Latinidad

Introduction

The concept of Latinidad, within a US context, emerged most prominently from the Chicano movement in which scholars like Gloria Anzaldúa promoted Latinidad to consolidate the political power of Latinas/os in the United States, who prior to 1969 were identified by the Census Bureau as white. [1] Today, Latinidad is “anchored in the social, everyday realities of our diasporic communities and in the spaces populated by Latinas/os of various nationalities, generations, immigrant statuses, and racial and gender identities.” [2] Latinidad is an ethnic construct rather than a racial one, which is important to note considering the confusion that exists amongst the mainstream about what race Latino/a/x people are.

Latinidad has been critiqued more recently for perpetuating white supremacy within the Latinx community, but some still maintain that Latinidad as an imperfect concept can be reworked to be more inclusive. In Keywords for Latina/o Studies, Frances R. Aparicio posits that Latinidad is a site of contestation defined by “competing authenticities and paradigms of identity that, together, and in conflict with each other, constitute the heterogeneous experiences of various Latina/o national groups” [3]. Highlighting the nomadic nature of the term allows for users to rewrite and reclaim it in a more inclusive manner. For example, scholars have utilized the plural term “Latinidades” to refer to the shared experiences of colonization of Latinx people and emphasize the agency of resistance of national groups of Latin American origin in the US. [4] In thinking of Latinidad as a fluid term, it sheds its homogenizing effects and becomes a label of collective identity that propels Latinx people to become political agents capable of defining and altering how they are perceived as a panethnic group.

Hegemonic Latinidad

The most common definition and understanding of Latinidad is what we have coined as the hegemonic, sanitized version of Latinidad; hegemonic Latinidad has been propagated by an extensive history of white supremacy in Latin America stemming primarily from the notion of mestizaje that posits Latin American society as racially “color blind” and “post-racial” due to extensive racial mixing that has occurred across Latin America. This notion of “color blindness” in Latin America ignores a large part of Latinidad’s history which is that about 15 times as many African slaves were taken to Latin American colonies than to the US by various European colonizing influences including the Spanish empire and the Portuguese empire. [5] It also ignores the violent history of Indigenous conquest across Latin America. The systemic impact of the term thus dates to before the 15th century, with implications of racial hierarchy and the exclusion of those who did not have European ancestry or white skin across Latin America as a result of the transatlantic slave trade and colonization of the Americas. The history behind hegemonic Latinidad as a colonial construct inherent to Latinidad’s definition is central to our understanding of how Latinidad is constructed and how it is being deconstructed contemporarily.

Iberian colonialism contributed to the construction of a racial caste system across Latin America that idealized the white purity of upper-class Hispano-Americans as descendants of colonizers. The history of the term Latinidad makes it clearly problematic, as it is a construct created by the White Creole and Mestizo/a elites of South America and the Caribbean who sought to create their own postcolonial identity as a means of securing their power in the racial hierarchy as above Indigenous, Black, or racially mixed colonized subjects. [6] Latinidad as a term thus offers pseudo-solidarity despite the fact that “Latinxs with the most privilege (white, straight, cis gender, wealthy, able-bodied men) are centered” within hegemonic Latinidad. [7] Despite this, many Latinos/as do not recognize the ways in which colonialism has shaped understandings of Latinidad as an identifier. Betraying Latinidad and critiquing its implications serves as a way for colonized people to challenge hegemonic notions of the very label used to identify them as “a concept that was given to us in the Global North means to re-center the Global South. . . . A betrayal of Latinidad is a remapping of the Global South as a place of incredible knowledge that the Global North is willingly silencing.” [8]

Critiques of Latinidad

Latinidad has recently come under fire for being exclusionary of non-white Latinx people and queer Latinx people. It has also been co-opted as a movement and commercialized, which has led others to critique how Latinidad has become imbricated by capitalism. In her piece “When It Comes to Latinidad, Who Is Included and Who Isn’t?” Janel Martinez argues that the generalized term of Latinidad perpetuates this history of white supremacy within Latin America. In 2018, poet Alan Pelaez Lopez went viral on Instagram after coining #latinidadiscancelled. In the article, Martinez highlights the #latinidadiscancelled discourse focused on critiquing Latinidad as an intellectual framework and political term, that “has historically proven to be a term beneficial to a select few.” [9] The construction of the word was built on the projection of a myth of color-blindness and mestizaje, when in reality, economic and social privilege break down along racial lines. Her critique pushes the notion that “the goal of Latinidad is to be accepted by white United Statians as opposed to the goal of Latinidad existing to address global anti-Blackness, particularly because Latin America has the largest population of Black people outside of Africa.” [10] Martinez’s critique asserts that Latinidad as a term that has been catered to a white, cis, straight population.

