Posted on 10/10/2013 7:27:48 AM PDT by Morgana
FULL TITLE: The photograph that shamed Mexico: Health director suspended after shocking image of indigenous woman giving birth on a clinic LAWN when nurses denied her treatment went viral
A disturbing photograph of an indigenous woman from Mexico delivering a baby on a patch of grass outside a medical center has set off a firestorm online and sparked a national debate that led to the suspension of the head of the clinic that has turned the mother away.
The shocking image, taken by a passerby, shows 29-year-old Irma Lopez , who is of Mazatec ethnicity, squatting after giving birth, her face contorted in pain and her tiny newborn son still bound by the umbilical cord and lying on the ground.
The government of the southern state of Oaxaca announced Wednesday that it has suspended the health center's director, Dr. Adrian Cruz, while officials conduct state and federal investigations into the October 2 incident.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Cool story.
Oh yes, it sounds exactly like Oaxaca. I’ve seen that walking clockwise/counter-clockwise too, maybe there. It is also represented in some of the typical dances. We took a tour bus/ small, south of there to an Indian market. Our son was about 10, blonde. The Indian ladies there followed him - reminded me of Cortes’s stories - and they came up to about his upper arm. VERY short Indians there.
We passed a guy plowing his fields with an oxen and one of those very basic plows - wood + a point/ hand-held. As we drove south towards Chiapas (but not INTO Chiapas), there was a road block - tires burning on the hiway and guys with guns. Our bus driver stopped and talked to the guys, and we took off into the field to make a detour. It was unsettling and seemed, at that moment, very far from DC.
It is very easy to believe the many, many Indian groups in Mexico do not all speak Spanish. I bet Mexico does not even have schools up in those indigenous areas.
Rampant racism, indeed! By gradations of skin color. Top is ‘white’ European, the conquerors. Then by gradations to black, lowest of the low.
I tutored a girl who came up from Colombia - same racist structures there. She was Indian + black, mixed. She had been in an orphanage. They did not bother to teach her, she was so low on the totem pole. I taught her the ALPHABET -an 8 year old,!!!! and how to read — Spanish, first, and then English - so she could enter one of the private schools here in So Cal. Talk about a transition.
She loved Cinderella best of all our books. We rewrote it according to her re-telling, very simply. It was HER story, of course.
-— Coming to a hospital near you.-—
But she didn’t have to pay anything out of pocket.
—I saw this myself with Hispanic employees I had, they looked down on the “Los Indios” and said that they didn’t speak Spanish.—
So you’re saying that Mexico isn’t so much different than the United States.
England is killing people in their hospitals. They need to look at themselves first.
What I am saying is that yes, we as HUMANS are no different in our ability to be racist despite the fact of all the people who ascribe racism to Whites only.
The big shopping area was one long tunnel of tents and tin shacks, connected together, within walking distance of our hotel. A straw hat salesman was convinced he could find a hat for my size 8 and a half head but no luck. I did find some sandals that fit and bought those with American money.
The people at the hotel were different than the local natives and spoke rapid Spanish. Locals spoke in “chants” that to my ears seemed to rhyme.
Curiously, there are Oaxaca locals, short, brown Indians, working in a local Mexican cafe and at a local nursery here in mid-Missouri. When I mention the radish festival, they seem to make a connection.
There was some kind of sewer gas coming up in the shower of our hotel room and my wife got a little woozy. The hotel called a local doctor and he showed up, carrying his medical kit in a nice Plano tackle box. He listened to her lungs and throat and concluded it was “all in her head.”
He wrote a prescription but we never filled it and checked out the next day...
Yes, traveling in Mexico is always, well, different. I lived in DF after high school, got to know the City pretty well, improved my Spanish a lot. Have driven down Baja from California (when it was a dirt road) — which is where I saw the courting young people walking in circles, I think - and poked around Yucatan. The people are lovely, really. I have had wonderful experiences and yet, I would not go there now. Too much lawlessness. So interesting to hear about your trips.
And so interesting - you have the Oaxacans there in Missouri?
Very interesting. Yes, they are a hard-working and honorable group - for the most part/ as with all humans.
Don’t know what happened to my graphs...
I was kind of being snarky. If you watch Telemundo or Univision, you’ll notice that a lot of the presenters/stars of those shows look very, very much like our own “stars”, i.e., they are just as racist/ethnocentrist as we supposedly are or worse, actually.
You see we agree. I have no problem with snarky it’s one of my middle names along with all the others given me by my Hispanic employees that I can’t repeat here.
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