10 Dangerous Myths Most Americans Believe About Latinos

Every woman in this photo is Latina. Not one of them is a maid.

When I was born in 1969, there was no such thing as “Latina.” No “Hispanic” category either. You know what I was? An American kid. The daughter of Nelson and Maxine. A New Mexican child who loved macaroni and cheese and ABC after-school specials. A kid who babysat to save money for an AC/DC album and waited in line on a hot summer’s day in Albuquerque to see the original Star Wars movie in a theater. On my mom’s side, I’m the 12th generation born in what is now the U.S. — our family’s been in New Mexico since our ancestor, Don Juan de Onate, named it in 1598. And way before that? Our Indigenous ancestors were here for at least 23,000 years.

The label “Hispanic” didn’t even exist until 1979 — when the U.S. government invented it, not because they cared about history or culture, but because they wanted an easier way to put people in marketing boxes for political gain. Republicans invented the “Hispanic” census category as a tool to lump together conservative Cuban exiles in Florida with Mexican Americans in South Texas, hoping to cook up a shiny new voting bloc for the right wing. Over the years, though, it has been slowly changed to be something even more sinister. So when I tell you this category is fake? I mean FAKE fake.

Now, fast forward. Decades of Fox News nonsense and far-right fear-mongering later, and here we are — living in a terrifying moment. A time when all Latinos are conflated with “illegal” and scapegoated for everything from crime to job loss to demographic change, with zero regard for facts. It’s racist theater, but the consequences are all too real.

So let’s set a few things straight.

---

1. “Latinos are new here.”
Really? Tell that to my mom’s side of the family — here since 1598. And tell it to the Indigenous ancestors who were here long before that. The Latino presence in this land predates the United States. So no, we didn’t “just get here.” America came to us. My first Spanish ancestors arrived in what’s now Santa Fe, New Mexico, 14 years before the first English settlers built Jamestown. It is incredible to me that someone like Nazi Pistachiohead Stephen Miller, whose first ancestors arrived in the USA in 1903, somehow feels more entitled to my country than he thinks I am. My family has been here 305 years longer than his. We did not cross the US border; it crossed us.

2. “Latinos are a monolith.”
Wrong. “Latino” and “Hispanic” are made-up categories covering people from more than 20 countries — with wildly different histories, cultures, “races,” socioeconomic classes, languages, and politics. You can’t assume a Cuban in Miami is the same as a Salvadoran in LA is the same as a Dominican in New York is the same as a New Mexican whose ancestors never left. We are not one thing. We never were. But the current administration and their propaganda wings (Fox News, Newsmax, ETC) not only conflate all of us with “Messican,” they also spew endless lies about our supposed innate criminality, a stereotype perpetuated endlessly by Hollywood and which I’ve been fighting my entire professional life.

3. “You can tell who’s Latino by looking at them.”
You think so? The “Latino look” most Americans imagine — brown skin, dark hair, certain features — is actually Indigenous American ancestry. Many Latinos are Indigenous or mixed Indigenous-European. But we also have Black Latinos, white Latinos, Asian Latinos, Afro-Indigenous Latinos — there is no one “Latino look.” If you think you can spot us, what you’re really spotting is your own bias. The history of Latin America is similar to that of the Eastern and Southern USA - colonized by Europeans (in English there, in Spanish, Portuguese and French elsewhere) who committed genocide against and enslaved Native Americans, then replaced the dead Natives with enslaved Africans.

4. “We all speak Spanish.”
Nope. Some of us do. Some speak Indigenous languages — and Mexico alone recognizes more than 60 of them. Most of us born in the USA speak English as a first and only language. Some speak Spanglish. Some don’t speak Spanish at all. Language ≠ identity. Stop assuming stupid shit based on a movie you saw that was written by a guy as ignorant as you.

5. “We don’t assimilate.”
That’s rich. The United States has been assimilating to us for centuries. Cowboy culture? Spanish and Mexican roots. Words like “rodeo,” “buckaroo,” “lariat,” “bronco”? Borrowed. The American West was Spanish-speaking long before it was English-speaking. John Wayne was cosplaying a Vaquero. Jason Aldean’s patriotic American archetype is actually Mexican. Tortillas now outsell bagels in the U.S. Salsa outsells ketchup. If that’s not cultural assimilation, what is?

Meanwhile, Latinos serve in the military, teach in schools, run businesses, vote, pay taxes — we participate in every part of civic life. The idea that we “refuse” to assimilate is pure projection from a racist white encave that doesn’t think we’re people and assumes we think the same of them.

