“I am Black, I am Mexican. The black gold of the sun and the descendant of the feathered serpent. I am her grandson, and she is my grandmother.”
Those are the first words Rush Davis says in We are mitú’s latest video “An ode to being Blaxican.” In the mini-doc, the California-baed artist discusses his identity and his grandmother, Dolores Morado, talks about what it was like to marry a black man and raise kids who are both Black and Mexican.
“It’s hard raising mixed kids,” Morado says in the video. “You try to show them, you know, they’re no different than anybody else, but you have people that don’t see it like that.”
In the video, Davis opened up about the difficulties that come with growing up caught between two identities. His grandmother also discussed the criticism she faced for marrying and having children with a black man.
“[My aunt] came over and she said that I was going to have to be strong in order to be able to raise them, but people were gonna talk about them,” Morado said. “And then I said to her, ‘And they can kiss my ass then’...I figure like this, any kid I got if God didn’t want me to have that baby, I wouldn’t have it. And he allowed me to have them, and they’re mine.”
Mexico recognized it’s 1.38 million Afro-Mexican for the first time in a national survey in January. The “black” racial category is expected to debut in the 2020 national census.
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