should i eat first or shower first *has phone in couch time for another 3 hours due to choice procrastination, a behavioral phenomenon observed in pigeons and rats as well*
Hello Latin person here, I’m very curious to read what you mean by “I could rant on about his calculated choices of how to present that identity, but that’d be a post on its own.” About Luis Carazo, that you mentioned in your post answering the question about Marisha. Have a great day.
Also answering this ask:
I’m gonna start with a disclaimer: there’s literally entire books that capture these issues far better than I can in an ask, so take this as my summary of my thoughts and not a definitive explanation discrimination faced by Latin Americans in the U.S.
Even then, this gets pretty long. I go over some historical context first, then address some AP choices by Luis.
I wrote up a whole bunch of history, then deleted it, because dude—there’s so much. I cannot possibly sum it up when I’m not a historian. I took an entire class on this. So here’s an incredibly specific vignette into one issue.
Race is a made up category. It has little to do with actual biology, and instead is typically wielded as a weapon to discriminate against classes of people based on their cultural heritage. However, the creation of racial categories is also the recognition of the fact that those people exist. The way in which people are categorized is strategic. To be lumped into a single category is to homogenize that group, often to achieve multiple ends. It can bolster the perceived size of those populations. It can be used as justification that there aren’t truly distinct peoples within them. All choices of how those labels are applied and to whom carries political intent.
This is a very barebones summary of history as to certain racial categorizations:
In 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican-American War in which the U.S. seized the entirety of the modern-day southwestern U.S. from Mexico. One of the terms of the treaty is that those of Mexican descent would be considered “White” under U.S. law—which was required for citizenship and the ability to vote. It’s not a coincidence. The U.S. wanted these new lands to be populated with people in the White category, regardless of their actual ancestry and heritage. This was especially important during the time of political strife regarding Black slavery, abolition, and the American Civil War on the horizon.
However, Mexicans were only “White” on paper. They were subjected to discrimination very much along the lines of Jim Crow laws throughout the southwestern U.S. Unlike other races, these “White” Mexicans did not succeed in challenging these laws under the 14th Amendment because they were “White”. It’s not racial discrimination when you’re lumped into the same category.
Prior to 1930, there was no racial category that applied to indigenous Americans who were not members of a federally recognized tribe (Native American). If you weren’t one of those specific tribes, the government simply did not recognize any racial category for you. 1930 was the only census where “Mexican” was included as a race. The first and only time there was any recognition of a race of indigenous people who didn’t fit into the Native American tribal categories.
In response to these policy changes, a federal judge ruled that several Mexican immigrants were thus ineligible for citizenship because they weren’t White. They’re the Mexican race! So even the minimal rights they had under the “White” category that preceded 1930 were now gone.
At the time, FDR had been attempting to improve relations with Mexico. As a result of this court-led backlash, the President instructed several agencies to uniformly classify people of Mexican descent as white again. Individuals had no discretion in the matter. The government fixed it by getting rid of the distinction. Most people reasoned that it was better to have at least citizenship, even if you otherwise aren’t recognized. Latin American, Hispanic, Mexican, and similarly situated cultural/political groups encouraged their people to assimilate. They needed to be as white as possible or else they’d lose what little legal rights they had.
Over the course of the next several decades, the U.S. government gradually added a census question whether people were “of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin?” The language varied in detail, sometimes with additional subcategory checkboxes, and other times with a simple yes/no. But there was never any race added to recognize that this group existed. There is no race of indigenous Americans except for specific tribes under the umbrella of Native American. There’s an ethnicity, and it doesn’t receive any special protections or recognition other than a checkbox.
And now we can talk about Actual Play shows and Luis Carazo.
A few weeks back, the Darrington Press YouTube channel hosted a Daggerheart one shot, Gilded Nights, featuring an all Latin/Black cast. I highly recommend it. It’s a homage to Sinners set in 1940s Hollywood and does not hide the racial bullshit any of the characters faced in the entertainment industry at the time. If you can pass for white by your name, speech, dress, and mannerisms, you will be tolerated—and your work will be stolen to be credited to the White partner on your projects. If you can’t pass, you’re the help or a spectacle for entertainment. It is not fair, it is not corrected within the story, and you must choose your battles wisely. The characters don’t challenge the structural problem because it’s too big for them to take on; they only defeat specific villains, and the institutions that shaped those villains remain.
Almost none of that has changed for Latin Americans, Hispanics, etc.
I’ll reblog a gif set of Oscar Isaac along with this response. Stage names are a big deal for screen actors. You’re supposed to pick one that is unique, so if you’ve got a generic or common name, sorry, you gotta make up a new one. However, if you’re ethnic, any agent with brains is going to tell you to pick a name that is as white as possible. The agent is doing an FDR: it’s racist as fuck that this is how it works, but it’s the easiest and most direct way that I can help you, by assisting with your assimilation. Assimilation means you are far more likely to be tolerated—permitted—to be here by those who make the decisions.
But wait! What about Antonio Banderas? Penelope Cruz? They were huge names in Hollywood. They flaunt their accents and names as an asset. They’re sexy and exotic and successful. They’re obviously not white, right?
Yeah, they’re Spanish. Born in Spain. European. Maybe a little too potentially-Moorish for white supremacists, but more acceptable than “White” Latin Americans.
Luis Carazo chose an entirely Latin stage name. He has the face and voice to be “ethnically ambiguous” in the same way that Oscar Isaac is: by ignoring that he is connected to a distinct, living culture in the Americas. He could have passed for “White” and chose not to. It has, without a doubt, cost him work. Even so, he has had a successful acting career.
