“Latinidad” as Erasure: Words from a Critical Discussion on the Single Narrative of Latinidad
Five library and archives workers within Latine heritage/Latin American culture discuss the problems with “Latinidad,” anti-Blackness, and white privilege within Latine communities, US imperialism and Indigenous erasure.
By Jennifer A. Ferretti, Cristina Fontánez Rodríguez, Yvette Ramírez, Amanda Toledo, and Gabby Womack
This transcript from a live panel discussion (https://www.wehere.space/problem-with-latinidad) has been edited for publication. Two of the five original presenters were unable to participate in this publication. Original date and running time: Friday, May 7, 2021, 5p EST, 2:13:05.
Preface
By Jennifer A. Ferretti
J. Ferretti: Mi mamá in Canada taking steps to get her US citizenship, sometime around 1968-70.
Reading Miguel Salazar’s “The Problem With Latinidad,” (2019) was a personal revelation in thinking about my Latina/Mestiza, child of immigrants, east coast US-born identity. In it Salazar interviews “journalists, organizers, and thinkers'' and discusses who gets to claim the term “Latinidad,” a Spanish-language term loosely translated as “Latino-ness,” whether or not it's useful and what purposes it serves. This article is what laid the groundwork for the We Here panel discussion with Cristina Fontánez Rodríguez, Mario Macías, Obden Mondésir, Yvette Ramírez, Amanda Toledo, and Gabby Womack, which took place on Friday, May 7, 2021. The speakers were selected after responding to a call for participation sent to We Here’s private communities. What follows this preface is an edited transcript of the live panel discussion.
After reading Salazar’s article, I reflected on how few conversations I’ve been made aware of on Latine identity generally, but particularly within the library and archives field. There are plenty of very necessary panels with folks who have devoted their research life to Latine identity and all the topics within that very broad description and I am grateful to them. But the idea behind the call for participation for this panel was to challenge the invention of Latinidad, through the stories of library and archives workers who have had personal experiences from different areas of the United States and from Latin America. The idea was to exemplify diversity and nuance within an ethnicity that some flatten by assuming anyone within the Latine identity are from countries most seen in the media (e.g. México) or even extend the identity to the European country of Spain, labeling us as “Spanish.”
But let’s back up. What even is Latin America? Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo writes about the idea of Latin America in “Latin America: The Allure and Power of an Idea.” Tenorio-Trillo writes,
“Of course, Latin America, like many other racio-cultural nineteenth-century ideas, at times was used as a call for social inclusion. And yet, it was so used not as an antiracist but as a racial argument, claiming superiority over other ‘races,’ excluding certain groups and often maintaining a strong faith either in an enlightened oligarchy or in impossible forms of direct popular ruling with no need for the ugly games of electoral democracies” (pg. 12).
As for Latin America geographically, there are a couple contemporary definitions, including countries in the Americas (note here there are other Americas than just the United States of America) where a romance language predominates: Spanish, Portuguese, French, and the Creole languages. As it’s used here, it includes México; most of Central and South America; in the Caribbean it includes Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Puerto Rico. Therefore, Latin America is defined as those parts of the Americas that were colonized by the Spanish, Portuguese, and French Empires, which includes a huge population of the Indigenous peoples of these lands. Knowing this, “Latinidad,” excludes many from Latin America by the mere fact that it is a Spanish language word.
Directly after reading Salazar’s article, I read Eduardo Galeano’s “Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent.” As Galeano writes,
“The Latin American colonies were discovered, conquered, and colonized within the process of the expansion of commercial capital.” And “The rape of accumulated treasure was followed by the systematic exploitation of the forced labor of Indians and abducted Africans in the mines,” (pg. 29).
Reading the history of colonization, capitalism, and devastating loss of life, culture, and religion that lasted for centuries provides a deeper understanding and context of contemporary events. Another crucial piece of reading that helped ground the panel discussion was “The Tortilla Cartel” in Taste by Elizabeth Dunn where they discuss the recent rise of industrial instant corn flour, masa harina and its representation of not only a gastronomic loss but the loss of México’s corn heritage.
As mentioned earlier, the panel was selected through a call for participation posted to We Here’s private spaces. Panelists were selected not for their research focus, but rather for their experiences, background, and narrative around what they could bring to the panel. Growing up on the east coast, most of the Latine people I knew came from families that recently emigrated to the US from Central America, mostly Nicaragua and El Salvador, like my families. I didn’t have a conversation with a peer who was of Méxican descent until I was an adult. I know that my life and relationship with my ethnicity and race would be very different had I grown up in a different part of the United States and many of the panelists express the significance of place shaping racial dynamics.
If we look at the dominant Latine narratives in the media, they are generally from the same countries and backgrounds, and perhaps more importantly from the same race or skin color. As stories are continuing to be told, we have to realize what we see isn’t the totality of the Latine ethnicity. It’s important to point out here that Latines make up 20% of the population yet amount to less than 4% of protagonists in American films [1]. Even when we are included, 25% of Latine speaking characters across 100 movies of 2019 were depicted as criminals [2].
However, we can’t only be critical of producers, publishers, and other folks in positions of power and who provide platforms. We must also be critical of our own anti-Blackness, Indigenous erasure, judgements about not being fluent in the Spanish language as well as assumptions that everyone in Latin America speaks Spanish (which aids in the erasure of Indigenous populations and leaves Brazil and Haiti out altogether).
The white supremacist lens must be turned in on ourselves and how we uphold it through trauma. As we examined the problems with Latinidad that Miguel Salazar raised, this was a way for us to talk about us.
Introductions: Presenters Share Their Stories
Gabby Womack
I titled my presentation, “Afro-Latina: A Work in Progress,” because I do feel that this is not something where I’m going to identify the same way for the rest of my life, based on what I'm going to explain to you today. So for my description I was explaining that I am Afro-Latina, yes, however you probably noticed that my last name is in English, so that makes it way harder to explain that to people. I was raised by my mom, who is the daughter of a light skinned Puerto Rican woman named Maria Luisa Lopez, and a Dominican man named Armando Payne. He was born in the Dominican Republic but his father and his mother were from the West Indies; his father, specifically, Jamaica. So, on his side, it is yes, Latine by birth and by culture but not necessarily by blood.
