About Identity during Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month and why Latinidad is no Longer Enough
FROM THE EMBODY LIB BLOG ARCHIVES
When my follower count starts going up every mid-September on my socials, it can only mean one thing: Hispanic Heritage Month has officially begun.
I understand how content creators and influencers who want to be more inclusive think “(Insert random Race, Nationality, Ethnic group here) Heritage Month” celebrations are low-hanging fruit when looking to encourage more diverse social media engagement among their audiences.
Creating posts, reels, and stories and tagging their favorite Hispanic/Latinx accounts might seem like an easy way to be in solidarity and can definitely serve as a way to uplift and bring visibility to the historically marginalized. But it also floods content creators like me with followers who are either 1.) not ready to commit or 2.) don’t see the personal benefit of committing to radical liberation and, as a result, just follows me to diversity their feed, tokenize my experiences and perform the activism and solidarity that is needed for tangible change.
Hispanic Heritage Month, now most commonly referred to as Latinx Heritage Month, aims to celebrate the contributions made by those across the Latine Diaspora since Colonization. Hispanic/Latine populations span 27 countries across 4 continents and make up most of the Western Hemisphere.
The mainstream perception of who is Hispanic/Latine and what countries are part of the diaspora are still pretty unclear for most people. For example, did you know that those from Spain are considered Hispanic? Or that Haiti, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Saint Barthelemy, and Saint Martin (majority Black, French-speaking countries) are part of the Latine diaspora?
How does this information shape what you know and believe about Latinidad, the cultural ideology the 62 million people in the United States or the 660 million people who live in Latin America are associated with?
At first glance, it may seem that the expansiveness of the Hispanic/Latine umbrellas is unifying and valuable in establishing a shared struggle and identity. But if our goal is Body Liberation, what we understand as Latinidad, can be, in actuality, limiting.
The following is my personal view about the Hispanic/Latine label and is not meant to speak on behalf of entire groups of people. In this narrative, I want to offer a nuanced perspective on the concept of Latinidad and encourage people to further examine the boxes we put ourselves and other people into and whether that promotes or hinders body liberation.
But first… A Little About My Own Identity
For the record, I have never resonated with the label “Hispanic” and always associated it with countries or individuals who strongly connect to their European ancestry. I correlate Hispanic with “originating from Spain,” and while it’s true that a quarter of my ancestry comes from there, I don’t have any cultural or current family ties to the country.
As far as identifying as Latine/x/o/a, it seemed like the only census category that best fit how I experienced the world for most of my life. If I had never embraced this identity, my family and I would never have had opportunities to form strong relationships with other families from Mexico, Central, and South America over the years when we moved from New York/New Jersey to the midwest, where we were the ethnic minority. I still feel so honored and privileged to be able to share in the kitchens, celebrations, and sacred beliefs of my “family” from the Mexican states of Michoacan & Jalisco and the countries of Colombia, Peru, and El Salvador over the years and still feel like I belong.
But as much as I could recognize what we had in common and our shared struggles, I also saw distinct differences. The biggest one, of course, was around citizenship. Even though my parents had somewhat of an “immigrant experience” when relocating and assimilating to the United States mainland, they never had to fear being criminalized or deported because of their documentation status. Other vital differences emerged and became more apparent when I started to actively unravel everything I thought to be true after I was diagnosed with an eating disorder in 2017.
For the past few years, my choice to be specific about my racial and ethnic identity has been part of my commitment to decolonial thinking and addressing internalized anti-Blackness. I feel most liberated when I am clear about my identity. I believe that broadly grouping people under an ethnic identity can be more harmful than helpful if it ignores how racism informs the hierarchization of people under these identity umbrellas.
I am of the Puerto Rican diaspora, which for me means someone who was not born on the island but has spent formative time there, which has significantly shaped my lived experiences and perspectives around modern-day colonialism and sovereignty.
I also identify as a multiracial non-Black person of color. I understand the hesitancy and complexity around this label. I hold space for this all while honoring the following truths:
What we define as “race” has no biological basis and is a social construct used to create and perpetuate racism, which reinforces imbalanced systems of power that subjugate entire groups of people based on melaninization
Anti-Blackness and racial categorization are integral parts of the formation and sustainability of Latin America and are just as prevalent as the racial caste system in the United States.
Although I am rarely racialized as Black, my lived experiences (including the generational trauma I carry) have been informed by the internalized and systemic anti-Blackness my family (particular my father and my paternal side of the family) has been subjected as Afrodescendents of enslaved West Africans that were brought to the Caribbean as a result of the Trans Atlantic Slave trade.
