Everybody loves to chant slogans—white people did it to Black folks, now they’re doing it to Mexicans, this is stolen land, just wait till it’s white people’s turn—but here’s the part no one wants to say out loud: America stole stolen land, and it wasn’t “Mexico” when Spain took it, it was hundreds of Indigenous nations, Aztec, Maya, Zapotec, Mixtec, Purépecha, Olmec, each with languages, gods, governments, and culture, until Spain showed up with a Bible in one hand and a sword in the other and said we’ll take it from here. They didn’t conquer Mexico, they invented it—first they called it New Spain, then after centuries of colonization and bloodletting independence in 1821 gave birth to what we now call Mexico, so no, Spain didn’t colonize Mexico, Spain created the conditions that forced it into existence. Spain and Portugal were the original playbook, they enslaved Africans, annihilated Indigenous nations, and justified it all with God, gold, and glory, and they didn’t just steal land, they stole identity, they burned languages, they rewrote origin stories, they replaced gods with a crucifix and now people wear the cross around their necks like it’s culture, which is basically like tattooing your mugger’s name on your chest and calling it heritage.
Most Mexicans today are descendants of both the conquerors and the conquered, you carry Indigenous blood but you pray to the colonizer’s God, you speak the colonizer’s language, you wear the colonizer’s names like Hernandez and Ramirez and Gonzalez, and you rage at U.S. colonization while forgetting Mexico itself was born from colonization—that’s like blaming your stepdad while giving your dad a free pass. Colonial amnesia kicked in and “Mexican” became an identity, not a history lesson, and “we’re all mixed” sounds nice until you ask who did the mixing and who got mixed into silence. In the U.S. people shout I’m not white, I’m Mexican, but Mexican isn’t a race, it’s a cocktail of Indigenous, European, and African bloodlines shaken under Catholic rule. We celebrate Aztecs and Mayans but still go to Catholic mass in Spanish, that’s not rebellion, that’s Stockholm Syndrome with tacos. Mexico had a caste system where lighter skin meant higher status, and generations were taught to “improve the race” while never asking where that poison came from.
And the hard part is people love easy villains—white people did this—and that’s fine but the truth is your ancestors helped build the same machine. The only difference between you and me is you still kneel to the God your colonizers gave you, I don’t. You cry for open borders but you can’t erase the mental borders you inherited, still chained to ideas you didn’t choose, still loyal to symbols that erased your story. The blood isn’t just on them, it’s on everyone, and if we keep screaming without clarity history won’t just repeat, it’ll reload, because colonization doesn’t need ships anymore, it just needs people too blind to see they’re still living by its rules. This was never just about race, it was about Christian empires, military conquest, the Doctrine of Discovery, the belief that some people were closer to God than others, and skin color is just geography, how close your ancestors lived to the sun. There’s only one race, human, the only system is power, the only cure is clarity, and if you want real freedom then stop worshipping the chains.
-Written by Steve Caprio