On my dad's side, I'm mostly African American and I didn't really grow up with them so I didn't really fully connect with Black American culture until about 7 years ago. I'm not usually perceived as being Latina, unless the person who's speaking to me is Dominican. Then, they usually can tell. For the most part, people don't see me as Latina and it's pretty common for me to have to prove that, especially since I don't speak Spanish, my last name is English, and my grandfather's last name is also English. So, that has made it extremely hard [to be seen as Latina], but it's kind of funny because if they [Latines] had just asked me, “Okay, what did you grow up on,” and I just said, “Oh, platanos, arroz con pollo, you know, mangoes, café con leche,” then they’d be like, “Okay, yeah, I see.” But since they don't ask that and it's usually like, “What are you?” it doesn't come out that way.
I've actually had my Latinidad questioned by my own Latine cousins on my Puerto Rican side. They don't really see me as one of them, so that makes it hard for me to fit in because of their light skin. I grew up with my mom's side of the family: our holiday season is filled with making pastelles together, dancing to Marc Anthony and Celia Cruz every family party and kissing every family member on the cheek afterwards, or my grandmother using Vick’s Vapor Rub on literally everything to do with any pain or anything. But when I was younger I moved to the Greater Seattle area, which kind of mixed things up.
When I got to Seattle, the only version of Latinas were Mexicans, from what people could understand. So when I told them about my grandparents’ backgrounds they thought it was within Mexico. It happened a lot and it got to the point where it just kind of got tired of explaining and left it alone. For most of my childhood, I was actually told I wasn't Black, so that made this whole thing very confusing. I think it sounded odd but, since I was a child, I didn't really think about it. It's very odd to hear that and look at my grandfather because he had dark skin. Especially since my dad is Black, so that was very awkward to grow up with. I think it was this anti-Blackness tradition passed down from family members because my grandfather left the Dominican Republic during the Trujillo dictatorship. It was famously anti-Black and anti-Haitian, which made it also awkward when the majority of the friends that I made were Haitian when I moved back to Central Florida.
Due to this anti-Blackness, I didn't wear my hair naturally until more recently, like in the past 7 years. Being Black was seen as an insult, and based on my grandfather's experiences of being excluded every time people perceived him to be Black. It was a very big deal for us to not claim it, because of what we knew would happen to us if we did, which is funny because people could see us as Black regardless whether or not we actually said it. So it was pretty annoying.
They do get a bit touchy on my mom's side when I'm researching my African American side more than my Caribbean or Latine side of the family. It's just that I was raised with their side, so I don't have to do as much research on that. When it comes to solidarity, the only folks who are technically Latines who I actually feel accepted by are my Haitian friends. My other Latine friends are like small portions from different islands and some from South America, but the majority are Haitian since I grew up in Central Florida. It makes it so that I feel that I am not claimed by Latines. I don't know whether I should claim that or not, because now that my grandparents are gone, I feel that my connection or way of holding on to them is continuing to call myself Afro-Latina. At the same time, it's hard because I know that these folks don't actually claim me. Do I take it or not? I don’t know. So that's why I say I’m a work in progress. It may be that in the future, my Instagram will change to Afro-Caribbean, I don't know. Right now it says, “Afro-Latina” because that's where I feel comfortable, regardless of what everybody else says.
Yvette Ramírez
Just to give a little context, I recently graduated from the School of Information at the University of Michigan and this summer will be a 2021 Dance/USA Archiving and Preservation fellow. But I'm here to unpack and basically move towards dismantling Latinidad, something that for me has been a process in itself and has taken years in the making.
I am a first-generation New Yorker from Queens who as of 3 or 4 years ago identifies as Aymara and Quechua descendiente, as well as Andina to pay tribute to my Indigenous ancestry via my grandparents. This is a photo of my maternal grandparents. I left my harddrive in my apartment in Michigan, so I wasn't able to get photos of my paternal side. I’d like to introduce the term Andina as paying tribute to that nebulous in-between space of having been born here in Queens, the traditional homeland of the Munsee Lenape peoples, and by nebulous I also mean perhaps something that perhaps y'all have felt as diaspora. My parents migrated to Bolivia from New York in the early 80s and while we traveled back, it was really sporadic due to mostly economic or migratory status related factors, but I grew up around a tight knit Bolivian community here in Queens, around many of our cultural traditions, music gatherings and dances. Part of that upbringing also included my Colombian, Peruvian, Dominican and Mexican friends and neighbors. So it was that hyper local hybridity of growing up in working class, Northwestern Queens that was home and the most familial to me.
I think when it comes to Latinidad beyond the hyper local, it’s manifested as something different that has always felt off to me. Growing up, US Latinx representation and visibility in particularly within Spanish language media - Univision & Telemundo - meant that people who look like me were in subservient roles meanwhile you had thriving white Latinx folks living their life in telenovelas and movies. I had issues with my black hair, I have really thick black hair and I definitely would not see that represented in say Latina magazine or what not. Even the Spanish that I learned at home had a lot of words like wawa which means baby/young child in Quechua and Aymara or choclo which means corn in Quechua. The more I grew, the more I began to learn the kind of reasons of why these sorts of tensions exist.
I learned of stories of relatives back home, who had too Indigenous sounding names and had to change to a more “proper” one that was more Spanish sounding in the 50s (to enroll in school). I learned about the intencional project in Bolivia of the Andean cholo-mestizo middle class, to represent this sole, unified, cultural identity. That (fabricated) identity was sort of the key to “modernization” for Bolivia. I learned about the gendered violence perpetrated by the Catholic Church on the maternal side of my family. And so these were the histories that I didn't learn from my parents due to perhaps inherited trauma, because they didn't want to talk about it or simply because they also didn't know much about it. There were traces of things that I subconsciously knew but also didn’t.
It's interesting because Bolivia is actually 45% Indigenous in terms of population from the last census and currently has 36 native Indigenous Nations. So for me in the Nation article, The Problem with Latinidad, what really resonated for me was that Latinidad in essence promotes a sense of the sole cohesion formed under national identity and borders. So for me basically all that I just shared is kind of erased by that, it tells me that my Aymara/Quechua identity and my US Latinx identity are basically two mutually exclusive realities. And to take a step back, the notion of Bolivianidad, as with many of our home countries, too serves the paradigm of nation settler states that aspired/aspires to in essence be a mono-ethnic “mestizo” state. This too has its limitations because obviously, as you might know, what is home to Indigenous nations usually go beyond national borders.