As Tatiana Flores explains in an essay from Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, “anti-Black racism is ubiquitous in Latin America and commonplace in Latinx communities, even in those with Afro-descendant roots. Black erasure, sadly, is built into the concept of latinidad.” [11] Flores distinguishes that Black, Indigenous, and Latinx pasts are not mutually exclusive. Still, US history is not bound by the physical border and has been shaped by events in Europe, the Caribbean, and across Latin America. She uses Haiti as a prime example, examining the country’s history, arguing that Haiti never counted as a part of ‘Latin’ America because ‘Latins’ were supposed to be not Black but White Creoles or, at most,” mixed-race peoples, who were “Europeans in mind.” [12] As Paris-based Peruvian intellectual Francisco García Calderón analyzed in his 1912 volume Les démocraties latines de l’Amérique, “Latin America’s ‘inferiority’ with respect to the United States and the world …[on] blackness.” [13] Calderón, “blackness is both a “‘degenerate’ element’ and a force “so vital and invigorated that it corrupts and overpowers the [Latin] race” that he himself frames as superior.” (McDaniel, 130) [14] Colonialism has made it, so people invest in the ideology of whiteness; therefore, Latinidad can additionally be interpreted as construction by the elite in attempts for white domination and to uphold a racial caste system.

The terms Hispanic and Latin American in the Americas presuppose a European colonial identity. The notion of “Latinity” as argued by Michela Coletta, is that nineteenth-century European immigration to South America deeply shaped “conceptions of Latinity.” [15] South America, she argues, “involved a complex endeavor in adapting European theories of civilization to Spanish American national realities.” In the Americas, the term “Hispanic carries connotations of racial purity, ” (Moya, 103), presupposing a European colonial identity. [16] The countries of Latin America have long seen themselves as European diaspora, although considered inferior by the United States. Axioms today like alluding to “mejorar la raza” (improving the race), widely used among Latinxs and Latin Americans to encourage “marrying up,” concludes the perpetuation of internalized anti-blackness within the Latin American community instilled through colonial powers and accomplices.

The experiences of Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Central Americans, Colombians and other Latin American groups in the United States are quite different. Do they share enough experiences and cultures to merit being lumped together under ‘latinidad’? Claudia Milian asserts the term Latinidad’s “tendency to homogenize peoples whose histories, language usage, and circumstances may differ significantly” and posits that it offers “no analytic terms…for the theorizing of collective Latino and Latina dissonances, variances, and disagreements.” (Milian, 12) [17] The idea of a “united race” conceals the reality that the construct of Laintidad excludes essential experiences and traditions of African, Asian, and indigenous populations of the American continent. As Flores puts it: “It is the mixed-race identity borne of miscegenation but known by the more benign name of mestizaje.” [18] The concept of Latinidad, when used to emphasize common heritage, traditions, and culture across Latin Americans in Latin American countries and the U.S., hides the reality of racialized oppression and racism prevalent in Latin American societies and the greater diaspora, including the United States of America. It also ignores other levels of privilege afforded to certain people, such as class privilege, citizenship status privileges, and educational privileges.

In their article “Latinx Thoughts: Latinidad with an X,” Salvador Vidal-Ortiz and Juliana Martínez outline how within discussions of Latinidad, the self-naming practices used have been a large source of contention; within academic spheres, the term Latinx is primarily used, even though it is imperfect. The term’s origin is unclear, but it has been traced to online forums from the 90s and different online queer spaces starting in 2004. [19] The term Latinx has been criticized as an imperialist imposition on the Spanish language because the “x” at the end of the word is not commonly used in Spanish grammar/phonology to indicate gender inclusivity. [20] Some argue that it is an imperialist term that “reaffirms the preponderance of the United States and its more dominant language on a global scale.” [21] However, Vidal-Ortiz and Martínez argue that the increasing presence of the “x” as a gender-inclusive alternative in Spanish words signals the plasticity and health of Spanish and Latinx culture. Instead of arguing about grammatical correctness or language purity around using a term ending in “x,” Vidal-Ortiz and Martínez think the conversation should focus on “how gendered and ethno-racialized bodies are produced and managed partly through language.” [22] The term Latinx produces discomfort among some conservative and normative Latinos/as, therefore destabilizing in-group power dynamics. The plurality of experience—of queer Latinx people, undocumented Latinx people, Afro-Latinx people, indigenous Latinx people, and others who are more likely to identify with Latinx—can be perceived as a threat to those who have traditionally controlled the narrative. Thus, although there are valid critiques to be made of the term, there is also value in thinking about how pushback might be a reflection of hegemonic, exclusive understandings of Latinidad.

