Imperialism: The Current Highest Stage of Cultural Erasure
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Our essays reflect only their author's point of view. We ask only that they respect our Principles.← Back to all essays | Author's essays Imperialism: The Current Highest Stage of Cultural Erasure
by Charhapiti
Published: 2025-10-10 (last update: 2025-10-10)
10-20 minutes
Centuries of Resilience
As I sit here listening to the sounds of my homeland in the most historically uncontacted region, I hear a lot of music that is not of our people nor our world, and was not just decades ago. I might even forget that I am in P'urhepecheo, that I am in 'Mexico profundo'.
This isn't cultural pluralism; this is cultural invasion.
There's things within the P'urhepecha world that I reject as outsider influence crowding out our essence. What I see is that we should be always choosing P'urhepecha rather than Spanish, pirekuaecha rather than Mexican cumbia/pop/banda/whatever.
I embrace mixing, I am mixed between two beautiful resilient cultures. So I learned firsthand about how they can act as two braided strands strengthening and anchoring each other.
And what I learned is the point is to keep the core, not to replace it.
Romani music is a masterclass in how mixing outside influences can happen while holding onto the core essence of a people. The melodies and motifs and language all remain the same throughout all the genres. Roma are masters at taking any elements and making it Romani.
When pirekuaecha are not an option, I would rather have Romani music, and a blend between them, even... Than to have the mestizo music. I would even sooner listen to other indigenous music from around the world.
How many of the youth are listening to pirekuaecha? Just imagine if pirekuaecha had the breadth of genres and emotions that Romani music has, instead of being relegated to the 'oldies' section of the radio, segregated and forgotten, or being mixed in with mestizo music for the sake of variety. Variety can exist within a tradition, and that tradition does not need to be reproduced mechanically. People can create new pirekuaecha that carry on the same themes, core, and structure, with a personal touch so no song need be exactly the same. In so doing, they promote their ancestral values and cosmology.
Some people are going to disagree with me about this. I understand where they are coming from. My point is that in having multiple genres of music, the goal wouldn't be to replace the traditional pirekua. The traditional form would remain the root, the source, the most sacred expression: the language, the melodies, the motifs that make pirekuaecha unique. Instruments and genres may change, but the soul of the music can be undeniably P'urhe. These new genres would be the branches, reaching out into the modern world, showcasing our P'urhepecha culture, not as a relic, it as a living, breathing, adapting force. That's what I see in the lively Romani music scene, and that's what I want to see in P'urhepecheo. The way that I can listen to Romani music from every country and genre, and still be able to tell just by listening that it is Romani -- that is what I want for the pirekua. The diversity to keep the engagement for all the population, for all occasions, to the extent that they don't even want to listen to the Mexican mestizo music, and you can still trace the core essence all throughout the genres and regions.
Instead of replacement of the pirekua by other music, how about expansion and reinforcement of the pirekua? Change is the only constant in the universe. Therefore, the true strength and source of life, juchari uinhapikua, is in our adaptability. Rigidity creates brittleness, breakage, and death.
The most obvious example of this principle is in the kuanintikua (rebozo). How many women would wear the kuanintikua if it wasn't made in so many colors and varieties? Clearly, from experience we can tell that women prefer to have many colors of kuanintikuaecha. So many beautiful, diverse kuanintikuaecha, most of them traditional and handmade, yet people say that the only real traditional ones are blue, black, and white. This is a metaphysical approach to culture. Why do we say this, if the blue, black, and white kuanintikuaecha aren't even something women wore if you go back far enough to when they were first introduced? I'm not saying that we should embrace Hello Kitty and other brands on our kuanintikuaecha but I am saying that P'urhepecha women's creativity is traditional.
The kuanintikua has prehispanic precursors but was solidified in form during the colonial period. It was, in part, an item encouraged or imposed by Spanish norms of modesty. Yet, P'urhepecha women took this garment and made it a canvas for their identity through specific weaving techniques, colors, and ways of wearing it. A long, shawl-like garment was present in the colonial context since 1572 (from Indigenous, Spanish, and Asian likely Philippines influences). The P'urhepecha people took this item and transformed it through their own weaving techniques, artistic vision, and cultural practices into something that is now a definitive symbol of their identity.
A similar thing happened to the Roma with the diklo, a garment worn on married Romani women's heads. They took this common, generic item and imposed their own distinct cultural rules, meanings, and identity onto it. It has become just as much an icon of Romani woman identity as the kuanintikua has become the icon of P'urhepecha woman identity.
