I am not Hmong; And I don’t speak Spanish! (via A Hmong Woman)

I comment here on a Great post by MaiBao (ahmongwoman.wordpress.com) that speaks to forgetting and how important forgetting is in becoming a national citizen. As much as the US likes to portray itself as a cultural mosaic, it is strongly based on very subtle forms of assimilation and marginalization. In some cases, as is the current situation of excluding Islam from an acceptability and its Islamophobia, the marginalization is extreme and unwarranted. Cultural heritages under the umbrella of ‘American citizen’ is a double-edged sword.

As people come to America or Europe to escape forms of violence that the US government and the Europeans create around the world through economic/military policies and covert operations, the sequestering of geographies of acceptability are created, and the social fabric of control become clearer through: assimilate or cannot assimilate, incarcerate or cannot incarcerate, criminalize or become a saint, become a nobody or do these certain things–then, and even then, as this post says to us, you may never arrive at ‘citizen.’ The racial, cultural, economic, linguistic, and body-form fabric of acceptability does have a dominant, mainstream center that everything circles around. This is why Americans spend most of their lives ‘finding themselves’ and ‘re-gaining themselves’ and ‘finding our true calling.’ It is because we live in a society where that is taken from us, as Americans. And at the same time, it is being stolen around the world, through globalization and its effects: displacement, refugee camps, demotion, de-prioritizing, ghetto-izing, criminalizing, judicial systems that make bureacracy strong, dominant secular Christianizing of morality, and the hierarchy of the white ways of thinking and doing and moralizing at the top. Even many so-called ‘white’ people cannot make it there. It is a nightmare. Then we add gender, sexualities, and other aspects of dominance and demotion and we have the fabric of our present world that has been globalizing (a neo-colonial continuation of expansion–through minds and economices instead of outright ‘direct invasions’) over centuries.

I hope, that through reading this posting by this Hmong-American, that we come to realize the treacherous path of forgetting, remembering, claiming, and resisting as everyday life, while we gain privileges in the troublesome American citizenship dream.

Here is the great post by MaiBao who is at: ahmongwoman.wordpress.com:

A few of years ago, my husband’s niece exclaimed, “Auntie, I know how to say door in Spanish.” “Dora, the Explorer” was one of her favorite children’s television shows at that time. I wondered if she had learned that from “Dora.” “How?” I asked. “Qhob rooj!” I gasped in surprise, “Athena, that’s not Spanish! That’s Hmong. And the correct way to p … Read More