To start, I do want to acknowledge the discrimination that Oaxacans face. Having many cousins who are half-Oaxacan, I’ve witnessed the insults and disrespect firsthand from other Mexican people. Self-hate and anti-Indigeneity run deep in our Mesox (Mesoamerican) communities; there’s no denying that. The pain is real, and it deserves to be acknowledged.
However, with that being said, it doesn’t justify vindictive lateral oppression. Despite the Indigenous buzzwords and posturing, LA Taco’s conscious decision to platform the sister Fabiola Santiago’s harmful piece—“The Complicated Relationship Between Chicano Identity and Mexican Cultural Appropriation”—doesn’t advance Indigenous liberation. Rather, it serves white supremacy’s primary strategy: divide & conquer Indigenous people, establish purity metrics, then let us police each other while colonizer extractors go unchallenged.
What alarms me most is the cultural violence this propaganda inflicts on Chicano youth. When young people read that their loved one’s huaraches represent “appropriation” rather than inheritance, when they’re told their pull toward mezcal is extraction rather than ancestral inclination, they start doubting their own Indigenous nature. This poison of unworthiness is one of colonialism’s strongest weapons—getting us to police our own legitimacy through colonial-informed purity tests while the actual systems of extraction continue unchallenged.
Especially ironic considering LA Taco built their entire brand aesthetic on Chicano culture and symbolism. They’re literally profiting from the Chicano vibe while publishing anti-Chicano propaganda.
And when community members raised concerns about this laterally oppressive framing to LA Taco’s editor? Dismissed.
The editorial choice to platform divisive anti-Chicano content while rejecting critique from the Chicano department of Indigenous communities reveals where they actually stand.
Especially ironic considering LA Taco built their entire brand aesthetic on Chicano culture and symbolism. They’re literally profiting from the Chicano vibe while publishing anti-Chicano propaganda. If anyone thought they were Chicano-friendly, that pass needs to be held until further review.
Let’s examine the primary dirty medicine. The article’s titling and its reinforcing URL—lataco.com/chicano-cultural-appropriation—deliberately associates Chicanos with the concept of cultural appropriation. No nuance about complex cultural exchange, just a simplistic accusation embedded in the web address. That keyword choice leaves me no doubt that the harm was intentional, not accidental.
The opening claim—”Not all Chicanos appropriate Mexican culture, but they’re more at risk of slipping into it”—would make Spanish friars proud. The sister positions herself as an arbiter of Indigenous authenticity, yet offers no evidence to support such a sweeping generalization. Most troubling is how she transforms one individual’s actions (Willy Chavarría’s collaboration) into a collective indictment of all Chicanos.
To be clear: Willy Chavarría’s collaboration was wrong. Those Adidas “huaraches” were wack af and failed to exhibit any respect or honor to Oaxacan artisanship or economic fairness to the communities whose aesthetics and branding were being exploited. You wouldn’t know this from the article, but Indigenous-aware Chicanos were among the first to call this out. Leaving that fact out was key, since its goal wasn’t to hold ONE designer accountable for HIS choices—but to weaponize his gross failure to indict ALL Chicanos as appropriators. That’s the dishonest move.
But here’s the truth she refuses to acknowledge: Chicano culture IS Mexican culture, responding to Anglo/U.S. conditions and environment. We didn’t just arrive with the Bracero Program. Mexican communities have existed in what’s now the Southwest before the 1846 border shift.
And Chicanidad is not a monolith. We are Mesox people from various regions, spanning from the southwest to Central America, including Oaxacan descendants. Many trace their lineage to the Purépecha, Yaqui, Maya, Nahua, and numerous other nations. When the sister attacks “Chicanos” as separate from other Mesox people, she’s also erasing the Oaxacan contingent within the Chicanah community.
The author writes that “Decades later, Chicanos adopted the huaraches as a symbol of activism and cultural pride.” Adopted? You cannot adopt what was never foreign to you. Huaraches are a pre-Columbian Indigenous technology with a documented history of over 500 years. What she dismisses as appropriation was, in fact, cultural restoration after generations of systematic erasure and ethnocide.
When our parents were literally beaten and ridiculed for speaking Spanish in school, when children were clowned for looking “too chunty,” when families were pressured to anglicize everything—wearing huaraches became an act of defiance and an anchor to restoring ourselves, not fashion.
