Castizo Futurism and the Contradictions of Multiracial White Nationalism

“We’re All Damaged Goods”

Castizo futurism, as its name might imply, is a concept steeped simultaneously in the history of Spanish colonization of the Americas and the pragmatic possibilities engendered by potential White-Latinx racial assimilation that some U.S. White nationalists see as aligning with their own political aims. Rooted in the legacies of the Spanish colonial casta system, which sought to categorize and delineate persons of mixed-race ancestry as a way of securing White dominance atop a multiracial society, the word “castizo” historically refers to an individual of mostly Spanish and partial Indigenous parentage.^[1] In the post-colonial era, a variety of Latin American states formally abolished these de jure racial caste distinctions while finding new ways to re-inscribe them in practice, including by promoting pseudoscientific, eugenicist visions of a homogeneous national identity forged through “constructive miscegenation” to “improve” and “Whiten” populations.^[2] This provided justification for racially discriminatory policies and encouraged the genocidal removal of Black and Indigenous communities.^[3]

State reinforcement of colonial-era racial hierarchies favored Europeans in immigration policies and valorized Whiter populations, such as castizos, as the “cosmic race” by excluding darker-skinned ones from a racially-defined citizenry.^[4] This served to reinforce a fundamental anti-Blackness that endures in Latin America today.^[5] In one of the more explicit examples of racialized nation-building in the region, Brazil in the late 19^th Century aggressively pursued a policy, known as blanqueamiento, that included importing European laborers, barring Black immigration, and encouraging the creation of mixed-race, lighter-skinned children in a state-led drive to invert its majority-Black and Indigenous racial makeup and “reinvigorate the Brazilian race” and nation through its whitening.^[6] Modern conceptualizations of castizo futurism draw much inspiration from this White supremacist legacy particular to Latin American history, tracing a more recent, and no less anti-Black, lineage to White nationalist discussion forums, podcasts, and other communal spaces across the internet.

A splintered consensus behind castizo futurism surfaces through its disparate, and at times contradictory, meanings. For some White nationalists, the term envisions a future wherein large numbers of castizo immigrants will marry and have White children with White Americans, staving off “White genocide” and ensuring the adaptation, survival, and continued demographic dominance of White Americans. This reflects the principle, undergirding centuries of White supremacist racial hierarchy in Latin America, of raising the social status of one’s descendants by having children with a person of higher class and lighter skin tone to “Whiten” the bloodline. As one anonymous commenter on 4chan’s Politically Incorrect forum, known for attracting wide swaths of far-right activists and Internet marauders, suggested, “Realistically, Castizo futurism is the only viable path for America. America will have to work towards become [sic] more white again.”

For others, it paints a rosy prognosis of a decisive shift in mainstream politics, predicting that growing numbers of conservative Latinx voters will unite with White conservatives to secure a permanent GOP majority, and achieve the “red-pilling” of the U.S. for decades to come. For some self-identified non-White Latinx commentators in these forums, meanwhile, the term evokes various forms of longed-for Latinx ethnonationalist revival, occurring across the Americas and complementing, or even eclipsing, a growth in White nationalism within U.S. White communities.

Taken together, such multitudinous views reflect the ideological core of White nationalism, not only through its espousal of a biologically determined racial hierarchy, but also through its ultranationalist obsession with non-White immigration and perceived White demographic decline, filtered through the alarmist lens of “Great Replacement” theory. That theory, a mainstay for generations of White nationalists, asserts (in the U.S. context) that continued migration from Latin America and stagnating “native” White birth rates will drive “the Hispanicization of the population,” as VDARE contributor Edwin S. Rubenstein presaged in 2011, and the dissipation of the White demographic majority by 2050. That, in turn, portends White genocide: the disappearance of the White race.^[7] Subscribers to the theory imply, to potent effect, that the racial demographics of a country spell out its cultural and economic destiny, disguising racist selective immigration policies (and antisemitic ideologies casting White genocide as a Jewish plot) as purely defensive and patriotic countermeasures to shield both a vulnerable White race and White American culture from its named enemies.

