Osea - New York Bruja and Activist (Part 1)

Meet Osea, a bruja, activist powerhouse and personal friend of mine making good trouble in Nueva York. Today's episode explores the complexities of cultural identity, language, and heritage. We discuss our personal experiences with education and activism, particularly the importance of understanding and challenging historical narratives. We delve into the ongoing impact of colonialism and the representation of indigenous peoples, and discuss the oversimplified views of history and identity held by people in the broader US culture.

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00:00 - Osea's Journey

02:56 - Identity and Heritage

03:49 - Cultural Background and Family History

08:10- Language and Cultural Education

09:29- Challenging Stereotypes and Misconceptions

13:03- Activism and Advocacy in Education

16:00 - Reclaiming Historical Narratives

18:42 - The Role of Education in Identity Formation

24:08 - Contemporary Issues in Identity and Culture

33:59 - The Complexity of Indigenous Identities

39:46 - The Continuation of Colonial Narratives

Transcript

Nicte-Ha: 0:00

My interview with this week's guest will be broken into several episodes. As a friend of mine for many years, Osea is a bruja, an activist, and a curandera in New York City. Because of the depth of our connection, our conversations were extremely wide-ranging, covering history, identity, belief, family, racism, colonialism, spirituality, and religion. This first episode is an introduction to her, her history of activism, and the education that she had from her family to craft her own identity. Thank you for tuning in for part one of my conversation with Osea. I hope that you find our conversations as fascinating and thought-provoking as I did. And I've known her for many, many years, and I can't wait to have this conversation because she has one of the most interesting personal journeys that I have had the privilege to hear a little bit about. And so I'm excited to get into her history, her journey, and her activism and her building of community. Thank you for having me.

Osea: 1:44

It's only taken us a couple decades to sit down.

Nicte-Ha: 1:46

Just a couple of decades. We had we had some conversations about this before. True, true. Life just keeps getting it. It's true. Before the world was right, and before the world was like so on fire. Right. But we could we can talk about that later. So first, um, can you talk about how you came to the name Osea and what it means to you and how you chose it?

Osea: 2:06

Sure. So I'm pretty active in activist circles here in New York City. And so for our own safety, we tend to keep changing names pretty often. Not our government names, obviously, but you know, we use other pseudonyms uh for the purpose of what we do, and you just kind of keep rotating them. And so I've gone through a few. This is not my only one, but one of the things that I was teased about to a certain degree is my Spanish is a mix of a lot of the people that I've been around. But the folks that I grew up around and learned Spanish from, it was Mexico City Spanish. And so one of the things that will often happen if you speak Mexico City Spanish is the interjection like, like this, like this, like this, is osea. Osea, da da da. So I would explain things to people and then clarify with the like. You know, lo que necesitas, es que so because I would interject oseas all the time into the things I was saying in very filango Spanish, o sea, kind of stuck.

Nicte-Ha: 3:09

One of the things that I try and highlight in this podcast and in my interviews is that so many of us, particularly Latinos, but or mestizos or however we want to identify those of us here in Latin America who are a mix of the descendants of the indígena, the indigenous people who lived here before colonization, the colonizers, slaves that they brought from West Africa. You know, we're this rich mix of people. And so some of us we're, you know, the colors of the rainbow dark hair, curly hair, light hair, blonde, blue-eyed, dark skin, light skin, median skin, and all of those, you know, those physical features, those accidents of genetics, they also impact our daily lives, how we identify, how we're raised, our experiences in our community, and also with the larger American society. And so just if you if you're comfortable sharing and talking about how you understood that identity when you were younger and how that's evolved over the years. I know we talked a little bit about it in our pre-show conversations, but just laying the groundwork for people so that they can understand your journey toward your current identity and how you saw that when you were younger.