6. “Latinos commit more crime.”
Lie. Study after study shows immigrants, including Latino immigrants, commit less crime than native-born Americans. The “criminal Latino” trope is racist propaganda. Always was. Always will be. There is NOTHING to back it up, and yet our entire domestic and foreign policy machinery right now is calibrated to sadistically abuse Latinos for Kristi ‘Dead Eyes’ Noam photo ops. The true criminals of this moment are the white supremacist terrorists in ICE, going around with their faces covered. Noam offered ICE jobs to the pardoned January 6 insurrectionists. This is all unfathomably disgusting.

7. “Latinos are all sexist and hold rigid gender roles.”
Look, yes, machismo exists — as it does in every culture. Especially Maga. But Latino communities also include fierce feminist movements, queer liberation movements, progressive activists. We are not stuck in the 1950s. Stereotyping us this way is just another excuse to dismiss us and dehumanize us.

8. “Latinos are one race of people from Mexico.”
First of all, “Latino” is not a race. (Race is a social construct and biological non-reality, but that’s another post for another day.) It’s an ethnicity — one the U.S. invented for census purposes. And while Mexican Americans are the largest Latino group in the U.S., Latinos in the agregate come from all over Latin America and the Caribbean and, apparently, Spain — another incredibly diverse place. And Mexico itself is more diverse than most Americans realize — home to dozens of Indigenous nations, languages, and cultures.

9. “Latinos aren’t real Americans.”
Millions of us are U.S.-born citizens. Fully 86% of the Latinos in the United States WERE BORN HERE. We are citizens. This inconvenient fact is behind Miller’s push to convinced the Supreme Court to overturn the 14th Amendment. Many more of us are naturalized citizens. Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens by birth. The idea that being Latino = foreign is a lie designed to make it easier to exclude and abuse us. It is a forced exoticism and it sucks. Full stop.

10. “Latinos want to take your jobs and replace you.”
Congratulations — you’ve been suckered by white nationalist propaganda. The so-called “great replacement” theory is pure fiction, and not the good kind. The myth that “Latinos are doing jobs Americans don’t want,” often spewed on the left, is also a myth. Migrants are doing those jobs. Most Latinos are not migrants. Some of us are, say, the Governor of New Mexico. Many of us are entrepreneurs creating jobs. We aren’t “replacing” anyone. We are human beings living human lives — contributing, thriving, and refusing to be erased.

---

Now let’s talk about the real problem.

None of these myths are accidental. Fox News and the far right have spent decades building this false exoticism — portraying us as dangerous, criminal, foreign — to arrive exactly at this moment. A moment where Latinos can be scapegoated for everything wrong in the country, with zero factual basis.

And it’s not a new trick. We’ve seen it before. During the Great Depression, Herbert Hoover — another racist president and the man whose idiot policies created the Great Depression — scapegoated “Mexicans” to distract from economic collapse, triggering mass forced relocations of up to 2 million people from the US to Mexico, most of them U.S. citizens. Families destroyed. No evidence, just raw racism. And while it is now safe to discuss the Japanese Internment Camps of WWII and say they were wrong, we as a nation are still ignoring the “Mexican Repatriation Act” under Hoover. Why? Because the cruelty and scapegoating of “Mexicans” (conflated now with “Latino”) is STILL FUCKING HAPPENING.

For what it’s worth, you cannot “deport” a person who never PORTED. Removing US citizens from their own country because of their perceived ethnicity is not deportation; it’s forced exile and removal from one’s homeland, which meets the international definition of GENOCIDE.

Sound familiar? It should. We are watching the same playbook unfold — now with ICE functioning as a militarized white nationalist organization, empowered to commit state violence against people whose only “crime” is looking Latino to ignorant men with badges they fished out of a Cracker Jacks box.

These aren’t “policy disagreements.” These are crimes against humanity. And they’re happening right now.

---

Bottom line:

Latinos are not new here. We are not a monolith. We are not criminals. We are not foreign. We are not here to “replace” you. We are your neighbors, coworkers, classmates, and fellow citizens. And if you’re eating a “wrap” while watching a rodeo in cowboy boots, you’re already living in a culture we helped build. For future reference, a wrap is a fucking burrito.

It’s time to stop believing the lies. It’s time to fight back against the propaganda. And it’s time to remember: scapegoating us won’t fix what’s broken in this country. But telling the truth? That just might.

---

If this connected with you — if you’re tired of the lies, the scapegoating, and the erasure — become a subscriber to Alisa Writes. Paid if you can, cuz mama got bills. Share this post.

This is the kind of writing I do here: truth-telling, myth-busting, and standing up for communities the powerful would rather silence.

Your subscription keeps this work going — and lets me keep saying what needs to be said, with no corporate filter and no fear.

Because let’s be real: Fox News isn’t going to tell this story. The mainstream media isn’t going to tell it right either. But we can. Right here. Together.

Subscribe now — and let’s keep telling the truth.