Essay: Latina Gothic: How anti-colonial struggle informed our signature dark glamour

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Set us as preferred ’Tis the season of the bruja.Every October, societal outcasts and weirdos relegated to the underground are permitted passage back into the mainstream.

What was once fodder for their ostracization now captivates the imagination of millions — and has been popularized in movies and TV shows, from “Interview With the Vampire” to “Wednesday.”But long before dark lip liner and “corporate goth” viral looks splashed across our social media feeds, the macabre was woven into the cultural histories of Latine people.And among Latinas in particular, tracing the threads of this visual lineage reveals how gothic subcultures became a kind of cultural armor.

Neither historical atrocities nor the racialized violence that persists today have been abstract concepts for Latine communities; the violent legacy of European colonialism, the widespread reach of the Catholic Church and land seizure by settlers have given Latine people an all-too intimate relationship with death.At the same time, existing Indigenous and Afro-diasporic cosmologies were either erased or absorbed, hiding in plain sight.On the latest episode of the De Los Podcast, Suzy Exposito and Fidel Martinez pick apart one of Latinos’ favorite genres, horror, and the allegorical significance it has for real-world fears in the community, from post-partum depression to gang violence.Women’s bodies have long served as a site of colonial violence, along with theft of resources and land itself.Conquering forces wielded sexual violence and the subjugation of Indigenous and Afro-descendant women as a tool to establish dominance, break community structures, and enforce racial hierarchies.

Indigenous and Black women were stripped of the protections or statuses afforded to white European women, positioning them as exploitable labor and objects of violence...