I think it’s up to everyone to do their own internal work around their identity. I don’t reserve judgment towards anyone who feels the Hispanic/Latine identity embodies a part of who they are. But this term doesn’t date as far back as you might think. The emergence of this identity coincides with the Black Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s, which sparked similar pushes for mobilization among feminists, LGBTQ communities, and Fat Acceptance activists.
A Brief History behind the Hispanic/Latine identity in the U.S.
The U.S. Government Census was instrumental in creating a unified Hispanic/Latine identity in the Americas. Many Federal programs use information collected on race to make critical policy decisions, promote equal employment opportunities and assess health and environmental disparities.
Before 1960, the racial categories that appeared on the census were: 1.) White, 2.) Black 3.) American Indian 4.) Other. Sometimes ethnicities such as Mexican, Japanese, or Filipino were included depending on the census year. Door-to-door enumerators collected census data and would take note of a person’s race by looking at them. Without input from the census taker, many people were undercounted and miscategorized as white or Black, depending on how vigorously enumerators applied the ‘one drop rule’ to the households they were assigned to survey. Census takers would not be able to self-select their racial/ethnic identity until 1970.
Then 1960 arrived, which prompted a decade filled with social, economic, cultural, and political disruption. Numerous grassroots movements and organizations formed in the U.S. during these years with varying goals: racial equality, labor rights, gender equality, anti-war, disability justice, and fat acceptance, to name just a few. There were also widespread organizing efforts around these issues from the largest Latin American ethnic groups concentrated in three regions of the U.S.:
Mexican Americans were most populous in the Southwest and West Coast.
Puerto Ricans made up most of the Northeast.
In South Florida, numerous Cuban communities thrived.
Mexicans and Puerto Ricans were bringing awareness to their communities’ disproportionate poverty rates and low access to educational and employment opportunities. The Cubans in Florida focused on addressing the heinous treatment of native Cubans that were opposed to the recently instilled Communist regime. Whatever their cause, they leveraged this moment in history to pursue labor and civil rights issues that most impacted them. Organizers more or less agreed that there were benefits in unifying under a single identity. The way they defined themselves was “consequential for the way the state will intervene on behalf of these racial disparities,” according to G. Cristina Mora, a sociology professor at UC Berkeley.
Recognizing that “the larger the category, the more statistical power it would have,” Grassroots organizations such as the United Farm Workers labor union (cofounded by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta), the Young Lords (comprised mainly of Black and brown Puerto Ricans), and anti-Castro dissident groups such as Alpha66, came together to press Lyndon B. Johnson to add an umbrella pan-ethnic grouping in the census that included those of Spanish speaking Latin American origin. This initial push was successful, and the 1970 census added an option with language that included those with roots in Latin American countries. However, it still mandated that participants select only one racial category with which they self-identified. When the 1970 census numbers were released, advocates claimed there was a vast undercount. They pushed for more awareness, working in conjunction with the Nixon administration to promote the term’s usage and highlighting the benefits of coming together to embrace the label. Spanish Language media outlets like Univision and nonprofit organizations like NCLR and LULAC were tasked with bringing the identifier to a broader audience and popularizing the term.
By 1980, the census finally included the “Hispanic/Latino” category as an option for race/ethnicity. In 1976, Congress passed legislation that mandated collecting and analyzing data for a specific ethnic group that fell under the category of “Americans of Spanish origin or descent.” This new category would include “Americans who identify themselves as being of Spanish-speaking background and trace their origin or descent from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Central, and South America, and other Spanish-speaking countries.” The new category ended up including 20 Spanish-speaking nations from Latin America and the country of Spain. Still, it did not include Brazil, Haiti, or other majority Black French-speaking countries in South America and the Caribbean. The 1980 census saw the number of people identifying as Latine rise exponentially compared to 1970 and continued to see vast jumps in numbers after the 1990 census. From 1970 to 1990, the census captured a 146% increase in the number of people who identified as Hispanic/Latine
If the Goal is Body liberation, Latinidad isn’t Enough
Just by revisiting the history of the U.S. Census, we can quickly see how racially exclusive the Hispanic/Latine category was. Even though in 1980, the census included a “Hispanic origin” category and allowed monoracial Black Latines to count themselves among other Hispanic, individuals were only limited to one racial identification, inaccurately recording many Indigenous and Afrodescended Latines as white. It wasn’t until 2000 that census takers had the option to identify as mixed ancestry if they selected Hispanic/Latine as their ethnic category.