Personally, this all comes to a standstill during the 2019 elections and ultimately the power coup, which I think really revealed a lot of the really painful conversations within my home country on our racial historical and very present legacy. During this time of political unrest massacres (in Senkata and Sacaba) occurred bringing to the forefront discourses of Indigenous folks as the “savage” or the “other” - a very much real, visible, and internalized notion within Bolivian mestizos. We saw this in the rhetoric of the transitory and fascist government of Jeanine Áñez. [Photo shared by Twitter user (at)angelcaido666x of one of the mobilizations that happened in 2019 in La Paz to protest the transitory and fascist government at the time of Jeanine Áñez.] We saw this when Aymara historian and political leader Felipe "El Mallku" Quispe proclaimed on a prime-time televised debate that he didn’t feel Bolivian but from Qullasuyu, the historial Aymara nation-state thus ensuing a national discourse on what does it mean to be truly "Bolivian". Because again, this idea of what is required to be Bolivian? To assimilate and forget? To assimilate, forget the inner Indigenous self? For me, connecting it to this conversation, what does it take for me to be Latinx or Latine? To forget my language? To forget these histories? I think for us it's really important to really make these connections to past and contemporary Indigenous sovereignty politics and movements, and to see the parallels between both.
My family's migration journey, in essence, is from one settler colonial state where white supremacy also exists to another one here in the US. I think, specifically now, it's really important to make these connections. Eve Tuck [and K. Wayne Yang] says only talking about colonialism or making the gesture towards Indigenous people is not enough, when addressing contemporary Indigenous sovereignty or rights [3]. In Latin America, we've seen a lot of uprisings in Peru, Chile and now in Colombia where Afro-Colombians and Indigenous folks are leading mobilizations. I think we [Latinx/Latine] need to connect within the region but also make the connections here in the US, Canada and throughout North America. Latinidad as it stands is not set up for that and instead keeps us focused on the construct of the nation. If we're not posing questions, questioning these dynamics and default to the social cohesion under national identity and borders, then what are we doing? That's the question that I want to pose in this conversation. I think us as information science/archives folks need to pay attention to these more nuanced conversations whether they are happening online or within our local communities. Just as they're happening within Andean diaspora spaces, they're happening probably elsewhere - in Caribbean, Central America digital spaces.
Cristina Fontánez Rodríguez
I was born and raised in Puerto Rico, in an urbanization called Roosevelt. Both of my parents are also from Puerto Rico. Most of my extended family has migrated to the United States, including me. I've been living here for about 5 years, specifically in Brooklyn. My mom was actually raised in the US and came back to Puerto Rico when she was about 20. My parents met in Miami. I am also an archivist, and this will be a little bit obvious throughout my presentation. First I want to note that I had a lot of trouble putting together my thoughts because it was just so difficult to organize how I felt on the subject. Everytime I attempted to convey my experiences in a clear and linear way and in under 7 minutes, I just ended up confusing myself. Until I finally gave up and realized these narratives are not clear, are not linear, and are dependent on the specific context in which it is experienced.
So I will talk about Latinidad as I see it within different place-based contexts and how it has evolved with me as I’ve moved through the world and also in my career. First, in my attempt to contextualize my identity, I wonder how my country as a whole fits into the concept of Latinidad. Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States, Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, however, Puerto Rico is not ‘America’, which is also a narrative that I’ve seen floating around in more recent years.
I think back to my time in Puerto Rico, and not thinking much about the concept of Latinidad. I just wasn’t concerned with my individual identity or my history, I mostly wanted to learn about others. What I would notice though was that in the retelling of Latin American history, Puerto Rico disappears from the history books after the U.S. invasion. If we’re lucky, we’re a footnote, like Puerto Rico didn’t survive the shark attack. When I moved to another Latin American country in my early 20s, it was the first time I was forced to do a little introspection into my identity. Suddenly I was the other, because of my Caribbean accent, because of how I thought and acted, and because of my physical features. Suddenly, we were not all Latinos who move freely between cultures. And you know, being ‘the other’ and having to adapt shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody moving to a new country, but it would certainly have been less jarring if I didn’t spend my whole life listening to a narrative of Latinidad as a unifying concept. In this new context, I was told by other Latinos that Puerto Rico is not a country and so, it is not Latin American and I am not Latina. And this hurt, because it underscored how our relationship to the US alienates us from the rest of the region.
But thinking back on it, if the concept of Latinidad takes into consideration the complexities of post and neocolonialism, race, color, legal status, class, nationality, language, how does Puerto Rico’s colonial status make us less Latino? Isn’t this so-called commonwealth a clear manifestation of the complexities of neo colonialism, race, color, legal status, etc? Which then takes us to the theme of this panel, how does Latinidad exclude those which don’t fit neatly into a category, a category that is supposed to be rooted in complexity?
So my other internal dispute with this concept of Latinidad, is as I’ve seen it manifested here and in particular in my profession as an archivist, where we talk a lot about gaps and silences, about the archival sliver, and who gets to tell your or our story. And oftentimes I see these calls to action wrapped in a narrative of Latinidad that I just don’t relate to. For example, I see exhibits, symposiums, panels etc, about great Puerto Rican men and women. And these initiatives are presented as efforts to highlight “marginalized” persons who are excluded from history books. Meanwhile in Puerto Rico, I see these historical figures as people who have highways, parks, and schools named after them, historical figures we are taught about in school. So then I see these stories are often presented without context, and I’m not talking about noting that a great woman was actually a woman of privilege in the island, but it’s presented without context in terms of the place that these figures or themes occupy in contemporary Puerto Rican history and their cultural value in Puerto Rico. And that’s when I asked myself, how are we contextualizing these efforts and how does this narrative of Latinidad as broadly marginalized people separate us from Latin American or how does this misrepresentation of people who are not from here hurt legitimate efforts of telling a more inclusive history of our people?
My last point: I’m a Caribbean woman and I don’t see this identity represented in what we describe as the Latine experience. For me, being from the Caribbean and growing up there, taking 5 showers a day, wearing polyester uniforms in 100 degree weather, buying mauvi, bread and chicharrón on the side of the road, what it means to go to college on the island, eccetera, this all signifies something to my identity; it’s not just my heritage, this is me, these are my experiences. And this is integral to how I move, to how I work, and to how I identify. I think this erasure or alienation of the Caribbean region from the concept of Latinidad, which is rooted in anti-Blackness, is telling of how Latinidad isn’t inherently unifying, it’s othering, and for me, has moved me further away from a region that not only shares my countries history and culture, but that also includes countries that exist in the same or similar political/colonial limbo as Puerto Rico.
