La Plaza Central

First, the link from the Omaha World-Herald.  The article is about the large percentage of immigrant farm workers from indigenous communities in Latin America.  Oftentimes, they don’t self-identify as indigenous because of the prejudice they face in their home countries, and so they are underestimated in surveys of farm workers here in the U.S.  They arrived here for many of the same reasons as their more “Hispanicized” or ladino countrymen, primarily war and poverty.  In many cases, they suffered the most when it came to civil wars and oppression of the people.

I think that it might be hard for some of us to conceptualize, for example, a person from Mexico who is not “Mexican” in the sense that we think of as being Mexican.  Guatemala is geographically about half the size of Nebraska.  There are 21 official languages spoken in Guatemala.  My job took me to many small towns where the only ones in the auditorium who could speak Spanish were me and the community representative.  There are many other areas of Latin American that are the same way: southern Mexico, Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru, to name a few.

I sometimes wonder to what extent and how quickly all of these differences will dissipate and eventually disappear as our world becomes more interconnected.   But that’s for another day.