Adding to the strangeness of our national mythologies is how Spanish, a colonial language, has been racialized in US popular culture. The most common visual image of Latinos in a mestizo body, or sometimes with African ancestry, renders theirs a “colored” rather than colonial language. And as with all architectures of colonialism and its aftermath, the colonized and post-colonized find themselves tethered to the colonizers. For much of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, the colonial legacy today is felt in the power of the United States as well as their European national elites.