Finally to add to the question of who we are excluding, I want to end by asking anybody who identifies as Latino, who are we alienating ourselves from?
Amanda Toledo
I am the daughter of Cuban immigrants, and I work as a library assistant in youth services in Southern California. I did want to preface this by saying I'm speaking on the traditional lands of the Tongva people, and I want to encourage others to engage with Indigenous people as real living people. Because I work with kids, I also wanted to drop a book recommendation, Waa’ aka’: The Bird Who Fell in Love with the Sun [4]written by Tongva author Cindi M. Alvitre and illustrated by Carly Lake. {I decided to include a land acknowledgement based on a lot of thought and reading of perspectives from different Native people. Just as there is no “one” representation of Indigeneity, there is no one speaker for Native peoples. Some activists have shared methods of building land acknowledgements with and approved by local tribes, some have stated that the concept of land acknowledgements is performative and easy to write off. I elected to take the advice of librarian Dr. Debbie Reese in a post on her website American Indians in Children’s Literature [5], where I not only acknowledge the land I’m on but recommend work by modern tribe members.}
Turning now to my background, it’s only within the past couple of years that I have come to identify, or understand my race as white, and I want to talk about that journey to understanding. As I mentioned earlier, my parents were Cuban immigrants, both of them came here when they were children. My dad arrived on a plane, my mom came on a banana boat, went through the whole wet foot dry foot thing. Both of them, I think, emphasized becoming very Americanized, blending in and fitting in.
My parents divorced when I was young and my mother moved me and my older sister to the suburbs outside of Chicago, which shaped a lot of how I came to see the world. At the time that we moved there we were one of the only Latine families in the area in the community, and definitely some of the few not white-American families in the area. There were many experiences that let us know—where we were made to feel other. This included situations like the time a man approached my mom and me in the parking lot at the grocery store saying “Go back to your country.” There was the grade school experience of me and my friend, who was the only other person of color in the class, getting pulled to the front of the classroom, because our teacher kept confusing us, calling us by each other's names. She had us stand back to back at the front of the class and asked the class, “Why do I keep mixing these two up?” Then our classmates responded, offering up, “They both wear glasses! They both like to read!” and the teacher saying, “They both have this lovely exotic skin color!”
So really being made to understand frequently that we did not belong. Even visually in the books we read, people who looked like my family, who talk like my family, weren’t present. This was not our place. We could try to fit in, we did try, but we were other. As I got older, into middle school, more and more Latino people, Black people, more people of color in general started moving to the area and so it was easy to build a community of support, and really a sense of solidarity.
I remember growing up with a lot of Cuban pride, repeatedly that repetition of, “I'm Cuban! We’re Cuban! We're not Mexican!” because Mexican was the only concept of Latinidad in that area, and then coming to recognize we had more in common with the Mexican families in this community than anybody else, and a sense of Latinidad felt supportive to me. Together we could be a safe space with each other in this very white community and so I grew up identifying as a person of color.
That, again, has changed. Within the past couple of years I started seeing activists on social media, talking about white Latinos, and it's because of my privilege that the phrase confused me. White Latinos? I'd never heard this, I didn't know anything about it and I wanted to learn more. I started listening, and basically the more I learned, the deeper I delved into race in Latinx communities, the more I could put pieces together. Like learning about the castas system from Spain where Spaniards set up castes for different races of people based on the race of their parents and assigned certain privileges within those castes. {I learned about this from many different places but one of the places I learned was from a short article by María Elena Martínez. [6]} I began having conversations with my grandparents and learning more about our history. At least three ancestors (great-great or great-great-great-grandparents) came straight to Cuba from Spain, it hit me: we are the colonizers. My grandma even told me— though I forget if it was in Cuba, or when they came to the United States— they were given a card with their race listed as white.
Really coming to understand that, how to process that and not fall into the white trap of thinking, “But I've suffered! But I've experienced racialized prejudice! Those white Americans do not treat me like a white person, they treated me as a person of color.” It was necessary to set aside my perspective, to listen and come to recognize in my own community what kind of privilege I carry.
I saw a great point someone made on social media about books that are published, stories like mine, a Latina girl in a white community, those are stories more frequently told. My story is not unique. I'm the kind of person who has a platform. I think I'm really privileged that I started working in libraries after I moved to California from Chicago. I have seen a lot of Latines represented in staffing and I've never been the only Latina on a library staff before, even if I have situations arise where I'm the only one in the room.
For me, it’s involved really starting to look at these things, learn deeper and have the hard conversations about how I want to show up. How can I be an ally, especially in my own spaces, how can I have the hard conversations with family members, being comfortable saying “Hey, that's racist.” It takes the willingness to call myself out. Willingness to learn and understand that I'm going to get things wrong, and learn to navigate different spaces as I do.
In the article, The Problem with Latinidad, Alan Pelaez Lopez said of being Afro Indigenous, “We are racialized, we don't get to claim a race people tell us what we are dependent on that geography that they're in.”
This idea was also brought up by Shereen Marisol Meraji on the podcast Code Switch, the idea of being racialized versus race within the Latine community. My race is white, I have a lot of privileges that I need to unpack and a lot of biases to unlearn to be a good accomplice. I need to try to dismantle racism, colonialism, and imperialism within myself and within my community. I also understand that the concept of my race, to others, is a flexible thing.
I've had groups of non-Latinx white friends tell me I am not white, I am a person of color. I've had friends of color tell me I’m not white and to not claim whiteness. I've also had friends of color tell me like... oh yeah! You're white! This work requires of us to just be able to sit in the discomfort. Position yourself with a desire to learn and to not be right but get it right and keep learning. (The be right vs get it right is a paraphrased saying from Brené Brown [7] that I did not realize resonated so much with me that it’s slipped into my everyday life.) That's the journey I'm on, and knowing that I still need to go deeper with this, wanting to learn more and understand my privilege. I know if I were magically able to go to Cuba tomorrow, I would have a lot of privilege. Especially within the systemic structures in place because of racism. The Cuban government put out something a few years ago about how they’d gotten rid of racism structurally, it's just socially that there's racism within the country. That, obviously, cannot exist. Those two components (social and structural) are intertwined. It’s on us to look for and practice antiracist ways to deconstruct this stuff, big scale, and small scale within ourselves.
