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 Latin 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.

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. In survival situations, the walls that only exist in our minds become absurd, like the class differences lived out in my beloved Bogotá.

Those invisible borders, apply it to your own country or region, disappear at Heathrow Airport. There you’re simply Colombian, period. 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.

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.

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, 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. So an uncomfortable question arises: is our identity only the exceptional achievements of our countrymen abroad? Is it just reggaeton dominating the Spotify charts?

We are so much more than that.

Our Latin artists have given music and lyrics to our contemporary identity, that’s undeniable. But it is each one of us, without exception, who has to choose the ingredients of that recipe. 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.

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 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, 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. 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. This isn’t about them and us. We are one, we are all.

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 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. 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.

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 would rank as the fifth largest on the planet, brushing up against $4.1 trillion. That places its net financial output above established powers such as the United Kingdom, India, France, Italy, or Canada.

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: 72% of the net new workforce added in the United States comes from families of Hispanic origin.

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 the founders of new technology-based businesses. This isn’t integration; it’s a silent transfer of economic and intellectual power that has already happened, in real time.

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 without remedy. Its native population isn’t reproducing at the rate its welfare state needs. Filling that gap, year after year, has been the Latin American diaspora.

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. Adding their children already born on Spanish soil, that’s seven million people in a country of 49. One in seven.

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. But Spain isn’t the only node in this network.

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.