Osea: 4:26

Sure. And I'll sort of plug this as the places where we live and who we're surrounded by cause that to continue to evolve. All right, so I'll I'll get into that and sort of tracing this history. So, you know, I was born in the United States, mixed parentage, you know, one parent from Mexico of Mestiza heritage, and one parent from the United States from the South, Irish, British heritage, but I'd say more like Irish American and very, very southern. And so that already, in and of itself, is like two very different worlds combining. And my parents met outside of the United States because my mom spoke a whole bunch of languages, and my dad only spoke one. And my mom found him on a train with a bunch of students and was like, This guy is a hot mess. He does not know where he's going to take his students to go stay. And I was like looking at a big fold-out map. This is 1970s, long before you know internet was available. And you know, it's not exactly like yellow pages of like go find a hotel while you're riding a train in Italy. And so my mom spoke four languages and basically was like, Can I help you? Because this is concerning. As my dad's like trying to find something on a map while he's already on the train and she understood English among the four languages that she spoke and was like, Just I'm gonna help you. Like, get off the train at the next stop. So I, you know, I laughed because you know, my dad was a hyper, you know, confident, um, you know, very skilled guy, renaissance man, he'd been in the military. But I just laughed because traveling through Europe, my mom was the boss. Like, she just was like, get off the train, I'm gonna handle this. And so she went and negotiated, you know, their stay for him and like all the kids in Italian, and actually like brought down the price and so forth, and was like ready to be like, All right, good luck, American, with whatever nonsense you have planned. And everybody was like, No, you cannot leave us here. We can't speak the same language. Please don't, please stay, please hang out with us. So, you know, we are lost.

Nicte-Ha: 6:27

We are lost, we are monolingual Americans.

