An Afro descendant is about to become the president of the United States. It's time to end a fake and racist identity imposed to dark skinned peoples of the southern nations of America. We are not Latinos nor Hispanics.
Illustration Robbie Dove
or any other country south of the US, he would be called Latino or Hispanic. In fact, the US government would say that he is white, that he needs to forget about his African father, and that because he speaks English and his mother looks European -even if she has Native ancestors- he is of fully European heritage.
Ridiculous ah? Well that is how I feel when someone tells me I am Latino or Hispanic. It's like denying a big part of my heritage and ancestry.
How did this happened?When the Abya Yala continent –America- was invaded at the end of the XV century, European kingdoms divided the land of our ancestors in different regions. After only five centuries, we face two main dominant influences in our land: the northern Europeans or Anglos, and the southern Europeans or Latinos.
This is obvious in the way we the Native people are described today. For some decades now, the words Latino and Hispanic have been used in the United States to group people (and their descendants) that are not considered fully Anglo Americans. With those words they refer to the peoples and cultures of the southern regions of this continent -taken by southern Europeans.
These words are wrong and bad intentioned, because they are intended to deny the true identity of hundreds of millions of Native peoples and African descendants who speak Spanish and Portuguese among hundreds of other Native and Afro descendant languages and dialects -as they say. Words that were picked by the US government and its allies in the south: mostly-white elites of so called Latin America region, the most unfair of the planet.
Thus, as long as you have a Spanish-sound name, you do become part of those groups no matter what race you are. By denying our identity, they are manipulating the poorest communities of this invaded continent, so our true history can be deleted for ever.
The "other" minorityAnd yet, another reason for the US government to create this fake “minority” was to compete with the African American civil rights process. Racist white people in the US decided that one way to prevent progress among the most oppressed people in this continent was by dividing us.
Therefore the fake Latino and Hispanic “minority” has become a lousy imitation of the Black American leadership. Everything African Americans do, the Hispanics will copy creating an unnecessary competition in order to content the majority.
Unlike African Americans, whose struggle, civil rights victories and freedom from slavery have become examples for the whole world; the “Latinos” are not one race nor have one only culture. No way. They lack of a common history in America as well, and there aren’t role models and a true representation to defend the rights of our peoples.
Cesar Chavez for example, was a Native man indigenous to this continent, like most Mexican Americans. I also am a Native man myself; my ancestors are the Quechua and Muchik people of the Andean region. But here in the US I get to be called with the same word that describes the slavers of my ancestors.
Remember, the Hispanics were the invaders who committed the biggest genocide in human history, and they started the African slave trade in Portugal. Remember.
Like in the moviesAnother reason to create the words Latino and Hispanic was to please Americans who like to live in a bubble of denial, preferring to ignore cultures and ethnicities of the rest of the world. This way, it has became easy to assume that if you have certain “look” or surname, then you must like eating tacos, dance Salsa and drink mojitos.
It’s like Carmen Miranda: dressing as a mocked African woman, dancing Brazilian music, in a Cuban cabaret environment. A whole new identity designed in the US was forced into the rest of the continent. One day we were told we are Latinos Hispanics, and we believed it, we were defeated.
This is who we areIn reality, the majority of our population here in the US, and in the countries of Central, Caribbean and South America, is either Native indigenous people to this continent, and Afro descendants.
We are Native people; we are the African descendants, including the mixed blooded Indigenous peoples. We are the same very people that Latinos and Hispanics have oppressed ever since the European invasion of the 15th century.
Of course we have also communities of other origins: Europeans –not only Spaniards- and Asians, Arabs, East Indians, Polynesians, you name it. We have diverse communities with differences and also with common elements. But unfortunately, we haven’t reached into a point in history where we respect that diversity. We are forced to deny who we are since we were children in school, and we hate each other secretly.
This is what has made “Latin” America such a divided and conflicting region, where small elites of European descendants –criollos- exploit the majority of Indigenous and Afro descendants, with the support of the US and European governments. Few people have too much, and a majority has nothing no matter how hard they work.
Why do they hate us?
