Of course, an American Tex-Mex restaurant had to ruin the beautiful momentum that the solar eclipse brought to people. On Monday afternoon, Chili’s Grill & Bar tweeted out a video with a caption that said, “The Mayans believed that eclipses were great excuses for margaritas and blood sacrifice. We agree with 50% of that.” The tweet was later deleted by Chili’s Twitter account.
Chili’s Facebook account posted the same video, but with a different caption.
Latino Rebels reached out to Brinker Restaurant Corporation, the company that owns Chili’s. We did not get an immediate response.
As expected, people reacted to the now-deleted tweets, from the racist angle to the historical one:
The Mayans weren’t even into blood sacrifice; it was the Toltecs who brought it to the Yucatan peninsula.
— Michelle Wallace (@skullandpelvis) August 22, 2017
We all know the Mayans really enjoyed margs, duh
— Alex Hernandez (@alexghrz) August 22, 2017
A million other tweets could have been made, but nooo
— Alex Hernandez (@alexghrz) August 22, 2017
For those who can’t quite get understand the problem here, here it goes:
The Maya civilization was centered in Mesoamerica—which is now Guatemala, western of Honduras and El Salvador, part of Belize and yes, also Mexico. They were exceptionally genius at creating things and getting things done. The Mayans built incredible temples and pyramids. They created their own writing system. They had an accurate calendar system. They left important and symbolic art work. The list can go on and on and on.
An accurate belief of the Mayans about eclipses is that this brilliant society had astronomers who were able to track planets, the moon and the sun.
But Mayans and Margaritas?
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María Camila Montañez is a journalism student at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism’s Spanish-language program. She is originally from Colombia and tweets from @mariacmontanez.