Osea: 6:30

Help us, monolingual Americans, and so you know, my mom, I guess, felt bad and was also like, fine, I guess I'll take a three-day paid retreat at this, you know, pensione to help out this poor American teacher and all of these high schoolers. And so that was the beginning of my dad trying to kick it to my mom, and then my mom just like went back to Mexico, was like, okay, American, bye, after all of that, and then it was like a long distance, you know, him trying to convince her to come to the states. So, you know, you have very different migration stories, very different stories where it's like people, you know, for whatever their reasons, they left their home country and they felt an intense need to be in the United States or to get out of their home country because the long history in Latin America of things going sideways for various and sundry reasons. It's sometimes, you know, our own country has some culpability in Operation Condor. But the situation of, you know, my own heritage, yeah, yeah, that's like a whole other conversation, right? The situation of my own parentage is yeah, I could just do a podcast about like how we have gotten in the midst of you know destabilizing all of Latin America. But, anyways, my personal situation was that my mom was like, I'm not needing to leave Mexico, thanks. Like, your country has problems. So I think that that's a really important place to start with how I'm explaining even my own identity, is in no way, shape, or form did my mother see coming to the US as like the huge upgrade, right? She had a career, she was happy with her career, she had an education, she traveled freely, independently as a woman in Europe, obviously helping, you know, my poor father handle his life, right, while he was traveling in Europe. She was a very independent gal, right? And very proud of what she was and what she was capable of. She spoke four languages. So coming to the States for her took a lot of convincing. And I think that I grew up with the impression that my mother is like, well, I'm here now. They started off in the mountain west. They started off in the mountain west, like when she moved to the States, she started off in the mountain west with him. I was born in the mountain west, and it was cold and there was snow. And she was like, Okay, I thought this was cute to like come and visit for skiing, but the I was not sold on this bill of goods that this would just continue to be like this. And so by the time I was five, my parents moved down to Florida because mom was not having it, and dad was not gonna have an unhappy mom. So there's just there, there's a lot to unpack there that like when my mom got to the States, you know, she moved away from everything that she knew culturally, linguistically, and so forth. And so was very adamant on raising my sister and I 100% exclusively in Spanish, like with books with materials that would detail to us our heritage, our history, and absolutely no backing down and being like, oh, well, you're in the state, so your identity is just this, or you know, that one is better than the other, one is dominant to the other. Like, no. I grew up with tons and tons and tons of educational materials, um, and just sort of being drilled into me about like the the Mesoamerican history, um, not just the history of Mexico as a country, but Mesoamerican history, pre-Columbian history, understanding belief systems, practices. They were not called mythologies, because mythology is a way of like passing off something as being a fairy tale or a story. It was it was taught as like these were beliefs and practices. And we had a bunch of art in my home growing up that were like replicas of pre-Columbian art, like primarily Mexica art in our house. So, like statues and sculptures and and so forth. So I grew up with a pretty interesting from the time I was pretty young, working knowledge of all of this history, heritage, and then language, like I said, where I I spoke Spanish before, I spoke English, but I grew up where the household was really 50-50 English-Spanish, and then the Spanish that I speak is also influenced by Nahuatl. You know, there are a lot of words and phrases that are that come from Nahuatl, and so indigenous language, right? And so even when I was in school, I felt like I was correcting people all the time for the time I was a little kid, because in the United States, there's a very interestingly limited view by many of what a Mexican is or who a Mexican could be or look like, or you know, the stereotypes or that is on both sides of the culture, too. Correct. And so I, you know, from the time I was very little, I was definitely course correcting everybody around me because they would make statements like, Well, you don't look Mexican. I'm like, really, how much time have you spent in Mexico? I'm just curious. Like, I would love to know what your findings are based off of. Because what if I were to say to you, you don't look Anglo-Saxon, right? Like, you know, that this is but I mean, like, these are things that would have from the time I was little where they would be like, Well, you don't talk Mexican. I'm like, guess what? Talking Mexican's not a language, bruh. You know, I'm so sad for you that you only speak one. That sounds very limiting. So, and you barely speak it well. Yikes. So I grew up very, very sassy in terms of being very proud of all the things that I am. And I think what helped is just having parents that also encouraged the sassiness. My mom was very insistent, where she was like, This was Mexico. Let's go back to the 1800s and talk about all of this territory was ours, right? So I got into it. I think I remember in like seventh grade, I had a history teacher that tried to teach some other version of history. And I was like, no, no, sir, hold on one second. Like, let me clarify some of the things that you were saying, because that's not what this is. And also, like the Texans did this, and they, you know, they broke a promise that they had made to the Mexican government about becoming Mexican citizens, they weren't even Texans, they were Mexican citizens, correct. And so, and and the teacher didn't want to hear it, and so I remember I went home and I was like, Mom, I'm gonna need to bring in some of those books with the photographs, and so I remember coming back to school the next day in seventh grade with like a stack of historical books. I was literally, I was like, I was like, sir, I hate to break this to you, but everything you're saying is wrong, right? Like, my people are studied people. Um everything you're saying is wrong. Here's all the evidence of that. Like, here are the the signed agreements which were broken by the people in Texas. Like, so let's get into it. And and the guy got so mad, he got so so mad, he wanted to like send me out of the class. I was like, Yeah, let me go take it up with our assistant principal since you don't seem to know how to teach the material. I'm good, and just like walked out with my books to the AP, like, hi, no, I'm very concerned about the quality of my education because it seems like um your person isn't qualified over here. So can we please get a check in on this curriculum? Again, probably like 12 or 13 years old. So, and then my dad would just like come raging in because again, he was an educator, and he'd be like, Why? Why are you guys not qualified? Like, what part of what my daughter showed you did not clarify the fact that this person has not accurately prepared their curriculum for study? He, I should also point out, was a history teacher. Like my schools, my classmates caught it all day, every day. We were just like a wrecking ball of not only am I not going to stand down, like not only am I not going to be like, okay, you know, I'm gonna just pile dive through all of this, and I'm not going to stop until you correct this, right? So, my history of whatever you want to call it, activism, advocacy, fight the power when it's wrong, right? Like that is from tiny, and you know, it and a lot of it came out of education and came out of the refuse to allow the stories of my people, our people, to be taught in a denigrating way. Like I remember again going through history courses where the very little that they would say about Mesoamericans is like colonization. And you know, they would either talk about Columbus or they would talk about the history of the Cortes, the conquistadors, etc. And I was like, let me get this straight. You're gonna skip over how advanced the civilization was, you're gonna skip over the fact that the Spanish came with diseases and they had no running water, like they didn't have the same kind of aqueducts, they didn't have the same level of technology. Oh, but our people were the inferior ones. Like, no, no, no, no, no. Check this out. And so, like I said, I would show up at school with all kinds of like books and historical documents. I'm going to the library, I was extra, I was extra, extra, just to be like, you really need to rewrite this curriculum because it's trashed. Like the fact that you think that the focus of our people is simply on how they were conquered, and it has nothing to do with their historical relevance, right? As an empowered and intelligent and artistic empire. Like, not that I like empires, I'm kind of anti-imperialist, but the point of my story is like, how are you gonna erase the history, the relevance, the contributions of hundreds of nations of native people and just tell the stories of a couple of Spaniards that frankly brought a lot of disease and trafficked the people that they encountered? I didn't realize that history was supposed to focus on the criminals, right? When you point it out that way, it sounds really gross. Like, why are we focusing on the criminals and not the people, you know, that for hundreds and hundreds of years established something relevant of meaning, right? Because we do this for the Romans, we do this for the Greeks. We have plenty of other cultures and civilizations that we emphasize their art, their history, their literature, their contributions to society. Why should it be any different for these massively impactful cultures of the Americas? So that was my fight in school. I was I was just not having it. That expanded definitely into like the rest of the Latin American world where they'd want to play the same game with you know the Caribbean. And I was like, I'm not even that, but I know you're wrong. Since clearly you got this wrong the first time. Let me come back at you with some more information. My history teacher, may he rest in peace. He's no longer with us. He used to call himself Emperor and then his last name, and he had that little like placard on his desk. But my history teacher made me a little placard and it was like comandante in my name, because every time I would come to class, he already knew that I was gonna come into class on 11 ready to debate anybody. And like I said, to the credit of this teacher in the schools that I went to, when I was in high school, I wasn't in I was in an international baccalaureate program. So badass. I don't know how much folks know about international baccalaureate programs. I know about IB.

