THE DE-COLONIAL OPTION AND THE MEANING OF IDENTITY IN POLITICS

Ethnicity comes from the Greek ethnos translated into Latin as nation. Thus, in both cases, it could be self-referential, as “the people that belongs to a given community ” of knowledge, language, memory, faith, habits, taste for certain food and celebrations of the season or of “national ” symbols, etc. In that sense, “ethnicity in Latin America ” invites a description of the different ethnic configurations that exist in a given place. However, ethnicity today is not just a neutral conglomeration of people that recognize themselves as belonging to a given ethnos. In the modern/colonial world, ethnicities have been racialized. And racialization means that there is a given discourse, and a given ethnicity that identifies itself with that discourse, that has the power to classify ethnic groups. In other words, to what ethnicity it belongs the discourse that classifies ethnicity? In “Latin America ” is not the discourse of people fro