Latinos who live in the United States or Canada are often looking for representation of

themselves. The problem is that when we go to consume media, we are often given either
folkloric characters, stereotypes of ourselves, or nothing at all. But our identities are far from just
one thing. We are an intersectional people - and that means there are many ways for us to
identify ourselves.

In the United States and Canada, Latinx people are often seen as white, despite their race being
Puerto Rican, Dominican, Mexican or many others. This is because of what is called “white-
passing privilege”: the idea that someone could look white enough to pass as a person with that
race - and be able to benefit from it. White-passing Latinos are often given more opportunities
than those who do not look white enough to pass. This is because of the idea that they are
“passing” - giving them extra power to benefit from. This allows for an unsafe environment in
which these people can live.

Latinos are not easily represented by the media due to their intersections with other identities:
racialized and sexualized. The media tends to portray us as stereotypes, often white people
wanting to be Latino. These four articles related to Juliet Hooker's (2014) article because they
all talk about colonialism and mestizaje and how this can affect Latinx individuals’ point of view
and the lack of representation that is the US/Canada media.

In Spanish, "mestizaje" means the mixing of two peoples or cultures through contact. Mestizaje
has become a term for the diversity of Latin American culture and people in the US. It refers to
cultural blends that may result from immigration, colonialism or Indigenous communities mixing
with one another. Mestizo identity is rooted historically in a sense of difference that structure’s
Latin American identity because it is shaped by moments of racial and ethnic hybridity among
these groups. Mestizaje is a product of the exchange between two distinct historical identities,
but it is more than that. Mestizaje transcends the duality of colonizer/colonized and
invader/invaded and pulls together processes of racialization, the construction of difference, and
state sovereignty (Gonzalez-Wippler). It points to a non-oppressive way to understand Latin
American experiences—the "self" produced by mestizaje. Mestizaje is not a period of history
that ends with the rise of a single dominant group. Rather, it is about the creation of a new
identity by Latin Americans who share an equal cultural and political history alongside their
"arrivals". The formation and use of mestizaje as an identity has been partial in that it has created
a more complex relationship between cultures than was initially intended. The term is a positive
one that depends on the acceptance of multiple cultures among Latin Americans and their
descendants in the Americas as a whole. This story begins with the Spanish colonization of the
Americas, but mestizaje in Latin America is also built from contact between Spanish settlers,
Native Americans, and Africans. The creation of "whiteness" became an American racial identity
rooted in race mixing and the relationship between white Spaniards, African slaves, and
Indigenous people.

Hooker, J. (2014). Hybrid subjectivities, Latin American mestizaje, and Latino political thought
on race. Politics, Groups, and Identities, 2(2), 188-201. DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2014.904798