Racial Comments About Mothers on Welfare in Mexico Spark Outrage Eduardo Stanley - VOXXI
go to original May 14, 2014

When the head of Mexico’s Welfare Department (Secretaría de Desarrollo Social) shocked everybody with a statement during a business trip to Nayarit, warning indigenous women that having more than three children will exclude them from collecting food stamps, the cries of racism across the country didn’t wait.

In her speech during her visit to the state located in the Northeast of Mexico, Rosario Robles Berlanga warned indigenous women that having more than three kids will preclude them from the program “Oportunidades.” This program provides up to $250 dollars per month to families living in poverty, and it also help their children with scholarships. Right after this statement, complaints were heard everywhere in Mexico, mostly pointing to her as a racist.

“Rosario Robles’s comments exposed the racial structure of Mexican society, something that people don’t want to recognize,” said Gaspar Rivera Salgado, Program Director of the UCLA Labor Center, based in Los Angeles. “Basically she is saying that indigenous women are ignorants who don’t know what they are doing.”

... Some of the results of a 2010 survey produced by the Enadis Survey (National Survey on Discrimination), shows that 23.3 percent of the population would not share a house with somebody from another race; 54.8 percent says that people receive insults based on their skin color; and four out of ten people say some people are treated differently due to their skin color.

Read the rest at VOXXI

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