Kids: from El Ratoncito to Negritude

Kids perpetuate the things that they hear and see, from good to bad to ugly. From the the mystical Ratoncito Perez (the Spanish equivalent of the Tooth Fairy) to the most irrelevant and unsolicited insults. They've gotten it all from somewhere. I just wonder, first of all whose idea the rat was; and second of all, where and at what point in time calling somebody black became a bad thing?

They call him El Ratoncito Perez - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=le0BswMXIBc. And he is indeed a rat. I don't personally, but there are a ton of young children in Spain who get rather animated at the idea of a little rodent giving them gifts after loosing their baby teeth. They smile at the thought of the creepy crawler coming into their room and bringing them money and other regalos in the night, but I don't personally get excited about a little beast scratching up my sheets and giving me coins as a replacement gift.

On the bright side, topics like El Ratoncito are the norm as I pick up harto (a great deal of) vocabulary from the under 9 crowd: from pedo (fart) to calbo (bald) and and lots of other good and not so innocent vocab from the young adults of Bollullos. (I had to explain to one of my teachers that "rubber" is not the American English equivalent of eraser... that's only in the UK.)

There are indeed some young adults here, or I think I might go crazy. I'm thinking about doing intercambios to meet more peeople. I'm also in the process of signing up for a dance class, another social endeavor, to learn flamenco, a bright spot in the culturally synchretic history of Andalucia. It should be cool... if it ever starts. The class is offered at the Casa de la Cultura about a block away from the primary school (colegio) where I teach. I went in today, again, to check on the horario and see if they'd set a schedule for classes yet, but they're still having meetings to decide.

As I was leaving, I saw three little kids from my school, one of whom is in my class. I was saying hello, and then realized they were saying more than hello back to me. The little girl who's in my class said that one of the boys was trying to insult me by calling me negra. Why... (sigh). So I told him, in short, it's not an insult if I am (jackass). I mean, you could call me morena, but that's almost like an admission that calling me black is indeed an insult or somehow bad. The girl later explained that negra is an insult because you use it to say, for example, your hand is "black and ugly", but, I told her, my hand is black and beautiful. So boo-yah.

It was kind of disappointing in retrospect because these are some of the browner kids in the school in comparison to some of their whiter-looking classmates. On top of that, I wasn't expecting to be insulted by my students. As if it weren't enough already to get the stare down on a regular basis, and have some people continue the stare down even after I've said "hola!" with an attack of the smiley face... now I have to wonder what the kids are calling me? Is this a joke?

I think I corrected the problem as best I could. Although, I hope they won't ever think to insult anyone else ever by calling them a word that should never have a bad connotation. They might come up with new insults, but I was pretty nice to them, so why would they need to? Plus, having embraced the concept of negra as less of an insult than a fact and a complementary one at that, they can't really use it against me. My goal was to take the power out of the insult. I did, however, find myself walking away wondering how with so many black people in the world, por todas partes, we somehow allowed any type of insult involving our color to be perpetuated. Where did this hateration come from in the first place?

I'll keep my head up. Sube, it means sooooo much. Hopefully working with kids, I'll leave a greater impression than even I can recognize right now. I may not understand the excitement of El Ratoncito, but I hope they can at least begin to comprehend that black is beautiful, rare in some parts of the world perhaps, but for sure nothing to be insulted or used derogatorily.