The Chicano Movement didn’t appropriate Indigenous symbols; we reclaimed them after colonial violence tried to sever those ties. It’s gotta be hard work to try to paint the picture that Chicano’s connection to Mexican material culture began in the 1940s. Rather, it persisted through innate memory—in our gramma’s molcajetes, our grampa’s green thumb, our mother’s plethora of herbal remedies and food recipes, our family’s foodways, and other embedded cultural mannerisms—despite colonial violence designed to break these bonds.
The sister claims Chicanos are “complicit in racial capitalism” by importing huaraches and mezcal while celebrating them as cultural pride. However, this framing reveals more about her dishonesty than any actual power analysis.
As a first-generation immigrant, her lived experience likely mirrors that of many Chicanos—navigating Anglo spaces, code-switching for survival, battling erasure. Yet she performs Indigenous superiority as if geographic proximity to Oaxaca grants immunity from the same assimilation pressures she weaponizes against us.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: As a first-generation immigrant, her lived experience likely mirrors that of many Chicanos—navigating Anglo spaces, code-switching for survival, battling erasure. Yet she performs Indigenous superiority as if geographic proximity to Oaxaca grants immunity from the same assimilation pressures she weaponizes against us. The difference between her and a third-generation Chicano? A few decades of Anglo colonizer-free weathering and a border. Not Indigenous authenticity.
She highlights Chicanos as the facilitators of mezcal’s commodification, claiming we’re “designers, brand owners, or brokers” driving the extraction. But where’s the evidence? The data? The non-rhetorical, fact-based analysis? Nothing.
Let’s be clear about class: the vast majority of Chicanos are working-class people who don’t own mezcal import businesses or broker international trade deals. We’re buying a bottle at the liquor store, not exploiting Oaxacan labor. We’re consumers participating in the same capitalist market as everyone else—including first-generation immigrants—not the architects of commodification.
The actual extractors? Multinational liquor conglomerates, venture capital firms, celebrity brands with distribution power. But those entities escape scrutiny while the sister points at working-class Chicanos buying mezcal and calls it extraction. Just another sweeping indictment, positioning us as primary agents of exploitation rather than fellow survivors of the same extractive economy, and as if other segments of American and Mexican society aren’t partaking.
When Oaxacan artisans sell to international markets, it’s framed as a means of economic survival. When Chicanos buy from those same markets, we’re exploiters. This selective accountability exposes the real agenda of the article: establishing hierarchies of who’s “Indigenous enough” to engage with their own ancestral culture.
Here’s what should unite us: Indigenous peoples—whether rooted in ancestral lands or navigating their unique diaspora circumstance— ALL risk having our cultural items commodified due to our proximity to poverty. When huaraches go from survival wear to luxury items, when mezcal transforms from campesino drink to $20 cocktails, we ALL lose.
Does her English-language article, behind a paywall, in a gentrifier-leaning food blog demonstrate more cultural authenticity than a Chicano teenager learning Nahuatl or Purhepecha in East LA?
The question isn’t “which Indigenous group is appropriating from which”—it’s “how do we collectively resist capitalist extraction that profits from ALL our cultures?” That resistance requires solidarity, not purity tests based on how many generations we’ve been on which side of a colonial border.
What makes this particularly dishonest is how the sister positions herself as a gatekeeper while likely sharing the same metropolitan distance from rural Indigenous life as urban Chicanos. Does living in L.A. as a first-generation Oaxacan make her more Indigenous than a third-generation Chicano whose grandmother still grinds her chile with a molcajete? Does her English-language article, behind a paywall, in a gentrifier-leaning food blog demonstrate more cultural authenticity than a Chicano teenager learning Nahuatl or Purhepecha in East LA?
She writes from Los Angeles—navigating the same pressures of assimilation, the same distance from ancestral lands, the same participation in global capitalism. Yet she reserves her critique exclusively for Chicanos, as if the community she claims to represent has been immune to colonization’s adverse effects.
Here’s what makes this propaganda particularly dangerous: Santiago employs the exact colonial logic she claims to resist. By suggesting that Mexicans—and by extension, Chicanos—aren’t truly Indigenous, she provides intellectual cover for one of white supremacy’s central myths: that all the Indians were wiped out.
