Why Latinidad Must Be Rethought: The Anti-Black Roots of Mestizaje and the Erasure of Afro-Latinos

Latinidad as we know it belongs to the myth-makers. It’s a glossed-over, color-blind concept built to soothe white fantasies more than reflect lived reality. The ideology of mestizaje—celebrated as Latin America’s grand racial harmony project—was in reality a colonial strategy deeply rooted in anti-Black and anti-Indigenous erasure. As scholars have long argued, the Latin American mestizo ideal masks a violent racial hierarchy that systematically erases darker bodies and enforces whiteness as default.

The Atlantic slave trade, also known as the transatlantic slave trade, was one of the most devastating and far-reaching forced migrations in human history. It began in the late 15th century and continued through the 19th century, involving the kidnapping and forced transport of over 12 million Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. European colonial powers—primarily Portugal, Spain, Britain, France, and the Netherlands—capitalized on this brutal system, using enslaved African labor to fuel the growth of their colonies, especially in industries like sugar, tobacco, and cotton. Africans were abducted from their homelands—mostly from West and Central Africa—chained and packed into ships under horrific conditions, with many not surviving the Middle Passage.

The trade was triangular in nature: European ships carried manufactured goods to Africa, traded them for enslaved people, then transported the enslaved to the Americas, and finally returned to Europe with goods produced by slave labor. The sheer scale and organization of the transatlantic slave trade made it a cornerstone of the global economy during that period. Crucially, more Africans were trafficked to Latin America—especially Brazil and the Caribbean—than to North America. Brazil alone received nearly 5 million enslaved Africans, compared to the approximately 388,000 who were brought to what is now the United States. This disproportionality is often erased in public memory and historical education, leading to an incomplete understanding of the African diaspora in the Americas.

The legacy of the Atlantic slave trade is deeply embedded in the social, political, and economic structures of the modern world. It not only created systems of racial hierarchy that still exist today, but also set the foundation for ongoing racialized violence and exclusion. In Latin America, the ideology of mestizaje was often used to downplay or erase the presence and influence of African descendants, despite their central role in building these societies. Understanding the scope and brutality of the Atlantic slave trade is crucial for grappling with the realities of racial inequality and anti-Blackness in the Americas today.

In Latin America—and the Caribbean especially—more Africans were kidnapped, trafficked, and sold into bondage than anywhere else outside Africa. Yet Latinidad conveniently forgets this: it omits entire populations to serve a sanitized national image of mixed-race idyll. Afro-descendant communities suffer higher levels of poverty, limited access to power, and persistent discrimination—even in countries that boast mestizaje as their defining identity.

This is not an accident. Elites and state actors historically crafted Latinidad to maintain whiteness as symbolic capital. They used whitening immigration policies, discredited Black identity, and applied colorist aesthetics to packaging and branding—including caricatured Black women on food products and candy boxes. These visuals weren’t nostalgic—they were deliberate markers of who belongs in the national narrative.

Take the infamous minstrel act by Geisha Montes de Oca, who appeared in blackface parodying Amara La Negra, mocking her Afro-Dominican identity. It was not just grotesque—it was political violence disguised as humor. Amara’s powerful rebuttals, and her fierce resilience in demanding visibility for Black Latinas, threatened the anti-Black imaginaries Latinidad upholds.

That same erasure surfaces in how Latinx media and representation consistently sideline or token Afro-Latinx characters. When In the Heights premiered in 2021, critics including Alan Pelaez Lopez called out its predominantly white-passing casting—even though it was supposed to depict a Dominican neighborhood in Washington Heights, a space historically shaped by Afro-Caribbean life. Pelaez Lopez, who launched the viral rhetoric #LatinidadIsCancelled, rightly argues that Latinidad often serves white cis, privileged elites—not the Black, Indigenous, queer, and femme people who built the diaspora.

People like Janel Martinez, founder of Ain’t I Latina?, have spent over a decade centering Afro-Latina voices erased by mainstream Latinidad. She writes that the concept flattens difference and excludes dark-skinned, queer, disabled, and Indigenous Latinas from the narrative of belonging The Root. Similarly, Dr. Rosa Clemente consistently emphasizes that Latinidad, as circulated in media and politics, “erases away Blackness” and dilutes radical identity politics with color-blind tropes.

Dr. Alan Pelaez Lopez erupts in critique: Latinidad, in its mainstream usage, is an identity scaffold aimed at acceptance by white-dominated U.S. culture—and not at liberation from anti-Blackness in our own communities. And cultural critic Zahira Kelly has created cartoons that lampoon the erasure, colorism, and hypocrisy within Latinx identity politics—visual satire that demands accountability where the concept of Latinidad claims unity but practices exclusion.

This history of language and representation is not just academic—it has grounded consequences. Anti-Blackness isn’t a relic: it manifests daily in who gets cast, who gets cited, who gets hired, and who gets erased. It undergirds colorism, classism, and internalized stigma that affects public policy, cultural allocation, and social mobility across the diaspora.

If Latinidad means anything radical, it means confronting this legacy head-on—not by celebrating mestizaje, but by dismantling it. It must center the ancestors and present-day lives of Black Latinas, Afro-Indigenous people, queer Latina descendants, and Black migrants whose labor, culture, and resistance have powered our communities. Without that reckoning, Latinidad remains a hollow brand—a comfort to elites and a denial of justice.

White Latinos too must reckon with their silence. If you see the problem and stay silent, your neutrality aids the system that profits from anti-Blackness. Racism in Latinidad won’t fade on its own—the only way forward is to name it, disrupt it, and redistribute visibility and power.

We owe so much to scholars and activists like Janel Martinez (Ain’t I Latina?), Dr. Rosa Clemente, Dr. Alan Pelaez Lopez, and Zahira Kelly—those of us pushing Latinidad from the margins into accountability. But the work doesn’t belong only to Black, queer, Indigenous folk. Real transformation demands that white Latinos, light-skinned Latinos, upper-class Latinos—who benefit from the system—step up and speak out. Together, we must demand a Latinidad that centers anti-Blackness, honors multiplicity, and refuses erasure as policy.

Because until Latinidad stops silencing Black life, our collective liberation will always be incomplete.