In the last blog, I wrote about flattening: the habit of turning living communities into categories that can be managed from a distance.

One of the clearest examples appears in the way liberal and left movements often approach immigrant communities. Too often, immigrant communities are treated as a natural constituency, a future electorate, proof of demographic change, or a presumed coalition. They are invited into campaigns, institutions, and funding strategies as symbols of a coming political majority. Their presence is counted as proof that a more just future is arriving.

This is politically inaccurate. It is also a form of claim.

The category Latino is frequently used this way. Liberal and progressive institutions often speak as though Latino identity itself establishes a shared politics: as though being Latino necessarily produces progressive values, an anti-imperial analysis, a commitment to racial justice, or a relationship of solidarity with those carrying the greatest consequences of domination.

Immigrant identity does not determine political formation. Latino identity can include people who are racially White, anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, invested in patriarchy, aligned with extractive development, committed to preserving hierarchy, politically conservative, or committed to MAGA politics. A person may carry a history of displacement while participating in the displacement of others.

This does not make Latino identity meaningless. It makes the category insufficient. Migration does not automatically produce a politics of solidarity. Displacement does not automatically produce an analysis of empire. Shared language, food, cultural memory, or family history do not automatically create a shared relationship to power.

For some of us, that insufficiency is especially consequential.

Terrenales names a structural position carried by descendants whose lineages emerge through the intertwined histories of Indigenous dispossession and Black enslavement across the Americas. It does not name a culture, a race, or a new demographic category. It names a relationship to history, territory, lineage, and consequence.

The category Latino can gather together people whose lives have been shaped by profoundly unequal relationships to land, Blackness, Indigeneity, Whiteness, labor, migration, and political power. It can make shared language or regional origin appear more politically meaningful than the actual conditions through which people have been formed.

Terrenalidad asks us to look more carefully. It asks us to understand that a person’s relationship to the hemisphere cannot be determined by ethnicity alone. It asks us to see the distinct consequences carried by descendants whose lineages emerge through the violent meeting of Indigenous and Black histories in the Americas. It also asks us to recognize that this structural position does not automatically produce political clarity, solidarity, or responsibility. Those capacities must still be practiced.

When liberal and left movements overlook these distinctions, they replace political formation with demographic fantasy. They assume that resources directed toward immigrant communities will naturally strengthen justice. They celebrate representation without asking which forms of power are being reproduced. They fund visibility, participation, and electoral access without sufficient discernment about the political worlds those resources may consolidate.

The problem is not immigrant communities. The problem is the institutional habit of mistaking identity for political formation and representation for solidarity.

Immigrant communities are living, internally differentiated communities shaped by distinct histories, unequal racial positions, class interests, political commitments, and relationships to power. They deserve engagement as political communities rather than symbolic populations.

There is also the question of cultural and intellectual theft. Flattening makes theft easier because it separates knowledge from the relationships, territories, histories, responsibilities, and collective conditions that give it meaning. A practice becomes a method. A teaching becomes content. A spiritual or ancestral tradition becomes a wellness offering. A community’s political analysis becomes a framework, a curriculum, a research finding, a brand, or a source of institutional credibility for someone else.

People can also monetize their representational roles. They may become recognized as the person who can speak for a people, translate a community, carry an ancestral practice into institutional spaces, or offer legitimacy to a funder, university, nonprofit, media platform, or healing economy. That role can create access, income, influence, and authority. Representation becomes extractive when the benefits accumulate primarily to the representative while the communities, lineages, territories, and living knowledge systems from which the value is drawn remain under-resourced, unheard, or politically displaced.

The question is not whether people may share knowledge across communities. The question is whether that sharing strengthens continuity, collective authority, material benefit, and self-determination for the people from whom the knowledge comes, or whether it converts their lives, memory, and practice into value for others.

Across philanthropy, electoral organizing, nonprofits, universities, media, research, healing spaces, and diaspora networks, this requires a shift from demographic targeting toward political discernment. It requires institutions to ask whether they are strengthening rooted authority, community-held knowledge, consent, reciprocity, collective benefit, and relationships with Indigenous, Black, and grassroots movements throughout the hemisphere, or whether they are rewarding institutional fluency, representational access, and extractive translation.

A more rigorous politics asks what political commitments are being carried, which racial and class hierarchies are being reproduced or interrupted, and what relationships people have to Indigenous communities, Black communities, grassroots movements, and the territories whose lives they invoke. It asks whose knowledge is being translated, circulated, monetized, or claimed. It asks who gains greater safety, authority, land, resources, and possibility because of this work, and who becomes more vulnerable.

These questions matter in the United States because the consequences of U.S.-based political formation do not remain in the United States. They matter throughout the hemisphere.

For Terrenales, diaspora carries particular consequence. Terrenales living in the United States may hold access to money, citizenship, institutions, mobility, language, and influence that relatives and communities in their places of origin do not. That access can strengthen continuity. It can also deepen rupture.

Terrenalidad asks more of diaspora than cultural loyalty or family remittances. It asks for discernment about consequence: what are our money, access, speech, relationships, and political commitments strengthening across the hemisphere? Are they helping communities carry forward authority, memory, land, and collective life, or reproducing the hierarchies from which so many of our own histories emerged?

Diaspora communities carry resources, influence, and authority across borders. That influence can sustain collective life. It can also strengthen domination. What matters is the political world that influence helps make possible.

I will turn more fully to that question next.