nezua:

badassmexicans:

Bracero workers registering.

Foreign contract labor was banned in the US since 1885 because of its connotations with slavery. The ban, however, was lifted to implement the Bracero Program (1942-1964). This program permitted companies to contract Mexican laborers to work in the US: it established a temporary worker program. The Bracero Program essentially created a new second-class citizenry of Mexican laborers in the U.S.: they had no rights of a U.S. citizen, yet provided great benefits to our economy.

BAM

Know your nation’s history. Acknowledge your debt.

REVOLUTIONARY WOMAN OF THE DAY: Lucy Parsons (circa 1853 – March 7, 1942) was a labor organizer, socialist, and legendary orator. Lucy was of Native American, Black, and Mexican ancestry, born in Texas as a slave. She moved to Chicago where she was a key organizer in the labor movement and also participated in revolutionary activism on behalf of political prisoners, people of color, the homeless, and women. She said, “We [women] are the slaves of slaves. We are exploited more ruthlessly than men.” We salute Lucy Parsons, known by the Chicago Police Department as “more dangerous than a thousand rioters”. Know your revolutionary women’s history.

via REVOLUTIONARY WOMAN OF THE DAY: Lucy Parsons | AF3IRM

nezua:

nuestrahermana:

Dia De Los Muertos Is Not Your Halloween by Nuestra Hermana

As we all know, Halloween in America is right around the corner. Kids & adults alike will be dressed up in costumes, consuming candy, attending parties, navigating through haunted houses and thoroughly enjoying their night. Think about your last Halloween and look at the images above.

These are still shots of Dia De Los Muertos in Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, California & Arizona. They are small snippets of a vibrant, important and REAL holiday for Latin@s. This is not your Halloween.

Dia De Los Muertos developed out of over 2,500 years of indigenous ritual celebrating death and paying respects to loved ones who have passed away. Scholars state that the Aztecs originally held a month long festival dedicated to the goddess Mictecacihuatl, the ruler of the afterlife.

After Spanish colonization and many attempts to eradicate the rituals & festival, a new merging with the Catholic holidays All Souls Day & All Saints Day developed over time to what is now Dia De Los Muertos.

Dia De Los Muertos is celebrated November 1st & 2nd (in alignment with All Saints Day & All Souls Day respectively). It is NOT celebrated on October 31st, it is not tied in with Halloween in America at all.

In Mexico, November 1st is dedicated as Dia De Los Inocentes, a day to honor and respect the innocents, children & infants to be more specific. November 2nd is Dia De Los Muertos, the day to honor deceased adults.

On these days, altars are made in honor of them. People build them on their loved ones graves, at home or anywhere they find rightful to honor their loved ones. They make ofrendas (offerings) to the dead of their favorite foods, toys (for children), pictures, pan de muertos, sugar skulls and many other things that help guide the spirits of the dead safely to the altars. Marigolds, known as the flowers of the dead, are usually prominent in the altars.

In Mexico, many people sleep overnight at the graves. Every ritual & altar is not the same everywhere. Many places have their own traditions and ways of honoring the dead. One thing is for sure, Dia De Los Muertos is not Halloween. It is a sacred time and holiday for Latin@s everywhere.

So, when you’re dressing up for Halloween remember: doing this, this, this or this is not only disrespectful but it is also a erasure of someone’s real life culture. Think before you walk out of that door.

It might even get you smacked! Maybe. Ok. Probably not.

But why risk it, yanno? Just don’t.

dahlias-y-rosas:

[photo: cinnamon skinned, muscular, long black haired, bearded mexican man wearing all black sits on a grey concrete, leaning up against a white concrete wall, his arms wrapped around his knees, looking up with a slight smile at a horse, who is picking their head through a window in the wall, tenderly nuzzling the sitting man.]

amerikkkanstories:

fuckyeahbrownpeople:

andythenerd:

This kind of story happens all the time:

My pal Antonio is an undocumented farm laborer, horse whisperer and superhero. He can clear an acre of brush in a single day with a machete and talk a psychotic horse down off the ceiling.

The other day the cops pulled him over for no reason, impounded his car, and threw him in jail. He was late for work and got in trouble with his boss.

His honky boss, for whom he has worked since leaving Mexico at the age of 17, is invested in keeping him dependent because he couldn’t run his farm without his indentured labor. Antonio owes him thousands of dollars for dental work that insurance would have paid for if he’d been a documented worker. His boss takes most of his paycheck to pay for the dental work, leaving him to live on $30 a week. He lets Antonio live in a crumbling old house on the property, but he won’t let him fix the bathroom or the furnace because then he’d have to pay taxes on a habitable dwelling. His boss has told him that he thinks of Antonio “like family.”

“But,” Antonio observes, “my boss’s daughter don’t live in no shithole casa.”

(via Barn tableau)

Can I marry this man?

An yet your Amerikkkan history books tell you slavery ended - that this is a bold, brave new world instead of a sad, slave new world order.

There’s too many stories like this. 

“As we come marching, marching, in the beauty of the day,

A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill-lofts gray

Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,

For the people hear us singing, “Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses.”

—James Oppenheim, “Bread and Roses,” 1911

The refrain of James Oppenheim’s poem became a popular rallying cry at labor demonstrations in the early 20th century, most famously at the 1912 “Bread and Roses Strike” of Lawrence, Mass., textile workers. The slogan’s roots go back eight centuries to the verses of the Persian poet Moslih Eddin Saadi, who instructed the destitute man, with only two loaves of his bread to his name, to “Sell one, and with the dole/ Buy hyacinths to feed thy soul.”

“Bread and Roses” remains a galvanizing motto for workers’ rights activists today; it articulates the continued aspiration of the working underclass for more than mere material subsistence—for employment conditions that enable a decent quality of life and ennoble workers with a measure of human dignity. (via Labors Lost | Baltimore City Paper)

From a review of an 2003 labour arts exhibition: “Work Song Duets: The embroidered images of 1900s labor activists pair up with portraits of modern-day maquiladora workers in Bread and Roses at School 33”.

bloodythumbs:ilovefat:fuckyeahzaftig:

Aristeo Jimenez - s/t At first I wasn’t sure if this image fitted on Zaftig. Jimenez’ models are mostly tansvestites and/or prostitutes from working-class neighbourhoods in Monterrey, Mexico. One can’t easily tell if this is a cis female or a trans male. However, it challenges standards of genre, size, class, race and age. They don’t really matter to her anyway. You can see she’s extremely confident and has a badass attitude. And that is gorgeous.