You have probably heard of Race in America all your life, but have you ever heard of Race in Latin America? Two societies, two different ways of interpreting identity and class. The way race is seen in America is different from Latin America and it was majorly influenced by the Colonial rules of Spain and Great Britain and their respective religions, Catholicism and Protestantism. This has been the subject of many different studies of race in Latin America and America, as we all know, and it comes to this: In America, it doesn't matter whether you are light-skinned or dark-skinned, you are still considered black, or white, or brown in that case. Very generalized and somehow demeaning race terms because it can obstruct the identities of people of color. However, at the same time, I have noticed that people of color in America owned their "brown-ness", their "blackness", so it doesn't matter what color palette you are in as long as you are proud and you own it. In Latin America, there is an obsession to get rid of the blackness in us, whether physical or linguistically. Which is why we find different racial terms to describe a person's look. For instance, one time my cousin asked us as a family to stop calling him "negro"(black) which was his nickname since he was a kid, he now wanted to be called "moreno", which has a different connotation because it makes one think of a lighter-skinned person.
The following will be just a little quote from Zoe Saldaña, a Dominican-American actress, that shows the reality of race in Latin America, so anthropological and yet so casual, she manages to describe the real situation of Afro-Latin Americans and their identity/name-labeling:
When I go to the D.R., the press in Santo Domingo always asks, "¿Qué te consideras, dominicana o americana?" (What do you consider yourself, Dominican or American?) I don't understand it, and it's the same people asking the same question. So I say, time and time again, "Yo soy una mujer negra." ("I am a black woman.") [They go,] "Oh, no, tú eres trigueñita." ("Oh no, you are 'dark skinned'") I'm like, "No! Let's get it straight, yo soy una mujer negra." ("I am a black woman.")