Dialogue: Presenters Respond to Questions
What is the problem with “Latinidad?” Who is included and who is left out?
Gabby Womack
I had a lot of issues with it but the main idea is that a lot of folks within Latinidad use this as a way to gatekeep, and they tend to choose [speaking the Spanish] language to be like the biggest gatekeeper, which doesn't make any sense at least to me and I'm sure to a lot of people on this panel. Spanish is not actually the language of our countries before these folks colonized us so it's very odd that there's such an emphasis on it [Spanish]. Then it ends up leaving out people who speak Indigenous languages. For people who don't speak Spanish, you know, generations down, it's confusing because you are raised within the culture but then you don't speak Spanish so you don't count now. This is very odd because literally anybody can learn a language, so do they count now? I don't know. So that was one problem.
The other problem is that there's also this gatekeeping of how we describe ourselves: like the Latine, Latinx, Latinos. It's very class-divided and is often connected to who got to go to college and who didn't get to go to college. So some of the folks have this huge discomfort with the term Latinx and are very against the idea of adding Latines. Some people literally don't have time to sit there and think about their identity, you know? I mean, my grandparents didn't finish school after the third grade. They didn’t have time to be sitting here like, “nobody likes me,” so it feels like us being extra sensitive. I recognize that it's real, it's just that this is who we leave out: we leave out these people who are the majority of us.
Amanda Toledo
I don't know that there's necessarily one problem with Latindad. I think we've all touched on a lot of the big components of colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy. When I was thinking about this question what came to mind was Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s the danger of a single story [8]. I think that's how we end up with books like American Dirt [9]. The idea that there’s one type of Latinidad, one type of immigrant story. Who does that leave out? People of color, Indigenous Latinx people. Who gets to tell the story if there's only one story?
Cristina Fontánez Rodríguez
For me, I've been thinking a lot about this concept of unity now. This is speaking not to academia or what has been written in regards to the concept of Latinidad, but mostly socially and colloquially... when we talk about Latinidad there is a lot of talk about unity but we don’t really delve deeper into why there is a need for unity. It’s colonialism and U.S. imperialism. But Latines and Latin American regions are not the only victims of U.S. imperialism and, going back to my last point [when I was speaking earlier], we are separating ourselves from other peoples and regions who are facing these same struggles (if we’re talking about struggle) from mass migrations to lack of sovereignty to war. Still, we insist on this idea of unity within Latinos without critically thinking about it and as if we’re the only ones facing a big power looking to subjugate us. That’s where I think the concept of Latinidad can be a bit superficial and particularly unhelpful.
Yvette Ramírez
I think one thing to not forget also in terms of folks, at least within the US but maybe even outside, that drive the idea of Latinidad or a sole identity, is how capitalism works within this construct and really who benefits. You know, cultural markers of Latinidad being Goya or Univision - basically corporations. Arlene Dávila talks a lot about this idea of malls booming in Latin America and how in the US, Latines have represented a new frontier for companies due to our capital and spending power in the US. I think that's one important thing not to miss is this want for us to assimilate into whiteness/mestizaje and use the cultural markers repackaged as “US Latine” culture for marketing purposes and whatnot.
Thinking about Bolivia, those markers are our folkloric dances, our music are super integral to how we perform national identity. How we show out in parades and how we create sonic spaces of community here in the diaspora not only in the US but also in Spain and Argentina where there are a lot of Bolivian immigrants. Speaking to some Quechua folks from the DMV (Delaware, Maryland Virginia), I’m writing a piece on the Bolivian music within the diaspora, and someone I spoke to was like it’s interesting you use the word folkloric because as someone who grew up in el campo/the countryside of Cochabamba, actually I don't really resonate with that at all, like for me it's more traditional music with specific types of instruments. So sometimes that nuance and locality is obliterated by the idea of what are Bolivian national dances that has appropriated not only Indigenous but also Black rhythms as well. So you have erasure of not knowing how our cultural traditions came about but then also another erasure with a purpose to have people consume and buy under the guise of Latinidad. That is why sometimes Mitú, Pero Like or other sort of Latine social media influencers are sometimes so cringeworthy for me because I wonder if they are making it worse to challenge these myths and capitalist fabrication within Latinidad. It’s pretty scary actually.
Gabby Womack
Some of my research is on the US Census and has been on racialization within the US Census and something that not everybody knows is that this Hispanic identity wasn't even a thing that people were talking about here until I believe the 1970s. There was only one point where Mexicans were counted as Mexican on the Census and that was like 1930. Then it was removed and came back later as “Hispanic.” The thing is, this whole Latino/Latinidad thing in the US is very odd because the thing is, this change in language only comes about, at least from my knowledge of us not wanting to keep “Hispanic” as the identifier. So we change to “Latino, Latine” all that stuff. So it's very awkward because I know that the US government has grouped us all together under that name just so that they can count us and be like, “Okay, how many white people do we still have? Are we good?” You know that was the real reason. This is a quota and they're trying to, they're trying to stomp us down. So I know that this sounds like “the man” and stuff like that but that's literally what it is. It’s how all this started. So I feel at odds to the whole thing because I'm one part like, “Yeah, I want to, I want to be connected with my folks and people with a common thing but, at the same time, I recognize that doing this is just fueling what they started for us and I'm not sure if I want to be a part of that.
How/does your identity affect your work in Library and Information Science?
Gabby Womack
…[referencing a previous speaker] the whole reason why I joined this profession in the first place was supposed to be for archives. I still do archives work but the point was from a historical standpoint. I graduated with a Bachelor's in history and I kept thinking, “Where's everybody else?” I don't care to talk about Jefferson for the millionth time. I really don't care. I kept thinking, “Where would everybody else be at this point?” It became an issue with decolonizing the stacks and the profession. I was trying to bring the documents to life but also trying to remind people that not every culture documents or thinks the same way. So that’s also been something I've been working towards. But the biggest issue that I'm connecting with right now is just retention and recruitment, because we're such a small population right now. Black, Indigenous, People of Color as a whole within this institution. I've been spending a lot of time talking to other BIPOC about what it means to be in Libraries and Information Science, what it takes, and what to look out for. Explaining to them that there's gaslighting and we're not getting paid very well. Librarians don't get paid very well, generally, but we get even less.
