As I opened an email from my local grocery store chain advertising Hispanic Heritage Month—which runs from Sept. 15 to Oct. 15 each year—I was surprised to see it highlighting recipes from four distinct regions: Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and South America.
The advertisement rightly noted that while corn and beans have framed much of what in the United States is considered “Hispanic” foods, Latin America has a much greater diversity of foods. Its cuisine, which began long before the Spanish or other colonizers came to the Americas, continues to flourish.
While many of us Latine—an alternative term for Latinos or Latinx that I prefer—embrace our European heritage, we also embrace our Indigenous and African heritage.
In recent decades, many Latin American nations have officially recognized their Indigenous and Afro-descendent populations as distinct groups with unique histories, cultures, foods and languages.
Countries across the Americas, including the United States, have revised their census questions to better understand their populations, enabling them to create more inclusive policies that actually address people’s needs—and to recognize the too-often hidden achievements of these groups.
Census Changes in Latin America
Some Latin American countries, such as Peru, have counted their Indigenous population for over a century. But with the exception of Brazil and Cuba, Latin American countries generally excluded race on their national census, allowing economic and social inequalities to flourish undocumented.
The effort to better capture both Indigenous and Afro-descendant populations in Latin America began around the turn of the 21st century.
Uruguay, a small and prosperous South American country, long portrayed itself as white and European despite being home to Afro-Uruguayans descended from enslaved Africans. In 1996, under pressure from Afro-descendent activists, it added race to its national household survey. That census had census workers identify the respondents’ race and found the country to be 6% Afro-descended and revealed stunning racial disparities in education, income and employment. When in 2006 Uruguayan census-takers began asking residents to state their own racial identity, the Afro-descended population jumped to 10%. This data shift had important implications when Uruguay implemented race-based affirmative action a few years
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