The Latin
code

In the endless search for my own identity, and trying to find a universal way to share this vision with whoever might read me, I had to turn to the oldest literary work on the planet: The Epic of Gilgamesh.

Gilgamesh was a king who lived in Mesopotamia some five thousand years ago. His feats, halfway between history and legend, reached us thanks to decades of archaeological work. The poets of his time tell how one day he set out on the hardest journey of his life, searching for immortality. After trying every possible way, living extraordinary experiences and using every ounce of power at his disposal, he failed. The king returned to his city, Uruk, empty handed.

Contemplating the imposing walls he had built, he had an epiphany: he understood that eternity did not live in his flesh, but that he would find it through his works. He understood that his identity and his legacy would survive in the bricks he left for future generations.

The search for Hispanic American identity is, in essence, our own epic of Gilgamesh: an endless search. We are all born with a latent identity, forged in our places of origin; it’s a suit we wear without noticing. And yet that identity we never finish defining rises to the surface and becomes vital the moment we are away, when we cross borders and become the diaspora. It’s exactly then, far from home, that even the smallest detail becomes enormous.

Frank Borman, the astronaut who was part of the historic Apollo 8 mission in 1968, described the Earth from orbit in a way I’ve never been able to forget. With nostalgia in his voice, he said that up there Earth was the only thing with color in a universe of black and white: a small, fragile sphere, completely alone. From that perspective, the borders that so divide us down here simply don’t exist.

That made me understand that the nostalgia we feel when far from our place of origin is one of the most human feelings there is. One that lets us see, with brilliant clarity, things that from the inside look dark.

Because no one crosses an ocean to become a speck of dust, someone who cleans other people’s bathrooms or clears rubble on job sites that will never carry their name. We want to build something of our own. Our own wall of Uruk.

Like many migrants, I have lived uprootedness firsthand.

When I lived in London, I had to leave at three in the morning to reach the heart of Westminster by 4:00, where my shift began. I cleaned hallways and bathrooms in one of the most extraordinary places I’ve ever known: the London Library. Founded in 1841, with over a million volumes, this library holds a collection Darwin used while writing On the Origin of Species, and has a rare-collections room we would enter to clean under escort.

For several nights I slept only a few hours, because I could only afford «a sofa» to sleep on, and often the other tenants would vacate that shared bed around eleven at night, once they’d finished watching the Champions League. It was my version of the well-known hot bed that many migrants put up with, because most of us, when we emigrate, can’t even afford to rent a room of our own.

Some days I’d finish cleaning before the first readers arrived. Other days, not. And on those days, I’d walk out into the hallway, bucket in hand, and watch them settle in: opening their notebooks, choosing their books with the calm of someone who knows exactly why they’re there. I knew too. Mine was just a different reason. A boy who, as a child, used to provoke punishments at school just to be left alone with the books had ended up cleaning, at dawn, the very library that inspired Darwin. I don’t know if that’s destiny or just life being ironic. But in those hallways, surrounded by more books than I could read in ten lifetimes, in a city that wasn’t mine, something told me I wasn’t lost. That I was there for a reason.

When I finally managed to rest, staring at someone else’s ceiling in the silence of the night, the same question that constantly haunts those of us far from home would hit me: Who are we?

Borman’s perspective, the one who looks from far away, gave me comfort. Because beyond learning to appreciate even a glass of fresh water, you also end up shedding a lot of the prejudices that bind us in our home countries. In survival situations, the walls that only exist in our minds become absurd, like the class differences lived out in my beloved Bogotá. The kind you notice in tiny details, like when you work at a restaurant on the north side of the city and people find your accent, the one from the south side of the capital, so «exotic.» Or when you say good morning in another Colombian city and someone answers back: «Wow, two words in and I can already tell you’re a rolo [a Bogotá native].»