Like much online far-right chatter, the castizo futurism conversation unfolds across a diffused network of mostly anonymous posters—nicknamed “anons”—on Twitter threads, 4chan forums, YouTube channels, chat rooms on alternative social media sites, and more. On 4chan, where the memetics and ideology of the movement is fleshed out in real time, the conversation, like many others, is suffused with a gloomy undertone of apocalyptic urgency. The problem, anons insist, is that while White European populations remain more closely rooted (for now at least) in ties of blood and soil, even the most race-conscious White Americans are condemned by the modern melting pot to the pitiable fate expressed by the popular meme Amerimutt: a caricature of a swarthy, olive-skinned, disheveled, self-deluded American who boasts of his White pride yet, in reality, is a mongrelization of various European and non-White ethnicities, his “Whiteness” degraded by the homogenizing forces of cultural diversity and consumer capitalism.^[8]

For some, however, the noble, if embattled, drive to ensure a racial majority simply demands fine-tuning for contemporary times. Under an article about plateauing U.S. White birth rates on the White nationalist website Counter-Currents, commenter Gonzaga lamented that the preservation of a White majority in the U.S. would be “a marathon that will take generations” and advised White Americans to both reconnect with their European roots and “have high standards [when choosing a mate] but be realistic. In this age of decadence, we’re all damaged goods to one extent or another.” Holding “high,” yet “realistic,” standards for the sake of keeping White dominance afloat, the commenter implies, may force a redefinition of the fluid, unsettled categories of White and non-White, expanding the boundaries of Whiteness to include some communities currently seen as people of color, such as castizo immigrants. As an ideological product of this growing, pragmatic framework, castizo futurism affirms the quest for permanent White hegemony as a struggle worth the sacrifice of a pure, undiluted ethnostate.       

The Complexities of Race Within Latinx Communities

White nationalist discourse reflects a popular confusion around questions of race, ethnicity, and Latinx identity common across U.S. society. In the xenophobic U.S. imagination, the geographic marker of “Latinx,” and the linguistic category of “Hispanic,” are often used interchangeably to construct an imagined homogenous racial Other, distinct from White America. At the same time, U.S. census data has, since 1997, allowed individuals to mark “Hispanic or Latino” as an ethnicity category separate from racial identification, invisibilizing the complex layers of racialization that impact distinct Latinx communities. To complicate matters further, contemporary narratives dominant across many Latin American countries and communities, such as mestizaje in Mexico, claim that colonial-era racial and caste distinctions have been largely sublimated into a single, inclusive ethno-racial culture called la raza.   

By contrast, many Afro-Latinx, Indigenous, and other scholars, artists and activists^[9] have highlighted the ways in which these flawed approaches perpetuate anti-Blackness, and erase racial and ethnic diversity and power imbalances that persist across distinct Latinx communities. Narratives of oversimplification erase this diversity, as well as the nuanced histories of European colonization and Indigenous genocide, African slavery, global migration patterns, and assimilation processes that have impacted various communities in specific ways.

These narratives also obscure the ways in which White Latinx communities participate in upholding White supremacy across the Americas. As Dash Harris, a Black Latin American multimedia producer who has helped advance these conversations, pointed out on Twitter in April 2021, many Latinx people play an active role in executing xenophobic U.S. immigration policy, while White elites in Latin American countries “share the same history, legacy & white power as their [North] American counterparts.”^[10] By claiming a White or White Latinx identity, many U.S. Latinx activists seek to draw attention to the ways they personally benefit from White privilege.

In much castizo futurist discourse, ironically, White nationalists stumble upon these questions of identity from a position of ignorance, baffled by the instability of supposedly ironclad racial categories and the discovery that some Latinx communities may in fact be White.

“Thanks, Conquistadors!”

Across anonymous movement forums, castizo futurist “anons” seek to codify a breeding population’s racial makeup into pseudoscientific categories, while arguing endlessly about what, and who, constitutes Whiteness. In their determination to find adequately White breeding partners, they resemble colonial-era Spanish conquistadors or 19th and 20th-century Latin American imperial administrators, retrofitted with today’s insidious aspirations for demographic engineering. Online memes and discourse imbue many abstract White nationalist notions about racial assimilation with an urgent practical significance, exemplified by one 4chan poster’s advice to “marry and have kids with a latino as they [at] least share SOME of your genes in common.”