Nicte-Ha: 17:18

Well, and also like the focus on IB is like global citizenship, knowledge, project-based learning, presentations, independent research. There's a lot of really good stuff in IB programming.

Osea: 17:31

So I was I was blessed to be in a public school IB program and that encouraged debate, right? That encouraged critical reasoning, that encouraged databased questions and reason and so forth. They thankfully did not shut it down. You know, whether I was in Spanish class or history class or even like English literature, you know, whenever we covered a topic or a subject, especially that related to Latin America or Afro-Latin Caribbean, and I would come with heat for my classmates and some of their conclusions, you know, and presumptions historically that again were very white Eurocentric. I was blessed and that I had professors that were like, I'm gonna let y'all deal with her. Like I'm not, I'm not gonna step in. And then the pushback was just make sure that you always have evidence for what you're saying, make sure, right, that you're thinking critically, that you're analyzing the bias of your sources, like things that I think would be really helpful today and would get us out of some of the shitshow that we're in, right? In modern society, if more of us had that kind of intellectual development. Um instead of reading.

Nicte-Ha: 18:30

Well, and also, I mean, you know, it speaks to your parents, you know, like my parents definitely, my mom was very invested in making sure that we knew, you know, the people's history of the United States before that book got written. Right. So shout out to her there wasn't as much of a focus on like pushing it inside the classroom, but she would see what we got and then she'd be like, let me tell you what this really is, or let me tell you what was happening around this. But most of her focus was on the black experience in the United States because her dad is black and her great-grandfather or her grandfather was black, and so sh her connection to the history of the United States and her, you know, desire to make sure that we knew at least some of the terrible history of the states um was through that lens. So there was a little bit of focus. She knew a little bit about Latin America, and she she's an extensive reader, but I think that was less of a focus. And plus it was in California, which is like 75% mexicanos. My hometown was actually majority, majority mexicano or majority Latino. Interestingly, the California history, there was more of a focus on Spanish occupation of California versus like Mexican history at all. Like I don't think I don't even think we learned about Latin American history in our history classes. Like I think it was maybe a page.

