And now for your Playa Moment…
With apologies to Crossfit and their Workout of the Day (WOD)…
I humbly present to you…(drum roll):
The Word of the Day (WOD)…(rim shot)
That’s right children, here at The Dialectical Playa, I like to imagine myself as a poor man’s, ultra-lite version of Mark Steyn’s “One-man Global Content Provider.” In my case, it’s more like that annoying Dude-in-the-bar-at-2am-who-won’t-shut-the-hell-up Content Provider. Regardless, I press on. While I put the finishing touches on quite possibly the greatest blog-post evah, I have deigned to leave my Olympus and mingle among you unworthy plebes, granting you just a glimpse of the brilliance that will soon overwhelm you with this, my humble WOD. This is kind of like the quest for fire, but I’ve decided to just give it to you out of my Promethean sense of duty and love for you losers so you won’t have to waste a lot of time trying to discover it. That way, you won’t be distracted by unimportant things like trying to figure out what the hell I’m saying and you’ll give me the attention that I deserve. So…
Today’s WOD is:latina, or for you hombres out there, latino. |
Popularized by la latina sabia Sonia Sotomayor, the term latina/latino is actually a misnomer. I work with a guy who likes to imagine us (I’m of Hispanic descent) as latinos though his Spanish is labored and very unfluentish. As for me, the only thing I’m fluent in is profanity. Even if I was down with the whole La Raza thing, I wouldn’t even speak the same lingo as my “brown brother” as my “latino” ass would be speaking Portuguese rather than Spanish since my heritage on my mother’s side is Brazilian.
To add to the overall level of multi-racial confusion at my job, my fellow proletarian and I are actually whitey white. His parents are Puerto Rican, but they are obviously pure-blooded Spaniards. While my mom is Brazilian, she is very Portuguese looking – as am I – though I inherited my Anglo-Saxon dad’s height as I’m 6’1″. When I visited the Portuguese Azores in the early 1990s on your tax dollars, everyone there looked like my mini-me since the older generation of Portuguese are hairy and short like Hobbits. Even the women looked like me, except with thicker mustaches and back hair.
Where the common misperception of the word occurs is in its limitation to only Third World, Spanish speaking people who look like Mexicans. For one thing, most Mexicans are actually Mestizo (descendants of mixed European and Amerindian ancestry though predominately Amerindian in appearance) and Amerindian (who are descendants of Amerindians and are, uh, predominately Amerindian looking). If one is intellectually honest, latina/latino actually refers to the Latin culture of Rome, which was spread by their empire throughout the Mediterranean and Balkan areas of modern day Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, and Romania; leaving an indelible legacy on those nations in regards to their respective cultures and languages.
Through Spanish conquest and colonialism, the language and culture of Rome was bestowed imposed upon the subjugated peoples of Central and South America. In fact, one could argue that such an occurrence happened to Anglo-Saxon England following the Norman conquest of 1066. The Normans were originally Scandinavian Norsemen led by the Viking chieftain Rollo and were bought off from raiding Paris by the French King Charles the Simple through the payment of coastal land at the mouth of the Seine River in 911 A.D.
This territory eventually became known as Normandy, with the Viking “settlers” known as Normans (a corruption of Norsemen). By William the Bastard’s era one hundred fifty years later, any vestiges of Scandinavian culture had been subsumed by the area’s more dominant French culture, with the consequence that the Norse language of William’s ancestors had become replaced by the French of William’s contemporaries. One legacy of his English conquest was that he changed his name from the unflattering William the Bastard to the more suitable and grandiloquent William the Conqueror. The other legacy was the influx of Latin words via French into Old English, with the result that we use such Latin words as “attorney,” “bailiff,” “chancellor,” “baron,” “count,” “duke,” “army,” “artillery,” and “battle,” among many, many others. So all Americans can actually claim with the utmost sincerity that we’re all latinos and latinas now! Open borders with Mexico! Viva la open border! Woohoo!!! Or as they say in Spanish, “Woohoo!!!”
So why wouldn’t Nicholas Sarkozy say that he’s a “wise latino?” Probably because he’d rather be embroiled in a typical, French non-scandal given life by France’s typically scandalous Socialists. Personally, all this self-hyphenating racial identifying can be tedious and disturbing. I mean, no one wants to be white anymore, and much to my chagrin, I’ve discovered that I’m white. Wow, Obama and I have something in common after all.
