Me against the world...

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Hello all,

Yeah, I know its been a LOOOOOOOOOOOOONG while since i've written one of these but I just got the urge to type up a lil something. Since coming here to BsAs I have noticed that it is a lot different than my previous experience in South America. This is probably because my previous experience was a year prior to this trip and in another country, Chile.

Anyhow, since arriving here in BsAs I have had this compelling feeling that it was "me against the world." I don't like pointing out things like this or even letting them drive any sort of thought in my mind. To me, every1 is a person, the world is grey, and all stand out through their actions and personality. Well, that's not the real world. That's not how things work. That's not what I get to experience on a daily basis. If that were the case, this would be the ideal experience. But no, that's not how things work. Everyday I step outside of my residence door I get stared at, picked at, pointed at, discriminated against, talked about (I guess they assume that I would NEVER be able to understand them), and even the occasional poke and such by lil kids (but I don't blame them, they don't know any better).

When I try to talk about it, I get pegged as always bringing up race issues, but the others in my group and such will NEVER have to worry about these things, at least not in this context. I really don't like to think about these things, but I needed to write something about it to express myself. I don't see how just b/c of my skin color I am judged before I even say/do anything. I'm not saying that I'm judging any1 as a whole, but I think the verdict of good/bad experiences is about half & half. But whatever, if I dwell on the bad, I'll never get to see the potential in the good, right?!

Here´s a lil sum10 about a little known topic:
For a while now scholars have long pondered the "disappearance" of people of African descent from Argentina, long considered South America's "whitest" nation. A 1973 article in Ebony asked, "what happened to Argentina's involuntary immigrants, those African slaves and their mulatto descendants who once outnumbered whites five to one, and who were for 250 years 'an important element' in the total population, which is now 97 percent white?" One history book calls the country's lack of self-identifying black people "one of the most intriguing riddles in Argentine history," while another notes that "the disappearance of the Negro from the Argentine scene has puzzled demographers far more than the vanishing Indian." Was the Afro-Argentine community annihilated by disease and war, or absorbed into the larger white community? Anyhow, the afro-argentines made major contributions to Argentinean culture, including the tango, which is based on West African sources and not simply a Spanish-Italian fusion as I had always mistakenly assumed.

Anyhow, this is a very controversial topic that has many different sides. so here are some links to check it out...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afro-Argentines
http://baires.elsur.org/archives/in-search-of-the-mythical-afro-argentine/
http://aprendizdetodo.com/travel/?item=20020404
...or just simply type in Afro-Argentines into any search engine.

I just want my fair chance to be equal.

Micky

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