Osea: 19:59

So I'm I'm thinking about this because I'm like, boy, did I force the hand of my teachers. No, I mean that's awesome. That they so at one point, like bringing it all back. I don't even remember what provoked it, but I think there was something that I read or saw that was about the American Indian movement and Leonard Pelletier and the standoff at Wounded Knee, and I would not let go. I think that, you know, we were we were at some point in school studying something that had to do with the tribes of, you know, the original peoples of the United States. And I remember like maybe we were like talking about Custer. I just remember like reading this and I was like, this sounds like ass. Like, this sounds like there's much more to unpack here than however they're telling this story. And then I just ended up on this really deep dive into wounded knee, its history, then eventually come across the story of Leonard Prelte, the American Indian movement. And again, I just remember going to school with my stacks and stacks of books, and then my teachers just looking at me like, What? We were we were just gonna talk about Custer. I was like, no, we are not. We're gonna talk about what Custer represented exactly for me, and we're gonna and we're gonna go into like this whole saga and how this continued to play out, and he's a political prison, all this, and I think that my teachers were like, Oh god, we should have never, we should have never, right? So that's why I'm laughing because when I tell you, I was just like this constant little upstart that whenever it came to telling the stories of non-white people, right, and they would try to like gloss over things or or paint things in such a way of you know, people being the victims less than, right, and never and never being right, the the the autonomous actors of their own experience. Like even the story of Harriet Tubman was really watered down, and it's like I don't know why they wanted to focus so hard on her being narcoleptic. And I was like, this woman was a military genius. She led campaigns of of stealing Confederate ships and navigating rivers that were full of mines and burning down plantations and freeing people and had no formalized military training, like no formalized literacy, and yet was a tactical genius to the point that the Northern Army like relied upon her as a tactician, right? I was like, versus you want to paint this as you know, like a mammy with an archolepsy magically right. And I'm like magically heard the voice of God and guided a few people to freedom. Right. So, like I said, my my experiences educationally are just like filled with moments of me shutting down whatever like the colonized version of these stories and being like, no, I'm sorry. And sorry, you know, I'm sorry to this man, Hutton Mifflin, and whoever else, you know, wrote these like history books of the night. He's like, I'm not with it. All of us is no. I'm sure I drove many of my teachers crazy, with the exception of this like wonderful history teacher and my wonderful Spanish teachers who just thought this was hilarious.

Nicte-Ha: 23:00

But uh he sounds amazing. Well, I mean, and also credit to your mom. Like, honestly, you know, it's not like it's not like Mexico has traditionally told a very progressive story of its own history, right? I know that like there was a more emphasis on the indigenous roots and reaching back, you know, starting in the early 1900s. But I do think that you still, you know, you're still struggling inside the country with a lot of racism and discrimination against the indigenous populations in Mexico. So, you know, credit to your mom for for being an educated, strong woman who was proud of her history and who sought out sources to like push back against that. Because my understanding is that that wasn't as usual, especially not in the time that she was growing up in Mexico. So she she must have been quite a woman to be so strong and so educated in her own history because I know that that was whitewashed a lot.

Osea: 23:56

I'd say shout out to my aunt, too. My aunt, you know, stated Mexico, you know, double masters in history and in education. So who do you think was shipping me all these books that I was then bringing to school? And then just looking at my teachers, like, oh, you're not bilingual. I'm so sorry, let me translate this for you, right? So I'm sassy. I will say yes, in terms of my have a limited scope of understanding of what education is now in, you know, in the country, but there have been plenty of universities, UNAM is one of them, you anybody see that autonomous, that has put a lot of effort in its search arms to making sure that these stories and these histories are preserved. It's clear to me that both, like you're saying, the racism has has perpetuated and existed for a long time in Mexico, but in personal opinion, we're now finally at a place where there is a person in government who is, you know, clearly taking a stand about these things and and trying to give more relevance at the national level to honoring the First Nations. I saw her inauguration.

Nicte-Ha: 24:59

Her inauguration was a very powerful statement to that effect.