Forcing my way into hiring committees has been rough. As the only person of color in the hiring committees, having to fight every single time and say, “What is it about this white man that you're trying to hire that is better than this person of color?” So that's where I'm coming into this profession. I’m focusing on representation and reminding people I'm here. I'm not really somebody who likes to be in the spotlight the whole time [anymore] so I'm pushing back on that, because I feel like I need to. That may come at my own expense, mental health-wise, but I know that in the long run this is something that could help us as a whole. I feel like other folks are probably trying to do the same.
Amanda Toledo
Building off of what you both just said, it really is the visibility. I read a statistic back when I was getting my Bachelor’s degree that only 2% of Latine people have a master's degree, and though that number has risen, that visibility, that master’s requirement, it's built into the foundation of librarianship. How many Latinx librarians are there? I never saw a Latinx librarian until I moved to California. Even as a teenager in Chicago, I didn't see that representation. The master's degree requirement is gatekeeping. How many amazing people have I seen, staff of color, Latinx people who are paraprofessionals? The kind of staff people say things about like, “Oh yeah they've worked here for 13 years, they're amazing, you know, they're basically a librarian! But they’re not.” Then looking at the burdens of representation that fall to those parapros. It's only happened a handful of times but for example, my being asked in a meeting to speak for all Latinos to explain the value of having a Spanish language collection. I don't want to misrepresent myself, I had to learn most of my Spanish in school because my parents were so Americanized. To be able to improve communicating with my grandparents from the amount of Spanish I grew up with, I had to take classes, so I'm not fully fluent by any stretch of the imagination.
That said, I can feel the impact of my presence, my representation when a kid comes to the library desk with a question and I can see that nervousness on their face because I've been that kid. Nervousness because their parent, or grandparents or caregiver has a question in Spanish, and they are expecting this kid to be the translator. To me, that moment is deeply impactful. It might not be perfect, it might not sound pretty, there's probably going to be a conjugation that’s gone wrong in there, but I can say “¿Cómo puedo ayudarte?” Being able to take the stress of being a translator off of a kid, seeing that little crease of stress disappear is part of the power of visibility in the field. Here in this library there's somebody for you. You are not other, you belong and I can help you. It might not be perfect but we can get it done.
Yvette Ramírez
Yeah, I think as someone who is newer to this profession because I just graduated and did a career transition. As a student learning about knowledge and information transmission, I realize that there are actually a varied number of ways knowledge sharing can happen. In the Andes such as in Bolivia it’s actually more orally as opposed to in written form. So I think we really need to acknowledge the underlying racist classification structures and it’s origins that we default to in our field. I think that's a good place to start and you know really acknowledging that history. Instead of building on top of what is already flawed perhaps let’s consider taking it apart and really ask those questions. As a former community organizer and an arts administrator, I’ve been fortunate to work with artists that are also doing memory work. So let’s also think outside of our field as there are a lot of other disciplines also doing or interested in this work. They're not in archives or libraries, but working on memory projects and having these very specific hyper-local community conversations on organizing information and co-building their own archives. I think those types of initiatives are really important.
The first semester of school, I looked at the Smithsonian virtual online archives and searched Bolivia. A habit of mine because before Evo Morales became President (in 2006), Bolivia was barely ever mentioned in mainstream Spanish news like Telemundo. And so I, like always, searched Bolivia in the Smithsonian online virtual archive, and literally the metadata I kept coming across for those records was just the word Indian, that's it. And there are 36 recognized nations in Bolivia, and perhaps that description happened 30 years ago but I'm wondering what is the reparative work? So I think for me it's one acknowledging this problem exists within Latin American-related records but also bringing in people with the lived experiences. If you're thinking about initiatives like these, whatever city you're in do not assume simply being Latinx or even having a shared nationality country works for that particular community. What are the power dynamics at play? Existing tensions in relation to class and race? Ask those questions versus going along with notions of you know like simply filling “the gaps” or other buzz terms we might use.
Cristina Fontánez Rodríguez
Talking about classification and “filling in the gaps”, I've learned mostly from being here and, being subjected to innumerable assumptions about me, the worst ones coming from well-meaning people. One example being people assuming I’ve read the same books or share their knowledge without realizing that I didn’t go through the same school system. So instead of asking me something, they’d rather assume. Having this happen to me has made me more self-aware and mindful when working with people who have a different background than me and doing description work, organizing and documentation project, or putting together an advisory board. For example, the same way that I can’t talk about the Nuyorican experience in the first person, as people often expect me to do, I wouldn’t organize a project around first-generation Filipinos and only talk to folks that have been here for three or four generations. So the one positive aspect of having these assumptions made about me, has been that I’m made aware of all the layers of an identity when trying to do representation work. And it’s still a work in progress because I was writing a case study and wrote “Puerto Rican community” and my co-author corrected me by saying “it’s Puerto Rican communities”.
How does Library and Information Science fail or succeed at supporting Latine communities, folks from Latin America or even expanding to first generation immigrants to the United States, or first generation US born?
Cristina Fontánez Rodríguez
Lack of resources in our languages, first of all. And when you see them, sometimes they're translated, again, by a well-meaning person with one year of college Spanish or Portuguese who comes up with a document that nobody from Latin American would understand and that nobody in the organization thinks should be proofed. How is this acceptable? It’s done to check a box. Meanwhile, everything else that’s written in English is vetted, revised, and proofread. And speaking from my personal experience, public libraries are not really ubiquitous in Puerto Rico. So I see us bringing in these ideas of what we think libraries and archives are, from our experience of going through grad school and working in these spaces and then turning around and creating resources for “our community” without taking the time to learn who our community is. So it’s been very jarring because I live in NYC and a lot of people have Spanish as a first language, and no matter our patrons' first language, we can’t assume that everyone understands library jargon. So imagine that library jargon going through rounds of translation by someone who is not qualified to make those translations. And of course I take into consideration budgetary issues. I know that libraries and archives can’t spend money that they don’t have on a translator. But the same care that we put into a ton of other initiatives could be put into creating resources that would actually reach the people we intend to reach.
