Fenenbock's Announcement & Cultural Exploitation

I've always hated when people who are not Latino feel like they need to speak to us in Spanish. I've been writing about it since Shapleigh used to do it regularly.

Thats just flat-out old school pandering.

But Dori Fenenbock took things an embarrassing step further during her announcement for the congressional seat currently occupied by Congressman Beto O'Rourke.

She crossed the line from pandering into cultural exploitation. She used something from Chicano cultura for her own personal political gain and its shameful.

Also, its good she was wearing boots because she must've known the amount of bullshit that was about to come out of her speech.

The use of the chant of ¡Si Se Puede! was beyond pandering, it was cultural exploitation.

Now before David K, a rich white guy from privilege writes a blog post to defend a rich white lady from privilege about the use of a Spanish term he doesn't even understand the cultural implications of, let me explain why it bothered me so much that Fenenbock had the audacity to use it.

¡Si se puede! was the rallying cry used in the fields to organize workers that were treated like 20th century slaves. It was the rallying cry of the poor, disenfranchised, and exploited workers who were taken advantage of because of the color of their skin and for profit.

People like my mother. My mother was a farmworker. As were my grandparents and my uncles and aunts. They toiled in the hot Arizona sun going from farm to farm to work the fields. It was long hours of back-breaking work. If you have never done it, you can't fully appreciate how terrible "la pisca" really is. Long hours of work before and after school, just to contribute a small amount to the household income - and later in life, your body pays the price.

¡Si se puede! was what they chanted on the picket lines in the fields when organizers for the United Farmworkers Union, like my father, conducted strikes and boycotts to call attention to the plight of the most humble of people who couldn't afford lawyers and fancy PR firms to tell their story.

And right now, I can't honestly tell you who I'm more pissed at - the rich white lady who said her biggest struggle was being a bailiff while in law school and used the term because she was standing in front of a bunch of brown people, or the brown people that clapped and chanted along.

Speaking of her "struggle" - she should stop talking about how working as a bailiff while she was in law school was her big struggle in life.

Give me a break.

That kind of income is a career goal for most El Pasoans, but to her it was roughing it. A bailiff earns significantly more than what the average El Paso family makes in a year. Struggle is having to push a car because its a clunker and all you can afford. Its going to collect commodities from a food pantry to make a meal for your kids. Struggle is having to work a couple of jobs to make ends meet, or sell plasma to pay a bill. Struggle is having to take your kids on the city bus to drop them off at day care before you ride the bus to work because that clunker finally gave out on you.

Struggle is having to work a couple of jobs to make what a bailiff makes.

There is a lot more I want to say about her announcement, particularly a round-up of all the hypocrisy that her speech contained, but I'll post that later today. For now, I want to stick with the fact that she used a rallying cry for the disenfranchised who struggled for the most basic improvements in working conditions as a punchline in her speech.

Here's a picture of my mom, the farmworker who now lives in here in El Paso, standing in the hot Arizona sun fighting for better pay and working conditions for the exploited, with her two oldest boys and pregnant with her first daughter.

I'm the handsome one on the left.

That lady right there, she can use the term ¡Si se puede! whenever she damn well pleases. She's earned it, along with countless other workers and supporters of El Movimiento over the years who's names are lost to history.

Because it belongs to us.

Its ours.

And its not for sale,  and its NOT to be stolen.