![]() ![]() ![]() In the real lives of Latino families, the empire’s power is plain to see. Their cruelty to my people is all I’ve known.” Her words could have been spoken by any of a number of different peoples across the eons of time: “The outsiders ravage our lands in front of our eyes. The most recent film adaptation of Dune earned more than $400 million in box-office revenue, and when I saw the film with my Mexican Guatemalan American son (who had read the novel in high school), we listened as one of the characters pronounced a speech about the horrors inflicted by an empire. The largest “Latino” city in the United States, Los Angeles, is also the home of a movie and television industry that makes billions of dollars telling empire fantasy stories. As Junot Díaz once put it: without the history of racialist ideologies, X-Men makes no sense without colonialism, Star Wars make no sense and without the history of chattel slavery in the New World, Dune makes no sense. Hollywood takes the history of colonialism and conquest and dresses up the characters in robes and helmets and gives them prop weapons, and it transforms this history into a crowd-pleasing fantasy. In class, or in books, we learn about the ship with captive men and women from the African kingdom of the Ndongo that arrived in the colony of Virginia in 1619 about the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole being forced out of their lands in the Trail of Tears. Bits and pieces of this history have been passed down to us. In the Americas, European conquerors erased ways of life that were alien to them, fought wars, enslaved people, razed temples, and outlawed religions. We live in a world of migrating peoples and interconnected markets, a global system of wealth creation built upon acts of violence. Stories about empire move us because they’re echoes of the memories that reside deep in our collective consciousness. When we see the empire defeated, we feel strong, liberated, and renewed. ![]() We sit in a darkened theater, or with our faces covered in the bluish glow of our private screens, and we watch heroes who are small and weak and isolated fight back against power. The empire of fantasy and cosplay is steel and stone perfection, and it is savagery. We watch and read narratives of powerful elites living inside stone towers and walled cities, protected by death rays and roiling fires and all-seeing eyes. I took them to movies and bought them books that transported them into fictional realms and into alternate pasts, or deep into the future, or into a galaxy that is “far, far away.” This is a rite of passage of a United States childhood. My children grew up devouring stories of empire and injustice, fantasies set in worlds that are not our own. Host Deepa Fernandes speaks with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Héctor Tobar about his new book, “ Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of ‘Latino.” In it, Tobar tells the stories he’s heard as well as his own to explore what it means to be called Latino. ![]()
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