In racist comments against Black and Indigenous people, Nury Martinez exposed a blinkered tradition of defining the Latino community that may be on the way out.
Councilmen Gil Cedillo and Kevin de León’s chairs sit empty at Wednesday’s city council meeting.‘You are not # goals or inspo,’ Melinna Bobadilla said after Nury Martinez addressed ‘all little Latina girls’ in her L.A. council resignation letter.
The erasure of Blackness within Latino identity long preceded Martinez. It’s part of a long-running tradition in Latin America. In the United States, “Latino” has generally come to be equated with the vague adjective of “brown.” In Latin America, Latino identity — Latinidad — is frequently incarnated by the symbol of the mestizo, interpreted to be a person of mixed European and Indigenous descent. In the essentialized form, the mestizo is someone who is of mixed race but adopts the culture and language of Europe. Brown — but not too brown.
Status, as a result, has generally been conferred to those with the greatest proximity to whiteness. In Latin America, the term “” — improve the race — means to make it whiter. The derogatory comments that Martinez, the fair-skinned daughter of Latino immigrants, leveled at other Latino immigrants — Indigenous Oaxacans — didn’t come out of nowhere.
It’s also a way of thinking that belongs increasingly in the past. The leaked tapes land at a moment when a younger generation of thinkers is challenging the very foundations of Latinidad.
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