Despite the postcolonial origins, the linguistic existence of 'kuanintikua' speaks to the P'urhepechaness of the garment; likewise, the term 'diklo' couldn't have existed either until the garment was created. So language also evolved with their material existence. It didn't necessarily have to be at least 400 years old to be validly traditional.
And when we think about the Romani creation of the word diklo... The Roma didn't just use the Hungarian, Russian, or Spanish word for "headscarf." They created their own term from their own Romani chib. This act of naming and design transforms a generic item into a culturally specific artifact. So despite the pressures exerted by their European overlords, the language evolved in a way that wasn't dilution, but a fortification.
What can my Roma side teach my P'urhe side about what is the indigenous original core? It teaches me that the core is not a static list of pre-contact items that can never change, and that even a diverse and landless people can continue to thrive. The heart of a culture is a living, generative process. The problem is when this generative process is found to be breaking down. The core giving away to something else. The core is the foundation, the fundamental building blocks, the DNA, that can be rearranged into infinite forms (genres) while remaining unmistakably P'urhepecha or Romani.
People say language is all we need to survive as a people. But, while language is foundational, it's not even the bare minimum. You can have people speaking P'urhepecha while singing cumbia tunes with Spanish-language structures. The language is saved, but a certain cultural essence is still lost. Therefore, active cultivation of all the rest is also necessary.
It's about what we pour our language into. The Romani language has survived not just because people spoke it, but because they used it to sing their specific music, to tell their specific stories, and to uphold their specific laws (Romanipen). The language was the vessel, but the cultural content was the precious cargo that gave the journey purpose. The remaining Roma who lost the language still carry a lot of the cultural 'cargo', and this brings them to want to learn it again.
For a thousand years, without a land, a state, an army, or a central authority, facing relentless persecution, the Roma have maintained their core. They have done it through the uncompromising, collective choice to prioritize their own essence in everyday life...
Man, if the Roma can do it and not even have a LAND, and if they can resist for not 400 but 1000 years...then so what excuse do we P'urhepecha even have? Who do we have to blame but ourselves if people's everyday choices are towards Mexican cultural nationalism when our own grandparents or great grandparents didn't even consider themselves Mexican let alone hispanic/latino/etc? You can hear it in the music the people play, the American clothing that almost never changes for our traditional xukuparhakua, the choice to speak Spanish and reject the language of our parents. Some elders feel that the youth are the problem, and they aren't entirely wrong: by and large, it's the youth who are assimilating. It's enough to make an old P'urhepecha man very grumpy.
Our Greatest Enemy Yet
The cultures I am talking about are thousands of years old and most likely pre-existed class society. If we don't practice our culture in our daily lives and everyday habits, then it will die out, and what comes after it will be not a new equivalent but total destruction. Cataclysm. It is called "way of life" for a reason.
After a thousand years, suddenly, even the Roma are facing an unprecedented cultural crisis of assimilation.
In fact, the last couple generations have seen rapid cultural loss in both P'urhepecha and Roma.
There's a reason this all suddenly happened.
The material conditions that allowed Romani resistance are being destroyed!
The question is not, as many liberals ask, "Why are our people making bad choices?"
The question is, "What systems have been put in place to make it impossible to prioritize the thriving of our culture?"
It's not a failure of will; it's all part of a long, structural war of attrition against indigenous existence. When survival itself demands assimilation.
Lenin's Imperialism: The Current Highest Stage of Capitalism argues that monopoly finance capital, in its quest for new markets and resources, must necessarily carve up the entire world. The material consequence of this on culture, is that imperialism breaks down and absorbs pre-capitalist economic and social formations, turning them into sources of capital:
- the systematic dismantling of the P'urhepecha communal land system and subsistence agriculture, replacing them with private property and wage labor
- the forced migration of P'urhepecha people from their land into cities to become a Spanish-speaking labor force
Imperialism creates markets for capitalist industry, and is always seeking to expand these markets -- thus is why we get the cultural assimilation. The promotion of Mexican nationalism, Spanish language, and consumer goods (American clothing, banda music) transforms people into consumers for a homogenized national and global market, breaking their cultural and economic sovereignty. Therefore our assimilation, both Roma and P'urhepecha, is all a consequence of the economic transformation driven by monopoly finance capital.
Colonialism was horrible, slavery was horrible, but imperialism is truly threatening to end us.
