YUCATAN IMMIGRANTS
“Yucatan is a
very special place and if you are born there, your heart is from Yucatan. I was 10 when I came here and we
didn’t speak English, so we just went to school with everyone else. Kids didn’t understand
why………..
you couldn’t talk to them , and from that experience, I realized that you become victimized if you don’t know English or Spanish – other Latinos take advantage of you and you’re dependent on others to do everything for you.” (ref.1) *
* (quote from:) Elmy Bermejo, currently a district
representative for Senator John Burton, came to SF as a child, Her father was a guest worker under the
“bracero program”, of the 1960s. She is now a powerful force in the state Democratic party
and is the first Latina named first woman to appointed to two state commissions
by Gov. Gray Davis. She chairs the
Commission on the Status of Women
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www.library.arizona.edu/ |
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http://www.affs.org/en/mexico2.html |
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“A lot of people confuse us with the other migrants, but every town, every state has its own way of being, its own way of thinking and living” “ If you go to Chichen Itza, every spring you can witness the birth of a new life. Three days after the equinox, the snakes shed their skins and the fields are filled with flowers. The sun falls and the shadow of a snake appears to crawl down the side of the pyramid. The Russians and the French and even the Americans tried to recreate that symmetry. But no one other than the Mayans could achieve that perfection”. *(ref.1) |
Demographics
Interview
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CULTURE
Culture is acquired as a total of way of living that is built up
by a group of human beings and transmitted from generation to generation. Children are exposed to behavior and ideas. They learn and
imitate in order to adapt and maintain the survival of the individual,
society and the culture. In this report, we
see examples where one generation’s drive to transfer the hope of
opportunity to the their children carries with it the weight of the
assimilation. |
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SOCIAL
The younger generation involved in this migratory odyssey is
quite globally aware, socially.
Will they disregard their heritage of legendary resistant battles
against Mexican cultural domination?
Since the Mayans were indentured labor slaves on colonial plantations
of the past century, as well as the hopeful land reform recipients and
promised assembly plants and transportation projects, the current rural
illiterate has lost agricultural economies and has sustained immigration
patterns to the north. Will they
fight their way to opportunity in Northern California, without losing their
cultural wealth? Immigration: factors that influence Variability within group Many immigrant Mexicans form communities in urban settings such
as SF Mission District, Many people don’t say they’re Mayan
when they get here- they just say they’re Mexicano. “There’s still
discrimination against the culture even in the Yucatan. There’s this idea that the
Mayans were really intelligent and they built all of these amazing temples,
but that civilization is over now, and now they are nothing. Some choose to
assimilate less. Some families have expressed sense of loss and isolation from
family traditions and have recently explored Mayan traditions through small
community groups, such as one called Grupo Maya. Members meet in each others’ homes in Oakland suburbs.
Every nine months, they co-sponsor a sunrise ceremony to celebrate a
traditional creation ritual.
Mayans from Guatamala and El Salvador, whose languages differ share in
similar cultural customs, together.
Not-with-standing, many Grupo Maya members serve their communities
through outreach in important translation work in hospitals or court
interpretation for immigrants entangled in the city’s justice system. Language structure and discourse rules UC Berkeley Professor
‘William Hanks, a cultural anthropologist studying the Yucatec Maya
language, has written several books about the language. The Yucateco culture and language has
been greatly affected immigration and assimilation. There are great differences in Spanish and Mayan language.
English ‘words have become part of the regional patois in
southern Yucatan http://ls.berkeley.edu/dept/anth/hanks.html References: (1) Yucatecos and
Chiapanecos in San Francisco:
Indigenous Immigrants Form Communities and Create New Niches in a
Sluggish Labor Market by Garance Burke, October 2002 (2) www.census.gov (3) http://www.mexconnect.com/mex_/history.html |