I was browsing through the categories of the 2004 Weblog Awards, and found that those blogs written in spansih or in this region of the world belong to this category:

Best Mexican or Central/South American Blog

It’s so clear. Latin America is, first, mexican, and then the rest. There is nothing innocent about this; it’s estimated that at least 58% of inmigrants referred to as “hispanics” -this label we haven’t established ourselves- that live in the United States are mexicans or direct descendents of mexicans. Again, the world is first seen from the quotidianity, what we see everyday and has installed itself as obvious. That the category starts by Mexico says much about what many places in the United States think Latin America is. And this, rather than a problem of ignorance -the typical excuse to justify why those we qualify, in an essencialistic way, as “US americans” see the world in a different way- should be understood from the use of an obvious category of quotidian application by many people that live in the North.

The same thing happens with categories like Best Liberal Blog or Best Conservative Blog; these are clearly created for the US american political reality.

I want to state that the idea of this post is to discuss a naturalized vision of Latin America. We are quietly allowing categories such as “hispanic” or “latino” to define us, establishing a false sense of homogeneity in our region, one that is so marked up by its differences within. Also, to empty the “latin american” category of any political oppositional content. If we let others classify the world for us, I’m afraid we’ll be more fucked up than we already are. It’s not wrong to play with categories, but we should remember that relations between the hierarchization of what’s real and its representation are sometimes too narrow.