In Latin America, the word “Chino” and its various diminutives—“Chinita” (little Asian girl) and “Chinito” (little Asian boy)—are ostensibly used to describe almost anybody with features that hint at East Asian descent. This can be confusing in lands of Mestizos, where Indigenous features and Asian ones are nearly indistinguishable from a distance. Jesus Alberto Miranda Peréz, the “Chino” in the Latin Grammy-winning Venezuelan pop group Chino y Nacho, for example, has no verifiable Asian heritage, and we can only assume he got his moniker from his exquisite cheekbones and narrow, deep-set eyes. (Miranda Peréz later dropped the “i” and now goes by “Chyno” to avoid confusion with another Spanish band named Chino).

The history of Asian immigration in Latin America is varied and complex, but the term “Chino”—with the exception of Brazil, where the largest Asian immigrant group is Japanese and people of Asian descent are referred to as “Japa” or “Japinha”—is used as a broad label. Latin American countries that have had significant amounts of Asian immigration like Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela use the term “Chino” just as easily as countries where you rarely see another Asian face, such as Ecuador, Cuba, and Colombia, the country where I’m currently living. (This is also not to be confused with how “chino” is slang for “dude” or “kid” in Bogotá.)

I’m a Chinese American woman who spends a significant amount of time traveling around countries where I’m called “Chinita.” As a matter of precaution, I have the word literally tattooed on my forearm in stark Old English script, so when the inevitable question comes—“Japonése? Coreáno?”—I can casually flick my hair, flash my arm, and confirm that I am, indeed, a woman of Chinese origins. I want to say that this is some sort of reclamation of the term from childhood trauma of being mistaken for the one other Asian girl in our grade, or a flippant middle finger to institutional racism that insists on treating Cambodian refugees and East Asian Hart-Cellar kids as a monolith. However, I’m not that deep—the truth is, I got the tattoo because Spanish speakers think it’s funny, and I like to make people smile.

So, what is the difference between being a “Chinita” in Colombia or Cuba, and someone calling you a “little Chinese girl” in Texas? Is it degrading to be addressed by an ethnic nickname?

In the United States, lumping a range of Asian features together under the umbrella of “Chinese” stems from a long history of specific exclusion. In 1882, President Chester A. Arthur signed his one claim to fame, an absolute 10-year ban on Chinese laborers immigrating to the United States called the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was then extended and made permanent in 1902. From 1910-40, immigration officials on Angel Island sorted thousands of Asian faces seeking the American Dream into two categories: “Oriental” (Chinese and Korean) and “Occidental” (Japanese and Europeans, though Angel Island subsequently became a processing station for Japanese detainees after Pearl Harbor).

That’s just the tip of the Sinophobic iceberg in the United States. To this day, every time corporations shift their production chains to cheaper countries, with fewer protection for laborers, every time the economy takes a downturn, ugly nationalistic sentiment —often backed by government policy—rears its head against “Oriental outsiders.” Blaming recent immigrants who look overtly different for broader economic issues is, of course, not specific to the United States. This type of xenophobia has occasionally been mirrored in Latin American countries, though never to the same extent. Strong anti-Chinese sentiment in Mexico resulted in deportations and illegal expulsions of Chinese Mexican families in the 1930s, and Peru was the only Latin American nation to send their Japanese population to American concentration camps during World War II.

When it’s difficult to identify most of a population’s exact racial background, it probably makes sense to refer to people by color, which is why terms like “moreno” or “negro” are not racial epithets. China is the most well-known Asian nation in most places, so we are all “Chino.”

Yet, there simply hasn’t been enough Asian immigration—and correspondingly, anti-Asian legislation—for “Chino” to carry the connotations it does in the United States. While Latin American countries have their own issues with colorism and class, the majority of people here are a complex mix of Indigenous, enslaved, and conquering genealogies. When it’s difficult to identify most of a population’s exact racial background, it probably makes sense to refer to people by color, which is why terms like “moreno” or “negro” are not racial epithets. China is the most well-known Asian nation in most places, so we are all “Chino.”

The other question here pertains to one’s perceived foreignness and how that impacts your daily life. In Colombia there are very few Asian people, especially outside of cosmopolitan Bogotá. While vacation hotspots invite a growing trickle of Asian American and (fewer) Asian tourists, for most Colombians, I’m likely one of the first Asian people they’ve ever closely interacted with. Here, I can compare my experience to a blonde-haired blue-eyed foreigner in small-town Southeast Asia. In Southeast Asia, I could pass for native if I didn’t open my mouth, so I never experienced the rush of semi-celebrity white foreigners do for their unique plumage. I didn’t speak the language, yet nobody treated me any differently unless they were trying to swindle me.

