Fellow Mexican residents of Belvedere

Fellow Mexican residents of Belvedere,

The problem presented to us tonight regarding the incorporation of our neighborhood into a municipality simply gives us a glimpse of the injustice the middle-class Anglo Americans have imposed upon us for years. They wish to implicitly evict us in their greed to transform Belvedere into a middle-class white neighborhood. They aim to take advantage of us, exploiting our financial difficulties to satisfy their needs. Yet we must always remember the hypocrisy and irony behind their discriminatory and oppressive actions. Los Angeles has never been a city of pure whiteness. It is a city built by migrants; even the early white settlers of the city are mid-western migrants. Yet they assume superiority over us Mexicans, shamelessly claiming their cultural stability. They choose to ignore the fact that there are no “natives” to the city. Whites have never been the true owners of the city. Escaping from a cultural turmoil back home, we Mexicans may have appeared culturally vulnerable. Our cultural identities were not entirely rooted in either America nor Mexico. The Anglo-Americans, already entranced in disgusting nativist sentiments, saw our cultural “invisibility” as an opportunity to unfairly oppress us. They may claim that we are culturally ambiguous, and perhaps the reality is so. Yet we must never forget that culture is fluid. Culture is not a set of rules permanently engraved into stones that we may refer back to every single time our identities may feel unstable. Culture does not define us. We define culture. We need not be either “Mexican,” or “American.” We are who we are. That is the solid foundation of culture on which we will continue our fight. 

- Zeferino Ramirez