Asturian-American Migration Forum

Terechu, the German comment was Neal Conan's. I didn't understand it and am not knowledgeable enough to know what to make of it.

CONAN: And indeed, this becomes important in Germany later, the battle between northern Germans, or the Prussians, if you will, who are from Weimar, and the soft, civilized, Romanized, if you will, Germans in Vienna.

I'm guessing that Conan was referring to something from her book.

Maybe he got the reference to Weimar backwards and was referring to the fourteen years of the Weimar era between WWI and the rise of Hitler in 1933. It was a brief comment and he may have fumbled it.

If I'm understanding correctly, there was a struggle between the softer Weimar culture (an intellectual explosion of creativity in science, technology, literature, philosophy and art) which stood in opposition to the harder Prussian militarism and authoritarianism. Some consider Vienna to have been part of this Weimar culture. Or Weimar might refer to the tradition of enlightenment liberalism in Germany with its origins in the 18th century city of Weimar, which were home to both Goethe and Schiller.

Or maybe not.

I did a search in the book on Amazon. She's talking writings by Christoph Meiners and J.F. Blumenbach from the late 18th century and early 19th, in which they develop a notions of race, part of which appears to deal with physical beauty, skull measurement, and skin color. It's important to note that she's critical of these writings. She also relates these ideas to the Holy Roman Empire and even Julius Caesar's understanding of the different Germanic tribes he was conquering.

She says that Meiners made a distinction between the northern Germans from Weimar, Dresden, Berlin, Hannover, and Göttingen (who were Protestant and who Meiners rated highly) and the southern Germans from Vienna (who were Catholic and Meiners did not rate well). She also relates Weimar to Goethe and Saxony, and describes three different of Saxony, including a mythical version that British and American "Anglo-Saxonists" flavored.

Art:

Yes, you've got it exactly right. That is her position exactly. In essence what she's outlining is an intense pro-northern bias with regard to even the internal cultures of Germany itself, whereby the closer one geographically or culturally (such as "Roman" Catholicism) gets to the "dark and deranged" (my own quotes inserted) Mediterranean, the less desirable something is.

In that context, it's interesting that some Asturians will say, "We're not Mediterranean!" Then again, they're aligning themselves with the people of the Celtic Rim, who (especially the Catholic Irish) weren't viewed positively in Anglo-Saxon realms.

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En ese contexto, es interesante que algunos asturianos dirá: "No estamos mediterráneos!" Por otra parte, se están alineados con la gente de la costa (¿borde?) celta, los quienes (especialmente los irlandeses católicos) no eran vistos positivamente en los entornos anglosajones..

Ronzalez, you must look yourself in a mirror and you must say " I am
intelligent, I am good, I am #1 " you must do it several times a day and
in a few weeks you will feel very good about yourself!

Ronzalez wrote:so at least this way I might possibly have a slim chance yet at a life, career, marriage, and children, all at the ripe old age of 41... too little too late, most likely...

I want to tell you that my 66 years old uncle got married ....and he had
a son a year later.....my Asturian great grandmother had twin girls at
54 years of age.....sooooo....you are young to start your life, you only
need to find a psychologist that guide you and take away all the negative
and all the fears that you have.....you need to put a photo of the President
in your room and everytime you wake up, you look at President Obama
and you can see that if President Obama is the USA President....you can
be whatever you want to be !!!

You can read about the Haitians...after all the disgraces and all the caos
and suffering, the Haitians smile and have faith in a better future...
forget about the Germans and read about positive people please!!!

You can also visit a catholic church and pray that the Lord guide you and
bless you!!! If the Asturians had faith in the Lord and crossed the ocean
not knowing what they were going to find at the other side of the world...
you can do the same, say your prayers and go for your dreams!!!

Art, the whole concept is faulty. Racial discrimination as we know it started with Imperialism and Colonialism in the 16th Century. (They occupied your land, took away your resources and sold you off into slavery - the British Empire justified this by claiming racial superiority, the Spanish by claiming religious superiority, etc.) - Hence the wonderful churches and cathedrals in all former Spanish colonies.

Julius Caesar never fought any German tribes, in fact I believe it was German mercenaries who helped him defeat the Gauls. I have to look it up, but we did read his "De Bello Gallico" in school, and I just remember the defeat of Helvetian Vercingetorix.
Vienna was then a Kelt settlement, like most of the Danube valley. No southern Germans here.

The kingdom of Prussia in its glory days was made up of Prussians, Estonians, Poles, Russians, and other ethnic groups.

Lastly, there was no ethnic discrimination in Roman days. Emperor Hadrian, who conquered England (the land of angles and saxons) was born in Spain, as was the great Hannibal (Carthago Novo is today's Cartagena), as was Seneca, as was emperor Trajan, and so on.

You'd have look in the book to see what she's saying. I think then you'd see that she's not as far out as you think. You'd also see that you and the author agree on many of your points.