In these conversations, the violent racism and misogyny of the White nationalist movement are on full display. Scrutinizing images of ambiguously racialized women as possible mating partners makes for a popular recurring forum pastime. These conversations brim with incel-infused rage against liberal White women, while rendering Latinx and other perceived women of color as both responsible for the degeneracy of White racial purity, and as exotic “conservative castiza chick[s]” with whom to “settle down if you really want a white trad wife.”     

Such conversations treat race as a science, stressing the importance of examining the “amount of European blood [Latinx people] have” and identifying castizos as “one quarter indian and 3 quarters white” or European. Taking this as proof of sufficient Whiteness, one anon on Gamer Uprising, another forum frequented by White nationalists, concluded that “3/4 White babies would mix with full White babies and over time progress towards a higher percentage. […] Often the kids look White, just tell them they are White!” Hundreds of similar assertions crowd online White nationalist platforms, where posters advance amateur “race realism” theories and navigate obsessively through a thicket of competing ideas about racial identity.

For others, though, depictions of castizos transcend any categorization made with neat calculations and a genealogical tree, collapsing the diverse ingredients of castizo status into a broad social station that is adjacent, but rarely equivalent, to Whiteness. Anchored by a foundational anti-Blackness, many posters concede that castizo-White coexistence may be a necessary, if imperfect, alternative to a truly inclusive multiracial society. “I would definitely 100% prefer a Christian castizo/white future for the US than a n***** future,” reasoned one poster. “At least the ones with mostly European genes seem human and work hard.” Another anon revealed the interplay between xenophobia, anti-Black racism, and antisemitism in these movement visions, detailing a dramatic, if tongue-in-cheek, state-building fantasy wherein U.S. castizo futurism, precisely through its inescapable contradictions, ends up redeeming the White race in Europe and worldwide. Introducing himself as “Evil white nationalist racist here,” he continues on 4chan,

Reluctant Allies    

Meanwhile, for a sizeable contingent of White nationalists who trumpet their “pure” European heritage and reject the miscegenation implied by racial caste classifications, anxieties about the debasement of White racial integrity can translate into an outright dismissal of “impure” castizos as movement allies and marriage partners, as well as broader ridicule of “castizo futurism” as a dead-end, and even heretical, movement strategy. As one 4chan commenter put it, “Maybe some of them [can pass as White], but if you are planning on having kids with one then you are kinda flushing your genetic line down the toilet if you are anglo or german. At the end of the day they are all brown people.” These purists, with their insistence that even “one drop” of non-White blood renders one irredeemably non-White, stress the eugenicist opposition to miscegenation shared by 20th Century U.S. race scientists, Jim Crow-era state policy, and Nazi Germany. Faced with the reality of demographic change, they seek to harden, rather than cautiously expand, the borders of White identity.

In the eyes of the hypothetical ethnostate’s gatekeepers, however, not all Latin American nationalities are created equal. Many express willingness to grant recognition of racial kinship to Latin Americans who can prove untainted European ancestry. They gaze longingly at countries like Argentina, with its 20^th Century policies of Indigenous genocide and extensive European immigration, while casting more demographically diverse nations like Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia as vessels of crime and multiracialism. Others find ways to reject the Whiteness of their would-be Latin American kin, citing their cultural inferiority as an irreconcilable difference.

The networked conversation around castizo futurism also includes self-identified non-White Latinx posters, who use the term to promote their own reactionary ethnonationalist visions of Latinx racial revival. These anons often boost “Mexican reconquista” memes, gleefully herald the coming “Hispanicization” of the U.S., and champion visions of “a majority right-wing Hispanic nation” in which a castizo “autocratic culture and heritage” happily converges with White conservative values. While some look to far-right ethnonationalist groups in Latin America to spearhead such a racial revival, others cling to a redemptive, utopian fantasy of North American society dominated by “a new race:” a hypermasculine, castizo-White warrior class that, in contrast to feeble, effeminate White liberals, will embody “just enough Savageness to fight off the wokeness” and defend Western civilization, while their consummate Whiteness precludes the “loss of [too much] civility to have a top civ[ilization].”

