A woman from the Mixteca Alta region of Oaxaca
lovingly carries her child in a rebozo.
(Creative Commons licensed by Ilhuicamina)

Could you imagine living in a country where newborn children are taken away from their mothers simply because they don't speak the language of the doctors? It sounds like something that would take place in another country, not the United States.

But that is exactly what happened to Cirila Baltazar Cruz, an undocumented indigenous woman from Oaxaca who gave birth in a Mississippi hospital. 

After reading the TIME magazine article that tells her story, I am left with feelings of anger, remorse and am completely overwhelmed at our inept understanding towards communities that only seek to be treated with basic human dignity. I wonder if Americans understand the multitude of complexities associated with Cirila and her family, or why a non-English speaking indigenous woman would leave behind a home, family and two children to risk her life traveling thousands of miles to work in a restaurant kitchen.

Whereas the United States has grown in size and power since the arrival of the pilgrims, millions of Native Americans perished in the conquest and are now separated in what many consider poverty-stricken reservations. This notion that Native people resided only within the borders of the United States makes the conversation of native indigenous populations limiting and telling of how much we are willing to accept as truth.

Frederick Douglas once wrote, "Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."

While Oaxaca is a state in Mexico, the population of indigenous people that resides in the region doesn't share the same rights and/or privileges as Mexican citizens, much like how Native Americans did not receive the same rights and/or privileges within U.S. borders. There is a long history of unspoken segregation and racism within the Mexican government towards indigenous populations. Despite the fact that Oaxaca may be rich in cocoa, uranium, mercury, gold and silver, the population is under educated, impoverished, and in dire need of assistance. Demoralized for being indigenous by Mexicans, subjected by the state, and exploited by living in a country that experiences overall oppression and colonialism, indigenous communities are conquered in language, class, religion and culture.

The struggle for basic civil rights for the indigenous people of Oaxaca and Chiapas, Oaxaca's next door neighbor, have often been categorized as radical, militant and anti-government. Subcomandante Marcos (a.k.a Delegate Zero) has been a longtime leader of that movement.

Cirila's Spanish name represents an imposed identity dating back centuries to the discovery of the Americas by the Spanish crown. Her name does not define her; it is in fact, a testament of the tyranny of colonialism, for Cirila barely speaks Spanish.

She is four times oppressed - for being indigenous, for being poor, for being an immigrant, and for being a woman.

In the United States, we continue that oppression by not understanding the context as to why she finds herself working in a Chinese restaurant by the shores of Mississippi, walking in the dark shadows of former tribal lands and the imprisoned African slaves of our American history.

Cirila represents injustice, as an obvious historical hegemonic struggle between cultural identity, language and the power that borders indigenous misogyny. What is most infuriating in this case is the belief in a judicial system that was created to help people but seems to fail more and more in the most illogical of ways. Where is our moral character? Where is the America that fights for democracy and women's rights? Is it a concept that exists solely on paper or in big Hollywood blockbusters where brave men fight for the ideals of our forefathers as we sit back and cheer from stadium seats and eat buckets of popcorn?

Have we not learned from our own history to see that indigenous communities from the Americas continue to walk in their own silent trail of tears?

Cirila's crime is not that she is undocumented. It's that she does not speak English or Spanish. She speaks her native tongue, Chatino, a Meso-American language that anthropologist suggest dates back to 4000 B.C. and is now only spoken by approximately 50,000 Oaxacan people. The Puerto Rican Spanish translator provided to her in Mississippi could not communicate with her and shared little in common other than a Spanish surname, which I already explained, means nothing.

Is the English language that much more superior that a judge would deny a mother her child based on the belief that not knowing the language puts that child at risk? Would Cirila be better off if she knew Spanish and was able to communicate with doctors? What if she didn't speak the language but was affluent? Would that have allowed her to keep her baby?

As it stands, Cirila is being aided by the Mississippi Immigrants' Rights Alliance (MIRA) and the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and is facing deportation, while her eight-month old daughter, Rubí, lives in foster care and may be put up for adoption.

The question we have to ask ourselves is this: Do our xenophobic fears toward immigrants and the unknown really compel us to be so cruel as to think that a mother is unworthy of her child solely by the language she speaks? Or in this case, doesn't speak?

If the answer is yes, then the words of Frederick Douglas don't just accurately describe the measure of injustice we impose on others, but our perverse willingness to sit back, stay quiet, and do nothing.

*Listen to Spanish language Radio Bilingue Podcast interview with Cirila Baltazar Cruz and translators at the 15:10 mark. (Creative Commons)

Picture Credit: A woman from the Mixteca Alta region of Oaxaca lovingly carries her child in a rebozo. Via Flickr Ilhuicamina. (Creative Commons)