“How did you Portuguese react to the performance history of Bad Bunny, in Super Bowlto exalt us, Latinos?”, asked me, more or less in these words, a university-educated Brazilian, last Monday.
It was the most unusual question I had to answer in Brazil since, still as a tourist in 2001, someone on a dream beach in the Northeast asked me what language was spoken in Portugal and, confused by my answer, insisted on an improvised Portuguese “to understand each other better”.
Like all Portuguese people, for 37 years, the ones I lived in Portugal before emigrating to Brazil 15 years ago, I was “Latino”. Logical: I was born in a country colonized by Romans, who lived in a region called Broadtoday Lazio, and because of this I speak a language of Latin origin, in addition to having other cultural traits common to Italians, Spaniards, French, Romanians and also French-speaking Belgians and French- and Italian-speaking Swiss.
In Brazil, I just became “white European”.
The fault, of course, lies with the denominations invented in the United States, a country always eager to distinguish, hierarchize and segregate human beings, those of the world and, above all, those of the country itself, according to races, colors, stereotypes, pasts and origins.
It was there that they invented the term “Latinos” to define all those originating from Latin American countries, which is called that, there, because it is made up of American countries colonized by the Spanish or, in the case of Brazil, by the Portuguese.
A Portuguese person (or a Spaniard or an Italian) walking in Times Square, however, is not officially described as a “Latin tourist” but rather as a “white European tourist”.
And Americans of Italian origin are just Italians or Italian-Americans, even if their grandparents came from that country. Broadtoday Lazio, the cradle of Latinity.
It doesn’t make much sense, like so much in the United States, starting with the current president.
But the saddest thing about this story is not the proverbial American ignorance and xenophobia. It is the proverbial Brazilian subservience and submission to the conventions of the United States, even the ignorant and xenophobic ones.
Because they don’t just come from those Brazilians, like Jair Bolsonaro and other reactionaries, who salute when they see the Yankee flag and think it’s chic to play American football, eat hamburgers wildly, drink Starbucks coffee and run to buy the latest gadget in a bigtech as unnecessary as the penultimate; also part of the so-called progressives, who replicate the agendas, ideas and expressions woke of the American academy even when these agendas, ideas and expressions do not resonate in practice with the Brazilian people.
The author of that 2001 question was someone with little education. The author of this 2026 is a scholar.
I replied that not only did I love Bad Bunny’s choreography in honor of Latin Americans but, to a large extent, I saw myself in it again, as a Latin European. He looked at me, confused, and almost started speaking to me in Portuguese.
Journalist, correspondent in São Paulo
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