Los Olvidados: On the Making of Invisible People

Abstract

In the United States, Latinos/as remain a largely invisible people who are rarely portrayed at all, and even more rarely portrayed in a positive light. This article discusses the production of Latino invisibility in three important, interdependent contexts. The first context involves Latinos rendered invisible through the lack of portrayal in print and visual media. While Latinos played a major role in the 1992 Los Angeles riots and suffered as a result, the images that emerged from the Los Angeles riots suggest the persistence of a cultural lens which focuses almost exclusively on images of racial conflict between blacks and whites.

A second context for Latino invisibility is the historical conception of the United States as a white nation, without racial mixture. Many of the nation’s Founders held such views. Such a historical conception precludes the full recognition of Latinos, most of whom are racially mixed, as equal members of the community, imposing invisibility upon Latinos. The third context is the role of the statutory “national origin” concept in attributing a false and stigmatizing foreignness upon Latino people. Casting Latinos as a people of non-American national origin produces a symbolic deportation. Meant to protect Americans from discrimination, the “national origin” concept in fact operates to exclude ethnically different Americans from the definition of American, and empowers courts to uphold overt discrimination against nonwhites.

Keywords: Inequality, Discrimination, Race, Race and Representation, Latinos, Legal History

JEL Classification: K00