On Being Latin American

My freshman year in college, I learned that the American government, for its U.S. Census purposes, invented the classification “Hispanic” to define all those who have familial roots in Latin America.

I, for one, was born in the United States to Guatemalan parents of European descent. I then went on to be raised everywhere from Mexico City to Buenos Aires, spending more than half of my life in Sao Paulo. Nearly all my life, I have self-identified as a “Guatemalan-Brazilian born in the United States”. When the time came to apply to American universities, this response would not suffice. Instead, I was faced with the following dilemma on the college applications I filled out: Was I Hispanic? White? Or, quite bizarrely, Other?

In the end, I was among the few applicants who left the race/ethnicity question blank. I just didn’t know the answer; mostly, I think, because I had never been asked. In fact, it was not until I was abroad in Paris my junior year, three years later, that I was again confronted with the question of what it means to be Latin American.

One of my classmates at the political science institute I was studying at in France was a Peruvian of Incan heritage who was abroad from his university in Florida. One evening, he asked me what “being Latin American” meant to me. I struggled to find the right words, but responded with something to the effect that being Latin American means embracing the Latin American way of life—the language, the folklore, the food, the music, the history, and, yes, the diversity of the human experience.

Throughout my awkward spiel, my friend nodded in agreement. When I was done, he said, “Yes, that is all very true and good. But you are white, descended from either the European colonizers or those that came after them, and therefore not truly Latin American.”

I blanched at this; his words truly stunned me. How could only those of Amerindian descent be true Latin Americans? How could I not be one as well when I grew up in Central and South America, saying goodnight to my parents in a Guatemalan accent, dancing samba and salsa, and eating refried beans and tortillas every day of my life? As these thoughts fired in my mind, I realized how strongly I felt attached to the Latin American identity and just how much I disagreed with my peer.

If I were to fill out a college application form again today, I would not check the White box because I have to come to realize that I am not simply a race, a color. I would not check the Hispanic box, because I refuse to conform to a federally-convenient category. I would, instead, fill out the elusive blank behind the word Other. I would write in what I always used to tell people growing up: “Guatemalan-Brazilian born in the United States.”

That being said, I am from Latin America. Latin Americans span the land that runs alongside the Rio Grande, dots the Caribbean, and continues all the way to what is nearly Antarctica. We speak three major languages and thousands of indigenous dialects. We are descended from Europeans, Arabs, Asians, Africans, and the Amerindian tribes. We are an ethno-cultural group composed of hundreds of different unique backgrounds. And we are not easily categorized.