What Miami Taught Me About Identity, Ancestry, and the Things We Don’t Say Out Loud

I didn’t expect the response I got.

I posted a simple observation on Threads. Something I had noticed living in Miami as a European — that many Latin Americans I encounter seem eager to emphasize their European ancestry while their indigenous roots go unacknowledged, sometimes actively avoided.

I asked if I was completely off.

Hundreds of people responded. And what happened in that comment section over the next 24 hours was one of the most honest, raw, and necessary conversations I have witnessed in a long time on social media.

This is my attempt to do justice to it.

The observation that started it

Miami is arguably the most Latin city outside Latin America. I say this as someone who has lived here for several years, who has been in relationships with Latin American women, who has built community here, who has watched this city from the particular vantage point of someone who is neither from here nor belongs entirely to anywhere else.

As a European — born in Fiesole, Florence, raised between Italy and America — I noticed a pattern.

The Italian grandparent gets mentioned. The Spanish surname gets celebrated. The German great-grandmother becomes a point of pride.

The indigenous ancestry — and here the picture becomes complicated — is rarely discussed with the same pride. Though I should be careful here. Several people pushed back on my original observation, and fairly.

The reality is layered. If you are Argentinian, Chilean, Paraguayan, or from southern Brazil, you may have no indigenous ancestry at all. In those regions, indigenous populations were largely decimated during colonization and subsequent waves of European immigration replaced them almost entirely. For someone from those backgrounds to embrace European heritage is not denial — it is simply accuracy. It is being who they actually are.

Cubans of Spanish heritage present another nuance. Many were deliberately driven out by Castro’s revolution. Their identification with Spanish roots is inseparable from a specific historical trauma — exile, displacement, the violent severing from a homeland. That identification carries grief as much as pride.

And others pointed out that birth records from colonial and post-colonial periods were often inaccurate or deliberately erased, making indigenous ancestry genuinely difficult to trace or claim with any confidence. The history itself made the evidence disappear. So perhaps the silence isn’t always avoidance. Sometimes it’s simply the absence of a paper trail. A lineage that was administratively erased before anyone alive today could inherit it.

So I want to be precise about what I observed. I am not saying all Latin Americans are indigenous or should claim to be. I am saying that in certain communities, in certain families, there is a specific discomfort — a learned distancing — from that part of the story. And that discomfort has a history worth understanding.

I witnessed it firsthand in my own life, in close relationships with Latin American people. Any connection to indigenous roots was met with a certain discomfort — not hostility exactly, but a quiet distancing. As if that part of the story was better left unacknowledged. Something absorbed so deeply from family and culture that it had become completely invisible to the person carrying it.

The Miami filter

Something else came up in the replies that reframed my original observation in an important way.

Several people pointed out that the Latin Americans who move to Miami are not a representative sample of Latin America. They come disproportionately from a specific social class — educated, professional, often politically conservative, frequently from families with more European ancestry to begin with. Miami’s Latin community has a particular political background and set of ideologies shaped by that self-selection. The Cuban exile community alone has profoundly shaped the political and social texture of the city in ways that don’t reflect Latin America as a whole.

In other words — I may have been observing Miami’s Latin community and drawing conclusions about Latin America. Those are not the same thing. Miami is a filter, not a mirror.

That’s a fair correction. And it makes the observation more specific, not less interesting.

What the replies taught me

Someone pointed me toward the Papal Bull of Pope Nicholas V — the 15th century Vatican decree that essentially authorized the conquest and enslavement of non-Christian peoples. That document, issued in 1455, is where much of what we’re still living with began. Not as ancient history. As living architecture. The foundation that everything else was built on.

Someone else explained blanqueamiento — the explicit 19th century policy in several Latin American countries of deliberately whitening the population through European immigration and intermarriage. This wasn’t subconscious. It was policy. Governments decided that European blood was the direction to move toward and indigenous or African blood was the problem to dilute.

A Chicano anthropologist added something that stopped me completely. The word Latino itself — the term millions of people use as their primary identity — was introduced in the 19th century by a French imperial agent specifically to encourage colonized peoples to identify with European Latinate civilization and accept French imperial rule. Latino is, in its origin, a term of colonial design. The people who use it proudly to claim their identity are using a word that was created to make them forget a different one.

Someone from Colombia described it with brutal clarity: Europeans were always higher class. South America is very classist. Colombia still has maid quarters in apartments. It is common to hear, when someone dates a person with light eyes and European features, that they are mejorando la raza — improving the race. Said approvingly. Said as a compliment.

Perhaps nothing illustrates this more precisely than what happened to a single word. Guaricha — originally a Chibcha word meaning princess, used by the indigenous people of what is now Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador — was taken, inverted, and turned into a slang term for prostitute. A word that once honored women became a word used to degrade them. The language itself was colonized. And the people who grew up using that word as an insult had no idea they were participating in an erasure that began five centuries ago. That is how deep this goes. Not politics. Not policy. A word for princess that became a word for prostitute and nobody remembered why.

Someone from Guatemala described growing up hearing adults say indigenous people were dirty, uneducated, responsible for everything wrong with the country. A child absorbs that. It becomes the water they swim in. By the time they’re adults in Miami mentioning the Italian grandparent, they’re not making a conscious decision. They’re breathing air that was poisoned before they were born.

A Brazilian reader introduced me to a concept I had never encountered: complexo de vira-latas — literally the stray dog complex. A term coined by Brazilian playwright Nelson Rodrigues in 1958 to describe a particular Brazilian tendency toward self-deprecation and inferiority in relation to foreign — particularly European and North American — culture. The stray dog who believes the purebred is simply better. Not because of evidence. Because of a story told so many times it became fact. This complex, Rodrigues argued, ran through Brazilian culture like a current — the belief that everything foreign is superior, that what is local, indigenous, homegrown is somehow lesser. It is colonialism internalized so completely that it no longer needs an external enforcer. The colonized mind becomes its own jailer.