These negotiated, if uneasy alliances between varying versions of castizo futurism find powerful common ground in their misogyny, anti-LGBTQ traditionalism, antisemitism, and pseudoscientific “race-realism,” with anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity at its core. Such tactical and ideological alignment spills beyond the virtual walls of online forums. For example, the 2016 American Renaissance conference featured, alongside prominent White nationalist speakers, self-described Mexican nationalist and identitarian Fernando Cortés, who in his speech chalked up Mexico-U.S. migrant flows to devious schemes by “globalist” architects.  Racial harmony, he stressed, could only be achieved when “each nation has its own folk, territory, and independence.”^[11] The inclusion of Cortés in the White nationalist venue signaled the ideological compatibility of nominally distinct ethnonationalisms, united in a mutually exclusionary solidarity against a cabal of greedy global elites supposedly foreclosing the possibility of harmonious coexistence between ethnostates. Much like their White counterparts, then, Latinx castizo nationalists valorize the noble and heroic rebirth of their imagined biological race in terms laden with xenophobia and ultra-traditionalism, envisioning a future purified of a Black and Indigenous underclass on the one hand, and liberated from the grip of subversive, homogenizing “globalist” overlords (often coded as Jewish) on the other.

Castizo futurism, then, steps in precisely at a moment of White nationalist disillusionment about the racial and socio-cultural future of the U.S, to supply a hopeful, if ambivalent, lifeline. In place of the oft-cited “black pill” of despair, it promises a future where some form of White dominance and cultural traditionalism may still reign—a kind of last-ditch compromise as the dream of a “pure” European-American ethnostate recedes.     

“The One-Drop Rule Violates Me”

While anons compulsively pick apart these issues on 4chan, White nationalist movement leaders have sought to chart a more nuanced path forward, fusing socio-cultural and biological racial identity in ways that seem counterintuitive to outside observers. In 2017, Counter-Currents editor Greg Johnson described his attitude as pragmatic when he was a guest on a movement podcast hosted by Latinx ethnonationalists.^[12] “If the person looks White, thinks they’re White, acts White and so forth, we can’t say they’re not White…I want to have a complete ban on future race mixing, and a complete amnesty on past race mixing.” While rejecting the principle of blanqueamiento—“You don’t get White people by Whitening up non-White populations,” Johnson argued, “You get mestizos and mulattos of increasingly lighter shades”—he nonetheless accepts castizos as a cultural subgroup within the normative White community, if not as acceptable mating partners. “At a certain point,” he explained,

Striking a similar “pragmatic” note in another 2017 episode of the podcast, then-Traditionalist Worker Party leader Matt Heimbach expounded that “the people who go down these purity spirals” of insisting upon 100 percent Euro-White genetic descent “are really never engaged in real politics. They’re not engaged in community advocacy, they’re not involved in the real world, so I kind of disregard those opinions.” Individuals with some non-European heritage could prove themselves as militant, dedicated activists in the White nationalist movement, he allowed, while mixed-race individuals could remain in separate communities within a future White ethnostate, as long as “they throw in early and are very active and very supportive and are willing to sacrifice for [the ethnostate]… I would make the decisions on citizenship based on the ability to assimilate, and also loyalty to the dream, loyalty to what we’re building.”

For previous generations of White nationalist leaders, strident calls for White purity and rebirth have long carried similar fine print. Even David Lane, a member of the 1980s terror group The Order and coiner of the movement mantra known as the 14 Words—“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”—acknowledged there are “no 100% pure Aryans.” In a prison communique entitled “Who Is White?” Lane explained that, “if someone looks White, acts White, fights White, then until their actions prove otherwise, they are our Folk.” William Pierce, longtime leader of the National Alliance and author of the “movement Bible” The Turner Diaries, spoke in near-identical terms that underscored the patriarchal impulse behind Jim Crow-era racial classification, concluding that, “if a person looks White and thinks of himself as White and is the kind of person our other members wouldn’t mind their sisters marrying—and if we know that he’s no more than one-sixteenth non-White, we consider him White.”

