Rafael Flores
Filmmaker | Father

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...my culture is not your costume
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In high school I remember white kids dressing up as Drunk Mexicans with ponchos on roaming the hallways with bottles in paper bags acting drunk. I got into a fight with the kid, and 4 years later the same thing happened to my sister.
People are ignorants and call us Hispanics. We are Chicanos and not every Latino is Mexican-American. Hispanic is a disrespectful term and people should stop using it. The term includes white Europeans to include them in immigration quotas to prevent brown-skinned people from immigrating here from Latin-America.
Latino refers to a region, not a colonial language. As a light-skinned Chicano I have received racist comments from Black, Latino and Whites because people assume many things is you are light-skinned, or somehow think I am not authentically Latino.
Latinos come in all shapes, sizes and colors. We are quickly becoming the majority ethnic minority in this country, and people need to smarten up if they don't want to get left behind.
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