what is there more to say

Oh god this is a minefield. Latinidad is rightfully criticized for its racial-civilizational implications of allegiance with Europe, though I don’t think we’re gonna have much success with eliminating América Latina as the popular name for the region.

The alternatives people suggest as the “true” name instead are also mythic themselves, like using Anahuac, Abya Yala, or Turtle Island to refer to all of the Americas. Each of those names were never meant to be that broad and were meant to refer to specific places which were the worlds of specific peoples. Not that the Pan-Indiegnous politics they’re tied to should be discouraged, but that it doesn’t entirely get around the problem and it doesn’t make sense to insist on those as direct alternatives to America/América.

The idea of the Americas emerged because many regions were united into a single region by European colonialism, they were positioned a certain way relative to the “Old World.” The name derived from Amerigo Vespucci already implies that origin. I don’t think we can undo the imperial continental unification implied by it, but we can contest it and turn it. This is what José Martí and Rodolfo Kusch meant by distinguishing between America and (Nuestra) América, focusing on the distinction between “Anglo” and América “Latina” but also on the racial and class divide within “Latin” América.

This also gets to the issue of mestizaje. In the U.S. a lot of “latinos” embrace it uncritically because it seems to be an obvious alternative to U.S. racism’s obsession with hard and fast racial lines, and for Chicanos especially because it seems to be a means to embrace indigenous ancestry as an alternative and original claim to continental unity and the right to migration that precede the U.S. Obviously this gets implicated in settler colonial dynamics especially in the retrospective mythologization of the history of northern New Spain/Republican Mexico. This also leads to indigenista LARP where the idea of being a multiracial people ends up becoming the idea that we are the descendants of Natives and therefore can make Native political claims ourselves.

This is where it gets complicated. This rhetorical move of mestizaje pushes towards the dispossession of actual living Native communities, since we are still mestizos who are civilizationally de-indigenized, but I’ve seen a lot of people react to it by basically calling for mestizos to be categorized the same way as Anglos and Spaniards. This way of drawing the lines might be useful polemically, but it limits strategy and ignores the process of de-indigenization that could even turn Natives into political mestizos or ladinos.

This is where you have to account for two sides of a critique of mestizo consciousness, since we do in fact have what can be described as a mestizo consciousness for better or for worse. On the one hand, yes you need to critique the delusion that we are Europeans, which drives and is driven by self hatred and self denial. On the other hand, the mythology of Native ancestors, especially Mexica, is an integration into Mexico’s state mythology and colonial foundations. Spain itself claimed continuity with the Mexico-Texcoco monarchy. This kind of thing is not decolonization.

Decolonization for mestizo consciousness would mean reconnecting but with full awareness of ourselves as de-indigenized and with an understanding of indigeneity as based on ways of living and active communities. In some cases reconnecting is not feasible. This is the case for me, I know the pueblos and peoples that my ancestors are from but the connections are distant by generations now and the living traces in my own family are limited to a handful of heterodox beliefs within otherwise Catholic belief like reincarnation and animal souls. Basically I don’t think it would be appropriate, because my only connection is by descent, so called blood lineage. I refuse to make any blood claims, and I don’t think anyone else should either. This is where decolonization has to take a predominantly negative and critical form, for me affirmation is limited.

There's still a lot to happen regarding identitary decolonisation related to the decades of anticommunist fearmongering that have kept indigenous peoples from developing class consciousness outside of the identitary and experiential limits of readopted colonial relationships of production. Colombia is a fractured mess on this regard as well, our ruling class basically inherited the entire spectre on colonising instrumentalisation Spaniards developed and exerted —and this is the very reason why Bolivarian variants of decolonisation, bourgeois-rooted as they are, often antagonise and undermine indigenous ones, sadly—; and conceptions around decolonial resistance as held by Colombians of non-indigenous upbringing are pretty much akin to Global North, petite bourgeoise-ish ones for the most part. Extractivistic ecological tourism and gentrification thrive in here precisely because of that, among other things.

I've adopted a sort of post-Andalusí approach on this in a sort of idiolectical sense because, while I'm not a white Spaniard by virtue of my skin colour and I don't want to pretend otherwise; I can't claim to having been brought up as a Quimbaya, Anorí, Nutabe, or Pijao indigenous individual —as blood is the only thing linking me to them, kinship-wise—, or an Andalusí Muslim by virtue of hispanicate descent and upbringing either, since Andalusís in Iberia —much like Quimbayas and Anorís here— were ethnically cleansed into sociocultural extinction. There are only ghostlily printed remnants of them, so I take those to advocate for the emancipation of all remaining indigenous polities hoping they're not further committed genocide upon as my forebearers on either side of the Atlantic were.

true north aid (an organization aimed at providing support to remote/northern indigenous people in canada)

canadian red cross wildfire fund

ontario spca and humane society (links to their donate page specifically aimed at supporting pets and animals in areas impacted by the fires)