Osea: 25:02

Yes, it's it's a it's a big shift from what you're describing. Very, very modern, very, very new. But I think that also one thing that I can say I've seen happen in this country, not so much in New York, though we've been pushing for it, but certainly in the Southwest, is you have the Chicano movements, you have the Atsan movement, you have lots of movements that have gone into trying to reclaim and take back narratives that at one point painted people as victimized and secondary societies. And I think that there's a lot of movement that happened in the social justice and liberation fights in the 50s and 60s and onward. Brown power movement. Right, brown power movement that have refused to be silenced in this regard. You know, and while I'm sure I could say, yeah, there's there's plenty of controversy as to like how they were received or even how they continue to be received, these were definitely steps in a direction of saying, I'm proud of who I am, and I'm not going to whitewash it, and I'm not going to allow it to be presented through a colonial lens. And I know plenty of people today, for example, out here, that they don't want to be referred to as Latinos. That's just not a term that they identify with, right? They identify as indigenous, they might identify as mestizo, but because of the colorism, because of the racism, because of the whitewashing, some of them have just dropped even the identity of being called Latino, Latinax, Latinae, whatever, because to them what they really are is indigenous or or mestizo, right? Which I totally understand because I can't say with assurance that, like you're saying, in native country or culture that everything that they were or are is respected, right? So it's a complex story, whether you're here or you're there, of how much our histories and languages and cultures and so forth have been honored, respected, and not minimized as being less than the colonizer culture.

Nicte-Ha: 26:56

And I know this is sort of like a different topic that I actually I want to interview some people about, but I know that there's actually a big, there's a significant amount of controversy. Like when Dansa Azteca started showing up to powwows in their dansa outfits and doing it, like initially the reaction was like, this is a fucking joke. Like, who are these people? They're not indigenous, we're they're not native. So I know that the development of pan-Indian culture and identity is relatively new, relatively recent, and can in some cases gloss over the vast diversity of indigenous culture in North America, Central America, and South America, right? The United States Indigenous community had a very different experience of colonization in some in many ways than people in Latin America. I read this tremendous book called Harvest of Empire, which goes back to the founding of the United States, uh, well, the discovery, colonization, founding, but the colonization by European powers and the way that the Spanish Empire was structured and set up and the way the English British Empire in North America was structured and set up. And it is amazing like how much you know those original structures and interactions down to like in Mexico, the Spanish encouraged marriages between Spaniards and Indigenous folks. Then they encouraged that for reasons that like are nefarious, but they still encourage that, right? They recognize those unions. Whereas like the North America, there was like apartheid from the beginning. They did not encourage or recognize those marriages or allow those children to have like legal rights and standing. And so you see that rolling forward in the way those the different countries have evolved and their policies have evolved. So it's a fascinating book. You know, he's definitely not defending the colonization, but it's just interesting to see how the even the foundations of the two lead to different viewpoints within the different communities around race and ethnicity and belonging, indigenity, and all the different names we call ourselves.

Osea: 29:17

Is the the rules and the laws and the caste systems that arose in Latin America around miscegenation, right? Very different. I'm not saying nice, I'm not saying great, I'm just saying very different. No, very different. Than just very different from the United States. Right, than the United States. And so it's like something I told people, my parents' marriage and you know, my mom's resulting pregnancy would have been illegal if I had been born a few years prior, right? Like they got married a few years after, you know, the love Supreme Court ruling, right? The one in Virginia about the the mixture of Loving v. Virginia, loving v. Virginia, right? So this is, you know, whereas like we could go back for generations and generations and Generations of you know family in Mexico where mestizaje was being practiced, sometimes forced, not all consensual to be abundantly clear, but certainly mestizaje was something that existed. And you know, you had lots and lots of people that were running around for generations in my family that were part of Mestizaje, you know, going back to even far beyond like great-great-grandparents. Whereas, you know, my dad marries somebody who's Mexican, and it's like, whoa, how is this gonna work? Right. So, again, just the the the cultural frequency, right? Which which you have, you know, mestizaje or miscegenation or however you want to view it, and then what that does to in a family dynamic, like whether those children, for example, are completely rejected, or whether those children are part of a household and part of a family dynamic and they're recognized, like that also has taken very different paths between both countries, right?