Those invisible borders, apply it to your own country or region, disappear at Heathrow Airport. There you’re simply Colombian, period. There are no separate lines for people from the coast, from Medellín, or from the north or south sides of Bogotá. A Peruvian or an Ecuadorian will know you’re Colombian, but to an average French, Italian or Spanish person, we’re all just South American. Though when they try to imitate our accent, they always do it with a Mexican one.

And if any Spaniard thinks he’s all that different from us «South American rockers,» I remember that when I worked in the City of London, during a fire-safety briefing given by our facility manager, who was Irish, she couldn’t tell a Peruvian from a Chilean, a Colombian, or a Spaniard apart. To her, we were all simply «Spanish Speakers» who needed everything explained to us like kindergartners.

And if we still insist on thinking we’re all so different from one another, here’s one more story, this time with May, a colleague born in Hong Kong. One day, newly hired at the company, she came up to me and asked, in English, since I don’t speak Cantonese: «Weimar, why do you use one accent when you talk to José Luis, and a different one when you talk to Marco?» I answered: «May, I’m not using a different accent. Marco is from Brazil, we speak Portuguese with him. José Luis is from Spain, we speak Spanish with him. They’re different languages.» In her eyes, we were just three people speaking one single, very strange language.

This should teach us a lot about our identity. If we don’t know where to start looking for it, at least by shifting perspective we know where not to start. And if we begin by recognizing that we have more in common than differences, we’d be more tolerant of one another and would avoid a lot of the internal conflicts that plague us.

That unconscious search for our identity ends up materializing in what economists call the «ethnic market.» Without noticing, we find ourselves walking down the aisles of a Latin market, looking for the ingredient that will bring us back to our grandmother’s kitchen.

We recognize ourselves buying arepas, sitting in the chair of a Latin barbershop where the accent and the gossip serve as therapy, or in the middle of a nightclub’s roar (or a concert by an artist only we recognize), where for a couple of hours we’re the majority again.

As part of the diaspora, we highlight and share on social media every achievement of a fellow Hispanic as if it were our own. We cheer for the athlete who won a world title, we tear up with pride over the Latino actor lifting an Oscar, and we fill with hope watching a Latina running operations at NASA.

So an uncomfortable question arises: is our identity only the exceptional achievements of our countrymen abroad? Is it just reggaeton dominating the Spotify charts? Does it come down to some guy flashing chains in a fake mobster pose, or a girl swearing in her songs to prove to the world she can perrear sola [dance on her own, no partner needed]?

We are so much more than that.

Our Latin artists have given music and lyrics to our contemporary identity, that’s undeniable. And even though it’s hard for me to admit, since I side with Cerati on this one, «wake me up when reggaeton’s over,» Bad Bunny, with his masterclass in storytelling, handed us the great vessel in which we have to mix it all together on a global scale: the Super Bowl halftime stage. But it is each one of us, without exception, who has to choose the ingredients of that recipe.

Even when we don’t believe it, when exhaustion sets in, when we feel insignificant cleaning a bathroom or wiping up someone else’s bodily waste, each one of us is the irreplaceable pinch of salt that mix needs. That master recipe isn’t invented out of nowhere; it’s shaped by our day to day, by our own reality. But we will never be able to recognize it, live it, and pass it on if we don’t know who we are.

It took me years to understand that.

Even after years living outside my country, fighting for my identity wasn’t something I considered urgent or important. In fact, I didn’t even notice it. Not until the day my heritage started to disappear.

As time passes and we go back to visit our country, a feeling washes over us that we tend not to talk about. For the one who left, time has stood still; the music, the places, the faces, all seemingly unchanged. But we know that isn’t true. Suddenly we show up at an aunt’s or uncle’s house, at a friend’s house, and find it’s now inhabited by strangers, even if they’re sometimes from the same family. They’re the descendants: cousins’ kids, boyfriends and girlfriends, babies or children who eye us with suspicion and won’t let us into a place that used to be ours. That kingdom we thought was ours only exists in our heads.