The whole America -or the Abya Yala continent as we the Indigenous peoples like to call it- is a continent that is still under colonization and occupation. We the dark-skinned peoples are still being oppressed by the nations created after the European contact.
That is why millions of Indigenous communities from Canada to Chile are pushed into poverty and isolation, and our culture is mocked and hidden by the media, our rights are denied, our land is stolen to extract natural resources, our religions are forbidden, our cultural heritage is stolen and renamed to make profits, our youth is infested with drugs and guns, our parents are told not to have children, our men are sent to wars, our workers are imprisoned.
That is why we as people are hidden behind a fake identity, they don’t want us to know we descend from the people they invaded and slaved. How can we stand for our rights, and fight injustice when we don’t even know who we are? When we hate each other based on who looks whiter than other.
A tragedy is happening in front of our eyes: millions of Native workers from the south that have walked into the US in the last decades, without documents –are called illegal aliens and treated as delinquents, being incarcerated, abused, exploited and rejected by a nation that lays in Native land itself. Who is speaking for us?
The African descendants who are one third of the population in "Latin" America, they had arrived to this land long before the Europeans. But Blacks didn’t come here to steal land and genocide our grandparents. We coexisted for many centuries.
Today, Black people in the Americas are one of the most oppressed and discriminated people -especially in those countries that call themselves Latins, where Afro descendants are considered less humans and less capable than others, and are pushed into poverty and associated with crime and anything that is negative.
Time for change?When Barack Obama -an African descendant- became elected as the next president of the US, many oppressed celebrated, and our souls were filled with hope, truly. A nation created by European invaders, and built on slavery and genocide, is trying to defeat its demons by electing the son of an African man and a white woman of Scottish and Cherokee Indigenous ancestry.
Change is definitely happening in America, we thought.
But it seems that within the US, there are people who are reluctant to change. They still call themselves Latinos and Hispanics, as they have learned to deny their true self. They prefer promoting the same cultural and racial discrimination that our relatives and friends suffer in the Indigenous America.
Following our true identityEach person must define and value their own identity, both racial and cultural. No human being should face such imposition, as is stated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations.
For the population of immigrant workers who speak Spanish -and their descendants- there is only one option to follow, if we ever want our rights to be respected.
That is, to embrace who we are, and the history that predates us, and to know the reasons why we are in this country today. We are here because of historical events that we didn’t cause nor promote; we escaped the poverty created by racist societies in “Latin” American societies. We are here not to beg, not to "fit in". We do not need to accommodate who we are and how we live, just to please their eyes.
The less we know the more vulnerableWe are here because he are searching for a better life, not a life of material comfort only but a place where we can be respected and our children can grow and develop as human beings. And part of that life includes honoring our ancestors.
Until the day when we are given back our right to value our true heritage, then our youth will fall into violence, drugs and conformism, as they ignore their place in earth and their true identity.
Until we recognize that the Latino and Hispanic communities are fake, and that we are not part of it, we won’t become part of America as the individuals we are. Because by withholding racist stereotypes, we are victims of self discrimination.
If we don’t recognize our true heritage, we will be slaved by a white-supremacist vision of the world, which states that if you are dark-skinned, then you are supposed to follow orders and accept the set of rules that others have pre designed for you and your people.
Change won’t come to our communities in the US, until we end the tyranny of the Spanish-speaking media that poison our households with their racist and stupid content, holding people in a state of servant mentality.
I am not asking for racial hate, but for respect. All humans should be equal.
Abuses, incarceration, deportations, displacement, assassinations, family separations and human exploitation against dark skinned Natives and Afro descendants in the Americas won't stop until we recognize the enemies, who are behind such evil actions.
We will be second class citizens until the moment we look at ourselves as the beautiful people we are, with a rich history that didn’t start with the European invasion, but it goes back to times when humans were color blind and when our mother land was respected, when borders didn’t exist, when the goal of life was to respect the space of time we were given in this stage of life.
The fake identities of European-centric origins are not for us. They must end. We are the original people of this continent, we survived. One day in the future, all brown skinned people will arise against their oppressors in the US and will reach justice and progress based on peace, coexistence, equality, and respect of human diversity.
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