Nicte-Ha: 30:58

Yeah. And I, you know, to your point about, you know, the narrative of the indigenous nations just being victims in colonization, I would have rejected that I held that belief or that feeling until I read um 1491, the book by Charles Mann, where he talks about pre-contact cultures such as we, you know, have evidence for. I think it's been updated and revised. And I was reading that book and I realized that I had, even in condemning colonization, right, and rejecting it and being aware of it, I had had in my own mind deprived the indigenous people of the agency to decide what they believed, what God they worshipped, how, you know, because he talks about how like people were making decisions and how they these were like among themselves.

Osea: 31:47

I think like that the part of the story.

Nicte-Ha: 31:51

Right. And that the and that the the the colonizers came into situations where there were pre-existing political tensions, where there were pre-existing political machinations that people were making. They saw the colon, they saw the conquistadors and they thought, like, hmm, how can I use these people to get the kingship of this state or change this or conquer this? And I had never considered that aspect, right? Even having all the knowledge that I did about the colonization of North America, I had completely ignored the political agency and intelligence and pre-existing relationships that the colonizers entered into in Latin America and in North America too.

Osea: 32:34

Yep.

Nicte-Ha: 32:34

I just I hadn't hadn't even considered that. And it was a big revelation for myself.

Osea: 32:39

Right. They stepped into a landmine depending on which civilization, right, we're going to talk about, because even the story of Malinsin, who's popularly known as Malinche, right? Like the Mexica people were an imperial people and they were busy conquesting the people, the the other tribes, right throughout Mesoamerica. And so she ends up captured, resold, right, enslaved, but she spoke languages. She was educated and she came from a completely different tribe. And so, you know, Hernán Cortes comes along and she's smart, she has political training, right? She has diplomatic training. So she utilizes that to her advantage, you know, ultimately with interest to protect her own people who had been brutalized by the Mexicas. So we definitely can't say that, you know, anybody was just a victim or anybody was just a this. There was a lot of political intrigue that was already happening between the nation states of the Mexican Empire and the other tribes that they had gone ahead and and you know brought under their empire and forced to pay tribute or had enslaved. And so that led to just a hotbed of political intrigue and conflict that the Spanish walked right into, right?

Nicte-Ha: 33:54

And then and ended up using like they very deliberately married conquistadores to women within the hierarchy, the political hierarchy of the Mexica nation and other important city-states. That was a deliberate choice that they made to do that, right?

Osea: 34:12

Yep.

Nicte-Ha: 34:13

So it was interesting for me, you know, even feeling like I had a good idea of the history and the horrors of colonization to also realize that I had been in my own way, depriving my people of their intelligence and their decision making and their autonomy, even when they were faced with this, with the uh with the the Spanish, you know, coming in and everything that followed.

Osea: 34:37

We we are not descendants of just passic victims, right? Right. It's really important not to infantilize the histories of our people. And it's also really important not to treat everyone as a behemoth, right? Like every tribe, every nation, every group. And like this is, for example, something I think a lot of people don't understand. I hate this word, but the Aztecs, the Mexicas, we're not the only First Nation in Mesoamerica. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of original people just in what is now considered Mexico, right? You have tons and tons of different languages, tons and tons, even of like Nahuatl. There are different variations of Nahuatl, right? So from classic Nahuat to like modern-day, like Huastec Nahuatl, like there are tons of variations of just that language that still continue to be used by millions of people here, you know, in the diaspora and also in Mexico and other parts of the world. So these stories that are told, like, oh, this was back in the day, and oh, it was a monolith, and oh, they're gone now. Like, no, none of that is true, right? Nahuatl continues to be a language that is utilized in the United States, in the diaspora, in Mexico, right? Like you can take college courses in it, but it's still a live language.

Nicte-Ha: 35:50

I have a workbook in it because I was trying, I was trying to learn it.

Osea: 35:55

I'm still we might we might we might have the same workbook. I'm like, I'm laughing here, but for real, like I sit down and I study it as well. And so, but it's by no mechanism, the only language or identity of Mesoamerica or Mexico, right? And so I think that that's one of the problems that I've seen just in like the way history gets taught, especially in the United States, is this super oversimplification and not to the benefit of the histories and the origins of our people.

