Comment by oscargrouch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oscargrouch | Hacker News Reader

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The big problem of this use for me is that people from the US tend to think in terms of "race". Like if there is a homogeneous "latino race" where it boils down to the average mexican immigrant that the US is more used to.

For instance, you can see this in north-american films, where the mexicans are hired to play Brazilians, where we (brazilians) can spot right-away they dont look like any type of average looking brazilian. But im pretty sure it make sense for the crew of the film and people watching it, even when they speak spanish.

Just to give you a glimpse of famous brazilians north-americans may know: Rodrigo Santoro, Morena Bacarin, Alice Braga, Gisele Bundchen, Alessandra Ambrosio, Jordana Brewster, Camilla Belle, Kaya Scodelario, Wagner Moura.

The thing is, i've just give you this sample, so you can see how they don't have any resemblance between each other or homogeneous look. The ones that speak perfect english can perfectly act in roles not meant for "latinos" and nobody notice it.

I think nowadays is right to use this term in the same sense as you use for Europe to define France or Italy as part of Europe. Albeit is even wrong to use in the sense of a continent giving America is just one continent, with north and south.

Anyway if you dig down and look to all the inconsistencies of the term it boils down to some sort of racial profiling thing, because it makes no sense in any other way you look at it except for labeling it as "not white".

Yeap, it's a very inconsistent mess up here. In the media, "Latino" and "Hispanic" are often treated interchangeably, and both as though they were a race. It's very common to see statistics broken down like "White, Black, Hispanic". This confusion reaches even the highest levels, including people who really should know better, e.g. see this "apology" which somehow still doesn't seem to understand that "Latino" is not a race: https://www.npr.org/2020/08/07/900147716/

> Albeit is even wrong to use in the sense of a continent giving America is just one continent, with north and south.

To make matters even worse, we're taught in school is that North America is a distinct continent by itself, as is South America, and that there is no continent named "America". This leads some North American "patriots" to get upset at the idea of a single continent, hence the insistence that the word "America" and "Americans" only refer to the USA.

I'm not an expert in USA culture, but looking from a distance it looks to me that this is cartesianism (as in pattern-matching) applied to social sciences, which as it turns out, is a legacy of the 19th century which lead to it's most extremist version represented in fascism.

I say this because here we have this too, as in any other part in the world, the only difference is that the targets are others.

Remember the obsession of those folks to measure and document people turning this into some sort of science where you could classify people objectively giving some properties drawing hard lines that would not be crossed. Once they defined what was the superior type it would be a matter of marginalize and eliminate the weaker to achieve the super race.

We all still do this here and there, but is much more organic, subtle and disguised as something else.

Anyway is funny to think that in US (and Brazil), the last wave of immigrants arriving were considered the low people and only with subsequent waves of immigrants the old "dirty ones" got some sort of social upgrade.

As irish in the US were marginalized and later the jews, polish and italians replace them as people with less value.

Here for instance, japaneses and italians were treated pretty badly in the beginning of the 20th century. (It was even worse for black people).

Its funny to see how people don't learn with history. There's no nobility by birth, at most it was the parents passing education and culture to their children. Leave a human alone in the forest and if he manage to survive it will behave like an animal.

Hahah yeap we're basically back to skull-size measuring. And what you write is exactly correct: It's a definitely form of "othering", arbitrarily separating people.

I've lived in both countries (US and Brazil) and another comparison I've heard made is between internal immigrants in Brazil such as from the Northeast, and Hispanic immigrants in the US (some internal, some external). A lot of it is economic. As an example, very similar economic & climate pressures that caused Northeasterners of Brazil to journey to SP, RJ, etc, caused many farmers in the dry lands of northern Mexico to move north (and seek jobs in the US as nannies & housekeepers, construction, large farms with horrible labor practices, etc).

One huge difference is language. I know many Brazilians I've chatted with were surprised to learn that ~15% of the US speaks Spanish. The US is very much a linguistically-segregated country, as much of it was once ruled by the Spanish Empire or successor states, and thus regions of it have never traditionally spoken English (and still don't). Puerto Rico of course is entirely Spanish-speaking and always has been, and areas of different states are majority Spanish-speaking, and most cities in the US have at least one or two neighborhoods that are primarily Spanish.

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