Brandon Vazquez

Professor Rangel

LS-101-01: Intro Latino Studies

14 October 2022

Latine Anti-Blackness

According to a poll released early last year by the Gallup Center, about one in four black

and ‘Hispanic’ workers report having experienced some extent of discrimination in their

workplace (Lloyd), accumulating to approximately 11,150,000 of the black and ‘Hispanic’

population in the United States. To present a relevant example, earlier this year a major

construction company known as Goodsell/Wilkins Inc. was sued for continuously harassing their

Latine workers since at least 2019, referring to them by names such as “wetbacks” and “Home

Depoteros” as a means of weaponizing their national origin and inability to speak English with

fluency against them (EEOC). This example and the aforementioned statistic only present a

sliver of the prominent experiences Latine workers must deal with on a day-to-day basis in their

laboring environments with abuse, especially from their white and/or American counterparts.

Similarly, when shifting the focus from the experiences of the Latine working population

with discrimination to the experiences of the black working population we encounter various

similar experiences. According to LATimes, earlier this year, over 500 black employees working

at Inland Empire warehouses owned by Cardinal Health and Ryder Integrated Logistics reported

not only being treated unfairly, spontaneously fired, and racially targeted and harassed in various

instances, but they also reported being ignored when bringing attention to various of these

instances to their supervisors. (Roosevelt) When viewing these experiences through a black-

white paradigm, the conversation quickly focuses on similar instances of anti-black abuse being

perpetrated by white people in relation to factors such as white supremacy without much regard,

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Brandon Vazquez

Professor Rangel

LS-101-01: Intro Latino Studies

14 October 2022

but the conversation changes when encountering anti-black sentiments on behalf of those who

are not white and/or American. The frequent harassment, abuse, and profiling being perpetrated

on these black workers were actually being done by their Latine coworkers, who referred to them

with slurs in both English and Spanish, and targeted them in other more specified manners.

(Roosevelt) But these instances being recorded and presented are few in comparison to the larger

working population of black and Latine people in the United States. The anti-black character of

this harassment is not only present amongst Latine people in working environments, but in their

everyday lives, which ultimately, paints the picture of a bigger problem within Latine

communities across the United States.

Due to the continuously increasing population of Latine people in the United States, the

perpetuation of anti-black sentiments amongst various communities continues to increase and

build upon itself which leads to this quality being ingrained across Latine culture in its vast

variety. But the question becomes, why is this so? Why is anti-blackness so prominent traversing

Latine people and various Latine communities as a whole?

The matter is diverse and could be explored by looking at copious amounts of situations

and possibilities on why exactly anti-blackness traverses the Latine experience in so many ways,

but I want to particularly focus on three primary aspects that may explore more in-depth the

source and prominence of anti-blackness in Latine communities across the United States. The

first possibility will be focusing on the alienation of blackness from the experience of being

Latine, the second possibility will be the assumption of whiteness by Latine people as a means to

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Brandon Vazquez

Professor Rangel

LS-101-01: Intro Latino Studies

14 October 2022

distance themselves from oppression, and the third possibility will be the influence of whiteness

and/or ‘Americanness,’ in other words the whitewashing of Latine people in the United States.

When looking at black and Latine experiences, oftentimes we encounter the character of

both cultures being painted as clashing and entirely separate from each other instead of being

complementary in various people and communities. Obviously, framing the existence of black

and Latine people in this manner ignores the indirect aspects of oppression that target both

groups, but also directly ignores the experiences and the very existence of black Latines. The

alienation of blackness from the Latine experience is something that takes shape amongst non-

black Latines as not only a sense of absolute difference but an active take on hostility and

prejudices against blackness, in other words, it is not only being framed as there is “us” and

“them,” but there is “us” against “them.” Due to this, when encountering blackness in Latine

culture we see it directly ignored or othered, an example being the interaction between the Black

Lives Matter movement and Latine people and communities. While countless amounts of Latine

people stood side by side with black people in their fight against police brutality, countless of

Latine people took this as a means to further demonize or ignore black people. In 2016, when

Selena Gomez, who is of Mexican descent and a self-identified Latina, was confronted on social

media regarding her support for the March for our Lives movement but her silence on the Black

Lives Matter movement, she stated in a Tweet “oh lol so that means if I hashtag something I save

lives?” and while this sentiment has shifted and her demonstration of support towards the

movement has been presented during its “peak” in 2020, the mocking expression she shared was

an example of the direct ignorance towards black people and their experiences with violence and

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Brandon Vazquez

Professor Rangel

LS-101-01: Intro Latino Studies

14 October 2022

discrimination (Koimoi.com Team). Regardless of what she truly believed, her support of the

March for our Lives movement, a student-led movement against gun violence, showed her

kinship with the people she was fighting for, but her silence and mocking of the Black Lives

Matter movement showed her alienation and indifference towards it. She lacked kinship with

black people which is a direct cause of this alienation and hostility. During 2020, the year of the

presidential election, the Black Lives Matter movement reached its “peak” (to be clear by peak

