LatinoLand Quotes

“For even as indigenous women were forced to breed with Spaniards, indigenous men were denied the ability to propagate their race.”
― Marie Arana, LatinoLand: A Portrait of America's Largest and Least Understood Minority

“Indeed, although we arrived long before the pilgrims—and although we account for more than half of the US population growth over the last decade and are projected to lead population growth for the next thirty-five years—it seems as if the rest of the country is perpetually in the act of discovering us.”
― Marie Arana, LatinoLand: A Portrait of America's Largest and Least Understood Minority

“...the shattering abuses that unaccompanied migrant children suffer in the United States today. A full quarter million Hispanic child laborers, mostly from the northern triangle... Entered this country from 2020 to 2022 and toil today in field and factory work. What The New York Times calls 'America's new economy of exploitation.' These minors are the product of a heartless patently dysfunctional immigration system that has not understood this country's history and hasn't faced its injustices in almost 40 years. Their suffering is in plain sight with no real legislation to stop it.”
― Marie Arana, LatinoLand: A Portrait of America's Largest and Least Understood Minority

“They tried to bury us. They did not know we were seeds.”
― Marie Arana, LatinoLand: A Portrait of America's Largest and Least Understood Minority

“Why couldn't latinos be a race? Just as the others are arbitrarily designated races in the census, the effect of diluting us to an ethnicity complicating the process of self identification and forcing the population to define itself under other labels has very real societal effects. Any statistics involving law enforcement, police brutality, the criminal justice system, educational attainment, instances of discrimination, economic success or peril, and many others are not tracked for latinos.”
― Marie Arana, LatinoLand: A Portrait of America's Largest and Least Understood Minority

“A reverse one drop rule had long operated among Mexicans and would eventually operate among Mexican Americans. If they had any Spanish blood at all from a distant ancestor they considered themselves classifiably and justifiably white. To be anything else in the United States, to be black mulatto or Asian was to have no votes. No access to property, no rights at all. By demanding citizenship, they were demanding whiteness.”
― Marie Arana, LatinoLand: A Portrait of America's Largest and Least Understood Minority

“Traumatized by a brutal racist colonial past, a lighter shade of skin un blancamento, a whitening would make your children's lives better easier. It is a systemic racism of another kind, the Latino kind.”
― Marie Arana, LatinoLand: A Portrait of America's Largest and Least Understood Minority

“In 500 years of race mixing as a consequence Latin Americans, and we their US Latino descendants, have come to represent every possible skin color. Nearly 2/3 of us are mixed race. Nowhere else on earth has a people of such ethnic complexity been wrought in such a short span of time. We are as one philosopher called us la raza cósmica, the cosmetic race.”
― Marie Arana, LatinoLand: A Portrait of America's Largest and Least Understood Minority

“By 1600, a mere 100 years after Columbus's arrival, a combination of war disease and a failure to multiply had slashed the indigenous population by as much as 90%. The vibrant race of 60 million that once inhabited, this hemisphere had been reduced to a scant 6 million. It was a genocide of historic proportion. Contemporary scientists call that period from 1492 to 1620, the great dying, an eradication so vast that the airs' carbon dioxide levels fell markedly lowering global temperatures by .15°C.”
― Marie Arana, LatinoLand: A Portrait of America's Largest and Least Understood Minority