her outfit ^_^

[sephirajo]

This is all great except for saying Oppenheimer is good and this isn't a taste thing this is a im really fucking tired of reminding people sad boy pain doesn't change the number of indigenous people who suffered and died ans whose deaths are still ignored to this day...

Also pissed the barbie movie makes a crack about our suffering re smallpox.

Men complaining about Barbie Movie are so pathetic

'they want to turn everyone gay' you literally have Margot Robbie, one of the most beautiful actresses working today, in pink mini dresses and bathing suits and then you also have beautiful women dressed as maids, mermaids, cheerleaders like ??? if you were very distracted by Ryan Gosling and his muscular body I have news for you, friend

'it's anti men' no??? it literally shows Ken being unhappy in a world run by the Barbies and the Barbies being unhappy in a world run by Kens. At the end they work together and find happiness

'it's anti women being mothers because they smash baby dolls' one of the main characters is literally a mother trying to connect with her daughter ??? The baby doll message is about girls being given other choices besides being a mother and house wife

So dumb

Oppenheimer has no women for the first 30 minutes and the moment we see one shes naked. I LOVE Florence Pugh but the contrast is pretty strong. It ignores the female scientists that actually worked at the time, btw. I did love Oppenheimer but it's not perfect in that regard either.

[yawnderu]

ah I didn’t know u were indigenous !! 💕 I’ve been imagining indigenous!bimbo!reader with a huge collection of beaded earrings in all sorts of cute designs (pink bows, hearts, etc etc) bc I keep finding indigenous designers on insta lol anyway she’s so slay and ily don’t listen to the haters

yeah!! I'm mestiza, my mum is a white latina while my dad is brown and indigenous :')

Ahh yes!! I just know she'd ROCK beaded earrings in very cute designs, and would even learn how to make her own beaded jewelry, even making matching rings with Simon long before he proposes, simply because she likes matching things with her Si💗

Simon goes to many different countries so if possible, he'd also be buying her beads and bringing them home as a gift for her!!

[gatheringbones]

[“It can be difficult for people raised as girls to express rage when we’ve been taught from very early on that it is in our best interest to suppress our anger. It is culturally acceptable for women to be sad, not angry. In one study on gender, anger, and the workplace, the participants conferred higher status to sad female employees than to angry ones. For men the opposite was true. Men, particularly white men, are rewarded and forgiven for their anger, while women are penalized and blamed.

Ceci, the mestiza paralegal, now lives in Los Angeles with her husband, five-year-old son, and twenty-two-year-old stepdaughter. She described herself using the exact language of a woman who was taught by the culture not to value or express her anger: “I’m a people pleaser. I don’t rock the boat. I go along with everything, do what people tell me.” This is the path of being a good girl, a good woman, and eventually a good mother. Lifelong gendered learning teaches people raised to be women to push down anger and any feelings in the “sub-anger” ballpark, such as annoyance, irritation, and frustration. I imagine this emotional push-down like the carnival game whack-a-mole. Each time an uncomfortable or unpleasant anger-related feeling pops up—whack!—women automatically bang it with a big-headed mallet, sending it back beneath the surface.

Like the rage itself, this game of anger whack-a-mole is an international phenomenon for women. In Korea, there is a culture-related anger syndrome called hwa-byung. It translates literally to “illness of fire” and mostly affects working-class middle-aged housewives, who have chronically suppressed anger stemming from strict gender roles, gender-based inequality, and patriarchal family structures. In traditional Latin American folk medicine, it is believed that holding onto certain emotions can cause physical illness. In Northeast Brazil, the term engolir sapos translates to “swallowing frogs,” and is mostly used by women to refer to the suppression of anger and irritation, and the pressure to tolerate unfair treatment without complaint.

