The “Mexican Boho” Mood Board Trap

How “discoverability” turns culture into branding

Tropical Fruits by Evelyn Galindo drgartlab.com

Being “discoverable” shouldn’t mean being stereotyped. And yet, here we are. It’s pretty disgraceful how SEO flattens cultures into whatever’s easiest to click, pin, and sell. This post is about how search engines reward stereotypes about Latin American culture while burying complexity.

I know where it comes from because I run a small art business, and I live inside search engines whether I like it or not. If you want visibility, you pay attention to what people search for. And what people search for tells you exactly how culture gets flattened.

Type “Mexican decor” or “Latin American art” into a search bar and look at what comes back: bright reds, yellows, turquoise. Skulls without context. Tile motifs stripped of meaning. A version of Latin America that’s always festive, always colorful, always easy to consume. That version doesn’t reflect lived experience. It reflects branding.

No grief.

No contradiction. Zero depth.

It’s fine to celebrate cultures, as long as celebration isn’t appropriation, so let’s clarify the difference. Celebration is when you engage with a culture with respect, context, and reciprocity: you know where something comes from, you name it accurately, you credit the people behind it, and you support them materially by buying from them, collaborating, or paying for the right to use their work.

Appropriation is when you extract the look without the meaning or permission, strip it of context, repackage it as a trend, and profit while the original community is ignored, misrepresented, or pushed out of visibility. The simplest tell is this: celebration honors and supports real people and living culture, while appropriation turns culture into a costume, an aesthetic that’s easy to sell. So yes, your “Mexican kitchen boho” Pinterest board is giving “I like the look, not the people” vibes.

Why “Mexican Decor” Search Results Look the Way They Do

Search engines reward what’s familiar, clickable, and commercially proven. They don’t ask whether something is accurate or respectful. They ask whether people click. Over time, that creates a feedback loop where the same shallow imagery rises to the top again and again, while anything more complex quietly disappears.

And let me be clear. This isn’t accidental. It’s structural.

Latin American Culture Is Not a Color Palette

Latin American identity isn’t a color palette or an aesthetic. It’s layered, regional, political, emotional, and often uncomfortable. It carries colonial history, migration, class, language loss, humor, resilience, and memory. But none of that fits neatly into a keyword or tag. None of that converts as easily as “fiesta colors.” So it gets buried.

What bothers me most isn’t just appropriation. It’s misrepresentation. The idea that Latin American culture exists primarily to be consumed. Good for a coffee mug. Safe for wallpaper. Cute for a kitchen theme. Decorative rather than complex. Easy to lift, simplify, and sell without context or consequence.

As a Latina small business owner, this flattening feels personal. I don’t recognize myself, my family, or my memories in that imagery. I recognize marketing. And marketing is very good at pretending it’s celebration.

Example: When “Tile” Isn’t Neutral

I’m not Argentine, but I visited the ESMA site in Buenos Aires and it changed the way I see certain “decor” motifs forever. I listened to a former detainee talk about being imprisoned and blindfolded, and how people tried to orient themselves through whatever fragments they could still perceive, including the patterns underfoot that they could see from underneath blindfolds. Tiles weren’t decoration. They were evidence of place. A tiny anchor to reality when everything else was taken.

So when search results turn “Latin tile patterns” into a cheerful kitchen vibe, I don’t just see style. I see what happens when history gets scraped off and sold back as aesthetic. It’s not that tiles can’t be beautiful. It’s that they’re not automatically innocent.

How SEO Pressures Creators to Flatten Themselves

SEO pressures creators like me into a quiet choice. Optimize for what search engines reward and flatten yourself in the process, or stay honest and accept that your work will be harder to find. This gets framed as a business decision, but it’s not a fair one. It asks marginalized creators to translate themselves into stereotypes in exchange for visibility.

What makes this worse is that search doesn’t just reflect demand. It trains it. If the only language available to describe Latin American culture online is shallow, then that’s all people learn to look for. You can’t search for nuance if you’ve never been shown it exists.

I still use SEO. I have to. But I’m careful about how I describe my work. I don’t call it “Latin-inspired” because it’s not inspiration. It’s lived, inherited, and remembered experience. I don’t design for mood boards. I design from proximity, memory, and responsibility.

If we want better representation, we have to stop rewarding the shallow version. We have to ask who is telling the story, who benefits from it, and what gets left out when culture becomes a trend. Fiesta colors are easy. Truth is harder.

I’m more interested in the hard part.