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| Photo Credit: AP. |
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Bricia Lopez has welcomed people of all walks to dine at her family’s popular restaurant on the Indigenous-influenced food of her native Mexican state of Oaxaca — among them Nury Martinez, the first Latina elected president of the Los Angeles City Council.
The
restaurant, Guelaguetza, has become an institution known for introducing
Oaxaca’s unique cuisine and culture to Angelenos, attracting everyone from
immigrant families to Mexican stars to powerful city officials like Martinez.
But now
after a scandal exploded over a recording of Martinez making racist remarks
about Oaxacans like Lopez, the 37-year-old restaurateur and cookbook author
said she feels a tremendous sense of betrayal.
Martinez
resigned from her council seat Wednesday and offered her apologies. But the
disparaging remarks still deeply hurt the city’s immigrants from Oaxaca, which
has one of Mexico’s large indigenous populations. Sadly, many said, they are
not surprised. Both growing up in their homeland and after reaching the U.S., they
say they’ve become accustomed to hearing such stinging comments — not only from
non-Latinos but from lighter skinned Mexican immigrants and their descendants.
“Every time these people looked at me in my
face, they were all lying to me,” Lopez said. “We should not let these people
continue to lie to us and tell us we are less than, or we are ugly, or allow
them to laugh at us.”
Following
Martinez’ departure, two other Latino city council members also are facing
widespread calls to resign since the year-old recording surfaced of them
mocking colleagues while scheming to protect Latino political strength in
council districts. Martinez used a disparaging term for the Black son of a
white council member and called immigrants from Oaxaca ugly.
“I see a lot
of little short dark people,” Martinez said on the recording, referring to an
area of the largely Hispanic Koreatown neighborhood. “I was like, I don’t know
where these people are from, I don’t know what village they came (from), how
they got here.”
Lopez said
she heard such racist comments growing up in California but had hoped they
would be a thing of the past, that young Oaxacan immigrants would not have to
hear them.
“I want people to look at themselves in the
mirror every day and see the beauty,” she said.
Oaxaca has
more than a dozen ethnicities including Mixtecos and Zapotecs. The southern
Mexican state is known for famously hand-dyed woven rugs, pristine Pacific
tourist beaches, a smokey alcohol called Mezcal and sophisticated cuisine
including moles — thick sauces crafted from more than two dozen ingredients.
Los Angeles
is home to the country’s largest Mexican population and nearly half the city of
4 million people is Latino, census figures show. Informal studies indicate several
hundred thousand Oaxacan immigrants live in California, with the largest
concentration in Los Angeles, said Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, director of the
University of California, Los Angeles Center for Mexican Studies.
Demeaning
language is often used against Mexico’s Indigenous people. It is“the legacy of
the colonial period,” Rivera-Salgado said of Spanish rule long ago.
Racism, and
colorism — discrimination against darker-skinned people within the same ethnic
group — run centuries deep in Mexico and other neighboring Latin American
countries. A few years ago, Yalitza Aparicio, the Oscar-nominated actress in
“Roma” who is from Oaxaca, faced racist comments in her country — and
derogatory tirades online over her Indigenous features after she appeared on
the cover of Vogue México.
Odilia
Romero said the scandal doesn’t surprise her. The Oaxacan community leader is
among many who had been pressing for the resignation of Martinez, the daughter
of Mexican immigrants, and the two other councilmembers on the recorded
conversation.
Romero said
she’s also fielded calls since the scandal broke, including from someone urging
her not to let the hurtful remarks distract from critical working aiding the
immigrant community.
“That is a very paternalist comment,” said
Romero, executive director of the group Comunidades Indigenas en Liderazgo or
CIELO and a Zapotec interpreter. “How dare you tell us Indigenous people that
we are not understanding. Of course we understand — we see this every day.”
Lynn
Stephen, an anthropology professor at University of Oregon who researches
Mexican migration and Indigenous peoples, said the concept of mestizaje — or
being a mixed-race and non-racial unified nation — intended to erase Indigenous
communities, not uplift them, and the discrimination persists to this day. It
is carried to the United States with those who migrate, she said, while similar
divisions also exist in other Latin American countries.
“These kinds
of comments directed toward Indigenous people from non-Indigenous people from
Mexico, Guatemala, etc., it’s a different kind of layer of racism,” Stephen
said. “Folks from Oaxaca they have to contend with anti-immigrant and
anti-Mexican backlash and racism often from non-Latino Americans, white Americans,
sometimes other folks, and then within that, often where they’re living or in
school.”
Ofelia
Platon, a tenant organizer, went to the Los Angeles city council chambers
recently to demand the officials step down. She said she hasn’t experienced
discrimination from within the Latino community as much as from outside it, but
there’s no place for such — especially coming from elected leaders the poor
count on to help improve their lives.
“They think
they have the power to step on people,” she said. “They’re two-faced.”
It’s not
just the hurtful remarks that sting Xóchitl M. Flores-Marcial, a Zapotec
scholar and professor of Chicana/o Studies at California State University,
Northridge. She called it very telling about the officials who make decisions
affecting her community. She said she grew up in the United States hearing
hurtful words and still faces similar rejection whenever she travels to Oaxaca
and people there are surprised she’s the research team leader.
“It’s so
painful because those are consequential people,” she said. “This is hurting us
— not just our emotions, but our actual life in terms of our jobs and our
opportunities.”
Still she
said she has hope for future generations in “Oaxacalifornia” — the tight-knit
community that has maintained traditions while embracing life in Los Angeles.
Taxin
reported from Orange County, California.
This story
corrects that Martinez is not a Mexican immigrant but the daughter of Mexican
immigrants.