A few years ago I watched the 2003 movie Chasing Papi starring Roselyn Sanchez, Sofía Vergara, and Jaci Velasquez. From this Chasing Papi movie still from Hollywood.com, you can see that the three women are gorgeous. That they are so is a big theme of the film; that the titular character finds them all so attractive that he cannot choose between them. Over the course of the movie they recognize their own fabulousness including their unique, Latina, beauty, and free themselves of Papi.
In the movie Latin American beauty is defined in a very particular way: dark hair, dark eyes, and lightly tan skin. The kind of look that could be Latina or Spanish or Italian or Greek. Not quite white enough to be “white” in the All American sense, yet definitely and absolutely not in the least bit Black. Even at the time I thought that this seemed like a really narrow idea of Latine beauty and culture. But, I’m not Latina and the movie is not the type that moves one to deep thoughts. I shrugged and moved on.
I’ve written this before and will probably write it countless more times. Race is a social construct. This does not mean it is not real. Money is a social construct and people kill and die over it every day. Because race is a social construct it is constructed differently by every society. Latin American societies have a lot in common with US society. They are born of colonialism and include the successful* and attempted genocide of indigenous people and the enslavement of Africans. This means that they have wildly diverse populations: the surviving indigenous peoples, the descendants of enslaved Africans, the descendants of the European colonizers, the waves of immigrants throughout the ensuing centuries, and all the mixing that has occurred over generations.
São Paulo, Brazil, for example, has the largest population of ethnic Japanese people outside of Japan. So many Italians immigrated to Argentina that they influenced the pronunciation of the language. The largest ethnic group in Suriname descends from India. All of these places have their own concepts of race, their own racial hierarchies. Then they come here. Some of that racial baggage comes with them but they also find themselves thrust into the racial hierarchy of the US. In the US they will find themselves cast by appearance. Afro-Latinos become Black. Japanese Brazilians become Asian. And Latine people who were white in their home countries may find themselves recast as “Brown”.
Until recently, and by recently I mean about 15 years ago when the ravages of Katrina brought in Latine workers to help in the repair and some of them stayed, Louisiana did not have much of a Latine or Hispanic population unless you count the descendants of the original Spanish Creoles. We used to joke that Latinos would pass through on their way to and from Texas and Florida and find absolutely no reason to stop. So, I didn’t meet a lot of Latine people until I moved to Texas. One of the Texas Latinas I met was originally from Colombia. She, I, and another woman, a white Anglo Saxon protestant (WASP), were talking and the Colombian girl referred to herself as white. The WASP woman instantly and insistently rejected that claim.
The Colombian girl looked a lot like a shorter, curvier Roselyn Sanchez. In retrospect, quite a lot. Basically, she was upper level hot. The WASP woman was blue eyed, blond haired, pale skinned and saw those attributes as making her beautiful. In fact, from her lips, was the first time I heard a woman claiming attractiveness based on those traits. Seventy-five percent of physical beauty is being young, healthy, and fit. At the time that fit the three of us: pretty, young women in our twenties. If forced to, I would have named her as no more attractive than myself at the time. Cute, but not all that and a bag of chips. However, when the WASP woman looked in the mirror, she saw the All American Girl. We did not.
When the WASP woman forcefully rejected the Colombian girl’s claim to whiteness, I asked why it mattered to her. She couldn’t give me an answer beyond her belief that, despite the Colombian girl’s pale skin and mostly European heritage, according to the American construct of race she was simply not quite white. The WASP woman was not “a racist”. At least, not by the American standard in which a racist is a hateful, but cartoonish, character with a closet full of KKK hoods spewing vitriol about minorities and immigrants. She was, after all, comfortably hanging out with a Black girl and a Latina. Despite her liberal and inclusive values, she had internalized the rigidity of the American caste system and instinctively rejected the Colombian girl’s self-placement in the top.
This is the racial hierarchy in which actors like Gina Rodriguez and John Leguizamo find themselves competing. This is why these actors fail to recognize Afro-Latinx people. This is why they, and other celebrities of the middle castes, may compare their progress to that of Black Americans as though Black progress is detrimental to their population.
*As I child I remember asking my teacher why the native peoples didn’t band together against the European invasion. In the US we are taught about the indigenous peoples of the Americas as if they are a single unit instead the conglomerate of vastly different nations that they were and are. In some cases, the people of these nations were completely obliterated by the Europeans. Hence why I refer to the genocide as both successful and attempted.