Latinx Heritage Month is a Reminder of Our Community's Flaws
my thoughts on community, racism, & erasure - welcome back to The Slush Pile!
Yesterday, September 15th, marked the first day of Latinx Heritage Month. First celebrated in 1968, the month-long celebration is meant to highlight Latinx history, as well as our contributions to culture, society, and industries of all kinds. Issue 36 of The Slush Pile is a day late for both LHM and my newsletter release schedule but I wanted to take the extra day to reflect on what this month is really about, who it’s really for, who it leaves out, and if it has ever succeeded in what it wants to accomplish.
I grew up vaguely aware of what was then known as “Hispanic Heritage Month” because it was the 2000s and much of the community embraced the term back then, even though it explicitly named our Spanish colonizers, included Spaniards, and excluded certain Latin American groups like Brazilians (because they were colonized not by the Spanish but by the Portuguese). I saw the HHM displays in bookstores, we might’ve even talked about it in school but it felt like something that only vaguely applied to me. It might’ve been because I was so desperate to free myself of my Mexican American identity, so longing to fit in, that I didn’t want to be seen as different even if it meant that my community got a whole month to ourselves.
Perhaps I had an inkling of what I know now to be true - that Latinx Heritage Month, more than being a time to celebrate us, is really a reminder that we aren’t perfect, not even close, because of the loud erasure, racism, anti-Blackness, anti-indigeneity, and self-xenophobia that runs rampant in everything we do. In the Spanish language, we have a dozen different ways to insult both Black and Indigenous peoples, targeting everything from skin tone to hair. We still know how to turn Black hair and hairstyles into something derogatory centuries after slaves were forcibly brought to the shores of Latin America against their wills. We take credit for genres of music that were invented by Afro-Latinx musicians like reggaeton and cumbia. We take the parts of our Indigenous history that we like for ourselves, only to oppress real indigenous peoples who are starving, lack clean water, lack government support, and whose languages are at risk of extinction all across the U.S. and Latin America. We get overly surprised when we see a Black or Asian person speaking Spanish or question them about their “real” heritage. We even have a bingo game, Lotería, that features a Black man (or more horrifyingly, a white man in blackface) in minstrel-style artwork that has since been removed from more modern version of the game, but which still leaves an awful iron taste in my mouth.
And it’s not just Latinx politicians or celebrities who are anti-immigrant. Real people, people you and I might know, vote against their own self-interests because they think themselves above undocumented people, repeat the same disgusting rhetoric that is spoken freely at rallies and political stages, replicate the same capitalistic strategies that oppress other members of their community because they “came the right way” and “lifted themselves up by their bootstraps.”
If you’d like, I could also talk about the women. How femicide is one of the leading causes of death of women in Mexico alone. How we watched our mothers and grandmothers submit to the men in our lives without question. How they were always the last to feed themselves. How, even now, women are continuously disrespected, fetishized, objectified, assaulted, harassed, dismissed, put down, ignored by the men who are “supposed” to be the leaders of our community.
We say “community” a lot, so much so that it’s common to hear the phrase “la comunidad” dropped in the middle of an English language sentence, but rarely do we define what community we’re actually referring to. Or, we go out of our way to explicitly include Afro-Latinxs, Indigenous Latinxs, and Asian Latinxs because we know, in some deep, dark part of ourselves, that “Latinx” only refers to a certain group of people within the diaspora because it is, by virtue, a term that is meant to erase, to invalidate, to separate.
The thing is, nothing is ever going to change unless we fess up to all the ways we’ve gone about policing others’ identities and misrepresenting our own. At its best, I believe the Latinx community is one of warmth, solidarity, support, and love. But more often than not, we are only repeating the patterns that were instilled into our cultures, our governments, even our foods, the moment that colonization began. I hope that this Latinx Heritage Month, we all think about ways we can become the best versions of ourselves and do the work of undoing the racism, colorism, and erasure that’s been instilled in ourselves and the people we love. Because if not, if we are silent, we will held accountable. It’s up to us to speak up this month and every single day of our lives.
notes from the writer’s desk ✍️
my favorite recently pub’d pieces:
updates:
I’m thrilled to share that this month, I’ll be giving my first talk on the TEDx stage in Huntington Beach!! I literally can’t wait for September 28th to speak about diversity, representation, and written storytelling. And guess what - tickets were just made available today! You can purchase yours via this link. See you there!
I’m so excited to announce the upcoming publication of my debut children’s book!! The book will spotlight past and present queer heroes from Latin America and the U.S. and is forthcoming from Jessica Kingsley Publishers in September 2025. More info and details to come soon! In the meantime, please read this thread I wrote about the project.
resources:
Looking for book recommendations? Check out my Bookstagram and TikTok to keep up with what I’m reading and loving right now! On TikTok, you’ll also get more snippets of my everyday writing life and lifestyle/fashion content. See you there!
other stories i’m loving 📖
currently reading:
My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones
currently watching:
Frog and Toad S2
currently listening to:
“Check” by FLO
all my love,
sofía xx