I wanted to link to this post from Afro-Netizen as a direct response to a comment on the post about the Puerto Rican quarter. It’s actually an issue that has come up a few times, especially, it seems, when there is a post related to Puerto Rican identity.

Race.

Latin America has a long history of white privilege and white supremecy, including: is colored with white privilege, from its political roots: U.S. implementation of Jim Crow in the Panama Canal, brutal Dominican dictatorship that erased African presence from its history and its culture, the massacre of hundreds of thousands indigenous Mayans in Guatemala, and blancismento (whitetification) in Argentina (South America) in which governments actively recruited Europeans to emigrate to their nations in order to “whiten” the society of its heavily indigenous and African populations.

Latinidad is not a race. It’s not even a sole ethnic group. The way I have consistantly used it is related to a shared history of colonization coming from the Iberian Peninsula. In using this definition I include indigenous populations, African slaves and their descendants and yes the colonizers and their descendants. While being Latino isn’t a single race or ethnic group, colonizers in the region from the Europeans to the U.S. have lumped all Latino together, makes it easier to oppress I guess. Currently this is easily witnessed in the racialization of the immigration issue that equates immigrants with Latinos, regardless of legal status.

Pero what is it about Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans specifically that pulls the race issue in even when talking about a quarter? Some of the comments of thread have revealed a denial of Indigenous and/or African roots. Other comments seek to racialize our Caribbean neighbors, Dominicans, as the “black ones”. Do we erase certain aspects of our racial identity in order to compensate for our confused status? Since we are neither an independent nation nor really part of the United States, is a confused or “mixed” racial status too much to deal with on top of our “mixed” national status? Is it an attempt to assimilate into U.S. colonial culture in the hopes that if we appear more “white” we will be more accepted, especially when we migrate from the island to the mainland United States?

As I wrote about in response to a post on Guerilla Mama Medicine, my own youthful attempts to “pass” as “white” had to do with certain privileges I had as a light skinned Puerto Rican daughter of migrants and the desire to assimilate and not be othered, something my own parents tried to do when they came here from Puerto Rico and grew up in the primarily white NYC suburbs.

So where do we as Latinos fit in racially? Is it possible to be only one “race” given our histories? Can any of us claim racial purity be that European, African or Indigenous?

Image: 1992 Poster for Comite Noviembre/Puerto Rican Heritage Month.