It all started shortly after I lost my parents. One day, out of nowhere, I caught myself speaking to my children not just in a different accent, but in a different language altogether from my mother tongue, and a feeling washed over me that I couldn’t name right away.

I was left breathless. I had the feeling of being pulled into a dark funnel that swallowed me, packed with millions of people. Some of those faces were familiar: my parents, uncles, aunts, my grandmother who was no longer there. I felt myself fading. And in some defense mechanism I don’t control, as if an invisible hand were pulling me upward, my mind pushed me straight into a scene from the past. I don’t know how the brain works in moments like that, but it felt like I was living it all over again.

In that scene was my school-age niece, asking me for help with her homework. She was studying social studies: the dynasties from the Habsburgs to the Bourbons. My natural curiosity opened the pages looking, of course, for that sixteenth-century event that had transformed the world: the discovery of America. What I found were a few well-written paragraphs: a brief history of the discovery and colonization. Then the Habsburgs, the Bourbons, and the start of the contemporary era, with a long section on Napoleon and his invasion of the Iberian Peninsula. And of the Latin American independence movements… barely a passing mention.

I was stunned.

I immediately remembered the cover of our history textbooks in Colombia: Historia de América and Historia Universal. What for us was a rupture, always narrated as the story of someone who came from very far away and hijacked all our attention, was for the Spanish Empire a major event, yes, but framed within many other major events of humanity.

But it wasn’t a lightning bolt that split us apart and wiped us off the map. We simply transformed, we merged. It doesn’t matter whether we’re dark-skinned, whether we look Native American, Afro-descendant, or were born on a reservation. Either way, we are part of the history of all of the Americas, from Alaska to Patagonia.

And the history on the other side of the ocean is ours too. The story of those who fought for or allied with an empire somewhere in Europe, of those who defended their land and their identity, or of those who crossed an ocean looking for a new destiny. This isn’t about them and us. We are one, we are all.

Our history intersects the moment we say «good morning» and get understood across a territory as vast as the entire American continent. When we taste something as ours as an alfajor and discover its origins trace back to the Muslim world. When we listen to a cumbia and understand that three continents live inside its rhythm at once.

Coming back out of that funnel that swallowed me, I understood that this was the missing ingredient to define who we are, and I try to share it in this book in honor of everything we are. That’s why I take you through many of the stories that, even if we don’t believe it, also belong to us.

Before the numbers confirm all of this, it’s worth remembering how those of us who were pioneers, nobody on anybody’s map, used to communicate. I remember having to gather hundred-peseta coins so I could talk, in a rush, from a public phone with whoever picked up when I called Colombia. That urgency in the voice: the certainty that someone was waiting on the other end, and that time was running out at the pace of the coins dropping into the slot.

Then came the rise of the call shops. Those places turned into makeshift embassies and consulates, confessionals and courts of love, business offices and crying rooms. Cheap particleboard booths, anything but soundproof, where the caller’s entire life was exposed to whoever was in the next booth. In summer you had to leave the door cracked open or roast from the heat, and privacy turned into an involuntary show. No screenwriter would have needed to invent a single thing to write a novel. All they would have had to do was sit and listen.

I remember a couple who lived near my house. They always arrived at the call shop holding hands, each one went into their own booth, and the greeting to whoever answered on the other end was identical in both cases: «Hi, my love, how are the kids?» Love from afar. Happy, all four of them.

That image, which seems like a mere anecdote, is actually the exact X-ray of the diaspora’s origin. Millions of people building their lives across two time zones and two continents, holding together families separated by an ocean with coins earned cleaning, building, caregiving. And none of it fully captured by any official data.

That is our source code.

When we audit that code and apply it at the global level, the data shows that the diaspora is not just a survival anecdote or a footnote in the records of northern capitals. We are a global driving force. The numbers, once cleaned of political bias and looked at head-on in the dashboard, completely change the analyst’s perspective: they reveal that the operating system of the most advanced economies is running on Latin servers, quietly but without interruption.

