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The duality of being both oppressor and oppressed in different places

Abstract:

The main purpose of this article is to offer a different perspective of an oppressor and an oppressed person and to understand my own reality through my own experience. My reality is that I am a mestizo from Ecuador, and in Ecuador mestizo is the dominant and “preferred” ethnicity. This duality makes me a person with unique characteristics. Characteristics that on occasion make me privileged and a person who commonly oppresses, exploits, and rules others with economic and social force. On the other hand, other situations make me a colonized person who is characterized by being self-depreciated, dependent, and masochist when I am in the position of Latino woman in the United States. I would like to think about myself as a woman who is willing to “develop [my] power to perceive critically the way [I] exist in the world with which and in which [I] find myself”(Freire, 2000, p. 12). I would like to see this world as a reality in a process of transformation.