Cheryl, the Black civil rights lawyer who internalizes her mom rage, is practiced at playing whack-a-mole with her anger: “I’m good at repressing things. So, a little problem, I repress it, and it gets packed on top of all the other things that make me mad, until there’s no way to untangle it. It’s just this huge tangle of anger that I’m trying to disassociate from all the time.” In our present-day culture of busy, intensive motherhood, stuffing down unpleasant emotions can be a matter of practicality. Minutes are a precious resource, and airing every frustration is a time expense that modern mothers cannot afford. Emails must be sent, dinner needs to get into bellies, and bodies need to snuggle under covers. But the perceived time-saver of the Emotional Whack-a-Mole phase is a mirage. Every time a mom suppresses her angry feelings, as she’s been taught to do her entire life, she is pushing them onto an ever-growing pile of anger inside her. Eventually, the pile will topple.”]

minna dubin, from mom rage: the everyday crisis of modern motherhood, 2023

[sephirajo]

Exactly. And I get it. There are sadly too people who know the term Aztec who would look at you sideways if you tried to tell them about the Mexica. :/ I apologize for jumping in. It's just a mild annoyance I guess. Azteca was foisted on us by Spain.

God I am sick and tired of people uwu-washing indigenous American history.

Did the Inca have exquisite building techniques, efficient messengers, and quality waterworks? Yes. They were also an expansionist empire built on violent conquest and the splitting up and relocating of conquered peoples.

Did the Aztecs have a gorgeous capital city built at the heart of a lake, with floating farms and towering temples honoring their fascinating pantheon? Yes. Guess what tho. They were also a violent expansionist empire who practiced ritual sacrifice of prisoners of war.

The Iroquois confederacy had one of the most unique representative political systems I’ve ever heard of, with women taking a forefront in most local government matters too. But their internal peace allowed them to redirect violence to their neighbors, as so often happens with tribal confederations, and they eventually violently conquered the Ohio valley and destroyed or displaced dozens of other indigenous groups.

Even my beloved Cahokia has the graves of sacrifice victims amidst its ruins.

A society should not need to be (and fundamentally cannot be) squeaky clean unproblematically stannable in order to be worth studying and remembering, and pretending that they were is no less disinformative than the European accounts painting them as godless savages.

[ruemzip]

Here's the thing I could do to draw Marko's family for the first time :D

Ramble under the cut uhhh

My English it's not the best I hope it's understandable :'D

Sooo, Vicente is a Peninsular (A child full Spaniard heritage but born in America), and Sole is Mestiza (Child half Spaniard half native)

Sole's family were merchandisers and Vicente's family (vieng full Spaniard) owned lands, crops and slaves

It was very rare at the time but both Sole and Vicente fell in love with each other, so they married and had children :D

Vicente's parents end up going back to Spain with their other children (so Marko's cousins are full Spaniard), but Vicente wanted to stay in New Spain with Sole

They are not rich, but they have some land in Mexico (in that time, a New Spain state), but as their children were mestizos, for Vicente it was important them to make themselves worthy, so after Maria was born, they moved to Florida closer to United Colonies

So, even if their first four children were girls, Vicente made sure they all were well educated both in Spanish and English

When Marko was born, Florida went from belonging to Spain to Britain, and Vicente started pushing Marko a lot more for being the first boy, now born in a British Colony

(The children were already less worthy than full Spaniard or even Peninsulares, now being foreigner in a British colony it would be hard for Marko to build a worthy life)

Sole got weak with Marko's birth and he was sick during all Marko's childhood, until Marko was five and she died

Vicente loved Sole so much it was difficult not thinking she died because of Marko, and the boy wasn't good at all (he couldn't read, he was clumsy and was too attached to his mother)

So he went from calm but firm man, to a strict and emotionally distant. Specially when in the same year Sole died, Marko started with vitiligo symptoms

Fran was the oldest and biggest proud of Vicente, so he just focused on her and let Marko under the care of his three other sisters

When Marko turned 15 Vicente decided it was about being time for him to be a man, and send him to the war to fight for the country they were living in and then moved back to Mexico, forcing Marko to join the army or find a way to survive

Marko tryed to scape to Spain because he remembers he had some family there, but while he was making a stop in England, he was forced to join the royal army

While Marko's in the war, their sisters and father were in New Spain. They weren't that rich, but they keep studying

Till Maria and Bell mainly, decided they wanted to do the same as their mom, an started moving all around the country together, selling clothes and clay stuff

