102. Clarifications

After my last pandemic post, called “Sores,” two readers close to me wrote to say that women have known all along that there are huge pay disparities between men and women performing the same or similar work—and that women have for decades reminded men of that. I casually replied that I should have said “white men” became more aware of the differences during the pandemic.

 

But that’s wrong. The point is that the pandemic has given the entire population pause, and has resulted in widespread general awareness of gender pay disparities; and of the water situation on the Navajo Reservation, the conditions of health and wealth on other reservations; and of the overwhelming numbers of black and brown Americans working in low-wage service jobs. We now collectively realize that the entire population depends on these workers for food, health, transportation, garbage removal, and any number of activities now seen as “essential” to the functioning of the body politic. 

 

I was also called out for not explicitly naming Latinos. I plead guilty, having allowed the “people of color” words to stand for many. In fact, one of my current curiosities is trying to understand who the Genizaros were and are. But I blithely skipped over Latinos on my way to discussing the pandemic’s laser lens on white racism aimed at Blacks, Asians, and Indians. 

 

My first ten years were lived minutes away from the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, where we knew nothing of treaties, allotments, and boarding schools; most of us were Lutherans, “we” all were white, and we knew no Indians… And then we moved to California.

 

In California we lived with and went to school with Catholics and Mormons, Negroes—the word at the time Clarifications—and Mexicans. The Pala Indian Reservation was close-by, but we knew no Indians. Now, sixty years on, I know that there were Indians among the Mexicans we went to school with, know that those we called Mexicans and those who called themselves Mexican had diverse family genealogies, reaching not only to Spain and modern Mexico, but to an old Mexico that is now California, to Indian tribes across the Southwest, and to globetrotters from everywhere who chased one boom or the other to California. 

 

And most recently I’ve learned about Genizaros, “detribalized Native Americans” who had been enslaved and/or indentured by other tribes and Euro-American settlers through war or payment of ransom, who melded into and comprised “up to a third of the population of New Mexico and southern Colorado.” This particular kind of slavery persisted well past the 13^th amendment, and now some Mexican-Americans are reclaiming this part of their—often hidden—past. 

 

Much that has been hidden is coming to light.

 

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