Title: What is “Latinx”?. An attempt to cohesively explain the… | by Andrea Merodeadora | Medium
Headings: What is “Latinx”?
What is “Latinx”?
Why an ethnicity and not a race?
What race are Latinxs, then?
Wait, I didn’t get that part about mixed Latinxs. What race are they?
So… do Latinxs experience racism?
Latin, Latino, Latinx, hispanic… What is the difference?
So, anyone born or descended from LatAm is Latinx?
What language do Latinxs speak?
Wait, I’m still confused. Are Spaniards/Portuguese/French/Italians… Latinx?
Ok, one last time, short and clear…
Latinxs can be of literally any race. Yes, this includes white. White Latinxs experience xenophobia but not racism.

Content: Latina hijabis posing for a picture. Racial politics in Latin America are way different than racial politics in the US –not that racism doesn’t exist, it’s just that racial identity, specially that of mixed people, is regarded differently. While USAmerican racial politics demand that people have a clear racial identity –I know this has to do with segregation, but this is already long enough so I’m gonna let y’all google for yourselves– in most of Latin America, race is a subject that we “don’t talk about”, a taboo. During revolutionary times, white politicians gained the people’s support by preaching that all Latin Americans were the same, a mass of multiracial people who were all equally oppressed by European rule. This rhetoric changed with the times and countries to adapt to the needs of the ruling (white) class, but it’s always been along the same lines: “ we are all part white, we are all part Brown, we’re all mixed and thus we don’t need to discuss race or racism”. This is a message that was used by most governments across all of Latin America to justify the massacre of Indigenous people, the oppression of Black people and the erasure and displacement of Brown communities as a whole. You probably have heard of “mejorar la raza” (to better the race), a widespread philosophy across Latin America of trying to marry to whiter people to have whiter children. Across all of Latin America, our non-white heritage is a dirty secret for a lot of families. We’re just mixed/mestizx until we are white-passing enough to call ourselves white, and then we don’t talk about race anymore.