Author Marie Arana, former book editor and columnist for the Washington Post and the inaugural literary director of the Library of Congress, joins today’s episode of Scheer Intelligence with host Robert Scheer to discuss her new book, LatinoLand: A Portrait of America’s Largest and Least Understood Minority, to answer the question — what does it mean to be Latino? While many know that Latinos often come to America, many forget that they have, in fact, always been in America.
With many Latinos being a mix of indigenous, European, African and Asian ethnicities, the complexity and diversity of the Latino people is “huge,” she says. Despite “representing race mixing that is really unequal in the rest of this Earth,” when Latinos come to America they arrive as “separate quantities,” categorized into different nationalities and ethnicities.
Arana says this is a result of Spanish colonialism which sought to separate the Latino people from each other and “keep [them] conquered by not allowing [them] to communicate with each other.” With communication forbidden, the Latino people could never understand themselves as a “unit,” and only as divided entities, complicated even more by the Spanish allowing the rampant raping of Indigenous women by the conquering conquistadors.
As Arana notes, “For all the glory of being the ethnicity that holds all the races of man, it came from an absolutely chaotic and disastrous past.”
LatinoLand captures the contradictions of a deeply racist past on both sides of the border, and the tunnel-vision view of the soul enabled by categorizing human beings based on the color of their skin or their country of origin. When Arana arrived in Florida the bathrooms were still racially segregated. As someone with European, Asian, Black, and indigenous ancestry — Arana was unsure where she fit into the binary camps of “colored” or white.
Going back all the way to the time of Columbus, Scheer and Arana delve into the dehumanization of people through the brutality of colonialism, and how borders create realities that can never capture the complexity of human existence. The result is a feasting ground for bigoted exploiters of America's largest and most productive immigrant population that is on full display in the current election season.