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145 points bryanrasmussen | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.214s | source
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thunder-blue-3 ◴[] No.44004103[source]
Mexico has so many greater problems to discuss than a few people learning the ancient tongue. 2 days ago a beauty influencer was shot dead on a live stream, and female (and male) mayors have been gunned down regularly. I couldn't care less about what they're speaking over there, I hope they take care of their basic human rights and giving their citizens dignity first.
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myth_drannon ◴[] No.44004766[source]
People without past have no future. Connecting to your ancient traditions is a form of empowerment. Look at what happened to Jews with Hebrew. It helped rebuild a united identity and contributed to Palestine's de-colonization effort. I hope people of the Americas will do the same and free themselves of the Spanish colonizers.
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sarchertech ◴[] No.44005475[source]
Most genetic studies show the average Mexican has around half and half Native American and European ancestry with about 5% African ancestry. 99% of Mexicans speak Spanish and 94% speak only Spanish.

I’d love to know what Spanish decolonization in such a place looks like.

There is no objectively correct demographic language or culture for a given location. You have to pick a point in time to go back to and there is no way to do that that isn’t arbitrary.

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lo_zamoyski ◴[] No.44006756[source]
Mexicans are indeed a new people drawn from both native and European stock and a fusion of those cultures. There is a notion of Mexicans (or even Latinos) as la raza cósmica, which is deeply connected with Our Lady of Guadalupe, regarded as "the first mestiza". This mestizo identity is core to Mexican identity. It isn't colonial even if colonialism served as a vector and a catalyst for it.

The idea of "going back" to some kind of pre-Spanish Mexico is nonsensical, and it would entail the very negation of Mexican identity and the invention of a fictional identity. Such "decolonization" movements are ahistorical. And frankly, I doubt most Mexicans would want a "return", whatever that even means.

Of course, this is different from learning Náhuatl. And it's worth noting that the Jesuits worked to preserve the native languages of the New World. You see this with Náhuatl. You see this in Paraguay where the Jesuits immediately began codifying and preserving Guarani in their missions, and where it is still widely spoken today.

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1. ◴[] No.44007148[source]