Gabby Womack
Yeah, I want to add to what Cristina's saying about the funds for that. A lot of the time, I keep hearing this excuse, “We can’t possibly afford to do this and stuff.” Then, they say they’re gonna hire this new library director, a white man who gets a $100,000 salary or something like that. I look at them with disbelief. I had to say to somebody not long ago, “If you're going to say that you're doing a DEI initiative and you're going to be hiring more people of color, you actually have to be able to put up that money.” I just don't understand how they don't see that correlation with the money: where the money is going and where the importance is. On top of that, they say that they are going to do the DEI initiative, be more inclusive, etc., but then they hire one person to fill that role. Then everybody else acts like, “Okay, we don't have to do anything else!”
I think we need more about that or about us but not about our subjugation all the time, but about celebrating us, and that ends up being all on me. This is what I'm talking about: you want me to just do it so then you don't put in that extra money. I end being the one that has to continue living in those conditions that they stereotype us for having to live in. It makes me want to pull my hair out and I know I'm not the only one.
Amanda Toledo
I think they're all just hitting it on the head exactly. We've never fostered relationships with Latine patrons so we get to call them an underserved community. Then we're here trying to figure out what they need and what they want. Someone on social media pointed out a pervasive phrase in non-profit work that I’ve heard a few times over the years when discussing marginalized communities, the idea of “making them productive members of society”. I’m for going in with a strengths based mentality for a community that's underserved and discarding that capitalist and ableist perspective that someone becomes of value by being productive. There's no program a library can offer to make someone a valued “productive” member of society, every human inherently has value. I love some of the things that are being said about EDI work and, yeah, we can’t do this if we don't have a policy change, or just dismantling white supremacy culture in libraries. Sofia Leung, did a great presentation about BIPOC solidarity and disrupting white supremacy and looking at white supremacy culture. It is pervasive in librarianship. If we can't dismantle that within our own systems, how can we really seek to serve any BIPOC and Latine communities?
Yvette Rodríguez
I saw there were some LIS and archive students in the chat so also thinking as someone who's just come out of a program as basically a diversity fellow which covered my tuition. However despite that monetary support I was astonished by the complete lack of support systems provided by my school. I'm from New York City but I'm now living in Ann Arbor, Michigan which is, in itself, just a huge shift from Queens. My program is very tech heavy so they kind of throw you in to take Python, which is good but as someone who has been out of school for like 10 years and with a humanities, social sciences background, I was literally learning how to code for the very first time. There is this sort of like very embedded bootstrap mentality of working hard but all on your own. My cohort was 90% white. There was this kind of like general sense of–I don't want to show you my code, I don't want to share with you my notes but just try harder and you’ll get it. Then you go to tutoring, and yeah, here's a tutor list with a rate of $100 an hour. What if you can’t afford that, what resources do you have and who could you turn to when you’re also probably dealing with imposter syndrome? A culture of silence. By finding other BIPOC and speaking of our very similar experiences, I was able to get that support and pass that Python class that first semester. It was like fuck it, we're gonna scam our way through this class, get it done and graduate.
It’s just incredible how these sort of moments can break you, where you’re wondering–is something wrong with me? Why is everyone just getting through and not me? Had I not found my friends in the program I might’ve been like, nope I'm giving up and went back home to Queens. I saw this apathy of whiteness; again this last semester where folks are looking for jobs and complaining about moving to a racist part of the country, meanwhile your Black and Brown classmates are struggling and asking for help but you don’t notice or care frankly. As folks are sharing about their experiences in the workplace, in LIS/Archives programs, it's just the same. There’s throwing money at a lot of stuff but in the wrong places.
Dialogue: Questions from the Audience
“For Latinx people who define themselves as white, how can you avoid assimilating to whiteness? This is why I don’t want to label myself as white.
For those that self-identify as Latinx, do you see your Latinx identity as a race or ethnicity? Are Spaniards considered Latino like Antonio Banderas and Enrique Iglesias who self-identify as Latino?”
Cristina Fontánez Rodríguez
One of the things that [Jennifer Ferretti] and I discussed I could bring into my 7-minute presentation was to talk about my experience encountering Latinindad in the U.S. I touched upon this just a little bit. I am eternally confused here. Ethnicity, race, and nationality are used interchangeably and that’s not something I was used to. I don’t see Latinidad as a race. Growing up on the island, it wasn’t news to me that “Puerto Rican” is not a race. So seeing journalists speak about the “Puerto Rican community and the Black community” or hearing people talk about white people but somehow not including white Latines into that group was something that was difficult for me to fully grasp. I also remember a friend saying that my partner, who is a Puerto Rican man, is white passing. No, he is a white man. How can being born somewhere change your race? That makes no sense. So to answer the question, no I don’t equate my Latinidad with my race. You should be able to call yourself Latine, if that’s how you identify, regardless of your race.
Now, do I think that people like Antonio Banderas and Enrique Iglesias are latinos? I don’t really care. I guess it depends on the description of Latinidad we’re using. I don’t know if folks remember the year that Antonio Banderas was nominated for an Oscar and someone wrote a piece stating that he was one of the few people of color nominated that year. There were quite a few articles from Spanish and Spanish-language media explaining to the public that all Latines are considered people of color in the US. It was so interesting to read about the same subject on American and Spanish media. Still, if we want to say that being from Spain doesn’t automatically make you Latine or doesn’t make you a person of color, that’s fine. But let’s also remember that just like people from the US can be Latines and just like not all Americans are white, it’s the same case in other countries, including Spain. It’s also important to remember that concepts of identity, heritage, and race vary by country. And on the flip side, being Latine doesn’t automatically make that person share the same lived experiences as other Latines. I don’t know why I keep thinking of Hollywood examples but I read and hear people talk about filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso Cuarón like they’re Dreamers and I just don’t understand the lack of nuance and context with which these stories of Latines who “made it” are presented.
Gabby Womack
I kind of don't care but I kind of do only because of the fact that the English colonizers don't get to claim Blackness, but for some reason Spaniards somehow have been able to slip into pretending that they are also oppressed people. That makes me uncomfortable because they were our colonizers, too. It's super awkward to me that they're trying to act like we're all part of the same crew, then you start speaking Spanish to them and they're like, “your Spanish is not real, you know!” They want to play both sides.
