As students sat bubbling in the pre-exam demographic questions on their standardized tests, I shot my hand up. My fifth-grade teacher marched through the aisles, making her way towards me.
“What’s the issue?” she asked.
“The survey is asking me for my race, but I don’t see Latino as an option,” I responded, struggling to conceive how I was supposed to answer this mandatory survey question.
“Oh, that’s because Hispanic isn’t a race,” she said. “I’m Latina too, and I would suggest selecting ‘Other.’ I usually just put White.”
Her response left me more confused than before. Select White? Not once in my life had I been called White. The names most often attributed to me were “Mexican,” “Latino,” and “Hispanic.”
I went home that day with a minor identity crisis. What was I? I asked my parents, as most kids do, but I ended up right where I’d started: “Mexican,” “Latino,” “Hispanic,”all identities that never appeared on demographic survey questions as races. It was not until high school that I fully gained a better understanding of race in Latin America.
Being Latino informs and complicates my understanding of my race. I look at myself and never have a definitive answer. That said, as I have met more Latines on campus, I have heard their stories and found that my experience is not that uncommon. The racialization of my Latinidad shapes one perception of my identity in the United States. Latinidad is seen as a racial category here. However, if and when we Latines return to Latin America, we can find ourselves stripped of the racialized Latinidad and thrust into a society with a completely different perception of race. In Latin American societies, race becomes a more fluid structure informed by histories of colonialism and racial mixing.
This variance in racial perspectives is due to the fact that race is a social construct. Different societies have come into frequent contact with specific communities that have influenced how they perceive the idea of race. The United States has often categorized race into broad mega-races, with the U.S. census providing options of “Asian,” “Black,” “Native American,” “White,” “Pacific Islander,” and “Other.” These rigid social structures institutionalize race in an oversimplified, reductive manner.
The rigidity in the construction of race in the United States can be traced back to the “one-drop rule,” claiming that anyone without 100% Caucasian blood would be considered non-White. As recently as 1924, the Racial Integrity Act, enacted by the Virginia General Assembly, classified a White person as one “who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian.” The one-drop rule generated a racial standard that extended beyond the scope of one’s phenotype, establishing an aversion against any affiliation with Blackness or Indigeneity.
On the other hand, the social conception of race in Latin America drastically differs from its North American counterpart. But, before I dive into explaining the racial structures of the region, I must qualify that Latin America is replete with racism. In 2019, eight of ten Brazilians murdered by the police were Black or “pardo,” which means mixed-race. In Bolivia and Peru, hundreds of thousands of Indigenous women have been sterilized or killed. These targeted attacks against the most marginalized communities in Latin America are terribly frequent.
In Latin America, however, these strictly defined racial groups are much more absent, with phenotype-based identity overshadowing genotype, contradicting the North American “one-drop rule.” It is a concept derived from the history of countries south of the U.S. border. While Asian immigrants have become more prominent in recent years, the origins of “Latinidad” — the pan-Latin American identity — are the result of the intersection between African, Indigenous, and European cultures, histories, and traditions. The arrival of the Spanish, French, and Portuguese in what is now Latin America marked the decimation of Indigenous communities and the enslavement and forced migration of African people.
While British settler colonies in the Americas cleared out Indigenous American communities, drawing strict racial lines between racial groups, in Latin American colonies, miscegenation was used to control Indigenous and Afro-descendent groups, resulting in diverse racial hierarchies. Racial mixes between Black, Indigenous, and Caucasian peoples led to different racial categories, something unlike anything in the United States: “Peninsulares” (European-born in the Iberian Peninsula), “Criollos” (European-born in Latin America), “Mestizos” (European and Indigenous), “Mulatos” (African and European), “Indígenas” (Indigenous), “Negros” (African), and “Zambos” (Indigenous and African). In this racial order, enslaved African and Indigenous people were placed at the bottom, with any association with Whiteness associated with social esteem and privilege. Remnants of this “casta” system are still visible in today’s Latin American society, as individuals are referred to based on physical features over general racial categories.
So, to Latines like me, it can often be challenging to find a racial group with which to identify. Due to our community’s mixed-race histories, questions of racial percentages become less significant. Rather, we generally identify most with how we look. From this emphasis on physical appearance comes the problem of colorism: the illusion that Whiteness is aspirational. Whiteness is associated with wealth and status, while darker skin tones are affiliated with poverty and ignorance — harmful stereotypes that have been perpetuated since colonial times. If there are two people, one of whom is Black and the other of mixed-racial heritage, the mixed-race person would almost certainly be the recipient of colorist privilege. Colorist treatment isn’t just predicated on skin color; it can also reflect biases associated with facial features and hair texture.
Every Latine person has their own journey to discovering their racial identity. Many make the misinformed — yet understandable — decision of racially identifying as Latino, Latine, or Latinx, without acknowledging that Latinidad in and of itself is an ethnic identity. However, due to mass genocide and racial discrimination, many Latines do not have the resources to truly know and understand their racial identity. Latines of mixed-race, like me, have to engage in historiographical research to uncover their racial ancestry.
Fortunately, my grandfather, whom I call Tito, was my primary source of knowledge for all things related to Mexican culture, history, and music. From Tito, I learned that I was a descendant of the Otomí community from Central México. While Tito only knew a few words in Otomí, he was undoubtedly Indigenous. While I had always seen myself as a brown Latino, Tito provided a sense of security in my identity, as both a person of color and Indigenous man.
My reclamation of indigeneity, however, was not without conflict. When I referred to my grandfather or myself as Indigenous, some family members would take offense, retorting, “Nosotros no somos indios:” “We are not Indians.” I struggled to understand how this identity could be so contentious. After all, if my family had distinctly Indigenous roots, then we were indubitably Indigenous. Nonetheless, I realized that the aversive reactions to this identity had been formed through colonial-era social constructs of the undesirability of Black and brown identities.
My reclamation of Indigeneity has fueled my passion to fight and resist Latin American colorist standards of rejecting African and Indigenous ancestry. Fear of being called Indigenous or Black amongst Latines of mixed-race heritage is a symptom of the plague of colorism. In claiming our Blackness and/or Indigeneity, Latines resist the seeming ubiquity of Eurocentrism. I ask you to embrace your roots.
Image by Daivd Valdez is licensed under the Google Images Creative Commons License.
