Latin America

As your resident latina I feel the need to weigh in on the moniker "Hispanic" as in "Hispanic Heritage Month". Actually, people have been asking me off-blog about the 'hispanic vs. latino' and I just have to weigh in.

If the opening of this post is any indication, and if you are too lazy to peruse our archives, you will see that not once have I used the term hispanic to descibe myself nor my heritage. I detest the word. I loathe the word. I find the word hispanic repulsive and repugnant, to the point of inciting me to acts of violence. Why? Let me give you some reasons :

1. Hispanic assumes that all people in Latin America speak Spanish.
   What about the languages spoken by Haitians (French), Trinidadians(English) or Brazilians (Portuguese)? What about indigenous and creole languages like Aymara, Quechua or Papiamento?

2. Hispanic assumes all people in Latin America have a Spaniard and European ascendancy.
   Along with the fallacy of Spanish-only, even in a place like Puerto Rico (which was a Spanish colony until 1898), Spanish Castillian culture was not the source of most of the Spanish culture in the island.

   Most of the Spaniards that settled in Puerto Rico were not Castillian. These so-called Hispanics were actually non-Spanish speaking Catalanes (Catalunya), Gallegos (Galicia), Mallorquines (Las Mallorcas) and Canarinos (Islas Canarias) with, as per some demographics theories floating around now for more than 30 years, a huge influx of Crypto-Moors and Crypto-Jews from Andalucia and Granada.

   
   

It's "Hispanic Heritage Month", a 31-day long pseudocelebration which, along with Black History month, makes a mockery of anything on US soil that is not Anglophilic.

I loathe the term 'hispanic' so much that I am willing to bring to you 31 reasons why Latin American culture is not mired in 'Hispanic' colonialist nostalgia; and what better way to start that than with a little taste of Nueva Trova.

One of the most outrageous pieces of misinformation spread about Fidel Castro is that he somehow has ruled in a complete political vaccum. Americans love to infantilize anybody they deem lesser (ie: a minority) to their cause and since 1959 they've spent a remarkable amount of ink describing Cubans as a country of cowering, uneducated twits who have been easily manipulated by "The Bearded Demon".

Cuban society and culture is much more complex than that and nobody embodies this distinction so well as Silvio Rodriguez.

Silvio is considered one of the pioneers of the Movimiento de Nueva Trova, the Cuban equivalent of the Nueva Canción movement that was sweeping Latin America back in the 1970s and 80s.