Don’t homogenize Latinx identity.
Happy Friday. Lots of people pointing fingers at the Latinx community right now, which only further emphasizes how complicit whiteness is in this election – and society as a whole. Today, Ian joins us to discuss the diversity of the Latinx community.
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By Ian Kumamoto (he/him)
I sometimes joke that when I moved to the United States from Mexico, I changed races. I went from being Mexican to being identified as an Asian-American by others.“You don’t look Latino,” Americans would say when I introduced myself.
I was born in Mexico City to a Chinese mother and a Mexican father of Indigenous descent. Spanish was my first language, and for a while, the only one I spoke. But when I arrived in the United States at seven years old, I quickly realized that I was not allowed to claim my Latinidad because I did not fit a narrow understanding of what being Latinx was supposed to look like.
Our collective misunderstanding about Latinx identity has never been displayed as clearly as it was this election. On Tuesday night, Democrats hoped to carry Florida and Texas in large part because more people of color, especially Hispanics, were turning out (NBC News). Instead, we saw historic numbers of Cubans and Venezuelans who showed up and helped Trump win. Although part of this can be attributed to those country's socialist histories, we must also confront another ugly reality: Latinx people can be white supremacists, too.
We often talk about Latinx identity as a monolith, especially when it comes to race. But “Latinx” and “Hispanic” are not races; they are ethnicities, as we will discuss in a future newsletter. As the elections near and discussions about the Hispanic vote intensify, we risk reducing a diverse population down to a singular cultural trope. More than 21 million people identify as Latinx in the United States. Many of them have vastly different notions of their identities, which means they also vote in radically different ways. One month ago, up to one-third of self-identified Hispanic people said they would cast their vote for Donald Trump in this coming election (Pew Research Center).
But Latinx people who vote for Trump aren’t “self-hating,” despite what John Leguizamo recently said on Real Time with Bill Maher (Remezcla). In fact, some feel like they have a real stake in upholding white supremacy (Remezcla). White supremacy within Latinx communities has thrived for centuries and has upheld a monolithic notion of the "Latino" that is exported abroad, one that erases Black, Asian and Indigenous people (The Nation).
Part of the reason the language around Latinidad is confusing is because it was made deliberately so. When the Spanish arrived in what is now Mexico in the 15th century, they created a racial caste system that positioned full-blood Europeans at the top. Peninsulares were the white ruling class while mestizos, who were mixed European and Indigenous, were below them (San Diego Reader). Similar systems developed throughout Latin America. But as more and more people became racially mixed, it got increasingly harder to determine the exact racial makeup of every person and categorize them accordingly. Eventually, Mexico discouraged such categorizations altogether (Indian Country Today). The umbrella term of “mestizo” was chosen as a sort of default national identity, even when referring to people who were mostly European or mostly Indigenous.
But a general mestizo identity glosses over the millions of people of other races who have little or no European ancestry at all. African enslaved people were transported to plantations in the Caribbean and Brazil. Chinese and Japanese immigrants went to South and Central America to farm, mine, and build railroads; in Peru, for example, people of Chinese descent make up 5 percent of the total population (Panoramas). Full-blooded Indigenous people were disenfranchised from economic systems and relegated to obscurity.
Despite the great racial variety of Latin American countries, its diversity is not reflected in the media. When you turn on the news, watch a telenovela, or scroll down a list of prominent celebrities in most Latin American countries today, you will likely see light-skinned or European-descendant people (The Nation). In the United States, many of the most recognizable Latinx figures (Bad Bunny, Pitbull, Shakira) are light-skinned. But it is much more difficult in these contexts to call out institutions for their lack of representation because they can simply claim a generalized Latinx identity and ignore how our cultures uplift whiteness.
Arguably the strongest pillar preventing a more inclusive notion of Latinidad is deeply-rooted beliefs that don’t question the idea of whiteness as inherently desirable. In the Dominican Republic and Mexico, for example, concepts like mejorar la raza (“to better the race”) are blunt ways of encouraging people to marry “up” and create more European-looking children who will be lighter-skinned than the generations before (Huffington Post). In Mexico, I grew up hearing the word Indio, or Indian, used as the worst kind of slur, while güero, or blondie, was used as a term of endearment.
In high school, I stopped speaking Spanish altogether because it promoted questions and sometimes even jokes (“Wow, an Asian who speaks Spanish!”). Even though the curiosity was seldom ill-intentioned, it became a barrier between me and the people of my community, who had internalized their own ideas about who was and was not allowed to be Latinx.
When discussing Latin identity and the political habits of Latinx people in the United States, it is essential to remember that our countries’ diversity means that our values and convictions can vary tremendously. It is crucial to have conversations about how white supremacy can be just as easily replicated by people who come to the U.S. from other countries. We must be vigilant against racism that pervades seemingly homogenous groups, or else we risk allowing the worst tendencies of a dominant group to thrive unchecked. Black, Asian, and Indigenous Latinx people are still fighting battles within our own communities to be seen, heard, and valued.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Latinx identity is not a monolith. More than 21 million people identify as Latinx in the United States, and many of them have vastly different notions of their identities.
When the Spanish arrived in what is now Mexico in the 15th century, they created a racial caste system that positioned full-blood Europeans at the top.
Despite the great racial variety of Latin American countries, its diversity is not reflected in the media. In the United States, many of the most recognizable Latinx figures are light-skinned.
Latinx identity often glorifies light-skinned people with European ancestry, but millions of Latinx people are racially Black, Asian, or fully Indigenous. We are still fighting battles within our own communities to be seen, heard, and valued.
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