I'd like to share an excerpt from an essay that was posted by the editor of The Unapologetic Mexican" blog, but first let me give some background to this excerpt-the blog editor, a Latino {man} named Nezua, shared his concerns about a person who twitters who uses a tag name that is prefaced by the group name "Latino" but never writes about issues related to Latinos.

Nezua wrote:

"I felt it would be best to go to the person's site to make sure I was not missing something. What did I find? Almost every face on their roster of bloggers was light-skinned, and many light haired. Latin@s after all, are not beholden to any demographic. I'm making another point, not the colorist one it might seem. My point is that if you can pass—if you lack accent and marked darkness and other traits that the the US dominant culture devalues as less "white" than others—you are nonetheless beholden to support your people. That's my thought. And to tell you the truth, I feel there is a focus is on you and a weight on you to do so. Because you have somewhat of a choice, depending on your situation. And that is a choice that has been stolen from the others by the maintenance and reification of a corrupt system of benefit and entitlement…which favors you arbitrarily. And when that's the case, yes, it would be easy to turn and simply be All Things Latino when it comes to superficial flavor; to throw in a word here and there of Español but to skirt far away from anything icky or sticky or brown or "controversial."

Doing so marks you, to me, as someone riding the backs of raza in not too different a way than the dominant culture does. Which marks you, to me, as something worse, even.

I try to understand it, but do not. To an activist type, what makes you "Latino" if you sever yourself from the land and people of Latin America? What makes you "Latino" if you stand discrete and distinct from not only the atrocities your own country wreaks upon your ancestral homeland, but the struggle to change them? What makes you "Latino" if all the books you read and suggest to others steer away from the politics that ensnare and exploit others who are "Latino"? What even makes you a "Latino" at all if you claim no solidarity with those who suffer from anti-Latino hate even in your own nation?

This remains Nezua's blog. It is not Gospel. You are free to form your own opinion. You are even free to leave it in the comments below. This is simply the decision at which I have arrived. And I don't care if you come from Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guatemala, México or Arizona. Perhaps it is up for debate before that moment you identify as "Latino/a" but once you do, and once you put yourself out there and in any way reap benefit from today's cultural gold rush—this new economy of both catering to and exploiting raza—you owe the rest of those people to which you are connecting yourself. You owe some kind of foot en la lucha, some hand, some voice. Something.

Don't you think so?"...

http://theunapologeticmexican.org/elmachete/2009/05/11/return-to-the-root/
Nezua. May 11, 2009 11:25 AM