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At the core, Ev* L*ng*r**’s comment alludes to the fantasy of a monolithic latinidad that will never have the best interest of Black women (& Black people-at-large) in mind. Her commentary can’t be dismissed b/c even though I frame Latinidad as a “fantasy,” that fantasy is real:
The fantasy of Latinidad is practiced, enacted, and actualized every single day: when Latinxs fight against xenophobia in the U.S. but not the abolition of anti-Blackness, what is actually being done is fighting for non-Black power and inclusion as opposed to liberation.
When we fight for “Latinx representation” in media but not for an end to anti-Black representations in the media we are just fighting for whiteness with an accent (and that whiteness brings with it an aestheticized heterosexual, able-bodied, & thin representation of belonging).
For those who have followed my analysis for a few years, y’all know I talk about the ways I see the BLM movement as a movement that gave me hope for Black people in Latin America and the Caribbean b/c the movement’s demand is for Black people to be safe, to live, to thrive.
The BLM movement formed in 2013 after the acquittal of Z*mm*rm*n, a White Latino (Peruvian mother, German father), who killed Tr**von M*rt*n, a 17yo African Am. The immediate critique from non-Black Latinxs was “Black Lives Matter is racist, what about Latinxs Lives Matter?”
As a Black Indigenous person born in Latin America, I immediately understood Tr**von M*rt*n’s reality as one that was too similar to the realities of Black people in Latin America at the hands of White people in Latin America (those y’all refer to as Latinx and POC).
When Z*mm*rm*n was acquitted, there was no critical conversation in the Latinx community about anti-Blackness and white supremacy in non-Black Latinx spaces that created the conditions of possibility for Z*mm*rm*n to do what he did and get away (and uplifted) for it.
That conversation still doesn’t exist in the U.S. b/c the fantasy of Latinidad says we are all “the same,” + “united.” I have seen some of the conversation happen in Latin America b/c the fantasy of a monolithic Latinidad isn’t as strong there, we need to unlearn it in the U.S.
I refuse to bond and build around an imagined community. I will build with those whose commitments are rooted in the longevity of Black and Indigenous lives. Latinidad doesn’t allow us to be that critical.
Black kin, we deserve so much: we deserve lives that are easy; we deserve the freedom to move without surveillance or policing; we deserve the right to say no; we deserve the right to leave a violent culture; we deserve the right to hold those who claim to “love” us accountable.
