Don't Cry For Me Argentina

I think that's a song from a movie about Eva Peron, who was the wife of a famous Argentine Dictator.  I haven't seen the movie, I just borrowed the song title for this blog.  I don't know if Argentina takes a periodic census, but if they do, and it's similar to ours, they probably ask people what race they consider themselves to be.  Apparently most Argentines consider themselves to be White.  Hispanic is not listed as a race on our own census forms.  First they ask you what race you are, and then they ask you if you are Hispanic.  According to my dictionary, a Hispanic is somebody from a Latin American country who is currently living in the United States.  By that definition, an Argentine is not a Hispanic unless he moves to the U.S.  If he subsequently moves from the U.S. to Canada, he would cease to be a Hispanic, but I don't know what the Canadians would call him.  As I said in a recent post, I don't even know why they call Central and South American countries Latin American, since Latin is not the official language in any of them.  Who speaks Latin anymore anyway?  The Roman Catholic Church used to, but they gave that up a long time ago.  I don't know if doctors and lawyers even speak Latin anymore either.

I used to know a guy from Brazil who claimed to be a mixture of Portuguese, Black, and American Indian, but he looked White to me.  He used to tell this little joke about himself:  "If a vegetarian primarily eats  vegetables, and a fruitarian primarily eats fruit, and a lactarian primarily eats dairy products, then my ancestors were humanitarians."

I remember, when we were in school, there was talk about Brazil trying to reinvent itself.  Most Brazilians lived around Rio de Janeiro in those days, and it was getting overcrowded, so they built a new capitol city way out in the jungle in an effort to get people to move into the interior of the country.  This was considered to be a good thing at the time, kind of like when they used to say "Go west young man!" in the U.S.  I don't remember when they changed it, but for some time now the PC people have been crying about how the Amazon Rain Forest is being destroyed.  Well, what did they think was going to happen?  Like Carl Marx said, "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."

Kids didn't speak Czech or Polish back in the day, just the old people, grandmas and grandpas.  My parents spoke Czech as a second language, I suppose because of the clientele in their store.  A lot of them spoke Polish, but that language is close enough to Czech that my Dad was able to communicate with them. When the Lawndale neighborhood started to turn Hispanic, my Dad told me that he was even starting to learn a little Spanish before he retired.