A lot of people in North America, both liberals and conservatives, have an absurd idea — based on ignorance — that all Hispanics are alike, that if you talk about “Latinos,” you are talking about Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Spaniards, Colombians, Bolivians, etc. collectively. To them, they are all interchangeable.
This may be very hard for some individuals to accept, especially for those leftists who salivate and eyes glaze whenever they hear the word “minorities,” but people who are of Hispanic descent are not one uniform, amorphous, blob. We are individuals. We do not all think alike. We do not all like the same music. We do not all eat the same food. We do not all have the same politics.
Hispanic immigrants are from Spain, from Cuba, from Mexico, Argentina, Puerto Rico, Perú, Chile, etc. We do not all eat tacos; in fact, most of us know how to use a fork and knife during dinner, thank you very much. For myself, the smell alone of barbacoa makes me vomit, Tejano music makes my ears ache, and I struggle to understand Tex-Mex (which even Mexican tourists laugh at).
In reality, although they all speak the same language, there are many, many differences between Hispanics in terms of food, customs, history, and yes, even words. The same as with Africans, but that’s another story. In the Andes, some eat guinea pigs, while cattle-rich Argentinians view chicken as dirt-poor people’s food. Many Argentinians speak with an Italian accent, due to the mass immigration that the country experienced. Cubans are uncompromisingly anti-Communist because they experienced totalitarianism firsthand and have no patience for leftists in this country who have been lobotomized in schools by Marxist professors.
What may be even more jarring to those who see Hispanics as an amorphous, homogenous, blob, there are longstanding antagonisms between different nationalities, e.g., Bolivians, Chileans, Peruvians, Ecuadorians. On top of that, within each country, you have different groups of citizens at odds with each other just like in the United States or the U.K.
The above will be a shock to Democrats. They were seeing us as being in their back pocket during elections, just like they have with blacks, who consistently vote for the party of racism, the party of segregation, the party of Jim Crow laws, the party of the KKK, the party of the Confederacy, the party of treason — in other words, the Democratic Party.
In 2016, the pundits were arrogantly predicting that a Hispanic electoral tsunami would sweep Trump away. He received 33% of the Hispanic votes, and in 2020 it was more. In fact, the group Latinos for Trump was very active — which caused either denial or cognitive dissonance among leftists. The reason is simple: Hispanics are religious, whereas Democrats/liberals/activists/Marxists are virulently anti-Christian. They are also pro-family. We also are the first to be victimized by illegal alien criminals, such as the infamous MS-13 criminals that the media hivemind deliberately ignores and Nancy Pelosi glorifies (“They have the spark of divinity.” Yes, she actually said that). And while it is true that a minority of those within the Hispanic community have swallowed the anti-white, anti-America Marxist propaganda (as is also true with some whites, blacks, and Asians), most have not.
One more thing: drop the term Latinx. It’s laughable. No self-respecting Hispanic uses the term (except, again, for those Hispanic students who have been lobotomized in school). Some white liberal jackass — in a sociology department I’m sure — must have come up with that term to get his ten seconds of fame, probably thinking that if People of Color supplanted African-Americans, which supplanted blacks, which supplanted colored folks, which supplanted Negroes, Hispanics would go along in order to appear trés chic. Avant guard. Progressive.
Actually, ridiculous.
And if you thought that the above was absurd, we come to the truly asinine idea that some White Liberal Saviors — are you ready for this? — are outraged because whites learn Spanish. They call it cultural appropriation. These progressives — who always claim to be so much more superior to libertarians and conservatives — are apparently ignorant of the fact that Spain is in Europe. That Spanish originated in Spain. That Hispanics from Spain, Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina are exclusively white, while other South American countries are mostly white.
These progressives are the type of people who go through life sucking the fun out of everyone’s existence. And feel superior doing so.
Finally, there is the idea that Hispanics are a race apart. Someone had the brilliant idea that in order to further Balkanize America, anyone who spoke Spanish would henceforth be of a different race. That is, if you speak another language, you belong to another race (but what about bilinguals, or trilinguals?). And, as I said, many Hispanics have even swallowed the idea, hook, line and sinker (after all, nowadays in the U.S. it is very advantageous to be categorized as A Minority, especially as a — snicker — “Marginalized” Minority).
But the fact of the matter is that many different races speak Spanish and live in Spanish countries. Almost all Uruguayans, Argentinians, Spaniards, and Chileans are white. Puerto Ricans and Cubans are white, black, or mulatos (in Cuba, blacks are forbidden from holding high office in the Communist government), while most Peruvians, Mexicans, Bolivians, and Paraguayans are Indians, whites and mestizos.
Consequently — this may come as a surprise to some — but “I Love Lucy” was not the first interracial sitcom. Desi was white. Yes, he had an accent. Yes, he spoke Spanish. Yes, he was Cuban. But he was white.
Spanish is a language, not a race.
So deal with it.
Armando Simón is a trilingual native of Cuba, a retired psychologist and author of A Cuban from Kansas, The Only Red Star I Liked was a Starfish, and The Zapheads and Other Science-Fiction Stories.
Using these vague “policy violations,” Google is now threatening to demonetize us. It’s part of Big Tech’s effort to silence conservative voices.
Bravo!!
YES. To all of this! I am convinced that leftists never travel, or if they do they only stay in their high end resort-hive. My grandmother’s family was from northern Mexico and descended from Spaniards. White. I’ve lived in Guatemala and Nicaragua, traveled a lot in Mexico, visited Colombia, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and Spain. (I also happen to work in Uganda and many differences in African tribes/countries are even more stark.) Pretty much everything is defined by the cultures which are all different. When we lived in Nicaragua many people thought I must be related to a former President – white. (That helped because I didn’t get pulled over for a bribe nearly as often as my blonde husband!) The whole thing is ludicrous and would be funny (in the way absurd things are) if they weren’t so dangerous now.
My late wife, Ana was Peruvian. We lived in Minnesota, U.S. Some people she met here thought that women from Peru wore “feather dresses”. In the U.S., many of us are not quite aware of what goes on elsewhere.