It’s no secret that Mexicans and blacks have a contentious history with each other -- at least in my neighborhood. Where I grew up (Holland, Michigan) most Mexicans had a favorite name for black folks -- negritos. Little Niggers. And black folks had a favorite name for us -- spics.

Being just a kid at the time, I wasn’t sure where the animosity between our two groups originally stemmed from -- it was just an accepted part of life. We hated black folks because they called us spics and were lazy, and they hated us because we called them negritos and spoke in Spanish in front of them.

Then I moved to Flint, Michigan. Flint is one of the most segregated cities in the state -- Mexicans stay on one part of the city, blacks stay in another part, and whites surround us with their good schools and clean suburbs.

I was homeless when I first moved to Flint, so I took the very first job I could find working at the local Cracker Barrel, where, for the first time in my life, I was in the minority. Because most waitresses are female, and I was going through a very angry anti-female stage in my life, I elected to work in the back of the house, which meant that most of my co-workers were black men.

Although I didn’t just get over my cultural history of “hate-isms” with black folks, when faced with the choice of working 8-12 hours in total silence or getting along with co-workers, I chose to get along with my co-workers.

Eventually, my co-workers and I became comfortable enough to talk about things with each other -- like why do black folks name their kids such weird names, why do Mexicans like to drink, how come black people follow a leader who said that his leader came down on a space ship and why do Mexicans fight in bunches instead of one-on-one like real men?

Being where I am at right now on the chain of education, I can see the positives of these conversations. If I (or they) had even thought of asking anybody in academia any of these questions, I (and they) would have gotten my ass kicked by somebody’s very well placed words. So, there was a lot of honest dialoguing between two groups that normally wouldn’t be dialoguing. And we were using our dialogues to come up with our own critique of our world -- our final analysis being that Mexicans and blacks were living different shades of blackness in a white world.

But this critique was not strong enough to help us through the tougher times.

The restaurant world is a very hard place to negotiate racism and gender norms. Men usually stay in the back of the house and women stay out front. Women figure they can make more money by doing easier “more natural” work, like flirting with old men. Men figure they’ll make less of an ass of themselves if they skip the flirting and do the physical work. Within these different segments of the restaurant world, race is strictly enforced through the different pay rates given to different jobs. For example, those who work the grill line (usually white) are paid as much as two dollars more than bussers (usually black or Mexican). And when you’re talking about a difference of between $5.25 (the minimum wage while I was working there) and $7.00 (which is what I hired in as a grill cook at), potentially, the difference in an average paycheck for each position could be up to a hundred dollars.

So although everybody may want the grill cook job, in all reality, the people who were getting the grill cook jobs were white males who jump from one restaurant job to another -- the restaurant lifers. Very rarely is there the opportunity for a full-time first-shift position to be filled by a black person or Mexican, as it is very hard to get experience when so many others already have it.

So when I, a young, almost homeless Mexican busser, got the invitation to move up to the grill line before the other older, more established black bussers, our fragile alliance evaporated almost immediately. I wasn’t about to let somebody else take a position offered to me that paid almost two dollars more than what I was making. And my black co-workers weren’t about to forgive me for taking a job that I shouldn’t have gotten that paid more than two dollars more than what they were making.

Within the week, two bussers had refused to let me cook their break food. The reason? As the racist stereotype goes, I was a spic and spics are notorious in the restaurant world for spitting, defecating, ejaculating in, and otherwise messing with food before serving it. My equally racist response to their taunting? The nigger in ‘em always shines through eventually.

I feel almost nauseous admitting these things -- not because I am ashamed of my racism or because their racism hurt me -- but because I am sickened at the thought that somebody could read about our exchanges and erase our experience by saying we were “acting trashy.” To be sure, they were acting like the niggers that the Boondock’s MLK was so angry at, and I was acting like the spic that “Mexican-Americans” hate so much. But I will fight anybody who dares to call either them or me niggers or spics. Because although many people’s reactions to the situation my black co-workers and I found ourselves in might be embarrassment or amusement -- to me, it was incredibly sad and disturbing.

My co-workers and I knew on a very innate unspeakable level what was going on. We all knew that I didn’t get the job as a grill cook because of my skills, but rather because it was better to have a light skinned spic cooking white folks food than it was to have a dark skinned nigger. We knew that our bosses saw that I didn’t speak ghetto -- which obviously meant that I could read and think and get along with the other white grill cooks, whereas my black co-workers were straight off the streets of Flint, and as such, fit every scary stereotype that our white managers held about black men. We all knew this, but nobody had the language to say it. And nobody had the resources or skills to know what to do about it.

