Dear ???????,
You were not in class, so you do not understand the context in witch it was mentioned, so of course I do not wonder why is difficult to see the connection…
We were in the middle of a discussion in which the main idea was to observe that there are some situations where it is impossible to conduct effective communication no matter how competent you can be, some situations simply are related to other phenomena, as power issues or direct orders. (We were talking also about the Mohammed cartoons in Denmark.)
The Cuban representation was expelled from the Sheraton Hotel in the middle of a meeting with Valero Energy Corporation, and members of the Department of the Economic Development of Louisiana and the Corpus Christi port in Texas.
The US can impose any law to their citizens if it is approved by the US congress, but it cannot be enforced outside their borders without an international treaty, in this case it came into a conflict with Mexican law against any kind of discrimination and the impossibility to confiscate
assets from particulars in Mexico without a federal order, as they confiscated the money from the representation.
The clever part of the history is that in order to avoid any diplomatic conflict, the Mexican government avoided any kind of confrontation with the US from this issue, and signaled as a conflict between individuals, but, to indirectly enforce the fact that in Mexico there will be no discrimination and asset confiscation based on nationality within the borders of the country, they sent all kind of inspectors from the municipality to the hotel, to find out if they are actually operating legally. They found out that the hotel has major problems with licenses, fire control systems and was using more land space than the concession allowed. So, it will be closed for a while.
I do not wonder also that you cannot find it in English speaking media, as the issue is mainly domestic and fairly non transcendent as the Mexican government dismissed it as a conflict between individuals, and (yes I will say it) there is major censorship in US media on this kind of controversial issues. That’s why I sent the news attached as a document.
You say “I detect here that you ignore this important historical context even though you point out the importance of “external and historical elements.”" ( I wonder if you are able to detect that from a 4 lines email.) Racism exists, discrimination exists, negative stereotyping exists, and of course the Cubans were expelled, and not the US citizens who were those who actually broke their own law because of historical elements. Let’s not forget the Florida situation in the Bush – Gore elections. It’s a sad reality, but is reality.
You say: “I believe that ordinarily it should not be our objective to openly politicize a communication setting, any more than a translator would inject their own thoughts while translating for a client.” I frankly differ in your opinion that an interculturalist is the same as a translator, and I fail to see why it is so important to separate politics from communication discourse analysis. If you want to professionally study world of values is a personal choice, but in my case I try to contextualize whenever possible, studying phenomena including the historical and social contexts. I may be wrong, but if the IC field only explores communication as an abstract being without including socio-economical factors and avoiding the political situation from an objective standpoint where the phenomena is taking place, then I think that the scientific process is not completed.