In countries like Colombia or Cuba, I experience that novelty in droves. Many people paint vague connections to their limited experience with Asian culture in broad strokes; Asians are such hard workers, they own many businesses in Venezuela! My daughter worked with Chinese fabric manufacturers for a summer in Beijing. Do Chinese people love Naruto? There’s a lot of staring, making it difficult to gauge whether they’re staring because you’re one of the few Asian people they’ve seen in real life, or because you have food on your face.

Such extra attention can be safely relegated to the former most of the time. But constant attention can lower your own vigilance for personal embarrassment. In one instance, I was walking down the street in Havana, Cuba a few years ago, and everybody craned their necks to look. I’d gotten so used to receiving second glances that I automatically dismissed their shocked expressions as responses to my ethnicity. When I got home, I realized that one of my dress straps had somehow snapped, and I’d been walking with one pale tittie out in broad daylight for several blocks.

The novelty does pay off in certain ways, particularly since I’m female. I can’t speak to the Asian male experience, but plenty of curiously attentive locals love playing tour guide to a cute little Chinese girl. My neighbor, whose deceased mother was a Guns N’ Roses superfan and named him after a band member—and who, for privacy purposes, we’ll refer to as Axel—is one of those people.

Axel is a native of Medellin, Colombia and administrative lawyer whose increasing disillusionment after working on government campaigns led him down the path of American entrepreneurship. For the last five years, he’s been moonlighting as a “fixer” for wealthy Americans looking for a good time in Medellin. Anything you want, he’ll get you; penthouses, cars, weed, drugs, women, etc. This, in addition to his frequent campaigning that takes him through every nook and cranny of the city, makes him an ideal tour guide. One day, he took me on a drive through neighborhoods most tour guides skip over.

We started in Barrio Antioquia, which he proclaimed the safest neighborhood in Medellin. There are drug dealers on every corner, but less robberies than in Laureles or Poblado (the safe-zoned expat neighborhoods), thanks to a truce between cartels to minimize police presence. “The only people who steal here are the police,” Axel tells me, pointing out pairs of teenaged boys slumped in front of bustling tienditas whistling birdsong in the concrete jungle—two chirps if a cop passes by and once for all-clear. He proves his statement by leaving me in the car with the windows rolled down and the engine running while he goes to get cash from an ATM. Twice.

This is all to say, in a neighborhood where people are hyper-cognizant of every passing car, cop, and newcomer, nobody noticed me. I’d gotten so used to being a spectacle that it was slightly disconcerting to realize I wasn’t the center of attention. Perhaps this is because in the barrio, people at least pretend to mind their own business. I was reminded of my foreigner status later in the night, at a scenic viewpoint high above the east side of the city. As I made my way down the open stairs of a terraced skeleton platform thick with couples ordering snacks and smoking joints, I caught the attention of a kitchen worker who immediately issued a series of kung fu sounds.

If it had happened in the United States, I would like to think I would, at the very least, raise hell with the manager. But that lean brown youth probably makes around $1 an hour (the minimum monthly wage in Colombia is $335 per month, and we were not at a bougie spot) so the most I could muster was guilt at being an expat driving up the cost-of-living prices in Medellin. My American passport trumps any race card in Latin America. This is particularly glaring in Medellin, a city still recovering from the ravages of civil war between narco-funded guerrillas and the U.S.-backed Colombian government, and where I am often bewildered at how gracefully people have accepted Americans, considering that our country’s political decisions cost Colombia hundreds of thousands of lives. When Axel tells me he lost both his parents before his first birthday to violence that the United States prolonged for decades, I couldn’t help selfishly affirming my innocence. None of my ancestors’ taxes went to the government that killed them. My parents were still in China.

The concept of foreignness is always defined in the context of shifting power dynamics. If you’re the only Asian child in a midwestern elementary school classroom, kids will probably assert their fledgling in-group tendencies and point out your differences, just like if you were too fat or too tall. When Americans of any color are traveling through Colombia, their economic and military dominance posits them as either helpful consumers or drug-seeking bullies. As China expands its reach into Latin America and potentially encroaches on local businesses, there may be a shift in attitudes towards economic conquerors from the East. But traveling is observation on a personal level, and travelers should expect reciprocation. You are, after all, going out of your way to gawk at somebody else’s homeland.