And the Roma? Roma are the direct opposite of P'urhepecha as a landless, diasporic people living within imperialist states.
The pressure on Roma is about their forceful integration into the capitalist system as a super-exploitable internal "reserve army of labor" and dismantling any social structure that resists this assimilation. You see, Romani historical resilience wasn't merely cultural will, it was built on niche, often nomadic, economies, especially in special trades that the Europeans didn't want to do. Metalworking, trading, entertainment, recycling, leatherwork, horse trading... Roma were defined largely by their trades, to the extent that their subgroup names are usually derived from these trades (Kalderash, Lovara).
Imperialism, in its most recent evolution, has systematically destroyed the trades that Roma relied upon. Large corporations and standardized manufacturing render traditional Romani crafts and trades obsolete or illegal. Laws against nomadism, vagrancy, and informal trading criminalize their traditional way of life. The enforcement of strict borders and private property destroys the spatial conditions necessary for their economic and social reproduction. The destruction of their traditional economies forces Roma into the margins of the capitalist labor market, often as the most exploited, precarious, and informal workers, or into permanent unemployment. The demonization of Roma serves to justify their economic marginalization and the bourgeois state's policies of their dispossession.
Imperialist media tells us both Roma and P'urhepecha that our traditional culture is poverty, and assimilation means access to smartphones, branded clothes, and social acceptance. Capitalism, with its ideology of hyper-individualism and consumerism, directly attacks communal values, encouraging youth to prioritize personal desire over community law.
For the P'urhepecha, imperialism operates as external pressure on a territorial base: the land and its resources are the primary target, and culture follows. For the Roma, imperialism operates as internal pressure on a social body: their community itself, its mobility and economic niches, are the primary target for disintegration and absorption into the proletariat.
The resulting assimilation crisis is the same: the choice for the dominant language, music, and clothing feels like the only path to economic survival and social acceptance. The fact that even the Roma, with their unparalleled history of resistance without a state, are succumbing to this pressure is a testament to the overwhelming, globalized power of monopoly finance capital and the bourgeois states in service of it. The fight for cultural essence, whether for the P'urhepecha or the Roma, is inextricably linked to a fight against the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
What Is To Be Done?
Western voyeurists tell stories about us, ripping our own concepts out of a holistic cultural context, taking our fluid, contextual, and deeply integrated systems and reducing them down to simplistic, sensationalist formulas, denying the people of their agency and complexity and fitting the people into a pre-existing Western narrative about "the exotic Other". If a culture has concepts of ritual purity, then comes the Nazi psychoanalytical voyeurism and projections, such as imagining that such a culture's people must necessarily secretly desire and find it 'exciting' to break such taboos, not because they really find evidence of this but merely because the Westerner assumes that whatever someone finds horrifically disgusting must be very appealing on a subconscious level. Of course this voyeuristic gaze is only directed towards the oppressed nations, not the dominant nations, settlers, or castes represented in the governments.
Sadly, when you're surrounded by people that tell lies about you and see you in false ways, you start to doubt yourself. In a political-economic system controlled by the voyeurists, such caricatured projections become internalized by the people themselves. Especially vulnerable is the diaspora population (who are usually migrant laborers) because of their physical separation from the community and separation from the community's socio-historical reproduction. As we internalize the objectifying Western gaze, we start to see our own culture and so-called "race" in a distorted, rigidified way, thus disempowering ourselves from doing anything about cultural erosion and demographic shifts and also failing to see our own resilience, creativity, consciousness and independence to become the masters of our future. We don't accept intuitive, creative solutions because they don't meet a metaphysical standard of "authenticity". The intellectually violent onslaught continuously tells us that our culture is doomed to expire and be replaced by the dominant group. Such is how imperialism pollutes our consciousness and prevents unity of action and unity of purpose. It is only through nurturing our collective revolutionary optimism that we can step into our power.
When we see things in their full clarity, then, the solution is surprisingly simple. When imperialism destroys our means of economic sustenance, we must find another means. In order for any oppressed nation to lovingly nurture the life of their languages and customs, they must build an economic life for their people that can provide the foundation to sustain their culture. Economic sovereignty is not found by handouts or by seeking opportunities outside the community, it must be built by the people themselves wherever they live. Oppressed nations in this era stand at a crossroads: either they will adapt and find economic sustenance, or they will perish and be assimilated. For the sake of global stability, for the sake of not unleashing global calamity, the world's proletariat must rise in solidarity with all the oppressed nations.