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with my hate for the hateful. I'm trying to keep my heart as clean as possible. I am. I am. thank you
I don't know why being a new employee, as the manager said, had to do with her awful racism but the resort did refund their guests the entire stay. My experience in Mexico is from neutral - no racist encounters, strange looks, et cetera - to absolutely wonderful.
I apologize for the length of this account.
The wonderful part is when years ago, I took my parents, visiting me here in SoCal, on a day trip to Tijuana. My Mom was in a colorful African dress and we were speaking our language as we wandered about. We weren't wandering for 10 minutes before a restaurant owner outside his establishment stopped us immediately to ask where we're from. My parents told him and he squealed in delight. It was too funny. Before we knew it, we were ushered into his place with him saying one of his great-great-great...grandmoms was an African and asked, "Please, could you tell me where she was from." He sent someone to retrieve a family photo album saying, "I'll prove it to you," I guess because he looked totally white though we didn't doubt him at all.
Because of a particular foodstuff that his grandma prepared and the recipe remained in the family, my parents figured right away where his ancestor was kidnapped - Togo, my parents said, they're our neighbors! They're the only ones who prepare whatever the dish was that way.
Wandering again when the same thing happened with another restaurant owner. And once again it was food that pinpointed location of origin. It was a crazy day and we were drunk from Tequila and food, heading back home earlier than expected. Neither men wanted any payment for all the food and drinks. This was in the early 2000s before the popularity of genetic testing and the connection for those men to their ancestor after centuries was precious and priceless.
I've had the same encounter since then, the most touching was with a couple who were managers at an apartment building my husband and I lived. The couple both spoke Spanish. The wife was from a Central American nation, clearly of African descent, a lovely super friendly lady who was not fluent in English. Her husband was a gorgeous very dark, Mexican-American dude, also very pleasant. One day, they both approached me, he asking the origin of my hyphenated last name. I told him my maiden name is Nigerian and the surname Belgian. She started speaking quickly in Spanish and he translated saying that one of her ancestors was definitely from West Africa, could I please tell her where she was from. Of course, I contacted my parents and got back to her saying that ancestor grandma was from Senegal. Good grief, she started crying her eyes out and I couldn't help myself and wept with her from deep frustration and, of course, joy.
By the mid 2000s, Prof. Gates produced the PBS series Black in Latin America. I was stunned by part of the title of one of the episodes - The Black Grandma in the Closet, a photo album one of the speakers went thru with Gates and all the food she laid out to identify in her experience the connections to African origin from Cuba, Puerto Rico to Mexico.
Ignorant waitress who probably doesn't know herself. In one part of the episode, Gates said that if the one-drop rule applied in Mexico, all of them would be considered black 
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I had a pang of sorrow on reading of the Senegalese woman leaning of her origin country and breaking into tears. So much has been left out of history books about the reality of African migration(s) forced and otherwise. So much left out of interactions between different cultures and the reality of those interactions and consequences. I loved this video, so true. 
So well stated. The outcome of so many encounters I've experienced or witnessed has been really bittersweet and joyful. And many magnificent stories of adventure, love, magic and beauty that would bring us all so much closer together as humans are left out.
I was so pleased to see in the past few years descendants of Africans demand and are now recognized in their census as Afro-Mexican-Peruvian-Argentinian, et cetera, after so many years of the whiteout.
I'm glad you loved the video. Thank You 
I lived in Quintana Roo for eighteen months (2003-04), and the weird thing was I witnessed more racism there than I've seen in the states, but the racism was targeted specifically at Nicaraguans and Guatemalans; never at black or white folk (regardless of nationality).
Granted, maybe it was hidden; my Spanish is at best, conversational, but not enough to recognize colloquialisms or dog-whistles.
On the other hand, when referring to central Americans, some of the most vile racist phrases I can imagine I heard there. And it was not really hidden at all.
I didn't stay long enough, and was not engaged enough to ever get to the root of it. I could milk the ad copy contracting position only so long before I had to come back to the states.
And if you ever went to Cancun on a three-hour tourist excursion from the docked cruise chip of a now-bankrupt liner and you wondered who wrote that magnificent voice-over about the "whispering sands, keeping your secrets safe and your happiness safer...", I'll take the bow fifteen years late. 
Would be this, I surmise. It's the same, I feel, of the intrastate bigotry as is among lighter/ darker brown/black skinned people. Being half German, I am during the winter a light skinned man of African-German-Spanish descent. I have always faced bigotry and hate from AA and Africans and European extracted people, respectively. Both in college and in my professional career. Just a fact of living in a terribly bigoted and racist world. Hell the Irish were hated in America by other European peoples who settled here. And all those European people(s), by and large, hated AA.
Slavery in America and the world is STILL responsible for a multitude of oozing bigotry's, prejudices, racist attitudes, murders, unfair false based on lies and racism imprisonment, executions, both summary and because of the fallacy of one race being 'superior' to another. This false dichotomy has led to immense grief for millions upon millions of POC.
This latest example of ameriKKKan Nazis snatching kids away from their parents proves it.
It really is all too much sometimes. And with this pos POS at the helm of this Titanic, all my experiences of interracial racism and intercultural bigotry have come flooding back in. Don't get me wrong, I know most Americans, black or white err on the side of decency, so far. German history is still an historical marker on how a nation can be sabotaged by its leaders that results in its TOTAL destruction.
Thank you for my further enlightenment.
especially when you spoke of experiencing intra-cultural bigotry and hate from Africans and AA as well.
But what I'm loving now coming out of the Americas is so many young people are learning our history and avoiding colorism that deepens love of ourselves as individuals and then as a group. To me, it's really about self-care that opens the door to our unique beauties of African roots. Though you and I may not see the end of bigotry and prejudice in our lifetime, I think Pan-Africanism will take stronger hold to join people of African descent globally.
I can't imagine that Afro-Latinos, so recent on their countries' census, didn't embrace their humanity, roots, and each other before their long struggle to be counted. Those people in the video and many, many others give me the biggest hope of all.
BTW, I've got half-white German/Nigerian and German-Nigerian cousins, both of whom are activists in Germany. They can barely understand me and I can't understand them fully either and we totally ruin our parents' language...lol. But yet we know the struggle is the same for us everywhere. They will not come to the U.S. because of the killings. So I have to go to Germany
including amerika saddens and sickens me to no end.
I am always looking to prove my point/question to myself. Did amerika provide the blueprint for modern worldwide racism and racist leaders? I know the South AfriKKKan apartheid system was set in stone in 1949. The extreme racist hate and the notion of white supremacy over the 'savages' was in place a couple of centuries before the Dutch white nationalists/supremacists created their 'white paradise' on the 'dark continent'.
Then of course with the expansion of white people to other lands and continents, their hates, prejudices and bigotry's infected many other POC worldwide.
I just use my search engine with the question
rigins of worldwide racism and how it spread to other lands like Central America and Amerika and what I find is the true nature of human being. Racist white supremacists and others. Truly depressing as a statement on our human evolution. W still are living in cages. The only things that evolved are weapons of war and items to facilitate movement and make life easier.
All I hope at my age of 70 is to see the end of human bigotries and prejudice. I am pretty cynical about that happening before I face the 'great mystery'.
Thanks for your response.