But this exclusion goes beyond census categories. Latinidad thrives most on Black exclusion and eradication. Latin America and thus the ideology of Latinidad emerged in Europe during the second half of the nineteenth century. It stemmed from a desire to create a set of geo-politically unified countries in Central and South America and parts of the Caribbean, which sharply contrasted with the nation-building mentality of nineteenth-century Western Europe. Blanqueamiento, a Latin American social, political, and economic process to “improve the race” (mejorar la raza) towards a supposed ideal of whiteness, reinforced Latinidad. Walter Mignolo, author of the academic text The Idea of Latin America, defined Latinidad as a construct created by “white Creole and Mestizo/a elites, in South America and the Spanish Caribbean islands, to create their own postcolonial identity.” - but it was an identity founded in white supremacy. Blanqueamiento, in addition to Native genocide and chattel slavery, were all central in the formation of Latin America and still plagues the diaspora today.
While Blanqueamiento was more straightforward in antiquity, it is more subtle today. Currently, it serves as a tool to dismiss the issue of anti-Black racism in the diaspora or even go as far as to say it doesn’t exist. For example, whether born on the archipelago or as part of the diaspora, confusion or dismissal of racial identity directly results from Puerto Rico’s political and colonial history. There were concerted efforts during the first half of the 20th century, after the American invasion, to make one’s race irrelevant yet culturally “whiten” both those living in Puerto Rico and those who left the island for the mainland. This false ideology of racial “harmony” and “unity” further marginalized darker-skinned brown and Black Puerto Ricans in seeking employment (especially those in government positions), political appointments, and social services. You can learn more about this time in our history here (start at 16:00)
Today, Black/Afro-Latines experience higher rates of interpersonal and systemic discrimination than non-Black Latines. There is frequent erasure of the challenges Black Latines and Afrodescendents face in policy and advocacy work, as there is an overrepresentation of the voices and experiences of communities living in Western regions compared to densely populated Afro-Latine communities up and down the East Coast. In mainstream media and pop culture, you are less likely to see people from non-Spanish-speaking Latin American countries represented in conversations around Latinidad. Brazil, Haiti, and French Guiana, three countries with large Black populations, are often not regarded as part of the Latin American Diaspora, as society conflates being “Latine/x/a/o” with being Spanish-speaking, otherwise known as a form of racial essentialization.
Like most organizing strategies deployed to propel liberation movements towards progress, they fall victim to the context of place and time in which these oppressive struggles appear, especially when these strategies aim to immediately disrupt dominant institutions of power in the name of civil rights. Understandably, organizing tactics that focus on minimizing the appearance of a white majority can build political will and confidence among groups of people that, up to that point, have been systemically marginalized. A Hispanic/Latine label was incredibly beneficial to advocates and community activists in collecting data to help persuade federal policymakers to push for equality in healthcare, employment, wages, and education, even if Latinidad is an outdated colonial construct that operates under a slightly different model of white supremacy.
While the initial goal of the Hispanic/Latine identity was to call for civil rights and equality, it fails to protect the Black and Afrodescended Latines that are most vulnerable to systemic discrimination. For them, what is supposed to be a unifying ideology, instead flattens the intersectionality of their lived experiences. Latinidad contributes to further erasure and marginalization in a society that stereotypically associates Latine/x/a/o as being “mestizo”, tan, or racially ambiguous men and women.
Body Liberation calls on us to examine supremacist ideologies (white supremacy, cis heteropatriarchy, colonization, modern-day colonialism) that inform our internal and external narratives. To identify as Latine/x/a/o means to reckon with the historical and current harm caused by Latinidad while simultaneously holding space for the time in which it contributed to the progression of significant labor and civil rights causes. If we want to continue moving forward in our efforts though, Latinidad is not enough. While activism across the Latine diaspora in the United States has been successful in closing some of the gaps in employment, education, and wages, it has also come to mirror the same racialized hierarchy as the American socio-political machine: White and otherwise non-Black Latines (including light-skinned mestizos) at the top of the order with greater access to wealth, resources, and opportunities. Darker-skinned Indigenous and Black/Afro-Latines are at the bottom, experiencing the brunt of systemic and institutional oppression.
A liberated future demands a revolution around (or, dare I say, abolition of) Latinidad as we know it today. With 1 in 4 people projected to identify as Hispanic/Latine in 2040 and the diaspora representing more racial, ethnic, and religious identities than ever before, why not start now?
To learn more, check out these resources:
YouTube and Podcast Episodes
The Experiment Podcast from The Atlantic on YouTube: Is ‘Latino’ A Real Identity?
Code Switch Podcast from NPR “What Does It Mean To Be Latino? The 'Light-Skinned Privilege' Edition”
Modern Racism Podcast: Latinidad and the American Racial Hierarchy
Articles
Content Creators and Thought Leaders on Instagram:
Dash Harris on IG as @diasporadash
Dr. Alan Pelaez Lopez on IG as @migrantscribble
Joey Pierre on IG as @joey_pierre
