Who or What Is ‘Latino’? Héctor Tobar Considers a Term’s Many Meanings

Tobar’s students sometimes recast their traumatic histories as trials resembling those of mythic heroes from books, movies, manga and anime, imagining themselves as protagonists from the Marvel Universe, Naruto and “Star Wars.” To Tobar, this makes perfect sense. These popular epics, in which outcasts and everyday people rise up to defeat oppressive powers, resemble the quests and battles survived by his students’ families and ancestors, who have escaped villainous gangs and governments, traversed oceans and continents, and evaded the militarized barriers of the world’s most powerful nation.

“Stories about empire,” Tobar writes, “move us because they’re echoes of the memories that reside deep in our collective consciousness.” Latinos, after all, are people “living with the hurt caused by war and politics, conquest and surrender, revolution and dictatorship.”

For readers without Latin American heritage, Tobar takes care to depict Latino life in a universal light, as something easily comprehensible to anyone who has ever felt the pull of a far-off person or place: “To feel that your being, your happiness, your wholeness and your love are divided between two distant spots on the globe is an entirely normal condition in the modern world.” So many exoticized aspects of Latino experience, he argues, are in fact exceedingly common; they seem bewildering only because they are rarely articulated, unlike the “fairy-tale” notions of whiteness prevalent in our dominant culture.

Tobar does not discuss whether he believes “Latino” is a label worth keeping, or whether there is another term we might someday seek to replace it with. He avoids in large part the history of conflicting movements within the Latino community, and neglects to fully examine issues of intersectionality and colorism, or whose stories are favored over others and what it means to achieve “representation.” While Tobar’s book is too slim to satisfyingly encompass every complexity, he nevertheless succeeds in capturing a kaleidoscope of shared stories and circumstances, of feelings and preoccupations that are both buried and overt.

For those who, like me, exist somewhere on the spectrum of Latinidad, “Our Migrant Souls” is likely to be a resonant and deeply affecting book, one that often holds up a mirror to our lives. While reading it, I often thought of my grandfather, who came to the United States as a small child, carried across the border during the Mexican Revolution. As he and his siblings were subsumed into American life, they came to reject ties to Mexico that might “darken” them, clinging instead to a centuries-removed “Spanish” lineage.