It's been a few days, but as I recall, she said that the Germani tribe that Caesar talked about actually lived in what is today France, not the area we now call Germany. She also said that Caesar wasn't racist or discriminatory in the way we think of that today. He was simply trying to understand the new peoples he was encountering, although he was conquering and enslaving (?) them.

Check it out. You'll find it interesting. This link will open a page that allows you to search in the book on Amazon. Caesar and the Germani are listed in many places.

Art and I have also been discussing this issue privately, and at one point he named off a list of chief-level executives of various powerful companies who have obviously Spanish names, and asked me to explain how they could have possibly risen to that point if my theory about anti-Spanish discrimination were true.

My response to him was this, which he thought I should share with the rest of you:

To answer your question, Art, I believe that the C-level executives you mentioned were able to enter the system because they probably had allied themselves strongly with their own ethnic group in some fashion, which definitely wasn't my case.

I would suspect that they probably grew up in some strongly hispanic area -- such as Miami or New York -- and maintained strong friendships and alliances within hispanic social circles. That increases the odds that someone within your native ethnic group has already penetrated a given industry or organization somehow, and is thereby able to get you in, also.

(Art explained that these people are called "enchufes".)

The National Review has published articles where they talk about this phenomenon of "ethnic nepotism", and not only does it happen a lot, but it may actually be the predominant way that people are actually getting jobs.

And so my answer is that I never played the race card enough, even though I've had it vaguely suggested to me occasionally over the years, by true, dyed-in-the-wool hispanics who always expressed their deep disappointment that I'd never officially really been a member of the hispanic world.

- Ron

Thank you, Raquel... you are very sweet to give me those kind words.

Raquel M wrote:Ronzalez, you must look yourself in a mirror and you must say " I am
intelligent, I am good, I am #1 " you must do it several times a day and
in a few weeks you will feel very good about yourself!

Ronzalez wrote:so at least this way I might possibly have a slim chance yet at a life, career, marriage, and children, all at the ripe old age of 41... too little too late, most likely...

I want to tell you that my 66 years old uncle got married ....and he had
a son a year later.....my Asturian great grandmother had twin girls at
54 years of age.....sooooo....you are young to start your life, you only
need to find a psychologist that guide you and take away all the negative
and all the fears that you have.....you need to put a photo of the President
in your room and everytime you wake up, you look at President Obama
and you can see that if President Obama is the USA President....you can
be whatever you want to be !!!

You can read about the Haitians...after all the disgraces and all the caos
and suffering, the Haitians smile and have faith in a better future...
forget about the Germans and read about positive people please!!!

You can also visit a catholic church and pray that the Lord guide you and
bless you!!! If the Asturians had faith in the Lord and crossed the ocean
not knowing what they were going to find at the other side of the world...
you can do the same, say your prayers and go for your dreams!!!

I have created a poll based on Ronzalez' message about the need for Americans with Hispanic last names to exploit connections with people of the same ethnic identity in order to get ahead in the work world. Please give your answer!
http://www.asturianus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3993

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He creado una encuesta basada en el mensaje de Ronzalez acerca de la necesidad para estadounidenses con apellidos hispanos de aprovechar los enchufes étnicas (las conexiones con la gente de la misma identidad étnica) con el fin de avanzar en el mundo del trabajo. ¡Se ruega dar tu respuesta!
http://www.asturianus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3993

I have to weigh in with my two cents on this and agree to a great extent with Ronzalez.

I was born and raised in Tampa. All four of my grandparents emigrated from Spain(Asturias, Cantabria, Leon and Andalucia) to Florida between 1900 and 1905. Fernandez, Garcia, Garcia, and Ruano. I am a typical second-generation American. I won't go into the stories of anti-Latin discrimination that they endured. That's from another era. But I feel that the Anglo-centric attitude that Ronzalez describes certainly exists in the US today. I have discussed this with my brothers and sisters. My brother who was an economist even jokingly came up with a formula to calculate what our gross earnings would be had our surname not ended in "ez". One of my sisters has, consciously or unconsciously, buried any cultural ties to our ancestry. She and her children are as cracker as cracker can be. It's sad.

I have had a lifetime of explaining to people that my blonde hair and green eyes are not a genetic aberration, that Spain is, in fact, part of Europe, that I'm not Mexican or Cuban or Puerto Rican(not that there's anything wrong with that ) I understand that these people are simply ignorant, but there exists a deep distrust of the non-Anglo, non-Hanseatic in this country not limited to Florida or the South or the uneducated. I've seen it in their eyes and heard it in their voices. There are doors that are closed to you if your name ends in a vowel. If you've not felt this in your life, I'm very glad for you. I think that you've been lucky or maybe just thicker-skinned than I am.

That said, no one is prouder of his or her ethnic identity than I am. I agree with the poster who advised Ronzalez to double-down on his Hispanic surname. Hyphenate and tack on a few more.

Thank you for speaking up about this -- I didn't arrive at my comments hastily or lightly.

