The Inheritance of Cultural Appropriation and the Scarlet Letter of Latinidad

By Jonathan Andrew Pérez, Esq.

“… I happened to place it on my breast… it seemed to me then, that I experienced a sensation not altogether physical, yet almost so, as of a burning heat;” – The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne

Through my life I had always struggled with style. But not just style in terms of clothing, but writing, selecting participle phrases, speaking for myself, the metric dance of writing. It had something which began and ended in a recurring alienation of the self. Specific, the lock-step I had with my inherited identity. Spanish, Latinx, or Hispanic, my last name wore on its sleeve the refrain that I was not fully white. Yet, the crime of all crimes, I was not fully Hispanic! From the first look of the other from white New England friends and colleagues in school, the origin story remained ambiguous, and generated a guilt when I couldn’t speak Spanish fluently.

I was brought up by a single mother throughout my childhood. One that played in the 1980s assimilationist ideals, through no fault of her own. I blame no one for the coughs, roars, and truth that I inherited. She pushed me to excel in school from the first English-style private school she entered me into, to the boarding school, where I found myself to be my greatest enemy.

Skipping to today the Latinx community is one of the most victimized and villainized of all non-majority groups in the U.S. While I am speaking about the cost of the flooding-across-the-border speculation garnered by a commander in chief with little to no regard for the intricacies of being not of the Mayflower. I am talking about American Dirt and Jeanine Cummins[1] accusations of phony-Latinidad. To surrender to the otherness that causes confusion (and by extension fear) in the majority that those who are proximate in name, or attempted ethno-historiography, such as Jeanine Cummins, have someone plagiarized or appropriated her Latinidad for profit is not new. Many of my social media networks have accused her of profitability, and that she is in fact “white.” Hers is a specific brand of whiteness and class that cannot be undone (many claim she is a white Puerto Rican), and thus, her attempt at transmuting proximate Latinidad represents a wholly un-American and un-Democratic liberal repetition of further disenfranchises “real” and “suffering” Latinos who have the birthmark of class struggle.

This was recently repeated by natural echo in Lana Del Rey’s attempt[2] to also re-historicize her Latinidad in an Instagram post, attempting to accentuate her name and space with a kind of feminist woman of color colloquium. She was lambasted and later posted a mea culpa claiming that she meant only to write about advocacy.

But I would like to couple this discussion with what many post-structural philosophers return to as the origin of all thought – lived experience. It is a tired argument from the 1990s identity politics generalist era to objectify categories of identity as 100% identifiable by politicized voting blocs. For example, being that she identifies as Latino and argues that her Latinidad allows her to advocate on behalf of others who are nominally, but not proximally, or economically, or socially, Latinx, as a sort of identity-family. The 1990s identity sociologist would then offer: well if she was visibly African American, Black, or Caribbean, marked by her visible appearance, she could more easily claim her born-identity, and construct a kinship with needed refuges of advocacy. But, she cannot as the Latinx community has inherited structural inequity through systems of U.S. and global inequity of forced incarceration due to histories of immigration policy, employment discrimination, social and personal assumptions about the global south and communal bias.

If she or this imagined white-Latinx is anything like me, let me be really frank and transparent: one does not have a choice where one’s parents send you to school, what last name you inherit, what identity has been uniquely tagged (to use a social media trope) to you. Imagine for a minute your name is Latinx Perez, Lopez, Rodriguez – each of which I have been called numerous times out of naivete of the email sender, or caller, in employment, personal, consumer, and educational contexts – perceived as one of group of purely Latinx persons. Then, imagine you grow up in a single parent household, not outside the realm of possibility. This household aligns you with your mother who is identifiably white and class-oriented driven by the American dream to extend the finest in the world of education and class-based upward mobility. You are shipped off to boarding school or another institution of your choice. There, you become a formal aberration, an alienated experiment within the realm of a pseudo-affirmative action (private schooling does not necessarily abide by the intricacies of the constitutional mandate that public schooling does, but instead, adhere to the consumerist belief that the school must prepare the majoritarian full-paying students to be “prepared for the world”). You have been represented as a scholarship student, or one is there for purposes of the multicultural mandate that the real world will require. You are not accepted into the stabilized atmosphere of white girls and boys, and have affixed to you a kind of humbling ancient image of the magical genius who made it out of the lower-middle class. Mind you, this is not at all a reality, other than the single-parent household and a hard working single parent who is sacrificing to give you this opportunity.

You make your life’s mission that of archaeology, a kind of mea culpe, but more a way to paint the picture you are Latinx and will work hard at reaffirming the alienated identity that you have inherited. Your family is worlds away, and your household never had Spanish. Your grandmother did not speak English, and when she passed that little connection to the decades of generational ethnic complexity disappear. You become a community-advocate for those who nominally are like you. You study and write about the history of public inequity and use your privilege to advocate for the voiceless. However, everytime you use voiceless there is a tinge of regret, guilt, dare I say, majoritarian eyes of judgment for your false representation.

There is nothing quantifiable about Latinidad and it stresses qualifiable moments of advocacy, as Lana Del Rey begins to describe in her Instagram post. The stresses of your name, and the stresses of the shame that the United States continues to position on a community in need of organizing is just another form of harm.

In the end only time will tell, but to have this discussion now is urgent before we are all detained.

[1] For more on Cummins’ controversy with the publication of American Dirt, see here: https://www.npr.org/2020/01/31/801530214/american-dirt-a-conversation-about-a-controversy

[2] For more on the Lana Del Rey controversy see: https://www.msn.com/en-us/music/news/lana-del-rey-called-anti-black-for-o nly-calling-out-the-urban-girls/ar-BB14tMt3

Jonathan Andrew Pérez is a senior Assistant District Attorney in Social Justice and has developed the first-ever study of the History of Systemic Inequity to train law enforcement, and prosecutors across the country on the history of laws and policies that have resulted in structural inequity in the hopes of transformation change. He teaches at Wesleyan University. His first book is published by Finishing Line Press, The Cartographer of Crumpled Maps: The Justice Elegies.