hroughout history, Latinos have been both colonized and colonizers. By this, I don’t mean simply the obvious: that Latinos are mestizos, the mixed-race descendants of Indigenous Americans, Spaniards, Middle Easterners, Africans, and other ethnic and racial groups. I also mean that Latinos have identified not only as survivors of imperialism and its ills, but also as supporters of imperial and national powers. As the historian Serge Gruzinski put it in The Mestizo Mind, the different groups that came together to forge Latino identity were like “prisoners in a maze,” bound to one another by the pain of conquest and the imperative to build new societies from the ashes.

That pain, of course, was extraordinary. The spread of the Spanish and American empires was achieved through great violence against African and Indigenous people and their mixed-race descendants. They were slaughtered, enslaved, and raped, their cultures and religions destroyed. These are necessary and hard truths, and they became more widely acknowledged in the mid-20th century, when decolonization movements swept the world and more people began speaking out against the legacies of white supremacy.

When that happened, more Latinos began to identify with their Indigenous and African roots, in opposition to the old imperial powers. Some called for an Indigenous revival: Puerto Ricans claimed Taíno identity, and the Young Lords, an activist group fashioned after the Black Panthers, fought for Puerto Rican independence. Chicanos referred to the Southwest as Aztlán, the mythical homeland of the Aztecs. In 1972, Rodolfo Acuña published his influential history Occupied America, which argued that Mexican Americans were internally colonized subjects of the United States.