The construction of Latin American femininities and how online self-representation is pushing us toward a decolonial future

An indigenous girl in the Amazon Forest goes viral on Tiktok presenting her village customs
to an online audience. Black feminists occupy YouTube. Northeastern Brazilian women
demand the end of xenophobic stereotyping on Instagram. In this scenario of profound
changes, my project seeks to answer: how are Latin American femininities constructed? How
is online representation by mixed-race Brazilian women pushing towards a decolonial future?
As pathways to answer those main questions, I will investigate Brazilian women's
representations development, the idea of mixed-race latina identity and its intersections with
digital activism, Brazilianness, Indigeneous folklore and Hollywood.
For centuries, Brazilianness has been determined from a foreign perspective, whether by
comparison, judgement or stereotyping, through various media: art, literature, television and
film. A colonizers' perspective, following an European lens, continues to be taught to
Brazilian children who grow up missing genuinely Indigenous, Black or mixed-race historical
references. Foreign cinema and literature exoticized Latinity and Brazilianness. When gender
is brought into the equation, it also brings sexualization and an illusory homogeneity of
Latino women.
Advances in online self-representation have demonstrated the power of telling our own
stories. Debates about decolonial art, education and history also invite us to revisit the past -
that other past, the one hidden behind everything we learned about in school, movies and
museums. Time has come to find new ways to imagine, represent and build our identity as a
mixed nation. To achieve this revolution, allowing a more inclusive feminism to rise,
abandoning the Eurocentrism we inherited, it is necessary to listen and analyze the female
voices that are advocating for their points of view on social media.
Today, Brazil is understood as a predominantly Black country, since the term for
miscegenation began to formally mean Blackness. Thus, all non-white descendants are
categorized as "pardos", a division of Blackness. Seeming to be just bureaucracy, it erases
mixed-race people from history again, from official data and even from government incentive
programs. In a country that had a mixed-race majority until the terminology was modified,
excluding miscegenation from Brazilianness is to annihilate the original Indigenous peoples
and understand "mestiçagem" as the middle way between only two ethnicities: Black and
white.
Such duality is old in the country. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Brazil underwent a national
policy of population whitening, encouraging European immigration with the goal of
extinguishing the Black population through miscegenation. One of its greatest defenders was
João Batista de Lacerda (1846-1915), a physician, anthropologist, and director of the
National Museum. At the Universal Congress of Races, held in London in 1911, he presented
the painting "The Redemption of Cam," by the Spanish artist Modesto Brocos.
The painting portrays a Black elderly woman, a white man, a mixed-race woman and a white
baby. It was used as a rendition of Brazil's future after the whitening initiatives. João Batista
described the image as: "black people becoming white, after the third generation, as a result
of race crossing."
The exclusion of Indigenous ancestry does not happen only due to the duality in discussions
about race in Brazil or its lacking race categories. No ethnic group has been as erased from
Brazilian history as the native peoples, who are unfairly represented or non-existent in the
media, politics, education, and the labour market. The exaltation of Western culture, their
stories, narratives and historical visions is proportional to the devaluation of Indigenous
culture, portrayed almost invariably through their filter.