Thirty years after the civil rights movement that both black and Mexicans participated in, there has been very little change in the amount of knowledge or resources that poor Mexicans and black folks have to fight structural oppression. This lack of knowledge, this lack of resources, is due largely to the middle class Mexicans and blacks desperate need to forget where they came from. Poor blacks and Mexicans are the bad memory to get away from, the embarrassment of those who participated in the movement. But at the same time, poor Mexicans and blacks are what middle class Mexicans and blacks need to make them feel like their cause has achieved something -- by berating poor Mexicans and blacks with “choice” (as in, they have the “choice” to do better and are “choosing” not to), they can then feel like their movement wasn’t really an abysmal failure.

Bill Cosby took a lot of flack from social justice groups for his comments about black folks needing to take responsibility for their actions. But behind closed doors, far too many radical folks copped up with the “You know, he could have said it in a different way, but there’s some truth there, man!” rhetoric.

Excuses were offered in defense of poor folks by social justice groups, like “structural oppression” and “lack of resources,” but none of these same groups, mine included, dared to speak the most obvious truth -- that our own insistence on prioritizing “voting” over direct challenges to the legitimacy of the nation/state, prioritizing desegregation with whites over forming alliances with each other, prioritizing affirmative action over resource allocation, prioritizing civil rights over workers’ rights, also played a huge part in positioning poor blacks and Mexicans where they are today.

This inability of black folks and Mexicans to own up to our place creating the world as it is today, has in turn made it almost impossible for us to work together as an alliance. Yet there is no escaping the fact that when you compare the histories of blacks and Mexicans, there seems to actually be a very ready-made alliance between us. Both of us have had our bodies violated by a system called capitalism -- ravaged to the point that our very identities are marked by how capitalism has exploited us.

Black folks are the “ungrateful” workers, the people who a war was fought for so they didn’t have to work anymore. As such, black folks’ very real willingness to work is currently marked invisible by the system -- they’re called lazy, they’re welfare queens, they’re insolent.

Mexicans, on the other hand, are the workers that the system has always dreamed of -- we are actually begging to be abused. We don’t just love working eighty hours a week, we are leaving our homes and our communities and facing death, rape, degradation to do it. We are cockroaches “invading” the security of the homeland.

But shifting through these racist structural beliefs about black and brown bodies is the consistent experience of human degradation centered around our positions as “the worker.” In other words, Mexicans’ very value as humans lies in our ability to live with little to no bodily integrity, little to no community structures and little to no demands or expectations as workers. Similarly, black folks very lack of value as humans lies in their willingness to live with little to no bodily integrity, little to no community structures, and little to no demands or expectations as workers rather than work 80 hours a week in the fields like the Mexicans do.

Different sides of the same coin.

So why on earth, after all these centuries of exploitation, abuse, degradation and violence, are we still just spics and negritos to each other?

For a lot of Mexicans and blacks, opening a dialogue with each other will mean admitting that the middle class expectation of “pulling oneself up by ones boots straps” is a bullshit expectation. It will also mean admitting how little the civil rights movements really did achieve.

For the rest of us poor folk, opening a dialogue with each other will mean confronting the possible loss of survival jobs, and therefore confronting the very real lack of power we have in our lives. What would have happened to me if I stood in solidarity with my black co-workers and refused the cooking position? What would have happened to my black co-workers if they had stood in solidarity with me and refused the position as well?

Unlike other instances in my life, I’m not ashamed of my racism during the Cracker Barrel period of my life, and I really hope my black co-workers aren’t either. We did the best we could with what we had and now that I know better, I’ve done better, as I’m sure those who managed to eek their ways out of the restaurant world have done as well.

What I am ashamed of is how very little work and dialoguing between our communities has been done by those of us who know better. We stand staring bitterly at each other through spic and nigger colored glasses -- refusing to budge for fear of realizing that once those glasses come off we really are little more than powerless brown people stuck in a system that would see us destroyed.

It’s time for us to start talking. We’re finally strong enough.

Si se puede!

Susana Adame asks readers to visit her blog, Woman of Color Blog, for radical organizing on the web.