Ana Mendieta’s Untitled, Glass on body imprints are a series of images with her face and body imprinted onto the glass thus distorting the portrayal of herself. This portrayal of herself disrupts how an audience encounters her being. Ana Mendieta was a Cuban-American performance and video artist, painter, and sculptor. Her works, like the Glass on body imprints, center themes of violence against women, which are frequently overlooked and ignored. Within the context of Latinidad, Mendieta’s work is vital because women’s bodies are continually sexualized, objectified, and commodified therefore Mendieta’s art brings attention to these issues; she refuses the silences that allow Latinx female bodies to be brutalized. Additionally, as someone who immigrated to the United States from Cuba through Operation Peter Pan, Mendieta’s work is heavily imbued with analyzing Cuba as the homeland and as a diasporic body alongside the violence imposed on female bodies. Although not directly tied to the Glass on body imprints, her poem “Pain of Cuba, body I am” continues the discussion of Latinidad through the perspective of bruised and broken bodies:

“Pain of Cuba 

body I am 

my orphanhood I live

In Cuba when you die 

the earth that covers us speaks

But here 

covered by the earth whose prisoner I am 

I feel death palpitating underneath 

the earth.

And, so 

as my whole body is filled with want of Cuba 

I go on to make my work upon the earth, 

to go on is victory.”

Both the poem and the photographs mentioned above, explore distinct conceptions of Latinidad. Her images not only create space for centering female perspectives but also ask the audience to question what cycles and structures, which are often perpetuated by the Latinx culture, lead to the sexualization of Latinx female bodies. Mendieta’s articulation of Cuba as a body and homeland she longs for but can no longer reach allude to Anzaldúa’s illustration of “the barbed wire,” and a perpetual existence of being in-between spaces (Anzaldúa). [23] Therefore, her pieces also pull from previous generations to articulate and unearth the still unspoken layers of Latinidad.

Rejection of Defined Structures

Critiques of Latinidad allow for the deconstruction and reconstruction of Latinidad into a term that more holistically includes and invites everyone. A term that was once used to exclude and exile people from belonging is being reclaimed as a place for holding the complexities and tensions of the hyphenated experience of Latinidad. By embracing, as Flores says in her essay, “antiracism…[and] speak[ing] out against sexism, gender violence, homophobia, transphobia, family separation, migrant criminalization, white supremacy, Indigenous invisibility, geographic segregation, and cultural erasure…” contemporary discussions seek to decolonize Latinidad. [24] Artists, academics, theorizers, writers, poets, and performers are more intentionally centering and amplifying the stories of those who are erased and hidden by white history. Black and Indigenous perspectives are moved from the periphery into the center of constructing Latinidad. Art and performance are two particularly popular avenues for the reworking of Latinidad; this makes sense given the commercialization of Latinidad has promoted a “one size fits all” approach to portrayals of Latinx culture on screen and in art, so Latinx creatives have taken to similar mediums to reconstruct Latinidad in the American imaginary. Art and performance are also relatively accessible forms of intellectual discourse, therefore destabilizing Latinidad’s historical prioritization of the wealthy elite in favor of a populist, people-centered avenue of discourse.

One artist working to reconstruct Latinidad is Josefina Báez, a Dominican and New Yorkian actress, writer, theater director, and educator. In 2000, Báez published Dominicanish, a written piece and performance that challenges hegemonic and binary notions of language by positioning herself in the liminal space of various identities. Since then, Báez has edited this piece several times, reworking the order and structure of the piece and performance. Báez was particularly thinking about her “Dominican-York” audience as she created this piece, as this was the standpoint which she was creating the performance from. Dominicanish is a book intentionally composed in Spanglish to reflect the hyphenated experience of Latinidad, thus this piece is curated for those who resonate with such an experience. By moving between English and Spanish, Báez frees herself of the confinement of solely existing in one language. In Dominicanish she rejects the confinement of “standard” English by saying “sursdei” instead of Tuesday and “zerdeis” instead of Thursday. [25] Rejections of “standard” English center new, reimagined, and reconstructed forms of language. By reimagining language, Báez reimagines Latinidad to exist outside of the singularity of one language. Latinidad, like Spanglish, moves to and from spaces and becomes kinetic. Through her writing, Báez highlights the embodied experience of constantly existing influx. Additionally, her portrayal of this piece into performance alludes to the embodied experience of Latinidad and hyphenated identity. Latinidad is not only experienced through language and speech, but through movement and music which Báez highlights in her piece. This portrayal of Latinidad as a constantly moving experience, vastly contradicts binary and exclusive portrayals of Latinidad.

