Michelle Santiago Cortés

She said that and she was like, when I go to Mexico or Panama, I'm pretty sure the Spanish colonizers have always felt very much at home in Latin America because these are countries that were colonized in the likeness and image of their homeland.

Not to be hyperbolic about her, but I really do feel like if she's the artist,

we say she is in terms of her virtuosity and her expansive thinking and her travels.

I want her to live in the real world.

If she's trying to connect people and she's talking about singing various languages because multiculturalism, I think that's fabulous.

But we don't all live in the fantasy land where you can just travel everywhere and be Miss Worldwide.

If you really want to connect with people, why not acknowledge that you're on different levels of a very real caste system?

But yeah, I do feel like the machine of it all is probably more liable.

Like her record label is probably who's responsible for pushing her candidacy in the Latin Grammys.

Yeah, I think from the American perspective, in North-South America, the way race is constructed, it's primarily constructed around the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade.

So if you start from there, most of the people that were brought over to the Americas on the transatlantic slave trade ended up in Central and South America.

So when you're talking about the legacy of slavery, the lion's share...

of the people with that ancestry are in Latin America by a huge margin.

So I always feel like that is a good place for Americans to start.

I think in America, people are used to interfacing with Latinidad as usually they picture this brown migrant from somewhere in Central and South America.

And they're always shocked when they realize that there are white Latinos, that there are black Latinos.

I feel like that's the issue that gets lost in the sauce is like, because the Latina demographic in the US is considered like, although it's shifting, but it's typically been considered like

you're a person of color, you're not white, you're other, various stages of migrant and citizenship status throughout history.

And so they usually get put in the bucket of like,

non-white person of color.