Pictured: kitty celebrates my job interview.
Anyway, I had one of those phone interviews (god this place has a ton of stuff to go through, I had to take some sort of weird personality test too) with one of the store managers. She was quite nice, she was asking me lots of questions about my previous jobs and the like. And then she asked what types of books I like to read, so I said translated Russian novels and biographies mainly (... shut up) but that I'm working my way through some Spanish novels (well, they're in Spanish, but by Mexican authors mainly, let me continue so you'll understand this, because I told her that they're written by Mexican authors) now. And she was a bit quiet at first, I could tell she was thinking that I was kinda weird, and then she said, "We have a lovely Puerto Rican lady that works here!" I didn't say anything at first, and then she was like, "I love Spanish people!" And I was like "... Yes, they're quite lovely..." while I debated correcting her. Obviously I decided against it, but... Puerto Rican does not mean Mexican does not mean Spanish. They are not the same.
It reminded me of this article I read in the Globe and Mail, about a... windsurfing accident that a Canadian athlete helped out in. He went looking for the guy. Let me set something up first: they were in Mexico.
Through the article, the writer kept calling the missing man's friend Spanish, and then at the end, he had a quote from the Canadian calling the guy Mexican. I had already figured (from the beginning of the article) that the other men were Mexican, but I decided to hope against hope that they really were Spanish. They were not. I wrote a letter to the writer and said that Spanish and Mexican are not the same thing, just like Canadian and American are not the same thing, just like British and Australian are not the same thing. They may speak the same language (with regional differences, of course), but they're not the same. He replied and apologized if he offended me, so that was nice, but still.
And the more I get into studying Spanish and hispanic cultures and such, the more I notice that we are incredibly guilty of doing this all the time, particularly in North America. And it really pisses me off.
I would write more, but my eyes are bleeding. Perhaps later.
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