“I heard about that too. The white mexicans just didn’t like the dark-skinned mexicans and vice versa. They are more educated and won’t even bother jumping over the border. I heard the same thing from my Italian grandmother that northern Italians treated the Southern Italians like crap due to skin color.”
I have two personal experiences to relate, one regarding Mexicans, and one regarding Italians, and their own versions of racial bigotry. When I was young and living for a few years in the south side of Chicago, around the Marquette Park area for those that know Chicago, my apartment building was owned by a Hispanic couple in their mid-30’s, Phyllis and David (they took Americanized names, as they both came from Mexico initially, not American born). They were ambitious, and Phyllis was the power behind the couple. That was because Phyllis was cute, and very, very white complected. She was of Spanish heritage in Mexico, and was as pale skinned as any Irish lass with red hair. Blue eyed, light hair, refined features, pretty. Her husband David was, as far as I could tell, a Mestizo, much darker skinned, with some obvious Indian facial features, a nice looking man, and an extremely hard worker. He worked night and day, and worshipped the ground his wife walked on. Meanwhile, Phyllis used her light skin and more aristocratic features as a weapon with her husband. He worshipped her for her whiteness, she looked down on his darkness, and never let him forget what a prize he had married by getting such a lighter caste woman for a wife. David continued to work his butt off to please his wife and give her anything she wanted. Actually, in spite of what I am saying here, they loved each other; it’s just that the power balance in that relationship was so obvious, and it was mainly based on racial distinction.
My second story is from when I was on a train in Italy years ago, going from one city to another near Rome. A man was sitting in the seat next to me and we struck up a conversation, in pidgeon English on his part. He was from southern Italy somewhere in the vicinity of Naples, and worked in northern Italy. As we spoke more and he loosened up, he lit right into the prejudice he felt in northern Italy because he was a short, dark, swarthy, southerner, unlike the northern Italians, fair skinned, light haired, more refined and urbane. He was really bitter about this.
So, the moral of the story is, no matter where you go in the world, there is prejudice, and caste systems, whether named or unnamed, and such is life.
“Phyllis used her light skin and more aristocratic features as a weapon with her husband. He worshipped her for her whiteness, she looked down on his darkness, and never let him forget what a prize he had married by getting such a lighter caste woman for a wife”
I see that type of psychology in lots of marriages, the wife always has something “better” than the man has and he’d better appreciate that she deemed him “worthy” of being married to her!(or else!)
The Italian story you told should be true. My grandmother on my father’s side is from Naples and would tell us stories about her not getting jobs when she was younger when she applied for jobs in the north of Italy, like Genoa.
And it has always been so since the days of the cavemen who preferred their own kind to another tribe’s..call it what you will: racism, prejudice, bias. It will never go away and has been around for thousands of years.