Nada Que Ver Aquí
It is a peculiar and disconcerting phenomenon that the capitalist, white supremacist, patriarchal, heteronormative, imperialist nation states of the United States (and Canada) are so god-awful to anyone who isn’t a white middle-class male, that we as Latinxs often forget (or choose to forget) that many of the same oppressive processes operate in Latin America.
We denounce how the U.S. and Canada exterminated indigenous populations for their land, while ignoring the fact that pretty much every Latin American nation state did the exact same thing.
We didn’t come to the U.S. and suddenly learned to be racist against Black people. We already were in our countries of origin. Just ask any Afro-Latinx, assuming you even believe they exist in your country (El Salvador, I’m looking at you!).
We complain that American TV and movies are all full of white people and do not represent Latinxs, yet we ignore the fact that all Univisión Telemundo, Televisa, and every form of media in Latin America has a white Latinx face on it.
We decry how the United States imposes itself an economic, political, and cultural power, yet ignore how the bigger, richer, and whiter Latin American countries did the same thing to the smaller, poorer, countries with more Black and indigenous populations.
We march and mobilize against the systematic of abuse of immigrants by the U.S. government, yet the Mexican government gets a free pass for doing far, far worse.
So fellow Latinxs, let’s not get blinded by nationalism and learn about the good things, and the not-so-good things, in our respective histories.