Fran and Bea got married not very long after Marko was left behind

When 1783 came and Marko didn't appear, they all assumed he had died either in war or in any other scenario. It was just Marko not being willing to go back. He missed his sisters but he was angrier with his father than he loved his sisters (they were way older than him, and they were always loved by Vicente, the opposite of what Marko felt)

So it wasn't till 1798 when Marko met his family again :D

[stirringwinds]

Can I ask what Maria & Antonio’s relationship has been like through the ages? Like, Al & Arthur have Crown Prince vs Old King, but what’s the vibe with Maria & Antonio? She was Crown Jewel of Spanish Empire. Do Spain & Cuba view each other as Father-Son? What about the rest of Central & South America? Also, Brazil & Portugal? Sorry for so many questions.

hey! thanks for the question—i will focus just on Maria (Mexico) and Antonio here, whom i have the clearest headcanons for.

how i personally headcanon it: Antonio and Maria are somewhat similar, but also different from Arthur and Alfred— so, a father/daughter dynamic. he is her "father"—in the usual, loaded nation sense of 'his actions caused her to come into being' and/or 'he has shaped her culturally'. just as in human families, not all fathers are good ones: so father-daughter here doesn't mean 'this is a healthy, cosy domestic dynamic'. after all, imperialism also shapes people and families intimately; Antonio is her "father" similarly to how Arthur is to Alfred—it's the dynamic of imperial power, authority and lineage. from the POV of humans who saw them both in 16th century Mexico City, they read them as 'oh, a spanish lord and his mestiza daughter.' he does have her officially legitimised (as some conquistadores historically did with their multiracial children).

nonetheless, like all nations, she isn’t born the human way. and in reality, she has more than two "parents"— at the very least, from a young age she'd been aware also of her connection to Mexica (who headed the powerful Triple Alliance commonly referred to as the "Aztec Empire") and Tlaxcala (another Nahuatl-speaking state and Mexica's long-time enemy, who made an alliance with the Spanish and furnished most of the soldiers during the siege of Tenochtitlan, the Mexica seat of power. Antonio's actions contributed to her being born—but so did Mexica and Tlaxcala's. thus, while Antonio tries to assert cultural dominance (speaking Spanish and religion for example), Maria always navigated it differently, rather than him being able to transplant his culture wholesale (such as with how cultural syncretism occurred re: religion in Mexico) because it was simply impossible for her not to be unaware of her non-European heritage. as i see it, from young, she was always fluent in Nahuatl (the language of both Mexica and Tlaxcala), not just Spanish.

much like Arthur did for Alfred, I see him being the one who picked the name 'Maria' for her. for Antonio, on some messed-up level, he sees himself in her and that’s one thing that underlies his willingness to legitimise her as his daughter: he understands himself as being born in the conquest and bloodshed inflicted by Rome and Carthage— and many others who came subsequently (your birth being someone else's misfortune or even death, is one thing that is understandably jarring from our point of view, but taken for granted by older nations). as I see it, “Antonio” came from Rome naming him “Antonius”. Hispania was fought over by Rome and Carthage in part for its rich silver mines, after all—and while history doesn't repeat, sometimes it rhymes. as it was with Alfred, while she was seen as the prestigious 'jewel' in the spanish crown, her relationship with her father was always riven by the contradictions imposed by imperialism.

Antonio claims her as his daughter, and his name and authority gives her access to certain things—but that acceptance and privilege was often conditional and inconsistent (as was the experience of many real mixed-race people during that time who had powerful fathers—or as in my own family re: the context of British and French imperialism in the 20th century), and there was no ignoring the imperial hierarchy in place in the wider colony-empire dynamic, even if Antonio was at times personally affectionate or indulgent towards her. so, while she was well-educated and had many social opportunities, she did feel the imperial hierarchy quite keenly. i feel that sometimes, she felt similarly to Alfred (and maybe even more so, given the richness of Mexico's silver mines and dramatic stories being told about the "Aztec" Empire/Mexica in Europe) in that she was being shown off for her father's status rather than being understood as a person. i will leave it here for this ask, for now, but overall, it was a relationship similar in some ways to Arthur and Alfred, in the sense of paternal authority and imperial hierarchy—but of course, also different due to the ways British and Spanish colonial policies in the Americas diverged.

