The region that is now recognized as Latin America wasn’t always known as such. The countries that make up this part of the world are relatively young nations, and before the violent process of colonization took place — through Indigenous genocide and the enslavement of Africans brought to the continent — Latin American borders did not exist and neither did Latinidad.
The creation of the Latine identity has long been written about. An identifier that is more often used in the United States than across Latin America and the Caribbean, "Latino" was first coined in the 19th century as a pan-national, pan-ethnic term to express the similarities of nations once colonized by Spain and Portugal. In the 20th century, "Hispanic" and later "Latino" were categories used by the U.S. census and the marketing industry to count and target a growing population of migrants from the area. In recent years, queer communities in Latin America and Latine U.S.A. developed words like “Latinx” and “Latine” to ensure that this category aimed at lumping people of diverse cultures, races, languages, and histories together also includes people of various genders. But despite the intention to merge people together, many feel like these categories really erase key aspects of their identities, and they reject identifying as Latine altogether, especially Indigenous peoples who descend from this region.
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"The construction of Latin American nation-states have consistently tried to erase Indigenous and African racial groups and their cultures to create a whitened, yet somehow still 'raceless,' Latin American identity."
NICOLE FROIO
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While born in Oaxaca, Alán Pelaez Lopez does not identify as Mexican, instead preferring to identify as AfroIndigenous and Zapotec. Although they migrated from Mexico to the U.S. when they were 5 years old, and thus technically fits into the category of “Latine,” the poet, artist, and scholar tells Refinery29 Somos that they never really identified with Latinidad.
“Growing up in Mexico, I knew that we had Mexican citizenship, but simultaneously we weren't protected by our citizenship,” Pelaez Lopez says. “I’m from a very rural community on the southern coast of Oaxaca, Mexico, a place where most people don't even have birth certificates because they're giving birth at home. For example, my grandmother didn't get a birth certificate until she was an adult, after she had already had children. And that's one way in which we understand that the Mexican nation-state doesn't necessarily represent us.”
By observing their grandmother, who traveled across Mexico and Guatemala as a healer, and through their own experience of their Indigenous culture, Pelaez Lopez always felt that they had a lot more in common with other Indigenous communities in Guatemala and El Salvador, countries that were close to them in Oaxaca, than with non-Indigenous Mexicans, so the national identity of "Mexican" never really made sense to them. “The label AfroIndigenous is a more concise term that thinks through my legal history, my geographical history, my gastronomy, and my culture,” Pelaez Lopez adds.
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"The label AfroIndigenous is a more concise term that thinks through my legal history, my geographical history, my gastronomy, and my culture."
Alán Pelaez Lopez
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The construction of Latin American nation-states have consistently tried to erase Indigenous and African racial groups and their cultures to create a whitened, yet somehow still “raceless,” Latin American identity. The myth of mestizaje, which upholds the idea that all Latines are mixed race, was invented to whiten the race in the territory, and erase any trace of Indigeneity or Blackness among Latin American people. As such, the crimes of colonialism and slavery become dissolved into a single identity that purports to represent everyone from that area of the world.
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For Jessica Hernandez, an Indigenous scientist and author of the Maya Ch’orti’ and Binnizá ethnicities, this brings up legal difficulties when advocating for the rights of Indigenous groups in Latin America, particularly when Indigenous people are displaced to the Global North.
“As a long-term volunteer for the International Maya League, one of the things that we often face is that when Indigenous peoples from what is now known as Latin America are displaced to United States, they receive the ethnic label of being Latine, and they become ineligible for the rights stipulated in the United Nations Declarations of the Rights of Indigenous peoples,” Hernandez tells Somos. “The United States and other settler countries like Canada, especially in the Global North, are trying to remove themselves from the responsibilities they have within that declaration. So by labeling Indigenous peoples as Latine, it's hard to pinpoint the realities of Indigenous peoples, and it becomes difficult to have discussions of sustainable self-determination and sovereignty rights of Indigenous peoples within those spaces.”
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"By labeling Indigenous peoples as Latine, it's hard to pinpoint the realities of Indigenous peoples, and it becomes difficult to have discussions of sustainable self-determination and sovereignty rights of Indigenous peoples within those spaces."
Jessica Hernandez
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In the U.S., as in Latin America, the Latine label has been useful for authorities to generalize a population, both politically and racially, even though many Black, Indigenous, Arab, and Asian people who come from the region now known as Latin America have been critical of their own nation-states' treatment of their people. According to Coni Marambio, who emigrated from an Indigenous community in Chile to the United Kingdom, her identity as a Latine person is dependent on her migration status. In Chile, Marambio identifies as xampurria Mapuche, which means she is of mixed Indigenous descent, and though she is critical of the Latine label, she finds it useful for her to connect with other people from South America while in the U.K.
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“Unfortunately, the xampurria Mapuche label doesn’t mean anything in Europe, even though the Mapuche are a fairly well-known Indigenous group in South America,” Marambio tells Somos, pointing out that though Latine is an ethnic category, it sometimes does result in racialization and generalization. “Both in Spain and in the U.K., people just lump us all together. They have no idea who we are and don’t care to acknowledge that we come from a very specific part of the world. I think that brings us together in a way, even if it's an imperfect category.”
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"It was suddenly super obvious that their Latinidad was not my Latinidad at all, and that trying to fit us all in the same category was uncomfortable for the both of us in many ways."
Coni Marambio
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Despite this, Marambio feels that her Indigeneity becomes even more evident when she is in a group of mostly white Latine people. “It was suddenly super obvious that their Latinidad was not my Latinidad at all, and that trying to fit us all in the same category was uncomfortable for the both of us in many ways,” Marambio says. “They want to be the face of Latinidad, but in many ways, they don't want to be identified with our features, our names, our accents, or with the color of our skin, because accepting that the face of Latinidad is a face that is much more Indigenous would require the acceptance of the fact that we exist.”
But at the same time, Marambio acknowledges that the migration experience is so lonely that you do want to connect with someone, “and that's why you end up having to take on that label.”
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"Latinidad continues to erase minority subjects in Latin America and in the Caribbean, and if we don't acknowledge that then what we're doing is contributing to that erasure."
ALÁN PELAEZ LOPEZ
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Though Pelaez Lopez, the AfroIndigenous poet and scholar, emphasizes that the Latine label can still be important to name xenophobia in the U.S. and in other places where Latine people might migrate, they also feel that the label can flatten the experiences of Black and Indigenous people. “Mestizaje entraps us into a narrative that we all have the same life experience, which is not the case,” Pelaez Lopez says. “I come from an Afro-Mexican community, and this is only year three in our history where we are considered a legal category that is protected under the Mexican constitution. So, for me, to identify as Latine, it erases the history that I’ve only had legal protection for the last three years.”
Ultimately, what Pelaez Lopez wants people to understand is that Latinidad is experienced on a spectrum. “Latinidad usually works for people who are seen as desirable subjects in the U.S. for a white American audience, who either speak Castellano or who can lean on the already-existing tropes of what a Latine person is in the United States. Latinidad continues to erase minority subjects in Latin America and in the Caribbean, and if we don't acknowledge that then what we're doing is contributing to that erasure.”