Nearly 1 in 5 Americans identifies as Hispanic or Latino, according to the U.S. Census, and they may have roots in Mexico, Central or South America, the Caribbean, or Spain. They may or may not speak Spanish, and they might not even personally identify as Latino or Hispanic.
Yet, they’re all lumped into one messy category, which Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Héctor Tobar says is outdated and based on inaccurate and potentially harmful notions about race.
Tobar, an LA native and son of Guatemalan immigrants, is author of “Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of ‘Latino,’” which came out in May.
Throughout the book, Tobar purposely puts the word “Latino” in quotation marks to underscore that it’s a poor descriptor and doesn’t fully represent the community’s diverse heritage.
“Latino is a European term. It goes back to the idea that we speak this romance language, right? Spanish. But it omits the fact that many of us have Indigenous roots. My family is part Mayan, although the exact nature of my Mayan roots are hidden to me. … Many of us have African ancestors in our past. And so ‘Latino’ suggests that we are European. And that's really only part of who we are.”
Meanwhile, the community grapples with a new word to describe their heritage — the non-gendered term “Latinx.” (A 2021 Gallup poll found that 4% of respondents expressed a preference for that term.)
Tobar himself prefers “Latino” — which he admits is broad and doesn’t encompass his Guatemalan background — because it’s an expression of solidarity.
“[Latino is] something that developed in cities like Chicago, when Puerto Rican activists met Mexican activists, Mexican American activists, and they decided to describe their alliance as Latino. It also is an alternative to Hispanic, which is a very English-sounding word.”
He argues, however, that “Latino” can also be synonymous with stereotypical media representations that have endured over the years.
“We’re either the maid in the popular media, or were the cartel operatives. That's what ‘Latino’ is to your average American consumer of Fox News, for example. And I think those are really dangerous ideas. It's a really dangerous perception.”
Tobar points to popular media such as “Star Wars,” Marvel films, and “Dune,” which he says are fantasy, but reinforce stories about colonization and empires.
“They're allegories about human history, right? The United States is filled with people who are refugees from Central America or survivors of revolutions in Latin America, and right-wing dictatorships. So those are people who have real stories of empires in their past. Those stories are basically monetized by Hollywood, and they're made into the stories of somebody else, usually the vast majority of the cast in these movies are white people.”
While these types of storytelling might not be intentional, Tobar says it’s part of the collective subconscious.
“We know that this wonderful world that we live in, this peaceful and calm and affluent world, has violence in its foundations. We get some of that right in our history classes in school. And so we're taking that and making it into this fantasy. In doing so, we're preventing ourselves from studying that real history. Your average California kid doesn't know anything about the Salvadoran revolution, or very little about the Mexican revolution. But these are incidents that are deeply tied now with California history.”
In his book, Tobar also talks about how the U.S.-Mexico border represents what it means to be white today.
“To be white in the United States means you need a fence to protect you against the Brown hordes to the south. And so the border has become the symbol of menace. And it's also this wound in many Latino families because of the new immigration policies that keep people from going back and forth to visit their families.”
Meanwhile, the crossing between the U.S. and Canada is longer and less secured, unlike the southern border.
Tobar recalls one visit to the boundary, where there was a park: “There was absolutely no fence. No barrier that marks the border. There's just a few stone and metal pillars. At one part, there's a little drainage ditch, you jump across it, and you're in Canada.”
It’s a stark difference to another park — Friendship Park — which separates San Diego and Tijuana.
“[It] was originally conceived to be [a] place where people could mingle together, but where there's now many layers of fencing. You can go up to the fence, only on the weekends, and you can sort of talk to people on the other side for a few hours with Border Patrol agents supervising you.”
Policy shapes what we see and what is feared
Tobar says American immigration policy has helped shape what the country looks and feels like. That includes decades of exclusionist laws during the late 19th and 20th century that limited immigration from regions such as China, as well as Southern and Eastern Europe.
In recent (and local) history, he points to the passage of Prop 187, a 1994 statewide ballot measure that sought to bar undocumented residents from using state social services. It was ruled unconstitutional.
“This was a time following a huge migration from Mexico and Central America that had changed the look and feel of California. There were also initiatives against bilingual education in that same era. So yes, absolutely, these are policies tied to fears about cultural and racial change in this country.”
Tobar included the stories of his students in his book, and says it's a grim time with less hope and opportunity than past generations.
“My students live in a time where there's almost no hope to get your papers fixed. Where you know that your parents might live into old age and never get their papers fixed. And so this heaviness, this anger over their immigration status is something that lingers over so many Latino families.”