What's a Latino? Héctor Tobar goes deep on stereotypes and solidarity
Héctor Tobar is tired of the Latino caricature.
It's everywhere from Netflix to the nightly news, from the Instagram feeds of the red-pilled to the bookshelves of the "woke." Conservative propagandists aren't alone in reducing Latinos to killers and cartel bosses. Liberal scribes traffic in such tropes too. But in their stories, Latinos aren't always sinners. They can also be "spicy," suffering or saintly characters.
No wonder so many people are silent or even celebratory in the face of the mass expulsion and exploitation of the most marginalized among us. Why should they care about the one-dimensional figures they imagine us to be?
Tobar's latest book, "," is the culmination of his decades-long struggle to correct this dehumanization. A bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who spent , Tobar. At times, he cites their work to elucidate the fact that many Latinos, from the Afro-Puerto Rican to the Blaxican or part-Asian, feel they don't fully belong anywhere. This sense of unbelonging is, in fact, what binds us.
