[Paracelsus]

(03-19-2017 10:49 PM)All or Nothing Wrote:  

(03-19-2017 10:32 PM)ElFlaco Wrote:  

Oddly enough, Cinco de Mayo isn't really a big deal in Mexico. It's not a national holiday and it's only celebrated in one state. Non-Mexican latinos in the US hate it because it's a Mexico-specific holiday but people treat it like it's some general celebration of latino culture. Fake holiday.

I suspect that days like St. Patrick's Day and Cinco de Mayo are part of the process of integrating and assimilating migrant groups that have higher levels of nationalistic tendencies.

Currently the United States as a nation is having a difficult time fully absorbing the impact of large Mexican migration. Before Mexican migration, the United States had massive Irish migrant populations and they were heavily nationalistic and difficult to fully assimilate too.

My take on all "expat" (though I doubt it's Mexican expats as such: it's American-raised Latinos who are doing this, not recent immigrants) celebrations like this is that they amount to overcompensating by the group that's carrying them out. They are narcissistic assertions of identity when you're worried you're insignificant in the place you landed.

Last Psychiatrist explains it in the context of idiotic Tiger Mom Amy Chua:

Quote:

Amy Chua isn't a Chinese mother, she's an American mother. She had a Chinese mother, but now she's a first generation American, which means she has more in common with Natalie Portman than she does with any recent Chinese immigrant. As an American, she was raised by the same forces: MTV, Reagan, Clinton, John Hughes movies. She may have reacted differently to those, but they were her experiences.

And what do Americans do? They brand themselves. I have no idea if Amy Chua cares about Viking stoves or Lexus automobiles but clearly her brand is SuperSinoMom and her bling are her kids. When Jay-Z wants to front he makes a video, and when Amy Chua represents she writes a WSJ article. Because that's her demo, you feel me?

Which means this self-serving piece has nothing to do with "how Chinese mothers are superior" but is really a summary of her episode of MTV Cribs. "Welcome to my home, yo, let me show you my gold toilet. It's for peeing and flushing the coke down when the heat comes in the back way."

Saint Patrick's Day as it originally started up was a Proddie celebration. Early on George Washington used it to try and get more Irishmen into the Continental army. And during most of its run - up until the 1880s or so - it was basically the Irish bitching about the English, which is kind of amusing given the English were out of America from 1780 or so. Only from the 1880s did it turn into Catholic nationalism as such. As with Australia, the Irish got the underclass character perk to start with en masse. Naturally they ghettoised. Naturally they went into a sort of mourning as they sucked so badly back in Ireland that they had to cross an ocean to find any chance of a better life and then didn't get that better life in spades when they arrived.

So one can certainly understand direct immigrants proudly asserting their culture (though not without exception. Others, like my grandmother, spit on the country they came from. She'd lived through a world war, and she repeatedly pronounced that she was Australian, that Australia was the best country in the world.)

The children of those expats, though? It's just branding. Just narcissism. Just capitalism: Paddy's day is a day for people to buy beer and get fucking drunk. Cinco de Mayo? For every five "Latinos" under the age of 30 at a Cinco de Mayo celebreation I'll bet you four of them don't speak any more Mexican than "Ay, papi". Because they're not Mexicans, they're Americans, and, having been force-fed the identity-free American culture, are paranoid about not having a brand for themselves.