Everybody Under The Same Umbrella

By: Linda Spector

I have been living in the United States for about four years. Since then, I am having a feeling of lost identity, lost race, and lost ethnicity. I was born in Colombia, and all my life I thought that I was part of one of the greatest countries in the world. I was Colombian. Today I am just one more Latino in the United States, I lost my Colombia. People call me Latina. But what does it mean to be Latino?

Some people think that Latinos all look alike, and come from the same place. Some people think that we all eat rice and beans and spicy food, we all are illegal immigrants, we all are small in height, we all have the same likable accent, and we all are beige, with dark colored eyes and black hair, like me.

Is it true that people from Central America, South America and North America, (Mexico is part of the North American Continent), are all Latinos?  Are they all alike? I would say it is not true. Every country in the world has different ethnicities, different traditions, different governments and different cultures. I don’t like that people make assumptions because the media has created a stereotype that people from South America, Central America and Mexico are all the same because most of the population speaks Spanish and has Spanish ancestry. 

 I totally disagree when people from Central America or from Colombia say “we are all the same because we are Latinos.” What does that even mean? And the media can’t even decide what to call the people from South America, Central America and Mexico – Latino or Hispanic.

           

            I don’t understand why we have to put everybody under one big umbrella just because people share a language and some of them have Spanish roots. I believe that not all the people from South America are the same, not all the people from one country are the same, and not even all the people from one city are the same.