This is What Latinos Look Like

Ronald Beltran- El Salvador

Claudia Vanessa Espinosa- Ecuador and Nicaragua

Ashleyann Bermicilia Sanabria- Puerto Rico

Yorlan Machin- Cuba

Elizabeth Corea Sanders- Nicaragua

Ivonne Amaya- Mexico

I recently read a piece by the Huffington Post Latino Voices  that answered a couple of FAQ regarding Latinos. The questions are mostly related to the idea of race and ethnicity as they relate to the Hispanic vs. Latino issue. The question that intrigued me the most, however, was question number five, which asked why so many Latinos are brown.

This is a loaded question in the Latino community. As in the Black community, lighter skin is sometimes more desirable than darker skin.That goes in a little deeper than what I'm trying at get at here, though.

The point is that whether you are a light skinned or dark skinned Latino, you are still Latino. No amount of color is going to change that—at least it shouldn't.

What does end up happening to many Latinos, however, is that their identity is assumed based on their skin color. Almost every brown Latino is assumed to be Mexican, while almost every light skinned Latino is assumed to be white, or at least half white.

The reality is this: Latinos come in all shades and they comes from a variety of countries. Please don't assume that every brown person is Mexican just because it's the closest non-white country to the U.S. Sometimes these assumptions are completely innocent; some people really don't know about most of the other countries that exist below Mexico. Hopefully this post clears some things up, as obvious as they may seem to some people.

Above are pictures of some great people I know, and they kindly let me use a photo of them to show the variety of skin colors and nationalities/countries that are present in the Latino community.
I'm sure that all of them at one point in their lives have been mistaken to be something they are not. This even happens within the Latino community sometimes. And as annoying as it may be, the only thing to do is to explain and educate.