Luis DM’d the first season of Tales Unrolled, which features an entirely Latin American cast in a primarily English spoken show. Just listen to the first 10 minutes. Luis has a fantastic accent (Colombian to my ears) that is wielded like a knife. It cuts in precisely where it is needed to convey something in another language and no more—until a later episode where he chooses to say the common mispronunciation of “axolotl” as the narrator and uses the correct Nahuatl pronunciation as a character.
That is a skill most Latin Americans have needed to hone so that we can “pass” in every day life. The sad reality is that we must prioritize sounding American in English over everything else, and our accents in those other languages suffer, regardless of which language it is. By choosing to mispronounce as the narrator, Luis is conveying to the target audience (Latin Americans) that “I am one of you, I must do this same thing” while also recognizing that the character who represents those people does not need to make those sacrifices like we do. It’s a multi-level meta narrative woven into a single word. Neither the narrator nor the character is wrong for it. This is who each of them are, and we make different choices, and the blame does not lie with us.
But that was for Tales Unrolled, a show directed at English-speaking Latin Americans. In all CR shows, Luis has not employed anything other than a U.S. accent. He sticks to “passing” strategies because that is the role that will increase his chances of success with a primarily white audience.
In EXU Calamity, Luis plays a human paladin, Zerxus Ilerez, who has the hubris of believing that he will redeem the Father of Lies, a god. To recap the lore, the gods came to Exandria and created mortal races with the Primordials. However, Luis paralleled U.S. imperialist talking points that the white, European settlers were actually right to be here and the new Latin American immigrants were graced with an invitation. Zerxus rejects the history of the gods having been here first, instead adopting a mortals-first mythology:
You didn't stumble upon this place, you and your kin. You were called here. We have always been here. You were wandering in the Abyss, lost. And we called you here, so that you can have a home. You didn't create anything. We have always been here.
It’s a false history, and that’s the whole point. Subtly baked into Zerxus is the American exceptionalism mentality that everyone else is welcome, but only if they recognize their inferiority. You’re welcome as an immigrant if you accept that I was here first (even though I wasn’t). You can stay here if you give up what you were and what you had for what I deign to shape you into: a better you. The version in my head.
And then we got to see Luis bait that god into smiting that paladin multiple times for the insolence of such belief.
Luis weaves these little moments into his characters with such precision that most people don’t even see them for what they are: a sharp critique of the racism and discrimination faced by Latin Americans and other indigenous peoples. Unless this stuff is on your mind, it just doesn’t register. The average American doesn’t know this aspect of the history of white supremacy, so they don’t recognize it when it’s right up in front of them.
Marion Collodi was Luis’s character in Candela Obscura for The Circle of Needle and Thread. Marion’s soul was stolen as a child, and since then, he made repeated choices of attempting to save others’ souls. He viewed himself as a vessel to be used, with little self-worth beyond that usefulness. At the climax, he uses magic to reach back in time and steal his younger self’s soul, becoming whole again and thwarting the monster’s plot to use him as a vessel. At the end, he sacrifices his soul and life to save a friend, the doctor who sealed the monster away and who could save more lives than he could. The narrative had changed from an object that needed a purpose to a man making his own choices about what his life was worth.
Azune Nayar is Luis’s character for C4. Possibly an orphan, but we don’t know, as he was sent off by his family and separated by war. We don’t know his heritage. He’s obsessed with remembering those who fell in battle because the victors view their rebellion as shameful and did its best to erase them. No one but Azune tries to maintain a record of who they were. He speaks a language he doesn’t understand to mend a candle by willing it to remember itself; he cannot remember or understand for it, but it can. But he cannot remedy the erasure that happened at the Palazzo Davinos; those people are gone and forgotten, with even the evidence of the massacre scrubbed away. These aspects of lost memory haunt him, and he takes it upon himself to be a memorial.
There’s no hint of that other accent in any of Luis’s CR roles. This isn’t the place for it. It won’t help him get the message across. It has to be made palatable, it has to be disguised, it has to be curated. And even with those challenges, he is razor sharp in execution. Luis speaks in perfect American: enough to “pass” while he takes multiple opportunities to tell stories about cultural erasure.
The census of 1930 was the only record of Mexicans as a race in the United States. Hundreds of years from now, when records have been lost, the census will be one of few longitudinal records given any legitimacy as to diversity of the population, and it will be a marker that there were people like that until they were intentionally scrubbed from that history. The history will be that this country repeatedly decided that it did not want them to be remembered. That’s not even getting into the refusal to recognize the histories and cultures beyond Mexicans. The U.S. as an institution is a White country repeatedly making every effort to erase that any other culture was ever here. The White lie that “We have always been here” is countered by Luis’s “We existed.”
So I’m excited to see how Luis does in C4. Azune is not going to be only about grief. There will be notes of erasure, history, and living memory. I’m looking forward to it.
I am Jewish. I am an anti-Zionist. I am always and forever pro-Palestine.
My grandmother was born in Palestine before Israel existed. My grandmother, who died less than a decade ago (in her 70s) was already older than the settler colonial state of Israel. Judaism exists without Zionism. Zionism goes against the Jewish religion. Zionism is white supremacy.
My deepest darkest fantasy is that I collapse on the street and I am rushed to the hospital. They perform a bunch of tests and find out I am severely deficient in some kind of vitamin. Then I start taking the vitamin and I become the happiest cleverest person alive because all my problems were caused by this one deficiency
Hello loves! I hate to do this but my sweet pup Annie may unfortunately have OCD or arthritis–or some other bone/cartilage disorder–and I’m looking at high vet costs for treatment. Please consider donating if you want/are able. I can doodle you a little something as thanks if you’d like that. In any case, thank you as always for your kindness and your support! ❤
Don’t look away, Rose! You need to see what happens when you try to bring a human to life, when you cross into God’s territory or whatever the hell it is! Is this what you want?! Look!
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