Indeed, while most White nationalist milieus brand themselves as exclusive to European-descended, non-Jewish Whites, notable exceptions to this rule within the movement abound, such as movement writer Martin Christopher Rojas, who self-identifies as a “full-time white Hispanic” and provocatively asked the readers of American Renaissance, “What do you think? Would you call me white?”^[13] Red Elephants writer Pedro Alvaredo situates himself similarly, describing himself as a “Hispanic dissident who is well aware of the realities of race…[and] offers clear warnings to Americans about the perils of multi-racialism.” Other movement leaders, such as Eric Striker (real name Joseph Jordan),^[14] have been “outed” as having partial Latinx ancestry, revelations that often cause controversy amongst their peers. Meanwhile, White movement activists anxiously conduct and compare DNA tests, scrambling to rationalize away any non-European ancestry they uncover in an uneasy bid to solidify the historically porous, shifting, and unstable foundations of Whiteness.

“America First Is a Latino Movement”

In many ways, the “castizo question” haunting the contemporary White nationalist movement comes to the fore with Nick Fuentes and his America First/groyper movement, a Generation-Z focused White nationalist formation that, after the collapse of the Alt Right, emerged as the leading U.S. White nationalist group of the late- and post-Trump era. Focused on broadening their appeal in order to pull the conservative movement rightward, the groypers package their core goal of ending White demographic “replacement” in fervent America First nationalism, hard-edged Christian traditionalism, and a carefully crafted aesthetic that blends suit-and-tie professionalism with the edgy irreverence of online trolling and gamer culture.

Confronted with the rise of the groypers, many outside observers are quick to mock the irony in a person surnamed Fuentes helming a White nationalist movement—a response that misses the deeper strategic significance of Fuentes’ racial positionality for contemporary White nationalism. Fuentes strongly embraces his Whiteness (causing no shortage of ire amongst his opponents within White nationalism); has built his political career around “saving the white race;” considers interracial sex “degenerate;” and frames Latinx immigrants as invading racial Others. At times, however, he identifies as a non-White Latino in a cynical attempt to deflect charges of racism before broader audiences. “I am a LATINO CAMPUS CONSERVATIVE,” he insisted in a 2019 tweet. “How could I be a white nationalist when I’m NOT EVEN WHITE?”          

The notable presence people of color as members, leaders and supporters helps the groypers blunt charges of White nationalism, angle towards coalition-building, and brand their movement for a mainstream Right audience. The America First movement eagerly highlights support from prominent conservative non-White pundits and influencers such as Michelle Malkin, Jon Miller, Ali Alexander, and Bryson Gray. Unlike other White nationalist formulations, they also accept people of color, and even Muslims and Jews, within the base of their deeply racist, Islamophobic, and antisemitic Christian nationalist groyper network.

Within the largely online groyper fan base, Latinx-identified accounts like “Hispanic Groyper,” “Venezuelan American Groyper,” and “Latino Zoomer” abound. The latter, a Texas-based teenager who describes himself as a “based brown kid,” frequently appears in videos, memes, and pictures sporting an accelerationist skull mask, celebrates Adolf Hitler and The Turner Diaries, and engages in virulent anti-Black racism, misogyny, antisemitism and xenophobia while stressing his Latino identity. Latino Zoomer maintains a small online community of Latinx-identified supporters that at one point called itself “Sp*cwaffen,” blending an anti-Latinx racial slur with reference to the White nationalist terror network Atomwaffen in an example of how these individuals navigate a complex positionality, professing admiration for and identification with the broader White nationalist movement while carving out a distinct identitarian space for themselves. “Nick Fuentes has his thing going and I think an all brown movement standing in solidarity with the white nationalist will be the best thing for all of us that are brown,” one member offered in July 2021. “That way we don’t have to go to white nationalist groups anymore[,] we have our own for our own people.”

Fuentes, for his part, maintains that the groypers “gotta be a big coalition,” as he told a self-identified Lebanese American “Muslim groyper” in November 2020: “It’s a movement that effectively wants to secure a white population core that will dictate culturally how the country is supposed to be. As long as people are ok with that, I don’t care if they’re orange or if they’re whatever.”^[15] Similarly, in April 2021, when a Black groyper supporter asked during a livestream whether “non-Whites will undermine the movement with time,” Vincent James Foxx responded, “I’ve never heard anyone suggest that non-Whites should be excluded from America First… If you are pushing in the same direction that we’re pushing, and you’re pushing for the exact same things that we’re pushing, why would we be like, ‘You’re not White, so you can’t fucking be a part of this’?”          