Amanda Toledo
Because I do identify as white, I'd also say I do appreciate how the question is phrased, because you're not putting emotional labor on Black, Indigenous, People of Color, so thank you. Speaking just from my personal lived experience, I don't know that there's a way to avoid assimilating with white values because we're steeped in that culture in America. What I can say is, yeah, it's painful to have to look at yourself and think of yourself as white. That's really uncomfortable, especially if you've experienced racialized prejudice. All you can do to try to resist that is educate yourself, maybe you cannot avoid assimilating with whiteness but you can attempt to be antiracist and think about all of these manifestations of white supremacy in your life. For example, I’m looking at reading Sabrina Strings book, Fearing the Black Body, it's about fat phobia. I'm not trying to go on a tangent, but I think about our families and fatness and ask what beauty standard, what value, is that rooted in within Latinidad? That's just one piece. So looking at educating yourself, not putting that labor on Afro Latinx people or Indigenous people, educating ourselves, is the first best step. We're not going to get it right all the time, and just doing that work is the best thing we can do.
Yvette Ramírez
I just want to add that it's really complicated due to mestizaje and this really nebulous idea of what identity is in Latin America which in the end too defaults to whiteness or better yet white supremacy. My father who's actually a lot darker than me actually identifies as white when filling out government forms such as the census. I also probably used to do that as well until I was like wait a minute, and started checking the other box. And that's a separate conversation but I think about what Amanda said, I'm also in this journey, and as someone who also has certain privileges in terms of access to information and finding digital communities also talking about this. I actually have been learning my ancestral language of Aymara this past year during the pandemic on Zoom/Whatsapp and that's been an amazing experience. My mother in particular has also been really interested in also learning more about our Aymara traditions as I've been in this process which has been a first because we never really intentionally talked about that. And I also don't want to be like, oh well how dare you not know more because again it's a process especially as a working class immigrant. These sort of conversations may start with us but it can become an intergenerational conversation with time and care.
I'm learning Aymara and my father shades me all the time, like “Why are you learning that language? You should be learning like you know French or some other you know useful language,” even though Aymara in Bolivia is now used in professional settings. It's just really complicated and again I just think about a lot of the stuff that they have lived through that I haven't while also recognizing my own racialized experience growing up in the US.
“I’ve heard from several Haitian immigrants over the past few years say that they don’t consider themselves to be part of the Latinidad diaspora, even though Haitians are often included in the Latinidad conversation. Is it possible to bridge the gap between Haitian and Latino people? If so, how?”
Gabby Womack
From my perspective, with my Haitian friends and in Central Florida, part of it is the older generations. They make it hard to try and make a change because they're just so stuck in this mindset. This is a quick example: My family was having a yard sale and we were trying to sell some clothes. Some of our Haitian neighbors were checking out the stuff and looking at the shoes and they start trying to haggle with my grandma. As soon as they walk away she's immediately critical. She was always talking under her breath in Spanish, but she was way worse when the people she was talking about were Haitian. “You see, they don't think that it's worth that much and they try to haggle with me,” she’d complain and I'm like, “but you were literally just haggling at the grocery store yesterday. Stop trying to act like they're the only ones who do the haggling.” It is very weird.
Part of it is then not being able to let go of that anti-Blackness, but I think one of the biggest issues I have is them not acknowledging the pain that we have inflicted on our Haitian friends and their families. Like the Parsley Massacre and all of the things going all the way back really to the whole creation of this country. If we acknowledge this, and actually start working towards eliminating anti-Haitian and anti-Blackness, I think that might make a difference.
We invite you to visit our event page, which contains our Further Reading list, music playlist, and panelist bios, and to take a look at our reading list on Bookshop.org. As a Bookshop.org affiliate, purchases made through our collections go directly to support Community Study.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to our editors, Sofia Leung and Jorge López-McKnight.
Thank you to the panel participants who made time to tell their story, not only during the live event, but in planning meetings before it happened.
Thank you to the panelists who were able to take part in the publishing process.
Thank you to those who were able to attend the live event.
Thank you to Kristina Santiago for the tech and content support of the live panel event.
Thank you to the We Here community.
Thank you to up//root: a we here publication for giving us the space to share this.
Thank you to Miguel Salazar for writing “The Problem with Latinidad.”
Wepa.
Citations and References
[1][2] University of Southern California. “New study finds that popular movies continue to marginalize Hispanic/Latinos,” USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. September 15, 2021.
[3] Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. (2012). "Decolonization is not a metaphor." Decolonization: Indigeneity, education & society 1.1.
[4] Alvitre, Cindy M. Waa’ aka’: The Bird Who Fell in Love with the Sun. Hey Day Books. https://heydaybooks.com/catalog/waaaka/.
[5] Reese, Debbie. (2019, March 9). Are You Planning To Do a Land Acknowledgement?. American Indians in Children’s Literature. https://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/2019/03/are-you-planning-to-do-land.html#:~:text=2)%20If%20you're%20wondering,is%20meant%20to%20create%20awareness.&text=It%20becomes%20an%20empty%20gesture,It%20becomes%20this%20century's%20mascot.
[6] Martínez, María Elena. Social Order in the Spanish New World. PBS. http://inside.sfuhs.org/dept/history/Mexicoreader/Chapter3/Social%20Order%20in%20the%20Spanish%20New%20World.pdf.
[7] Brown, Brené. (2018). Dare to Lead. Random House.
[8] Adichie, Chimamnda Ngozi. “The Danger of a Single Story”. TedTalks. https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.
[9] Gurba, Myriam. (2019, Dec 12). Pendeja, You Ain’t Steinbeck: My Bronca with Fake-Ass Social Justice Literature. Tropics of Meta.
@angelcaido666x (Twitter user). (2019, Nov 21). https://twitter.com/angelcaido666x/status/1197582319177129986?s=20
Codeswitch, NPR. (2021, May 12). The Kid Mero Talks ‘What It Means to Be Latino.’ Codeswitch. https://www.npr.org/2021/04/28/991629761/the-kid-mero-talks-what-it-means-to-be-latino
Dunn, Elizabeth. (2018, May 15). The Tortilla Cartel. Taste. https://tastecooking.com/the-tortilla-cartel/
Galeano, Eduardo. (1997). Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. Monthly Review Press.
Leung, Sofia Y. (2020). Disrupting White Supremacy Through BIPOC Solidarity. The Chinese American Library Association Northern California Chapter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viCeoxO20BI
Salazar, Miguel. (2019). “The Problem with Latinidad. The Nation. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/hispanic-heritage-month-latinidad/
Strings, Sabrina. (2019). Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia. NYU Press.
Tenorio-Trillo, Mauricio. (2020). Latin America: The Allure and Power of an Idea. University of Chicago Press.
