VivirLatino

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.

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