Aluna, 2017, Maria Berrio

Into de Storm  -   Chin H. Shin, 2016

Korean,b. ?

Paul Mathey (1844-1929) “Portrait of painter Georges Clairin” Oil on canvas Located in the Musée des Augustins, Hazebrouck, France

Toni Morrison Takes White Supremacy To Task

That is the best part, right? A great majority of us are against colonialism. In fact in this blog I said that I’m against it. We weren’t the ones going. And attacking us and our culture for that?? Ridiculous

You are literally comparing the Roman empire colonisation of the Iberian Peninsula (which happened several hundred years ago) to Spanish colonialism that only ceased - on a grand scale - by the end of the 19th Century. Even today Spain continues to occupy - as a colonial force - places like Melilla and Ceuta, and several Spanish corporations throughout Central and South America act as proxies of Spanish imperialism and literally continue to steal natural resources at the cost of local populations.

As soon as it’s suggested that Spain should pay reparations to former colonies for centuries of mass genocide and profiteering from slave trade and resource extraction people here go berserk in rage for simply mentioning historical facts, and pull out their best racist vocabulary and stereotypes on peoples from the Americas living here.

Anyone with a degree of compassion and understanding of history: please don’t do this, it’s embarrassing

You:

But anyways! Hablando en serio, Spain has had a friendly relationship with Latin America since independence. Tons of development projects, scholarship programs, infrastructure building, literacy programs...

And Spain DOES have a system of reparations for citizens of its former colonies, including my country, El Salvador. Spain gives us an expedited citizenship process- takes only two years of residency in Spain and they’re flexible with definition of “residency”. It’s almost like their way of saying “hey, sorry we left you in these conditions 200 years ago, but we’re gonna make it easy for you to come live in the EU where the quality of life is better”...it may not seem like a lot, but it’s an inteligent way to offer help bc it’s grounded in modernity, given the complexities and limitations of financial reparations. You can’t expect Spain to just give Latin America money- there are smarter ways to help.

Spain is also actively apologizing to Sephardic Jews for what they did to them 500 years ago by granting their descendants citizenship.