Multiracial White Nationalism

In October 2019, Alt Right writer Bronze Age Pervert offered a rebuke to the moribund conservative establishment which, he charged, failed to understand the deep appeal of Trump’s populism to a new generation of right-wing youth, including many people of color. “We are far better at recruiting Latinos” than old-style conservatives, he insisted, and “there is much more involvement also by nonwhite youth and particularly by Latino, Asian, and multiracial youth in this phenomenon than people want to admit…this new, energetic and popular form of the right is a Latino movement.”

Indeed, the present U.S. White nationalist movement is far removed from the “Aryan” caricature of past iterations, exemplified by figures like Richard Spencer, and is increasingly shaped by a kind of castizo futurist praxis in which Latinx and non-White activists may play prominent roles. Paralleling what others have deemed the “multiracial far-right,”^[16] formations like the groypers demonstrate a variant of multiracial White nationalism, combining a classical U.S. White nationalist emphasis on demographic dominance and opposition to non-White immigration with a nominally inclusive and traditionalist ultranationalism. Discussions around “castizo futurism” reflect, from another angle, this ambiguity of a White nationalist movement in transition.

Questions of immigration and demographics remain prevalent across U.S. society, and amid sensationalized images of a faceless tide of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, White nationalist answers to these questions continue to move into the mainstream Right. In September 2021, Fox News host Tucker Carlson used White nationalist terminology and framing to warn his millions of viewers that President Biden actively promotes “an unrelenting stream of immigration…to change the racial mix of the country…in political terms, this policy is called the ‘great replacement,’ the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far-away countries.” Nor are these trends confined to the institutional Far Right. Biden initially resisted raising the Trump-era cap on refugee admissions over concerns of political optics,^[17] and carried out the largest mass expulsion of Haitian asylum-seekers in recent memory.^[18] Meanwhile, center-right commentators like Eric Kaufmann parallel discourses of castizo futurism, casting a scholarly, respectable veneer onto White identitarian politics to defend measures that would curtail immigration and forcibly assimilate migrants into a unitary “White culture.”^[19]

Progressives cannot underestimate the Right’s ability to tap into racial realignments and xenophobia to build a multiracial coalition and score major political victories. In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, a groundswell of support for Trump in some Latinx communities, credited to targeted Republican culture war campaigns,^[20] zealous “pro-police and pro-jobs” messaging, and enthusiastic mobilization by Latinx organizers,^[21] surprised many political analysts who had long viewed Latinx voters as a secure Democratic base. Indeed, Trump’s rhetorical synthesis of ultranationalism with a nominally “race-blind” individualism founded on economic prosperity—combined with diatribes against Black Lives Matter, “critical race theory,” and more—resonated with many Latinx voters, especially men, who view themselves as “American[s]” before minorities, free to “take advantage of whatever opportunities just as Anglo people did.”^[22]

But as this mentality suggests, a growing identification with Whiteness, explicit or otherwise, helps shape attitudes toward bootstraps ideology and “law-and-order” governance, embodied for many by Trump’s border wall and boisterous businessman rhetoric, in powerful and unanticipated ways. Many right-wing Latinx voters may subscribe to the “race-blind” patriotism and economic populism of the GOP narrative, but what they share in common with Latinx and non-White groypers, and castizo futurists, betrays a parallel complicity in upholding systemic anti-Black and anti-immigrant racism: a growing feeling of inclusion in, or alignment with, the normative White population, and its accompanying politics of exclusion and hierarchy.

For centuries across Latin America and the U.S., the heirs of White settler colonialism have wrestled with the contradictions engendered by intertwined processes of racial formation, nation-building, and capitalism, negotiating different forms of hierarchy—from blanqueamiento in Brazil to Jim Crow in the U.S.—in order to preserve White dominance. In our own age, White nationalists engaging in dialogue around castizo futurism, movements like the groypers, GOP party-builders, and more will tend the flames of their movements using tactics angled not merely toward survival, but expansion and long-term power-building before an uncertain future.