We are the "evil empire" we warned everybody about

[antigone382]

160. Well, I have been there once, and much of my social group are Mexicans and Hondurans...

I am not fully fluent, but competent in Spanish, enough that I worked at my friend's Mexican Restaurant, where most workplace talk was in Spanish...So here's my perspective:

My context is a tiny island off the coast of Honduras. In many respects the folks here don't represent typical Central America; A Caribbean Creole dialect of English is spoken by most island natives, although a majority of the current population is from the Mainland. There is some resentment of America as a global superpower. At the same time, the American lifestyle is also admired and sought after, and in that sense America is glorified.

At the same time, the people seeking to identify with America and share in its "standard of living" complain about empty nets and wonder where the fish have gone (fishery decline is a huge problem in the Caribbean). They sell burgers, fries and coke to tourists and they can take a quick ferry to visit the Kentucky Fried Chicken on the mainland, but they complain that their native foods have become so expensive that they can no longer afford to prepare them. They complain about the problems of crime and violence, and wonder why things are so unstable. They complain about the loss of self-sufficiency and the erosion of small-scale industries that supported them, such as the coconut industry; while at the same time they take jobs which carry them across the ocean on trade barges. They see more and more of their land being bought up to build fancy resorts and condos, more and more of their streets filling up with casual tourists, more and more of their natural resources being co-opted and destroyed for lazy eco-tourism that destroys the very landscape it purports to honor. Many people on the island see these connections; many more do not; they are on the subsistence level and they only want their lives to get a little better; and aspiring to be "American" is one way they dream of doing that.

I live in one of the poorest and least healthy counties in America. Conditions here literally rival the third world, with people lacking basic things like running water and indoor plumbing. Yet I see people here voting against their own interests because they identify with the wealthy and the dominant all the time. So when I see the same among poor Latinos and Mexicans abroad and at-home, I don't assume that their love for America in any way removes the oppression and dispossession they suffer under American economic and foreign policy.