Nicte-Ha: 36:26

My biggest pet peeve is this obsession with human sacrifice. And I'm like, the cultures who sent who spent hundreds of years burning, raping, pillaging, and murdering across the world want to come over here and lecture my people about human sacrifice. I'm like, what were the crusades, if not a massive human sacrifice? Right. You guys did horrific things to other human beings.

Osea: 36:59

Well, homie, we know it doesn't count when white people do it.

Nicte-Ha: 37:03

But it's amazing. All anyone says, like, oh yeah, the Aztecs sacrifice people. And I'm like, that's what you're focusing on. Not only that, but like the structure of human sacrifice was a highly ritualized structured thing that had like very particular, it wasn't just like, oh, we're randomly sacrificed, although the Mashika, I maybe were a little more enthusiastic than other people about this, right? But again, it's also looking at that and condemning them specifically is like you're forgetting that power structures are human structures, whether they're in the Mashika or they're in Rome, right? You have people trying to get and maintain power and legitimacy and authority, whether that comes through, you know, the Mexica power structure or it comes through, you know, the Roman power structure or the Church of England.

Osea: 37:55

I mean, that's where the gag is. Like, how is it that we're gonna get all up in arms about this ritualistic practice, right? But we're not gonna talk about the Roman circuses, we're not gonna talk about the gladiators. That was basically human sacrifice in a ring for sport, for sport, for pure entertainment. So, again, as the Spanish phrase goes, Elojo no mira pa' adentro, elojo no mira para adentro, right? It's really easy again to dehumanize a people, right? To try to classify them as savages or barbaric or whatever the story is uniquely terrible and bloody. And and and ergo, they needed to be colonized, and ergo, they needed to be eliminated, and ergo they needed to be conquered because of how savage and how barbaric their practices were. You know, from the Romans all the way from the trade. Right to the Portuguese were doing, right? Like, so that was the Congo. Right. Hello. Yeah. So again holy crap. Right. And and let's let's be honest, continues to this day. Yeah, continues to this day, right? The genocides continue to this day, that the the expansion into, as an example, Central Africa for the pursuit of the same shit that they were trying to get hundreds of years ago. They're still after precious minerals, they're still after rare metals, they're still after all of this. This is not changed in the Congo, this is not changed in Sudan, right? This is still what is happening right now, but it's the Mexica that are barbaric, right? So again, eloho no mire pa' dentro, because it's cool when white people go and do it, right? Because that's the case. Oh, that's capitalism, Chica. That's capitalism. It's progress. Right. So that's that's what, you know, this goes back to my entire educational history of like call a spade a spade. Like, oh, we're not we're not gonna touch genocide, but yes, please tell me how barbaric, you know.

Nicte-Ha: 39:51

Let's burn their entire libraries and then talk about how they're an illiterate people.

Osea: 39:56

Right. Well, I'm gonna be honest, it kind of reminds me of a certain thing that's happening in the Middle East, right? Right. But it just, you know, it it it tries to give some kind of semblance of an excuse to say this is why we need to eliminate a people, but we're gonna paint somebody as the savage and say that that is what excuses for committing genocide against unoriginal people of the area. So it's the same, it's the same sad ass excuse, right? Whether we're gonna use it to talk about contested territory in the Middle East or whether we're gonna use it to talk about territory in Latin America or in the African continent. It's the same story, the same story of white supremacy, of imperialism, right? Just washrooms repeat, different, you know, different groups committing it, and then everybody else trying to silence whoever tells the story of no in fairness what what actually happened, right? Like I said, you know, the fact that I am maybe not, maybe, maybe, well, under this federal government, we'll see. But it's like, you know, I can still tell the story of what happened in Latin America and for the time being still be free. They're really trying to eliminate that though.

Nicte-Ha: 41:04

No, they're working hard on it. Girl, I was born in Mexico. I was born in Mexico, so my passport says birthplace, Mexico. Oh. And I'm like, great. I'm not, I'm a, you know, I have a certificate of birth abroad, but are these people looking at eliminating that too? Is my citizenship at risk? You know, under these people, I would say yes. Right. You can't presume that the answer is no, I think.