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tuesday wrote (edited )

But I struggle to understand how their oppression is different from many white european migrants.

I didn't say that it was either unique to my experience or that others don't share it. I'm not a white European migrant so I can't speak to their experience. I can say that there's a level of derision that comes when some folks find out that I'm "one of those Hispanics" (actual quote from a manager at a gas station where I was applying for a job) which positions me as other. I don't know if that happens outside of latinidad because I've never experienced it. Maybe it does, but I feel like that's ignoring that white America, especially in the South, HATES Latinos. And it's also creating this weird space where I feel like I have to account for the experiences of people who aren't within my community. I can't do that. I'm not here to compare. Their experiences are just as valid as my own.

Also a lot of your response isn't really relevant to the issue at hand. Indigenous people in Brazil aren't Latino because they don't live in the United States. The label Latino is specific to immigrants in the US. Using it to talk about everyone who lives in Latin America is wrong, because that's neither how they identify or how they speak about each other. But this is partially because no one but Americans do what we do (as far as I know) in identifying with heritages in a pan-ethnic way, as opposed to by the countries people are from. There are no Chilean-Guatamalans. There are people who live in Guatamala from Chile, for sure, but it's a pretty American thing to identify like that.

I think questions should and need to be asked about who is making the defintions

Literally immigrants from Mexico, Cuba, and Puerto Ricans (who aren't really immigrants). They had the conversation and Hispanic was the thing they ended on. And like they grappled with this too. At the time there was some effort to disclude people from Cuba, for example, because the migrants were overwhelmingly white and they were given advantages that other migrants didn't have access to. But in the end they decided to include everyone because there were shared experiences and the broader the term the more people it included, the better served the population is by the government.

I think these are important conversations, for people from Latin America in the United States to have. And we are. I've had multiple conversations, online, in person, in large forums with tens of people, in smaller forums with a handful of people. There's a lot of frustration, and there's a lot of confusion, and there's a lot of hurt tied up because we're often told (and grow up thinking) that Hispanic and Latino are titles given by colonizers. They aren't. They're titles claimed by the people who use it to talk about their particular American experience. We're talking about a self-created community. Not a state sponsored box that the United States government forced people into, but one that was created by the community it describes and then made to be accepted by the government.

At any rate, Bad Empanada is not the guy to have those conversations.

If we lived in a world without governments Latino as a category wouldn't exist. There would be no need for it. But because immigrants from Latin America, especially those who are black and brown (which was a category they toyed with, actually, just the inclusion of "brown" to clarify they're talking about racialized people - which was rejected because Indigenous Americans and activists from South Asia and the Middle East were like "naw, because we're brown too") face issues with discrimination, racialized violence, xenophobia, etc., they came together to create a community that could be represented in a way that didn't divide them by which country they came from because the experience they were sharing wasn't specific to their country of origin, just their existence in America. They decided to include white immigrant populations as well, it was an intentional decision because the broader the categorization, the more people who qualify, the better representation those people have.

I know a lot of people who find the term Latino useful. I know a lot of people who don't. That's their call though, not the call of an Australian of Greek heritage living in Argentina (which also has an overwhelmingly white population). Imagine me moving to South Korea, starting a YouTube channel named Bad Kim-Chi and making videos about the experiences of Asian immigrants in England? Not my lane. Not his either.

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lettuceLeafer OP wrote (edited )

I think maybe I'm bad at explaing. But my contention is not that many people who identify as LatinX recierve racism or xenophobia. The contension is if they should overall be treated like most are just settler colonialists as most white people. So idk I'm trying to take about that but maybe it sounds like it's up for dispute if latines experience racism or xenophobia which I agree exists, is a problem that is fine to complain about. It's the whole settler colonialism History of this group which is important. Hence why history is important to bring up. Idk maybe I'm bad at explaing

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