Her piece is not a decolonial analysis. It’s linear, hierarchical thinking dressed in Indigenous aesthetics. Real Indigenous epistemology—the circular worldview our ancestors practiced—recognizes interconnection, not competition. The Four Circles teaching shows how harm at one level ripples outward: self → family → community → extended communities. When we fragment Mesoamerican unity through purity tests based on proximity to colonial borders, we don’t just hurt Chicanos—we weaken Indigenous resistance nationally and globally.
We must remember: the anti-Indigenous upbringings we ALL experienced—north and south of the border—were designed by European ruling classes (Spanish and British colonizers and their descendants) who control school systems and media to this day. They taught Mexicans to be ashamed of being “indio.” They beat Spanish out of Chicanos in U.S. schools. They profit when we police each other’s reconnection instead of supporting it. The media that erases us, the institutions that punish our languages, the economic systems that extract from our cultures—these are maintained by a ruling class with shared European ancestry and interests. Our reconnection threatens their narrative. Our solidarity threatens their power. That’s why they need us divided.
Her piece is not a decolonial analysis. It’s linear, hierarchical thinking dressed in Indigenous aesthetics. When we fragment Mesoamerican unity through purity tests.. we weaken Indigenous resistance nationally and globally.
After 25 years doing this work, I’ve watched this anti-Chicano propaganda trend accelerate over the past seven years. Questionable social media accounts invoking “Pueblos Originarios” while systematically trying to delegitimize Chicano Indigenous identity have become more frequent as well as the reinforcement of that propaganda by publications chasing safe, white-gaze-friendly content. The pattern and agenda are clear: keep Mesoamerican-descended communities policing each other’s authenticity instead of helping each other heal our particular wounds and uniting against systems of power.
Who benefits from this fragmentation? White supremacy wins when the largest Brown population in the U.S. is cut off from its roots. Corporate extractors—Adidas, venture capital firms, multinational conglomerates—escape the smoke while we fight over who’s “authentic enough.” Right-wing interests celebrate as Indigenous peoples turn on each other. And the spirit of hierarchical, colonial mentality gets another generation of hosts willing to do its work.
If we’re serious about decolonization, we need the skill to identify white supremacist logic even when it’s wrapped in Indigenous optics and catch phrases. Real decolonial work demands that everyone participate in self-reflection. It means asking if our actions serve collective liberation or fragmentation. Does it challenge systems of extraction or just police cultural reconnection to satisfy emotional and individualistic whims?
Actual Indigenous values—reciprocity, relational accountability, collective liberation—call us to build solidarity that honors specific cultural differences without creating new hierarchies. Bi-national activism and organizing between Chicanos and Pueblos Originales has been happening for decades. Ignoring these collaborations and erasing this solidarity work not only reeks of wack scholarship, it’s a disservice to Indigenous liberation.
Yes, critique exploitative behavior wherever it exists. Call out extraction, commodification, and anti-Indigeneity—including within Chicano communities when it actually occurs. But there’s a difference between accountability and de-Indianization.
What if, instead of focusing on lateral attacks, we discussed supporting community-based mezcal brands owned and stewarded by our Oaxacan relatives? What if we built economic accountability initiatives together? What if we recognized that Chicanos and Oaxacans face the same ICE raids, the same wage theft, the same colonial erasure—and organized accordingly?
Real Indigenous praxis looks like defending each other, building economic alternatives, teaching our languages, protecting our lands, and refusing the colonial script that would have us fight over scraps while the actual systems of power remain untouched.
LA Taco: Your conscious editorial choice to platform this divisive content while dismissing Indigenous critique positions you as opps to authentic solidarity. You’ve exploited Chicano symbolism for branding while normalizing anti-Chicano sentiment under the guise of cultural criticism. You owe the community accountability, not clickbait. That 16k engagement you got? That’s 16,000 people potentially internalizing anti-Chicano propaganda. The damage is done.
And to those questionable personas producing anti-Chicano propaganda wrapped in Indigenous aesthetics: We see you. We see the deceptive spirits of division and dishonesty hiding behind your optical Indigeneity. You will be challenged. Not because there’s no criticism to be had or that we can’t take it, but because our youth deserve protection from deceptive colonial logic being presented as Indigenous integrity.
So for most of us who want to do right by our Ancestors, let’s move forward with principles over performance, solidarity over social capital, and the actual hard work of collective liberation over the easy work of lateral oppression.
Kokuani! (Let’s go! [in Purhepecha])
Quimichipilli/Jeiaki Sapichu
Chicano-Purhepecha