[sephirajo]

The thing i hate most about this website is the number of preachy vegans who have never studied how nature actually works. We need to bring that shit back to schools. Even your salad was bought with blood and death, just human blood and plant death. But thats okay if the cute animals live 🤦‍♀️i just can't please learn how nature actually works and leave ndn people and our food alone

[sephirajo]

I'm a Mexican mutt and the show is frank with death the way we are taught to be. To look the truth of it right in the face and act anyway. Hell when Andor admits fear too it reminded me of something my abuela and bisabuela say all the time "only two types of people have no fear, the dead and the foolish and the foolish will join the dead"

This is a VERY Mexican show.

i don’t want to be overly essentialist or talk outside my cultural lane but… there is something so intensely not anglo-’murican about the way the way andor treats death and it’s so fascinating and refreshing. like on one level this is a show profoundly about death from the very structure of its narrative, but it’s about how you live knowing you will die rather than the glorious death-from-martyrdom-death-as-redemption narrative, and therefor, inversely, about the profound interconnections between the dead and the living and those on the liminal in-between. now we have maarva’s death, and the very introduction of her death comes through the assembled chorus of communal voices who have come to clean her house and take her to rest. (i also love the fact that maarva died, explicitly, of old age and so many of the other related issues. i don’t think you can make the case that the empire *wasn’t* involved because she’s someone so utterly and clearly destroyed by its actions, but i do like that this was a so-called “ordinary” death, because of the thematic purpose that even “ordinary” deaths are heartbreaking and awful and worth remembering.)

andor makes it canon that there are communal aid organizations- i immediately think chevra kadishas! though many cultures have their own organisations and social structures for how to support the grieving and honour the dead- which is just one of the ways it highlights community and the complexity of interpersonal relationships. the daughters of ferrix are introduced an episode earlier, and i realised on a rewatch with my family that the daughter of ferrix - keezy maybe?- introduced at the beginning of the episode is also mentioned by bee in the first episode as being someone who helps maarva with her dinner and medication. we don’t see maarva’s body go alone, we see her transported through the streets by the women of ferrix. andor makes the case of elder care as communal connection and antifascist work, AND that it is done by the same people as those that bury the dead. and the way that andor is building up t having the season finale be the funeral, the thing that drags cassian home and into the line of fire being his mother’s funeral, the storytelling possible about funerary customs and memorialisation as acts of cultural resistance and aggressive rehumanisation… i’m too verklempt to say much more but i think the way this thematic arc is so intertwined with cassian’s time in narkina 5 and the scene with him and melshi at the end of the episode like! no one is lovingly honouring every one of those men with two-day funeral ceremonies through the streets. NO ONE remembers but cassian and melshi. two episodes earlier ulaf died, but the closest thing he had to the daughters of ferrix was the doctor, the fellow prisoner, who refused to learn his name and quietly euthanised him in the hallway. until we know more there were nearly five thousand other deaths. and the episode ends with melshi saying, it’s our duty as survivors to carry the weight of memory so that other people will know and remember this. they are also carrying the weight of mourning those whose time it was not to die. fuck. this show guys. it has me 

[not-so-rosyyy]

I have a question do some Filipino consider themselves Pacific Islander in Guam we have a lot of people from there who say they are but when I visit the states many would identify as Asian I’m just curious the lilo and stitch live action may me think a lot about how colonization ruin the islands in the pacific and people don’t know what a native Hawaiian actually is

hi! sorry for the late response to this. as far as I can tell, this debate of how Filipinos identify is only an issue in the diaspora, most especially with young Filipino-Americans. but for those of us here in the Philippines, I can tell you we don't identify as Pacific Islanders. we're geographically located in Southeast Asia, so for all it's worth, WE ARE ASIANS.

all of this is a bit more complicated, tho. I think most of the confusion with our identity stems from the fact that America tends to lump Asians & Pacific Islanders together in one category. but since our people's culture & history are very unique from the rest of our Asian neighbors, Fil-Ams struggle to find where they really belong in the cultural melting pot.

