I am usually put in a weird position. Here, in my home country, I'm privileged; I'm light-skinned, descended from Italians and Spaniards for the most part. I am not a Bolivian, Paraguayan, or Peruvian immigrant or descended from them. To be explicit, they are our version of the racially/ethnically disenfranchised. When someone in my country complains about "them there peoples stealing our jobz", that's who they mean. I'm not that.
But when I lived in the U.S., I lived in San Francisco's Mission District. I hung out with cholos, Mexicans, Venezuelans, Colombians, and the sons and daughters thereof. But you know what else there was tons of in the Mission (a predominantly Hispanic area of S.F. at the time)? African and Asian-American people. Did I get along with all of them? No. But my first crush was this gorgeous Fillipino girl, and for a while I didn't have any white friends, and the people who were my friends saw me as Hispanic, because I was.
I guess what I'm getting at is that context matters so much when you're talking about racve, ethnicity, nationality, and the segregation of class though economic, racial, and ethnic delimitations. I wouldn't understand the reasoning behind the way my own country and city's segregation works if I hadn't lived on both sides. I've been called all the things and am mostly toughened against it on the outside, but it still stings, regardless of which.
Now that my verbal diarrhea is done, I have a perhaps interesting annotation to make to this thread, continuing on my train of thought regarding context:
In my country, especially in my city, like I said, the disenfranchised are Bolivians, Peruvians, and Paraguayans. We have very, very, very little black people. Most black people here are from Brazil, the Carribbean, Colombia, or actually from Africa (the majority, actually). But they are rare. I see perhaps two or three a day if I take a long bike ride through specific streets.
One time, a friend of a friend started a conversation that got me thinking, because they were talking about the Bolivians stealing jobs or whatever (some racist bullshit, he was an asshole) and after some talking I brought up these actual black people who lived among us. (Black is a very common slur here, one over which I have gotten into a lot of fights.) And I wonder why they aren't included in this complaint, in this worry. I didn't have to think about it long.
I just had to look around. There weren't that many of them. When it comes to the privileged class's fears, quantity matters. The privileged class here will never be scared of these people because they are too few, they pose no threat. But the Bolivians? The Peruvians? The Paraguayans? Holy shit, they are the Devil. Because there's enough of them. They might stop being vegetable store owners and start having money-making jobs, and wearing suits, and marrying our women, and aaaaaah, ohnoes, we're doomed.
Anyway, that's my tangent: context is king every single time. In the U.S., black people and other ethnic minorities are seen as the threat (which is also why the atrocities committed against them are so downplayed). Here, it's people of neighboring countries (and the same thing happens with atrocities committed to them here--one headline of a rag down here read: "Building catches fire, deaths include 2 people and 3 Bolivians", and I am not even fucking kidding).
Argh. Okay. Spam over. Sorry!