#just mexican things

[tyanis]

Me, a half-white/half-Mexican woman disagreeing with something: "No." (English)

Me, a half-white/half-Mexican woman seeing or hearing something scary: "No." (Spanish)

[sephirajo]

Andor. Is. So. Fucking. Mexican.

Gonna think on it another day or so but I have to write SOMETHING about How Andor is a very very VERY Indigenous Mexican show. About how it’s themes of life, death, remembrance and fighting these battles are presented in ways I don’t see outside of Mexican or Xicane medias.

Like guys, seriously, if you’re not Mexican or don’t get our culture I’m like not sure how I can explain this to you but I have to because H OLY SHIT EVERYONE.

[goethefaustworld]

More like a one year old's baptism who feel asleep at 6

[carkrash]

for a second I’m like oooh i could name my kid carson but my family would call them calzón i already knoooow

[skitskatdacat63]

"It hurts always the same, to be honest, when you don't see the checkered flag. It doesn't matter which number."

[royalarchivist]

Quackity: We're gonna talk about it on our way there, ok?

Tommy: Just tell me where you went right and where I went wrong.

Quackity: This is where I went right. You're white, I'm not.

Tommy: PFTT— Yeah, ok.

Quackity: So that's– we're gonna start off with that, Tommy.

[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 

[tooquirkytolose]

Lolita Folklorico~

A take on lolita style inspired by mexican baile folklorico dresses :)

[dvnieldraws]

wet cat dad and his strong protector daughter [q!missa & q!tallulah]

[tyanis]

Was at the store earlier and saw that there's an horchata flavor of mochi ice cream and my Mexican half nearly exploded AND I GOT IT AND IT'S SO GOOD AND I WANNA EAT IT FOREVER HOLY SHIT

[goethefaustworld]

Well, here in Mexico, public high schools (and middle schools... and elementary schools) have the students come in two batches

The bigger half go in the morning with the stated schedule, while the rest go during the evening, like myself (though only in highschool), as stated, from 1 to 8 pm

It's functionally the same school with two different student bodies and some overlap when it comes to the professors

The strange workings of how they sort the new students is something I know not of and honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if it was random

For some reason my highschool tried to foment a rivalry between both student bodies, from "our drill took longer" (we didn't care, and indeed cheered harder when they told us our time) to "they're sabotaging your graduation event" (which didn't work as we actually had communication so the event's planing went smoothly)

Of course, there was the possibility of changing shifts, a thing I didn't try because I didn't care, but a friend of mine did. People saw going in the morning as preferable.

Yall was discussing with some Canadians earlier so

[sephirajo]

I love following other Mexican gamers, esp those playing BG3 and seeing the Nahuatl names for their Tavs cross my dash :D

[lavernius]

Locus as a metaphor for colorism/racism

Some people were interested in this take so I'm going to go over it really quick. I am brown, a lot of the experiences I talk about here are lived (and a lot of them I experienced from this fandom, ironically enough). Warnings for discussion of racism and colorism + abuse.

Don't be weird, keep it civil! I'm not telling you what to think I'm just giving my two cents as a person who has experienced all of this.

Note: I don't think RT intentionally did any of this because they couldn't even treat their real life employees of color well so I don’t trust them with a character of color LMAO. “Colorism” is specified here because being brown affects every part of life in a way that's difficult to explain if you haven't experienced it firsthand.

Locus experiences very true aspects of real-world racial profiling: he's a big, dark-skinned, reserved brown man who is heavily demonized—both by the narrative/show AND in-universe. The fact that the “scary” merc of the duo is the one who was confirmed brown in 14 is likely colorism on RT's part, yes, but it doesn't change that Locus is painted as an aggressive monster canonically (a common stereotype of brown men, and a cause for code-switching in many POC). He's a monster, a dog, a weapon, a machine—all words that are used to describe him in the show, some he even uses on himself. Obviously not words you should be applying to a brown person good lord!

Locus’s apathy isn't inherently part of him. Maybe he wasn't always kind or gentle, but he was forced into a violent situation and TRIED to stay empathetic, wanting to spare his enemies at times, before he was forced out of the mindset—something that still bothers him to this day, even if he's repressed it! Brown people commonly have mental health issues and trauma that doesn't get addressed because of cultural expectations and medical racism, to the point where a lot of our cultures normalize very unhealthy behaviors. More of a stretch, maybe, but it reads like racial trauma if I ever saw it (and I have). Specifically because:

Felix sees him starting to lose his empathy, which is VERY BAD for Locus’s mental health, and takes advantage of it to use Locus as something of a “guard dog”. Erm, white people benefiting from racism and colorism? White people forcing stigma on brown people to gain power over them? What a surprise!