they sometimes find it hard to identify strictly as Asians, because "asian" in the US is often only associated with those from the Sinosphere (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc). most Americans and those very same Asian neighbors also tend to exclude Filipinos from the group because we have more similiarities with Latin cultures now due to having been a Spanish colony for 300+ hundreds years. (we used to be part of the Spanish East Indies that also included Guam, in fact). but then, we also can't identify as Hispanic since...well, we obviously aren't. we do share a genealogical history and Austronesian heritage with Pacific Islanders, though (for example: similar language, tribal tattooing, etc).

so, all things considered, I think the feeling of being an outsider in the Asian community is part of the reason why some Fil-Ams identify more with Pacific Islanders. and I can't really fault them for that.

to me, however, it's absurd to strictly classify us into a single ethnic category. we're a multi-race nation. a typical Filipino family can have one member look like chinese, another will look mestiza, and another one will look like your average polynesian. some of our indigenous peoples are even black. our people's ethnic DNA is a rainbow, and--I say this without exaggeration--our skin colors are literally the Fenty shade range.

that said, the Lilo & Stitch casting debacle is still a mistake...and not so much because of ethnicity, but because of ✨colorism✨. the girl they cast as Nani is mixed European-Filipino, and is clearly fair-skinned...and Nani is very much NOT.

[cosmic-vanity]

Gwendolina “Doli” Maximiliana Stacy (My take on Gwen-42)

Fun facts about her!!!

Mestiza, 17, "Straight" (Bisexual), She/Her.

Speaks both Spanish and English but she has a VERY heavy accent when speaking in Englishand literally all her friends find it SO attractive.

MDLR, her and the Mary Janes are a gang.

Has messed around with MJ before. She says it wasn't really her thing, but actually she'd 100% do it again.

Was previously in a weird situationship with Miles G, before he became the Prowler. Now they're more like frienemies, but she loves teasing him about it.

Also a vigilante, but she only "works her magic" on regular criminals, not villains. No fancy tech gear, just her hair rifle.

Smokes SO MUCH. She either has gum or a cigarette in her mouth at all times.

Her dad is almost never home, and her mother died from an overdose. She's very irresponsible but refuses to try hard drugs, since she knows what path it can take someone down.

Airpods in 24/7, has to be tapped on the shoulder several times if you want her to listen.

Speaking of this, she exclusively listens to Reggaeton and Hispanic Rap. Says the American kind is garbage. Miles and her have beefed over this.

Judgy as hell and kind of a jackass to anyone outside her circle but she's chill with the people she likes. Zero filter, though, she is BRUTALLY honest.

[annemarieyeretzian]

Things I was grateful for in September 2024: Medusa by Arnold Böcklin, LUSH Godiva shampoo, Glory conditioner, Super Milk conditioning hair primer, Sticky Dates shower gel, Sticky Dates body lotion, Herbalism face cleanser, and Sticky Dates lip scrub, Glossier boy brow duo, ColourPop Golden Hour eyeshadow palette and So Juicy plumping gloss, Frostbeard Studio’s Bookstore candle, The Sight of Death by T. J. Clark, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa, Charli XCX’s brat, a brat keytag, Mat Kearney’s Just Kids, American Eagle Peanuts fall pajamas, Triple Beam Pizza, Shake Shack’s chocolate salted caramel shake and veggie burger, Frostbeard Studio’s The Old Forest candle, and The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

[sephirajo]

[lorraineofcominantes]

Heinrix bleeding after an attack. Rana forgetting he's a psyker for a brief moment and taking off her pañuelo to tie the wound. Except the pañuelo is the only thing keeping a traje de mestiza's top half remotely modest. That's see through fabric. Fucking slut. And he's just standing there looking like he's actually losing blood. Esta bien pa ba tu? Uh… yes, of course, I was simply distracted for a moment, Ra- Your Ladyship.

[anexperimentallife]

One thing to keep in mind when considering a move to the Philippines is that you will never be able to blend into a crowd if you are white-passing or Black. (Some Latin American/Indigenous American folks can pull it off until they speak, because everyone will just assume they're part of the large mestiza population here, just as a lot of Filipinos in the US are mistaken for Latinos or Indigenous folks.)

Which is a real issue if you're a white-passing autistic (like me) having an "I don't want to be perceived" kind of day.