By Estefanía Camacho—

Latin American pride is rooted in a colonial and undeniably hierarchical category. This is how ayuujk (mixe) writer, linguist, and activist Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil (1981) described it in an interview during the San Miguel Writers’ Conference & Literary Festival in February 2026.

“If we were to arbitrarily mark the history of our peoples with the domestication of maize 10,000 years ago, we would have spent 10,000 years being Zapotec, Mixe, or Nahua, and of those 10,000 years, 500 as Indians and 200 as Indigenous. So where does ‘Latino’ come from?” questions Yásnaya, with her long, straight black hair, wearing black-framed glasses with a small cat-ear-like detail at the top.

She explains that “Latino” is a label that originated in France in the 19th century, coined to distinguish between two types of colonization in this part of the continent: Anglo-Saxon America and Latin America.

“’Latina’ has to do with the fact that we were oppressed (…) it is a category produced by a colonialist process. Therefore, there are peoples who have not been fully Latinized,” she explains, referring to the different Indigenous populations across the territory, who continue to keep languages alive outside Spanish and their own roots.

“Latino” in Spanish—not to be confused with how it is used in the United States—is a category that has not only regained relevance but has also gained strength in response to racist actions, especially in that country, primarily against Spanish-speaking migrants or racially profiled Americans.

Yásnaya, translator too, also understands the nuance of “Latino” as a “weapon of resistance,” but she asks that it should not be used as a folklorizing essentialization of something that comes from a violent process such as colonization, and that it remains as an external label.

The category of “Latino” and that of “Indigenous”
Yásnaya says that when she travels to other regions, she is invariably categorized as Latina, regardless of the fact that she is ayuujk and—if anything—identifies as Indigenous.

“In Europe I was Mexican, in Mexico I am Oaxacan, in Oaxaca I am Mixe, in the sierra I am usually from Ayutla. At some point I am Indigenous, but that was something I was told or intuited through contrast before the name even arrived. During an extraterrestrial attack, I will surely be an Earthling, and I will be so with passion,” she wrote in her first book “Ää: manifiestos sobre la diversidad lingüística” (Almadía, 2023).

She has frequently pointed out in her research and columns that patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist systems seek to turn “the other” as a mechanism into a homogeneous, monolithic entity in order to oppress them.

Just as with the category “Latina,” the same happens in Mexico when the category “Indigenous” is adopted as a whole, without mentioning the 68 Indigenous peoples who live in the country, including Afro-Mexicans, who represent at least 10% of the total population.
“Indigenous is a category created by a system of oppression; it is not an essence of our peoples. It is a political moment in our history. We were not always Indigenous,” Yásnaya said. “In the end, in the future, hopefully we can be Mixe without being Indigenous. Because that has already happened. That would mean there is no longer oppression,” the writer proposes.

She explained during her keynote lecture at the literary conference that in Mexico there are 11 Indo-American language families within the 68 groupings of languages, and these in turn belong to 365 distinct linguistic systems, according to the National Catalog of Indigenous Languages. “What generalization can be made about such diversity? None. What exists is a diversity of traditions and poetic mechanisms,” she added.

Now everyone wants to be Latino?
“Now everyone wants to be Latino, but they lack flavor,” sang the world’s most famous musician, Bad Bunny, in his song “El Apagón” during the halftime show of the 2026 Super Bowl.

The surge in pride around the “Latino” category was especially visible during this event in the United States, but it was also observed across much of the world. The Puerto Rican singer went on a global tour in 2025, although he skipped performing in the US out of concern that anti-immigrant raids could be organized at his concerts. The Super Bowl was the only performance he gave there, and the performance was loaded with symbolism, alluding to an independent Puerto Rico and America as a continent and not merely as the “country.”

However, Yásnaya questioned the emotional weight and sense of pride attached to the label “latino” in the days following the event: “That America that continues to resist the effects of colonization is not even America; it is Abya Yala,” she wrote a few days after the Super Bowl in her El País column titled “¿América Latina o América latinizada?. Xëëmo’oy”

There is still resistance to European colonization from the territory, just as there is today from communities resisting other processes driven by contemporary imperialism.

Spanish, its defense, and shifting contexts
In a context where speaking Spanish can be a risk in a country like the United States, or where it was fiercely defended once it was announced that Bad Bunny would headline the Super Bowl halftime show, Yásnaya explains that it is not a hegemonic language.
“I had always seen Spanish as an enemy because it is erasing my language, right? The first time I went to Los Angeles and spoke with migrant communities, I realized that their experiences were the same as mine in school and with discrimination. So Spanish is not always hegemonic; in reality, we cannot see it only as English versus Spanish and Spanish versus Indigenous languages. There are many layers of complexity,” she said.

During the interview, she also mentioned that as a linguist, she is aware that due to structural asymmetry, she cannot have something as basic as a Mixe dictionary. “Something that is so basic for another language,” she says, “you can go to a bookstore and buy books in Spanish and buy a dictionary where the words are in Spanish and the definitions are also in Spanish. I cannot have a dictionary in Mixe where the definitions are in Mixe. At best, they are bilingual.”
However, she does not see it as far off that a Mixe dictionary with definitions in Mixe could exist.

Defending diversity and multidiversity
“In short, I would not have learned about myself, about what I speak of, through the lens, the eyes, the language of others,” she also wrote in her 2023 book.

Yásnaya has been an activist for linguistic rights, Indigenous autonomy, and the revitalization of indigenous languages, while also consistently advocating against climate change and for the defense of land and resources.

She also writes about celebrating otherness and plurality, as she believes that at this moment in history there are too many “ideological political monocultures” threatening the world, as she warned during the conference.

“Let us remember that monolingual utopias, or futures designed in a monolingual way, are characteristic of the far right.”

Estefanía Camacho is a freelance Mexican journalist working across media and digital magazines. She is a specialist in gender, SMEs, economics, and business.