Another similar creative disrupting hegemonic Latinidad is Candice D’Meza, an African American-Haitian Queer Mother, writer, actor, activist, and filmmaker whose work focuses on theater, performance, and dance, as well as ritual and Afrofuturism. In 2020, D’Meza published FATHERLAND, a multimedia piece, and performance that spotlights Haitian Vodou spirituality as a method for grappling with grief and death. For D’Meza, this piece was a space for her to heal from the heartbreak she experienced in her relationship with her father. This piece also came at a time of deep turbulence and turmoil both for individuals and society. Therefore, although unintentionally, this piece also offered a space of healing for viewers. Haitian Vodou spirituality became a place for D’Meza to encounter her own healing. By centering these practices, D’Meza’s piece rejects the demonizing narrative imposed onto Black spirituality within Latinidad. Additionally, she creates space to wrestle with the struggles of grief which are frequently overlooked within Latinidad because survival—a predominant characteristic of Latinidad within the United States—does not allow space for hurt, heartbreak, and hopelessness. FATHERLAND rejects the erasure of Blackness and redefines Latinidad by incorporating Afro-Latinx voices and practices. Similarly to Báez’s piece, FATHERLAND is a performance piece that also centers embodied experience. This is further experimented with in D’Meza’s piece as she plays with location. She situates herself on stage, then in a bathtub submerged in water, and next to the ocean. As D’Meza experiments with different locations, she is also alluding to the movement, ebb, and flow, of the process of healing. Her connection to water is also significant in conjunction with Haiti and showcases her intention to come back to the island as her homeland. FATHERLAND redefines Latinidad through themes of home and healing specific to an Afro-Latinx context, which has been excluded from hegemonic Latinidad.

Within discussions of Latinidad, the voices of women of color—which have long been displaced from the conversation—place both their experiences and the experiences of their communities at the center to reimagine and recreate what Latinidad encapsulates. Báez and D’Meza use performance to highlight the ways in which the physical body embodies and experiences trauma and how it can also be used to find healing. As women of color, the choice to center their bodies is an act of reclamation. Although their works are intended for a broader Latinx audience, both artists intentionally chose to center the racialized bodies of women of color in their creative work, which is a large disruption of hegemonic Latinidad’s usage of racialized bodies as expendable at best or invisible at worst. They reclaim their bodies and give themselves the power to decide how they will tell their stories. For Báez, writing becomes the medium through which she can reclaim her voice and define language on her own terms; writing is the space she uses to liberate herself of literary structures that seek to reject her voice. Through diverse art expressions, Báez and D’Meza reject the notions of Latinidad that sought to exclude them and, instead, amplify Black Latinx voices. Their depiction of Latinidad is just one way of deconstructing hegemonic Latinidad.

Contributors

Paola Ruiz-Manrique, Amalia Hirschhorn-Martinez, Emara Sáez

References

1. Aparicio, Frances R. “Latinidad/es.” In Keywords for Latina/o Studies, by Deborah R. Vargas, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, and Nancy Raquel Mirabal. New York University Press, 2017. http://ezproxy.library.tufts.edu/login?auth=tufts&url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/nyupresskls/latinidad_es/0?institutionId=991
2. Aparicio, Keywords for Latina/o Studies.
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5. Flores, Tatiana. “Latinidad Is Cancelled.” Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, vol. 3, no. 3, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1525/lavc.2021.3.3.58, 73.
6. Flores, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, 63.
7. Martinez, Janel. “When It Comes to Latinidad, Who Is Included and Who Isn’t?” Remezcla, 2 Aug. 2019, https://remezcla.com/features/culture/when-it-comes-to-latinidad-who-is-included- and-who-isnt/.
8. Flores, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, 67.
9. Martinez, Remezcla.
10. Martinez, Remezcla.
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13. Flores, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, 63.
14. McDaniel, Shawn. “Votre América: Blackness and Pan-Latinism in Les démocraties latines de l’Amérique.” Revista hispánica moderna 68, no. 2 (2015): 103.
15. Moya, Paula “Why I Am Not Hispanic: An Argument with Jorge Gracia,” The American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Hispanic/Latino Issues in Philosophy 1 (Spring 2001): 103.
16. Milian, Claudia. Latining America: Black-Brown Passages and the Coloring of Latino/a Studies (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2013), 12.
17. Flores, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, 69.
18. Vidal-Ortiz, Salvador, and Juliana Martínez. “Latinx Thoughts: Latinidad with an X.”SpringerLink. Palgrave Macmillan UK, September 3, 2018. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41276-018-0137-8#citeas, 385.
19. Vidal-Ortiz and Martínez. “Latinx Thoughts: Latinidad with an X.” 385.
20. Vidal-Ortiz and Martínez. “Latinx Thoughts: Latinidad with an X.” 391.
21. Vidal-Ortiz and Martínez. “Latinx Thoughts: Latinidad with an X.” 393.
22. Anzaldua
23. Flores, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, 59.
24. Baez, Josefina. Dominicanish: A Performance Text. Nueva York: Graphic Art, 2000.
25. Baez, Dominicanish