Why misrepresentation and Latinxs matters to me as a radical
So my last Medium piece “The Misrepresentations of Latinxs” is making the rounds and tons of people are enjoying it, hating it, blah blah blah. You know how it goes.
I always have thoughts about what I could do to make a piece I’ve written better, or anxiousness over things I missed (which given how long my shit already tends to be is kind of a scary thought), or a desire to engage good points I realized after the fact or that were brought to me. I tend to ignore these encroaching sentiments and not add disclaimers or do follow ups because I feel that takes away from a piece and comes off as needlessly controlling or nitpicky, or like I care about each negative or critical comment I get enough to have to defend myself when frankly I don’t, or like the piece doesn’t stand well enough on its own.
But sometimes the piece doesn’t stand well enough on its own, or there are REALLY good points missing that you want to engage, or it accidentally communicates something you didn’t mean to say and clarification is necessary. So here’s some clarification.
I regret that my last post veered more into a more superficial politic that I don’t exactly care for (representation and diversity) and didn’t instead keep in heart my actual perspective on why these things matter: A lack of representation or a whitewashed tokenized representation reflects how power feels about and treats the communities they exclude and how they demand we assimilate into their norms and standards, and radical storytelling and a rejection of that assimilation, not merely diversifying what ever hit Netflix show comes up, can help us achieve justice.
I also want to stress that I don’t think that buying into a capitalist institution is going to save me or fix how power feels about me either, or pretend like I don’t know what pop culture means to them. For them, media is about making money, and whiteness makes money. That is the reason for the exclusion of people like me (and so many much more marginalized and maligned by power than me). Even if I do come to see us in media, it is because it is financially advantageous to do so, and I’m being exploited. Knowing this, it is a double-edge sword for me to demand being seen because when we are, we’ll have to put up with bad story-telling, stereotypes, tokenizing and yet buy in to make sure it keeps happening with the wholes that it will get better, eventually. That is not my politic or the end goal I have in mind.
Lastly, Anti-Blackness and Anti-Indigeneity in media is damaging not because I’m putting all my eggs in a basket to see a Black Latina girl in a TV show (though of course, as many people have written and as I’ve touched upon with telling my own story about my childhood, that *does* matter), but because it is a mirror and look into our world. Institutionally, politically, economically socially, culturally, those groups experience a lot of erasure and violence and both Latinx and American culture. Our media is a reflection of our culture and its institutions and vice versa. Media on its own matters yet, but media in tandem with other avenues of power and their relationship is even more important to focus on.
You don’t see Indigenous people represented well in either media, and you also see how Indigenous sovereignty isn’t respected, their land protection advocacy stifled and ignored, their activists murdered. You don’t see Black people represented well in either media, and you also see how Black people in Latin America and the United States are disproportionately policed-the murder rates of Black people at the hands of police are catastrophic in Brazil. How power oppresses institutionally and how we are seen in pop culture are related to one another.
Lastly, I’m not ashamed of who I am or my background and I don’t beg, and I wasn’t doing so in my last post. I was naming that I wouldn’t dare have the back of a white Latina who doesn’t represent me and my struggles exactly because they go so much deeper than what comedy can cover, have more to do than the fact that people don’t know how to pronounce my last names.
My goal is justice, not tokenism or assimilation. Faithful story-telling that we are in control of and that reflects our real existences, struggles and identities can help us achieve that.
