A new Coca-Cola ad released earlier this week aims to send an important message to its white and Mestizo consumers in Mexico this Christmas: break with your comfort zone and bring civilization to Indigenous people.This, at least, is what their most recent advertisement seems to convey. “81.6 percent of Mexican Indigenous have felt rejected for speaking another language,” the ad purports to inform while somber Indigenous faces fill the screen. Fortunately for Mexico’s Indigenous, white Mexican hipsters are here to save them this Christmas with a “special message,” the ad tells us. What follows next is a painful metaphor of ongoing colonialism in the country: white kids storm the Mixe Indigenous community, as if a crusade, distribute coke bottles and build a giant Coca-Cola Christmas tree for all to idolize.
Like most white savior plots, the ad is all about having a huge emotional experience about Brown victimhood that urges European descendants to take up the moral duty to save the oppressed from their oppression. It is founded on a white egocentric myth that there is something that Brown people must need that only White people can give them. In this colonial fairy tale Brown people can only be conceived as passive objects in need of white care, not active agents that might outright just reject white rescue missions. In fact, for the Indigenous of Mexico, white people bringing Coca-Cola is not just a joyful Christmas ad, it is a reality of corporate and cultural domination and destruction. “The video is a clear demonstration of the presence of transnationals in the Indigenous territories of Oaxaca. In the last years, these companies have increasingly been taking over natural, economic and now cultural resources from the communities,” Laura Melchor, a human rights advocate in Oaxaca, told teleSUR English. Since 2000, Coca-Cola has worked with the Mexican government to privatize water resources, including aquifers and rivers that belong to Indigenous peoples. Coca-Cola even uses some of these simply to dump their industrial waste into public waters. The increasing privatization of water has left well over 15 million Mexicans without access to drinking water, turning Mexico into the second top consumer of bottled water in the world. Horrifyingly enough, these too are mostly sold by the very same Coca-Cola company.
READ MORE.....
No comments:
Post a Comment