Author Archives: Plamen Miltenoff

on the Trek to America

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A Deadly Jungle on the Trek to America

Some 90,000 people have crossed the Darién Gap this year on the trek to the U.S. The jungle between Colombia and Panama is one of the most dangerous migrant routes in the world – and not everybody makes it out alive.
The most dangerous part of the journey for Romain and his small family lies just ahead: Right after crossing the Gulf of Urabá, they will need to enter the jungle connecting Colombia and Panama, the rainforest of Darién. They will face an approximately six-day journey by foot through a dangerous forest where getting lost is common. Others collapse in exhaustion and remain lying in the jungle, an environment with raging rivers, poisonous snakes and wild pumas.

Mexican Spanish

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‘Mexican Spanish is permeated by indigenous languages’

https://english.elpais.com/usa/2021-08-13/mexican-spanish-is-permeated-by-indigenous-languages.html

Many Mexicans still feel that Spanish is an imposed language, and do not feel that this is their language

What came to Mexico was Spanish with many dialects influenced by Andalusia and the Caribbean

Because the Habsburgs always had a policy of separating the Indian villages from the Spanish villages. Divide and conquer. Separate them and then each one is in their corner and I can control them better. But in that separation, there was a great respect for their customs, legislation and indigenous ways of life. The Habsburg dynasty respected the separation of Indian villages and they used intermediaries. Documents show that they were Spanish-speaking Indians, in the sense that they spoke both languages. They spoke Zapotec and Spanish, for example.

When the Bourbons ascended the Spanish throne, they totally centralized the administration. They eliminated the separation of indigenous towns and Spanish towns, and of course imposed Spanish. Remember that they had been living together for 200 years, and that the Indians had also adopted Spanish because it was more fluid and faster for them to communicate in Spanish than to communicate in Nahuatl and to look for an interpreter. That was not because of ‘how nice it sounds.’ It was purely for survival.

Yusra Mardini

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yusra_Mardini

https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/team-refugees/how-yusra-mardini-survived-25-day-trek-syria-became-olympian-n601946

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/yusra-mardini-rio-2016-olympics-women-s-swimming-syrian-refugee-competing-olympics-who-saved-lives-17-people-jumping-open-water-and-pushing-their-sinking-boat-safety-a7173546.html

liberal anti-racists

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“Much of today’s advocacy around racial justice places the onus on individual actors and the private sector. We need collective action instead.”

Posted by The Guardian on Monday, March 8, 2021

After years of embracing the “post-racial” rhetoric of figures like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, mainstream Democrats are coming around to acknowledging how much the 1960s civil rights revolution left unfinished. And yet, years into a “great awokening” that has drawn attention to these issues, it’s worth asking whether anything is changing.

companies like Apple, where workers in the secretive Chinese complex that manufactures iPhones attracted global concern after a spate of suicides, just brought out a special edition $429 Black Unity Apple Watch that was marketed for Black History Month. Apple says: “The Black Unity Sport Band is inspired by the pan-African flag and made from soft, high-performance fluoroelastomer with a pin-and-tuck closure laser-etched with ‘Truth. Power. Solidarity.’” Where is the power or solidarity for the workers toiling in factories in China, one might wonder? Or for child workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo who toil and die in mines extracting raw materials like cobalt that are used in iPhones. One doesn’t hear anything about that kind of material injustice affecting the working class from the global south when corporations make their self-congratulatory PR statements around inclusion.

A 2020 paper, not surprisingly, finds that white workers are less likely to hold racist views if they’re in a union, and that white union members also tend to have greater support for not only universal social goods, but for policies like affirmative action.