Yet the garment chafes. The term struggles under the weight of its own diversity. It must somehow contain the Afro-Caribbean rhythms of the Dominican Republic, the Indigenous cosmologies of the Guatemalan highlands, the European-inflected architecture of Buenos Aires, and the Asian migrations to Lima. It flattens race. A white Cuban exile, a Black Panamanian, and a mestizo farmer from Jalisco are all “Latino,” despite facing vastly different realities of privilege and police violence. It also flattens language. While Spanish is the lingua franca, it excludes the millions of Portuguese-speaking Brazilians, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Indigenous-language speakers from Nahuatl to Quechua who are suddenly lumped into a category defined by Latin-rooted speech.
