Feliz Latinx Heritage Month, mi gente. In honor of the season, I want to talk about something that doesn’t always feel very “celebratory”… historical trauma. But hear me out, because understanding this is part of understanding ourselves.
As a social worker, I look at mental health through a systemic, social-justice lens, which means history isn’t separate from the conversation.
What Historical Trauma Actually Is
Historical trauma is the cumulative emotional and psychological harm caused by a significant traumatic event, or series of events, experienced by a group. Harm that doesn’t stay contained to the generation that lived it, but gets transmitted forward.
It’s different from individual trauma (what happens to one person) and intergenerational trauma (effects passed from one generation to the next). Historical trauma is broader: it’s the cumulative wounding of an entire group across generations, tied to a shared history of oppression (colonization, slavery, forced migration, genocide).
The term was developed in the 1990s by Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, a social worker describing what happened to Native communities in what is now the U.S.: massacres, land theft, generations of children forcibly sent to boarding schools designed to strip them of language and culture.
That history isn’t separate from Latinx history. A huge portion of what is now the U.S. was Mexico. For many families, Indigenous and Latinx identity overlap..it’s complicated.
It Looks Different Depending on Where Your Family Is From
We talk about “Latin America” like it’s one place with one history, but it isn’t. The specific historical trauma in your family tree depends on where your people are from.
In Mexico, Spanish colonization beginning in the 1500s wasn’t just a change in power, it was a systematic effort to erase Indigenous life. Millions died from violence and disease. Religious practices were banned and replaced with forced Catholic conversion. Native languages were suppressed. A hierarchy took hold where anything Indigenous (language, dress, ritual, even skin tone) was something to be ashamed of, and proximity to Spanish and European identity was something to aspire to. That hierarchy didn’t stay in the 1500s, it’s part of why some families still carry unspoken rules about who’s “more” or “less” Mexican.
In South America, colonization is part of the story, but so is political violence within living memory — regimes that ran coordinated campaigns against students, journalists, and activists. People were disappeared, tortured, killed. Many families never got a body to bury, never got closure. This isn’t only history, because for many families, it’s still happening.
In the Dominican Republic, state violence targeted people of certain ancestry, a legacy that still shapes conversations about race and identity today. In Cuba, displacement created a specific kind of grief, people who lost their home and may never be able to return. Puerto Rico carries a century of U.S. colonial status.
When we say “Latin America” or “Latinx,” we’re talking about several distinct histories of loss, violence, and displacement, sometimes overlapping in the same family tree, sometimes not. We are not a monolith.
How Trauma Actually Travels Forward: Loss
If historical trauma is the event, loss is the mechanism that keeps it moving through generations.
- Loss of language. A grandparent fluent only in Spanish or an Indigenous language. A parent who’s bilingual but self-conscious about their accent, maybe punished for speaking Spanish in public. A grandchild who understands the language but doesn’t speak it. Here in Colorado, especially in the San Luis Valley, land that was once Mexico, there are still living people who remember being punished for speaking Spanish in the classroom.
- Loss of ritual and tradition. Practices dropped under pressure to assimilate, or the shame that pushed us not to stand out. It usually doesn’t disappear in one moment, it fades out, one generation at a time.
- Loss of identity itself. The ni de aquí, ni de allá experience: not “Latino enough” for one space, not “American enough” for another, not “Indigenous enough” because we don’t know which pueblo we’re from. That in-between space is a chronic, low-grade stressor: wanting to belong, never quite arriving.
- Loss of land and ancestral ties, especially for families with Indigenous or Afro-Latino roots, which, let’s be honest, is most of us. That same hierarchy still decides whose culture gets preserved and whose gets left behind.
Losing language and culture cuts off the coping practices and stories our ancestors used to buffer stress. When that’s missing, people are left to cope with the echoes of trauma without the tools their great-grandparents might have had.
How It Shows Up in the Body and Mind
This is where it gets genuinely fascinating, and I want to be honest that this research is still developing, and I’m not an expert in the science itself.
Epigenetics is the study of how experience can change gene expression, not the genes themselves, but whether certain genes get turned up or down. Chronic stress and trauma can alter how the body regulates cortisol, our primary stress hormone. Research on trauma survivors, Holocaust survivors, for example, has found that these altered stress-regulation patterns show up in their children, before that child ever experienced anything traumatic themselves. If you’re naturally anxious or hypervigilant, your nervous system might be carrying a stress response calibrated generations before you were born.
We also inherit shame, about not speaking Spanish or an Indigenous language fluently, about skin color, hair texture, features, about not feeling “enough” of an identity that was deliberately and violently stripped from our families generations ago. That shame is an inherited echo of colonization and assimilation, shame was the tool that enforced the loss in the first place.
And we inherit unresolved grief, for land, language, history, identity. There’s no funeral for this kind of loss. Sometimes there isn’t even social permission to mourn it.
“That’s Just Our Culture”…Or Is It?
Some of what gets filed under “that’s just how our people are” has a much more specific origin than we usually admit.
Mejorar la raza, “improving the race”, the idea that a lighter-skinned baby, ojos azules, was a win for the family. That preference is a direct descendant of the colonial hierarchy that ranked European features above Indigenous or Afro-Latino ones for centuries. Repeat it enough generations and it stops sounding like colonization. It just sounds like a compliment.
Same with pelo bueno versus pelo malo, straighter textures praised, coily hair treated as something to tame. This hits Afro-Latinos especially hard. It’s the same colonial ranking, applied to hair instead of skin.
And when someone feels disconnected from their culture…doesn’t speak Spanish fluently, doesn’t know their Indigenous roots, feels like an outsider at family gatherings, that often turns into private shame. What’s wrong with me? Why didn’t I try harder?
I want to challenge that. If language, land, tradition, and knowledge were taken through violence and forced assimilation, and then the loss was perpetuated through generations of shame designed to make people hide these things, that’s not a personal failure! It’s a predictable outcome of what was done to that family, often before the person carrying the shame was even born.
And if you want to reclaim that connection later in life, learning a language as an adult, researching your family history, picking up a ritual, it is not too little, too late! It’s an active, legitimate part of healing.
So What Do We Do With This?
- Name it. Understanding that your anxiety, shame, or hypervigilance might be inherited doesn’t mean you’re powerless against it, it means you finally have a map. You can’t interrupt a pattern you don’t know you’re in.
- Treat reconnection as active healing, not sentimentality. Learning a few words of Spanish or an Indigenous language. Asking your parents or grandparents where they’re from and hearing their stories, especially before it’s not possible to ask anymore. Cooking a dish from scratch, the way it used to be made. These aren’t nostalgic hobbies. They’re rebuilding the identity that was taken.
- Talk about it across generations. A lot of families have an unspoken rule against discussing certain history. That silence was often protective. But honest conversation, including telling your own kids what you’re doing and why, can change what gets passed down next.
- Remember this is bigger than individual willpower. It’s a collective wound, which means healing benefits from collective spaces, culturally-informed therapy, community, practicing shared traditions, conversations like this one. You don’t have to individually-therapy your way out of centuries of history.
None of this erases what happened. But it does mean you can feel empowered with the information you have!
Listen to the full episode HERE . Follow along on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. Join the newsletter at TheChicanaTherapist.com for podcast updates, blog posts, and upcoming retreats — including the Denver mini-retreat for Latinas in the helping professions on October 16th. Cuídense mucho.