Volume 6 - December Ethnicities Magazine

CREATING AWARENESS
Now imagine that your sister is introducing
his steady boyfriend to your family. He is a
successful entrepreneur who owns more
than 30 hot-dog carts in the city and whose
monthly income far exceeds your family’s
salaries put together. However, your sister
is a doctor, you’re an accountant, and both
of your parents are college graduates. It’s
almost a given that sooner rather than later
most of your family will adopt condescending
attitudes towards this hard-working,
honest individual who —according to your
particular criteria— will be forever at fault for
not following the accepted path of a college
education.... which is not intrinsically unsuitable,
but acutely undervalued in conventional
social perception.
Being the target of this type of discrimination
leads to some major backlashes,
as I will show in two real examples of stall
owners in what could be any Latin American
central market. This first person sells almost
two tons of fish a day, which endowed him
to relocate his family to an upscale neighborhood.
However, when his teenage son
invited his newfound “friends” to play in his
enhanced videogame rec room, they ridiculed
him on social networks for his “fish-stenched
house”. Which —granted— is not far
off the mark. But this mockery betrays a
maneuver of social exclusion elicited by this
family’s way of making a living.
An even more drastic example comes from a
family that makes its living selling disposable
plastic bags, also at a central market stall.
The couple decided to buy a whole block
at a lower-middle-class suburb, where they
built a mansion and hence were immediately
acknowledged as the local fat cats. Feasibly
they decided on this after considering the
predicament of the fish seller, a good friend
of theirs.
I’m positive that, at one moment or another, we’ve all
been guilty of discriminating by occupational choice. It
is a deeply entrenched attitude, particularly in an underdeveloped
subcontinent where rising above ourselves
implies aspiring to previously unattainable lifestyles or
that were reserved for the elite.
In my graphic novel Aerolíneas Latinoamericanas I
evidence occupational choice-discrimination through
various characters, among them:
Rubilio Suazo, a Honduran man who is compelled to
open a laundry at home which will enable to care for his
sick mother.
Emilio Aravena, a former Chilean bureaucrat who after
being dismissed strains to make a living by carving artisanal
religious figurines.
Mako Jativa, a young Colombian who had grown accustomed
to being socially accepted while serving as
deputy for a civil engineer is now shunned for working as
a mason.
Yanay Guañuna, a Peruvian student ostracized (in an
indigenous university, no less) for having been raised in a
family of waste-pickers.
“THE MOST ONEROUS CHALLENGE IN BECOMING
A BETTER PERSON IS THOROUGHLY QUESTIONING
WHAT WE CONSIDER TO BE ‘RIGHT.”
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UNTIL NEXT MONTH; THRIVE IN MUTUAL RES-
PECT, ALWAYS .
HAVE YOU EVER BEEN LOOKED DOWN ON?
TELL ME ALL ABOUT IT ON TWITTER: @DIS-
CRIES