One reader made a comparison I found genuinely illuminating — drawing a parallel between colonization and narcissism. Both operate through the same tactics: the systematic dismantling of the other’s sense of self-worth, the installation of the colonizer’s values as the only valid ones, the creation of a dependency that persists long after the original relationship ends. And then there is Stockholm syndrome — the colonized coming to identify with, protect, and even celebrate the values of those who conquered them. Not as weakness. As survival. As the only available adaptation to an impossible situation.

Someone else shared something more personal. Her father was embarrassed by his Colombian ancestry, mentioning only his Italian side when meeting new people. She found it strange growing up. Later she understood — in the United States there is so much judgment of South Americans that he had learned, through painful experience, that he would be more accepted, more liked, more trusted if he left that part of himself out. He wasn’t denying his identity. He was protecting himself with the tools available to him.

And then someone responded with anger to my original post.

He felt accused by an observation that contained no accusation. He put words in my mouth that I never wrote. He asked why it was strange that Latin Americans celebrate the heritage that makes up the majority of their ancestry.

I understood — because I’ve seen this before, in other rooms, in other conversations — that his anger wasn’t really about me.

I wasn’t generating controversy. I was generating revelation. People were showing me exactly where they carry unresolved tension around identity — not because I attacked them but because I named something true. And truth has that effect on unhealed wounds.

The ones who respond with anger are often the most interesting. They tell you the post landed exactly where it needed to.

Stay in your lane

Someone told me, not unkindly, to stick to what I know. This is not your territory. Stay in your lane.

I sat with that for a moment.

They’re not entirely wrong. I am a European outsider. I will never fully understand what it means to grow up inside these dynamics — to hear indio as a slur, to feel the weight of blanqueamiento in your own family’s choices, to navigate a social world where the lightness of your skin determines the warmth of your reception.

But I want to push back gently on the idea that only insiders can observe.

The outsider position — which has been my position my entire life, in every country I have ever lived in — is not a position of ignorance. It is a position of particular visibility. The person fully inside a system often cannot see the system. The person adjacent to it sometimes can.

I am not claiming authority over this conversation. I am claiming the right to notice something, to ask a genuine question, and to listen carefully to the answers.

That is all I was doing. That is all I ever do.

What I felt reading all of this

I was not prepared for how much emotion this topic carried.

I posted an observation. What came back was something closer to a confession. Hundreds of people saying — in different languages, from different countries, with different histories — yes, this is real, and nobody talks about it.

That silence is the thing that moved me most.

What moved me was the relief in the comments. The sense that something unspoken was finally being said out loud in a public space and people were exhaling.

I think about this in the context of my own work. Hero World exists because I believe stories that are kept in the dark do damage in the dark. The Hero’s Journey is not just a narrative framework — it is a map for bringing what is hidden into the light so it loses its power over us.

What I watched happen in that comment section was a version of that. Imperfect, chaotic, sometimes heated — but real. People who had never met each other, from countries that have complicated relationships with each other, finding common ground in the acknowledgment of a shared wound.

What I actually believe about my own European identity

I’m a European. Born in Florence. The product of a Florentine father who never left the neighborhood and an American mother who fled Gaddafi’s Libya. I carry my own complicated relationship with identity — the Italian in America, the American in Italy, the outsider everywhere I’ve ever lived.

I don’t think European heritage is superior. European history is — as I wrote in the original post — filled with some of the most systematic brutality the world has ever seen. The Papal Bull. The conquest. The dismantling of entire civilizations. The policies that turned self-hatred into a cultural inheritance passed down through generations.

If I had indigenous ancestry I would wear it with pride. I said that and I meant it.

But what I care about more than whether I was right or wrong is this: we need more conversations like the one that happened in that comment section. About the things that shape us without our permission. About the identities we were taught to be ashamed of. About the wounds that travel through generations looking for someone to finally see them.

Family Constellations — work I have been doing for five years — teaches something directly relevant here. The things that are excluded from the family system don’t disappear. They travel forward in time, looking for resolution. Looking for someone who will finally turn around and include what was left behind.

The complexo de vira-latas. The blanqueamiento. The father who learned to mention only his Italian side. The grandmother who said mejorando la raza as a compliment. These are not individual failures. They are the long shadow of a colonial project that was designed, deliberately and systematically, to make people ashamed of what they were — so they would be easier to govern, easier to exploit, easier to replace.

What I watched happen in that comment section was a version of that inclusion. Messy and incomplete and happening on a social media platform rather than in a healing circle — but real.

Someone in Guatemala heard indio as a slur their entire childhood. Someone in Puerto Rico is proudly claiming roots their parents taught them to hide. Someone’s Finnish-American brother married a Colombian woman and calls indigenous genes a flex. A Brazilian reader named the stray dog that lives inside their culture and refuses to pretend it isn’t there.

The generation is turning. Slowly. Noisily. Online.

But turning.

One last thing

I started this with a question: am I completely off?

The answer, after hundreds of replies, is that the question itself is less important than the conversation it opened.

I am a European outsider in Miami. I will never fully understand what it means to grow up inside these dynamics. What I can do is notice. Ask. Listen. Hold space for the answer without needing to be right.

That is what I was built for.

That is why I built Hero World.

If this resonated with you — share it with someone who needs to read it. And if you have a story about identity, ancestry, or the things your family didn’t talk about — I want to hear it.

Hero World exists for exactly these conversations.

By just being here — you are already a hero.

Matteo Scaletti · #beyourownhero