And while I understand that obviously there are people here who say they've not had the kind of experience I'm talking about, I do tend to think it probably affects the younger generations, and the males much more than the females, as female immigrants have always tended to be desired for incorporation by a dominant ethnic society much more than male immigrants. This tradition seems to have been around since at least the days when human beings were running around in loin cloths.

In response to Julian Fernandez:

I survived communism in Cuba....I know discrimination, I was called many
names at a very young age and I had to close my mouth, so I learned to
ignore everything, that's why Cubans in the USA are different, we do not
care about discrimination and we just go for our dreams. It is not that
we have thicker skin, it is because we survived years of discrimination,
sufferings in Cuba, so we have teached our children and our grandchildren
to pray to God and go for their dreams, they must ignore the ignorant that
put stones in their roads to happiness!

My baby grandchild is a bundle of joy, he is white and pink, with big blue
eyes....his last name ends in EZ...he is a Gonzalez!!! and we will teach him
to be proud of his roots, his religion and his last name!

Yes, I am proud to be born in Cuba, I am proud to be American by choice,
I am proud of my Asturian roots, I don't care if ignorants do not like it,
but I don't care whatever they can think or say!!!

Raquel,

Well, please understand that after high school graduation, the racism comes out in full force and your grandchild will need all the "enchufes" he can get to be able to even make money to support himself.

I am 41 years old and have a bachelor's degree from Duke University (which I'm certain by now was only possible because I was very begrudgingly accepted there in the first place as a token minority). And do you know what? Since graduation, I've not completed one single full year of full-time work -- not one.

Do you know how they tell you that it's just a matter of persistence, to find a job? Well, how about this: since 1992, with this degree under my belt, I've sent out resume after resume after resume and job application after job application after job application, and I have never ONCE been called back for any job that I've actually applied for. They have occasionally called me back, however, for some completely different job where they only need someone who speaks Spanish.

This is our only possible value to them, and how they see us: as these weird quasi-human creatures who speak a strange language, and who could never possibly have the brain power to do any job which requires half a degree of real intelligence beyond some dumb animal ability to squawk out a weird language, like parrots or seals.

In 1998, after years of trying and mysteriously failing, and after being taken for a four-year ride by a Hanseatic female who it turns out had only been posing as the only girlfriend I've ever been allowed to have my entire life, I finally had a suicidal nervous breakdown and had to be hospitalized several times.

And what do you think this society did to me, upon seeing that I couldn't take any more? Do you think they finally said, "Okay, we've been mean enough to this kid, it's time to stop now and be fair". NO. They only got more vicious and more cold-blooded. I can't possibly TELL you what this nightmare of a country does to people who just can't take any more of its abuse -- it actually gets meaner. Can you believe that?

Fast-forward to today, to 2011. I am 41 years old, and with this fraud of a degree in my hand, I can't even get called back for a lousy minimum-wage job at a fast food restaurant or a bookstore. AND I have just over $50,000 dollars in student loans to repay.

I have no wife, I've never been able to marry; I have no children, I've never been able to do that, either. My "mommy" and my "daddy" pay my bills and give me an "allowance" so that I can afford to do anything. And there isn't a day, hour, or minute that goes by where I don't close my eyes and imagine various ways to kill myself and finally be relieved of this life, in this "wonderful" country called America.

So THERE is your "land of opportunity" for you. That's the only America that I and MY family have ever known.

Have you decided to live in Spain?

Everytime my daughter goes to Spain, she comes very upset, because
people ( in Spain ) ask her where is she from...she says she is from Cuba
and people always tell her :"people from Cuba are all blacks"....how she a
blonde with blue eyes can be from Cuba....so my daughter, born in
Florida, she has never been in Cuba, always respond " Cubans are ONE
people, no matter their skin color, and you are a racist ignorant!
So my daughter returns from her trips from la Madre Patria very upset
and I enjoy all her stories because I am proud that my daughter is proud
of her Cuban heritage and she knows how to respond to racists and
ignorants.I am sure her baby Gonzalez will know how to defend his last
name and his heritage from racists and ignorants!

I am sorry to hear about your bad experiences, but as I told you before
try to get involved in charity work, try to help the people that do not
have a family or a home, you may try to help the Haitians in Haiti for
a while, so I am sure you will return changed because I think the Haitians
are the poorest of the poor....they even had a hurricane lately and they are
an example of sacrifice because it does not matter the times that you fall,
you need to count the times that you rise again. You must look around
you, there are people with a lot of problems, everybody have a problem
because we are humans, we are not robots.
May the Lord guide you and bless you abundantly!

[quote="Raquel M"]Have you decided to live in Spain?

Everytime my daughter goes to Spain, she comes very upset, because
people ( in Spain ) ask her where is she from...she says she is from Cuba
and people always tell her :"people from Cuba are all blacks"....

Raquel I find that hard to believe, I live in Spain and I can assure we see images of Cuba, of the Castro family and their government day in and day out. It is estimated that almost 6 million Cubans could claim Spanish citizenship, because they have a grandparent who was born in Spain.