I’m not referencing a sense of profit or popularity, but I am speaking about awareness amongst

the general public) which led to increased hostility against the movement by (some) Latine

people. According to WLRN, a poll by the Florida International University shows the fact that

the support Trump received in Florida was largely by Cuban, Venezuelan, and Colombian voters,

the reason for this is argued to be a way to further themselves from the left-wing government

they fled, inherently leading to the demonization of the Black Lives Matter movement because of

said association. It went as far that figures such as Carinés A. Moncada, a Venezuelan journalist,

who claimed that the Black Lives Matter movement was co-founded by someone who practiced

“brujeria” and Maria Elvira Salazar, a Cuban-American Republican US Congresswoman, often

making claims such as “Black Lives Matter is controlling Biden and the Democrats.” (Padgett)

All of these constant efforts of demonizing the fight against racially motivated police brutality

depicts the alienation and hostility on behalf of Latine people towards blackness.

While this hostility towards blackness is due to alienation of black people by Latines, the

source of this alienation is still a matter of importance. Like mentioned before, the experiences of

black and Latine people overlap when it comes to varying degrees of racial and ethnic

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Brandon Vazquez

Professor Rangel

LS-101-01: Intro Latino Studies

14 October 2022

persecution. Latine people in recent years have themselves been victims of police brutality in

great numbers, according to CNN, around 2,600 Latinos had been killed or died while held in

custody over the 6 years leading up to 2021 by the police (Chavez), one of these examples is the

case of Adam Toledo, a 13-year-old Latino boy who was killed by a police officer in a Mexican

neighborhood in Chicago, one of the various examples of law enforcement’s violent presence in

black and Latine neighborhoods (Al Jazeera). All of these instances are only a small proportion

of the hostility Latine people experience in the United States. And yet, regardless of these shared

instances of police brutality and racially/ethnically motivated violence experienced by hundreds

of black and Latine people we see the growth of groups such as ‘Latinos for Trump.’ Latinos for

Trump are a group who hold representation over a great number of the Latine Republican

population within various states of the United States. They have shared disapproval of the Black

Lives Matter movement due to their belief that it “challenges traditional values,” regardless of

the movement's actual motive to fight racially motivated police brutality (Cadava). Further, even

though Trump’s restrictions on immigration and his poor expressed view of Latine people,

Latinos suchs as Abraham Enriquez, the founder of Bienvenido US expresses that the majority of

Latine Republicans don’t find themselves in a state of solidarity with Latines as a whole, and are

likely to identify as American first and foremost, as well as not identify with their immigrant

predecessors. Their detachment from their Latine identity and the solidarity and support they

carry out for men like Trump who actively threatens them alongside black people, is due to their

attempt at freeing themselves from this state of persecution and the hostility they experience. By

supporting men like Trump they are showing opposition to blackness and liberation, and are

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Brandon Vazquez

Professor Rangel

LS-101-01: Intro Latino Studies

14 October 2022

assuming whiteness and assimilation in order to not deviate themselves from the white American

standard (Paz).

The lives of many Latines in the United States are built around and dependent on

whiteness due to the environment we become accustomed to in contrast to the environment we

descend from. I, as a Chicano, have found that over the extent of my life my Latino identity has

been primarily built within a largely American mold due to the fact that my parents never raised

me or shared with me their Mexican identity in its entirety, besides factors such as language.

Even though I have been targeted and am affected by xenophobia, my personal identity does not

connect in its entirety to what is being hurt, in other words, the path I traverse as a Latino has

been whitewashed. As of 2017, according to the Pew Research Center, about 11% of people with

‘Hispanic’ ancestry have found themselves more likely to no longer identify ‘Hispanic,’ due to

factors such as declining immigration and high intermarriage, and while these statistics may not

be completely recent they still depict a constant theme traversing Latine people in the United

States (Lopez et al). Within Mexican-American circles, mural art has been one of the greatest

and most frequently used forms of depicting Mexican-American culture and history across the

United States, especially in regards to the Chicano Movement in the 1970s. But over the years

this art has begun to disappear,“¡Murales Rebeldes!” was an exhibition that depicted various

Chicano murals by artists such as Sergio O’Cardiz that had been censored and/or whitewashed,

in other words, literally painted over with white. (Imbler) The erasure and elimination of this art

which forms a great part of various Mexican-American community’s identities and histories

depicts the detachment and whitewashing of their identities as Latines, and ultimately their

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Brandon Vazquez

Professor Rangel

LS-101-01: Intro Latino Studies

14 October 2022

assimilation into whiteness. Our detachment as Latines from our history and predecessors creates

a rift amongst our experiences making us likely to assume or become accustomed to whiteness,

which alienates and nourishes anti-blackness in Latine circles.

To conclude, the exploration of anti-blackness amongst Latine people is an overtly broad

topic that can involve various factors in regards to oppression, power dynamics, colorism,

persecution, xenophobia, racism, solidarity, community, personhood and more that entire books

could be written on the matter. The self-reflection and deconstruction of understanding why

many people think and are conditioned into expressing hostility towards blackness is a struggle

that in its core carries the alienation of blackness, the assumption of whiteness, and the erasure of

Latine identities in the United States, due to such we come into contact with the prevalent anti-

blackness amongst Latine people and communities that needs to be unraveled.