Mike, you wrote....
>Hello Renee--
>It would be interesting to know how the use of racial categories manifests
>itself where you are now geographically. Its a whole differently
>complicated
>ball of wax.
>mike cole
(Well, I am responding to the list because Mike wrote to me originally on
the list...I hope nobody minds...I am still getting accostomed to list
ptotocols)
I canīt say too much about this topic right now, because I have only been
here about a month and am still in the "figuring out how to use buses and
things" stage of acclimation. But I can tell you a few things that I find
interesting...
I am in the northwest of Spain, the autonomous community of Galicia, and I
am still kind of getting used to the fact that everybody here is basically
of the SAME racial background. There is little immigration here...my kids
are the only foreigners in their school, and there do not seem to be any
racially or ethnically distinct groups here. (What a shock for me, I spent
all my life living outside of Philadelphia in the US.) Well, in the south
of Spain there are more immigrants, mostly from Northern Africa, but here in
Vigo, not much diversity in that sense.
What is interesting here is that there is an indigenous language, Gallego,
so this give me a chance to experience a culture where Spanish is more or
less the dominant, hegemony language. Kind of an interesting reversal for
an American, especially me (I am focusing for my dissertation on social
relations of Spanish in a US bilingual classroom). So here it seems the
categories are about national vs. regional language and culture.
Well, itīs an enlightening experience for me to be somewhere where the
categories are all sort of turned upside down and inside out for me...like
what was dominant is now minority...categories are about regional autonomy
not immigration...
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