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

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An indigenous girl in the Amazon Forest goes viral on Tiktok presenting her village customsto an online audience. Black feminists occupy YouTube. Northeastern Brazilian womendemand the end of xenophobic stereotyping on Instagram. In this scenario of profoundchanges, my project seeks to answer: how are Latin American femininities constructed? Howis online representation by mixed-race Brazilian women pushing towards a decolonial future?As pathways to answer those main questions, I will investigate Brazilian women'srepresentations development, the idea of mixed-race latina identity and its intersections withdigital activism, Brazilianness, Indigeneous folklore and Hollywood.For centuries, Brazilianness has been determined from a foreign perspective, whether bycomparison, judgement or stereotyping, through various media: art, literature, television andfilm. A colonizers' perspective, following an European lens, continues to be taught toBrazilian children who grow up missing genuinely Indigenous, Black or mixed-race historicalreferences. Foreign cinema and literature exoticized Latinity and Brazilianness. When genderis brought into the equation, it also brings sexualization and an illusory homogeneity ofLatino women.Advances in online self-representation have demonstrated the power of telling our ownstories. 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 andmuseums. Time has come to find new ways to imagine, represent and build our identity as amixed 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 femalevoices that are advocating for their points of view on social media.Today, Brazil is understood as a predominantly Black country, since the term formiscegenation began to formally mean Blackness. Thus, all non-white descendants arecategorized as "pardos", a division of Blackness. Seeming to be just bureaucracy, it erasesmixed-race people from history again, from official data and even from government incentiveprograms. In a country that had a mixed-race majority until the terminology was modified,excluding miscegenation from Brazilianness is to annihilate the original Indigenous peoplesand understand "mestiçagem" as the middle way between only two ethnicities: Black andwhite.Such duality is old in the country. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Brazil underwent a nationalpolicy of population whitening, encouraging European immigration with the goal ofextinguishing the Black population through miscegenation. One of its greatest defenders wasJoão Batista de Lacerda (1846-1915), a physician, anthropologist, and director of theNational Museum. At the Universal Congress of Races, held in London in 1911, he presentedthe 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 whitebaby. It was used as a rendition of Brazil's future after the whitening initiatives. João Batistadescribed the image as: "black people becoming white, after the third generation, as a resultof race crossing."The exclusion of Indigenous ancestry does not happen only due to the duality in discussionsabout race in Brazil or its lacking race categories. No ethnic group has been as erased fromBrazilian history as the native peoples, who are unfairly represented or non-existent in themedia, politics, education, and the labour market. The exaltation of Western culture, theirstories, narratives and historical visions is proportional to the devaluation of Indigenousculture, portrayed almost invariably through their filter.