Latin America Archives

October 3, 2020

They came for us

Recent revelations by whistleblower Dawn Wooten, exposed that at ICE detention centers, doctors have been performing hysterectomies on unsuspecting patients. Her revelations, while appalling and detestable, are not surprising to me. I’ve seen this before. I know this movie well. It’s like The Ten Commandments playing on television during Good Friday, I know what happens next. I can quote this story line for line.
As a Latin American History scholar, I’ve spent many years familiarizing myself with people like Cornelius Rhoads, a former US Army doctor and hospital administrator who was oversaw racist and barbaric human experimentation projects. I have learned about forced sterilizations on colonial islands through documentaries like La Operación. I’ve combed through the published studies of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment on African American males who were injected with syphilis. I am well aware of the medical community’s penchant for using people in Africa to conduct clinical trials for prescription drugs.

September 30, 2020

by Héctor Reyes

Assimilate This! Is it possible or desirable to assimilate into a white supremacist, colonial settler, and imperialist nation?

Assimilation is this political plasticine that is frequently at the core of newspaper editorials, scapegoating by politicians, and ideological constructs of what it is to be a citizen of the United States of America (U.S.). As such, it refers to a myth-soaked narrative of the history of the U.S. as a nation; who is assumed to belong to it, or who can be allowed to earn a spot in that ark of glorified passengers known as “Americans.”
The term “American” sits at the center of this chauvinistic and exaggerated conception of who is a “red-blooded” inhabitant, and therefore a bona fide “citizen” of the U.S. It is a misguided and vainglorious term that robs the rest of the inhabitants of the Americas of such self-designation. For everyone born or naturalized in Latin America, Central America and the Caribbean

September 6, 2019

by Héctor Reyes

U.S. imperialism in the Americas: the function of colonialism and racism, and how they are different

If you live in the U.S. and are not indigenous to it, you live on stolen land.

Frequently, racism and colonialism are used as substitutes for each other. The technical term for this type of conflation is metonym, as Chickasaw Nation scholar Jodi A. Byrd asserts. I want to argue that the currently popular use of the terms racism and colonialism as interchangeable qualities among social justice activists, and even academics, is not only inappropriate, but that their frequent conflation is the result of more than simple expediency.

The failure to recognize that colonialism is structurally different than and not just another manifestation of racism does irreparable damage to the victims of colonialism. In the specific context of colonialism, failure to recognize colonialism as a continuing crime of erasure and dispossession, the liberal prescriptions of inclusion and civil rights exacerbate the harms of colonialism.