The Latino Donor Collaborative calculates in its market audits that if the Hispanic community in the United States were an independent economy, its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) would rank as the fifth largest on the planet, at $4 trillion. That places its net financial output above established powers such as the United Kingdom, India, France, Italy, or Canada. This isn’t an optimistic projection built on nostalgia, nor a rhetorical exercise: it’s the verified, audited revenue of one of the most dynamic communities in the world.

Source: U.S. Latino GDP Report (LDC, 2025) and World Bank. With $4 trillion in GDP and purchasing power already topping $4.1 trillion, this «invisible nation» is growing faster than powers like the United Kingdom or France, driven by a strong demographic dividend, high labor participation, and entrepreneurship.

This volume of capital doesn’t sit in passive accounts; it moves with a transaction speed and dynamism that injects daily liquidity into the market. Beyond fueling domestic consumption and business creation in host countries, this financial force also sustains the economies of countries of origin through remittances: a direct flow that travels from worker to family with no bureaucratic tolls, immediately funding education, healthcare, and small businesses back home.

The figure that stops me the most, though, isn’t the GDP. The key indicator is demographic, and it points to the future of the productive system: 78% of the net new workforce added in the United States comes from families of Hispanic origin. This isn’t a temporary fluctuation; it’s the generational handoff sustaining the viability of the country’s economic engine amid native population decline.

The children and grandchildren of those pioneers who once cleaned hospitals or built highways under the sun are today the engineers at Big Tech companies, the doctors running surgical wards, and, true to their entrepreneurial nature, the founders of new technology-based businesses.

This isn’t integration; it’s a contribution that’s already happening in real time, quiet but decisive.

And the phenomenon doesn’t stop in the Americas. Crossing the Atlantic, the data tells the same story with a different accent. Spain has spent twenty years aging. Its native population isn’t growing at the rate the rest of its demographic indicators suggest. Over that same period, the Latin American diaspora became a structural part of the country.

The data from Spain’s National Statistics Institute (INE) tells it this way: as of January 2024, 4.2 million people born in a Hispanic American country were living in the country. Colombia alone accounted for 857,000; Venezuela, nearly 600,000; Ecuador, more than 448,000. 60% of all foreign population residing in Spain has Latin American origin. And that’s without counting their children, already born on Spanish soil, whom the Labor Force Survey puts at another 3.1 million. That’s seven million people in a country of 49. One in seven.

Methodological note on second generations: unlike the United States, Spain’s INE doesn’t track second generations born in Spain by ethnicity once their parents hold Spanish nationality. The 3.1 million figure comes from the Labor Force Survey (EPA, Q4 2024), which does identify children with a father and/or mother born abroad, regardless of their current nationality.

If we consider this figure in a country of 49 million inhabitants, the data reveals a phenomenon that’s the reverse of the 20th century: Spain is no longer just the origin, it’s the receiving node of a shared cultural code. The fact that the diaspora amounts to more than a tenth of the traditional native population breaks the myth that today’s migration flows are marginal. In historical perspective, this stands as one of the largest processes of peaceful intermixing on the Iberian Peninsula since the time of Al-Andalus.

But Spain isn’t the only node in this network. In Italy, ISTAT counts more than 357,000 people holding the nationality of a Hispanic American country, on top of more than 200,000 who acquired Italian citizenship between 2000 and 2020. In the United Kingdom, the Latin American community numbers around 250,000, according to Office for National Statistics estimates, with Colombians and Brazilians leading the most recent flows. France and Germany have smaller, more dispersed communities, but present in key sectors of their economies.

Our identity doesn’t need permission. We carry it with us, we make it grow in every place we live, mixing all of that with what we brought from home.

Just like Gilgamesh facing the immense walls of Uruk, we may never reach eternal life. But we are building a code: a wall of stories and resilience that will outlast us all, by far. This book is my attempt to make us see it.