This term gets used incredibly widely in Colombia. Lots of straight people with otherwise great politics use it as a teasing term of affection, but one that still carries a punch. I have heard it argued that it is used so widely that it should be rendered in English with a term that is less denigratory than faggot, but I really don't think marica has been reclaimed as a positive term. In the 80s in my Seattle high school it also used to be quite common to hear straight people use the term fag widely in similar ways, but thankfully I don't hear it used that way now on my uni campus in Toronto.
Given that we are in a miraculous month where first the Supreme Court of Mexico made gay marriage legal, and the US followed, perhaps culture will catch up to the law and use of this term will become less common.
I am totally making this one up, but I kind of love it and think it would be as understandable as the English neologism.
If you've read any US news in the last few days you've heard of Rachel Dolezal's blackface. There is such a long history of people doing similar redface charades (a la Grey Owl) that there is this term for them. Actually Rachel also claims to be native and, get this, to have been born in a tipi. Because I guess being pretend black wasn't enough?
In Colombia the euphemism for these is 'falsos positivos.' Exterminados is a bit more honest. I learned it from the article below from the Nation magazine:
El Salvador’s Gang Violence: The Continuation of Civil War by Other Means
A gang community in Ilopango, El Salvador. Graffiti of the Mara Salvatrucha is in the foreground, the flags of the ARENA and FMLN parties fly in the background. (All photographs by the author)
San Salvador—On a dizzyingly humid Tuesday in mid-May, a friend and I walk to one of the entrances to Nuevo Israel, a marginal community located just northwest of central San Salvador.
We approach a walkway lined, on either side, with champas (tin shacks) and houses with cracked walls painted aquamarine, yellow, sky-blue, and other faded pastel colors. Suddenly, a thin, dark-skinned, teenager in a loose white T-shirt stops us. “Esperen,” he says (wait). “Para donde van?” (Where are you going?), he asks nervously, but with the authoritative tone of a border guard. He is a poste, a gatekeeper authorized to monitor and control traffic in and out of Nuevo Israel by the Mara Salvatrucha, the gang that controls this community.
Having already, on numerous occasions, dealt with police and military who have stopped us to ask similar questions during random stops in other parts of this tense and violent capital city, we know how to respond: quickly, directly, no BS, just as if we were traveling through El Salvador’s war zones of the 1980s and early ’90s.
“We’re here to see Santiago,” responds my friend, referring to one of the few people in this entire gang-violence-ravaged country designated to speak to the wider world on behalf of both of the two major gangs, 18th Street and Mara Salvatrucha, following a temporary truce brokered in 2012.
The young man eyes my friend’s buzz cut, which looks uncomfortably close to those used by one of the 7,000 regular army soldiers and three battalions of the special forces rapid-response units recently deployed throughout the country to fight the gangs. As a result, tensions in Nuevo Israel and throughout the country are escalating to record levels. The gangs have started targeting police and military personnel when they’re off-duty, killing them on buses, in the streets, and near their homes.
I show the poste my new journalist’s credential for the beatification just last month of Monsignor Oscar Arnulfo Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador who was shot through the heart by a death squad assassin while giving mass back in 1980, at the beginning of the country’s twelve-year civil war, before the poste or many in the Maras were even born. I do so in the hope that the picture of the smiling archbishop will act as a talisman, releasing some of the positive and peaceful messages of Romero-mania that slowed El Salvador’s gang violence for a few days.
“Lift up your shirt,” says the young man, a precautionary measure to make sure my friend is also not with a rival gang. He proceeds to grab his shirt. “Hey,” I exclaim, “he’s helping me with my work here. Please stop.” The poste looks over my friend’s exposed, tattoo-free torso and nods his approval.
Charging the humid air in Nuevo Israel is the murder, a few days earlier, of Oscar Armando Galeas, a 21-year-old shot in the head for allegedly being a member of a rival gang. Some here believe he was yet another one of the exterminados, the extrajudicial killings that gang members and some human rights activists suspect are being carried out by government security forces. Last week, El Faro, by far El Salvador’s pre-eminent news organization, broke a story about four soldiers and a sergeant charged with the forced disappearances of three men in the town of Armenia. Echoing the country’s wartime past, the judge hearing the case called the alleged action of the soldiers a “crime against humanity.”
An estimated 500 climate activists took to kayaks, canoes, paddleboards, and even a solar-powered party barge on Saturday to tell Shell to get the hell out of Seattle. Rallying cry:#sHellNo!
The oil giant brought a huge drilling rig, the Polar Pioneer, to the city’s port on Thursday, over objections from the mayor, city council, and a whole lot of pissed-off Seattleites. Shell plans to use the port as a staging ground for oil drilling operations in the Arctic over the next two years. The kayaktivists made their objections clear — and made for a pretty spectacle against the blue-gray background of Puget Sound.
My other bloglooks at colonial patterns in international solidarity and ways that we might change them, and talks about my research on international accompaniment and how it uses difference and privilege to make space for peace. The latest entries are listed below.
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