A rant on race in novels.

[chocmarsh]

A little wanring before you continue; there are 'bad' words in Spanish, bad spelling of Spanish words since my comp doesn't do a good job of making accents easy for me to find, and a discussion about race, or rather, the portrayal of Mexicans in novels.

Comments

[w0rld4vamps]

i usually stop reading by the third "mistake" though most of the time I can't talk because my spanglish is so warped.. and my spanish slang is so old (as in I'm not keeping up with the times and I sound weird when I try to keep up with my cousins so I don't even try anymore)..but yes. I understand.

*snaps fingers.. then walks away*

-w.

[chocmarsh]

Sometimes, if it happens once or twice in a book, I'll just bear through it and translate the slang in my head to make it flow better, but if its more than that and I find myself re-writing the story I just say 'fuck it,' and stop reading. But this was just really weird timing. I read one story halfway through because I couldn't deal with it, then picked up another and gave up on page 3, PAGE 3, because they had the Mexican guy walking into a club and talking about how hot all that brown skin looked. And that's another thing that pisses me off, because I've never read of a Caucasian male walking into a club and saying something like, 'all that pale skin made me hot,' its usually just 'all that skin,' so I hate that. That incident really pissed me off 'cause it was a book co-written by an author I love, and I had to stop right then and there because if I kept on reading and found that he'd written things like that during his section of the writing, I would have been completely pissed off. Though sometimes I just want to pick up the

[vellum]

omg. if i had a dollar for everytime some random person has said hello to me in mandarin chinese (which, anyway, i understand cantonese, not mandarin) i would have a lot more money than i have now.

[chocmarsh]

Yes. I keep getting asked if I know Punjabi, which I still don't understand why.