Miscegenation as Nation-Building: Indian and Immigrant Women in Mexico

When reading this chapter, two things stood out to me; population increase of a certain group because of rape, and how people of lower class are given different names to classify them.

The first one I would like to touch on is how they classified certain mix groups. The only thing that came to my mind was the genocide in Rwanda; even though they were all of African decent, the Belgiums came over and decided who had higher status just because of who closest to favor them. This class seperation brought a lot of hostility between the two groups. And after many years of back and forth hatred between the two, after the assasination of the Hutu king became the beginning of a massacre. The Hutu were set out to wipe out all of the Tutsi (children and all). All of this because of a classification set on them by an outside leader. The only thing setting these two groups apart are minor skin complextion and genetics. This how to keep a race from rising up...you turn them on eachother.

The second part I would like to touch on is the expansion of a race due to rape. The women who were being raped were minorities with little rights at the time. And in that era, abortion was not as simple as it is to obtain today. So who did the woemn get raped by? Sometimes men of the same race but most likely came from the rich white men trying to prove in another way his male dominance on this primitive race; In most cases it would be the owner or manager of the woman. But a woman of that status, a mexican, black, or native status, their word means less of a male of the same status. So along with the embarrassment of being raped, the difficulty of getting an abortion forced women to have these mixed babies. Indian and Immigrant women are still constantly taken advantage of in the work place, so my question to is, "What needs to be done in order for it to stop?"