On the note of Felix: while Santa’s reveal that Felix is afraid of Locus can have several meanings, a lot of them can still lead down a road of (abusive) racism. He's scared of Locus because he's a “merciless killer”, isn't the same person he used to be? Who caused that, I wonder? Scared because if Locus found out he was being manipulated he’d immediately abandon Felix? Yeah, because he's being manipulated and abused, of course he’d leave… if I found out I was being manipulated by a white man I'd be uncomfortable too! Victim blaming is EXTREMELY common with racist white people because there is POWER in being white and blaming the brown man.

I like to see Locus’s divorce from his given name and visage as a symbol of cultural isolation. POC are so frequently made victims of identity crises because we’re expected to conform to a white world, whether we try to be white people or try to be what white people expect us to be. The latter in Locus’s case—they want a violent brown man, they have one. It keeps him alive at the cost of taking his sense of self away. He's safer as Locus, the armor, than he is as Ortez, the person.

There's not like, canonical evidence I can point to, but Locus feels like a catch-22 of “I want to be angry that people see me as a monster for being brown, but if I’m angry they’ll see me as a monster because I am brown”. It's a cycle that's hard to escape because when you ARE a righteous brown person who wants to be angry because the world has hurt you, it's so easy to paint you as an animal.

Um the fandom is extremely racist to him in ways I don't think they're even aware of. He's got it all! Fandom whitewashing and stereotyping and sexualizing and demonizing, people shipping him with a white person who hurt him (because a brown person cannot be hurt by a white person without SOMEONE wanting to forgive the white perpetrator for it LMFAO, many such cases where it’s done for the sake of shipping too), performative diversity and a lack of actual depth in his culture bar the fact that he speaks Spanish and has a Hispanic name…I don’t even think the guy who MADE him gives a shit that he’s brown (past it giving him brownie points) and how it affects him. Yeah who’s surprised. (EDIT: did not know Miles was mixed, but POC are still capable of colorism, etc. I still think Miles, as a lighter skinned person, doesn't fully comprehend how Locus being dark plays into the dynamic/Locus's character as a whole. Still, entirely my mistake.)

So basically: brown guy gets dehumanized, white guy takes advantage of it, systemic colorism and stigma helps white guy get away with it, brown guy is alienated from himself as a result and thinks he genuinely is a monster because everyone treats him like one. I see myself in him as a brown person who has experienced colorism for having low empathy and not connecting with society. It's awesome.

He is a textbook traumatized brown guy. He's got internalized racism/colorism. He's going to meet other brown people and unlearn it. He’s going to connect with his culture again. He’s going to realize he never owed the white man power over him just because he was convenient to control. He's going to be okay!

No thanks to RT because they couldn’t write a good brown guy if they tried + it falls on us brown people to give coincidences this kind of personal meaning. LOL

Next week (not really) I get into how Lopez is an incredible accidental portrayal of alienated brown people who have pride in themselves and want justice for being mistreated all the time.

[spider-man-2o99]

hits the disinformation machine with a bat a big bat a big heavy lead-core thick wood bat kablam whack whack whack whack whack. miguel ohara does not have "spider instincts," he has never in even one piece of official material ever had nor experienced the phenomenon that fandom colloquially refers to as "spider instincts," okay, that concept is entirely and 100% a fandom-born headcanon that people created post-ATSV as an excuse to write the guy as a stupid Feral Brown Beast-Man caricature . lord have mercy. it takes. two seconds of research 2 not perpetuate racist malarkey. do better

[gael-garcia]

Gael García Bernal on the etymology of "chingar", and Diego Luna might have just exposed himself 🤭 (x)

[emizzzleblur]

I showed my mama this exact picture and asked what she would think if I brought them home, here’s the results:

Max: no he’s too old for you

Lance: hmm he’s nice looking

Checo and Fernando: they’re too old for you, like your fathers age (my dad is 67)

Lewis: *silence* eh

George: oooo, I like him

Charles: oh even better he’s cute

Carlos: OH WHO IS THAT??? The hair!! Oh look at those lips!! Very nice!! I’d like to come home to him!!

Pierre: oh he looks fun! He’d be fun to date

Esteban: oh he has a sultry look to him, look at those eyes!

Kevin: he has a German look. meh.

Nico: *silence* too old

Daniel: *silence* *squints* *silence*

Yuki: awwww he looks like a little puppy, he’s adorable

Zhou: I’m not into Asians

Val: he’s too old, but I like the mustache

Alex: oh he looks like he’d be a fun son-in-law

Lando, Oscar and Logan: they’re too full of themselves. Look at that ego, they’re all the same I do not like them.