The patronization is right on cue

Leftists have already figured out the difference between these regions, if you're curious. The Balkans are peripheral Europe. https://hexbear.net/post/1385667

Western can be a misnomer like global south. Half the time when I say NATO I'm mentally including Japan and Australia and occupied Korea. Japan and occupied Korea are pretty damn Western now depending on how you mean that.

I'm palestinian honduran so I wouldn't even bother trying to argue with the few people I'd run into that seriously consider race what makes someone western.

those "few people", aka the entirety of the population who actually cares about this shit lmao. Including the cunning ones who pretend to consider you guys "western" just for optics, and then support every standard right-wing American position

Nobody considers Christian, Portugese-speaking Angola to be "Western". Race is literally half the criteria.

I still don't see why it matters so much to american leftists tho

uhhh...because it matters to american rightists? If you spent a few months in America in a rural area with an Islamic name I think you'd learn pretty quick

"Western" = politically western European, and white

Russia isn't politically western so they don't fit
Poland used to not be western, but now is
Parts of the Balkans are part of the west (certainly not in the core though)
Japan and Korea are rich and vassal states of NATO, but are not white
America is technically mixed race, but the average white American is 98.5% white (and western european to boot), unlike any "white" person in any Latin country where even the least mixed people are still 20% Native admixed

Nothing in Latin America is Western in any sense other than cardinal directions. Yes, you're all Christian and part Spanish/Portu, but any "camaraderie" you see there is a completely one-way street--the people in Europe do NOT feel that way mutually about you, even if they don't get as violent about it as in the US. You could MAYBE make an exception for Argentina and Uruguay because it seems a lot of them (still not all) are close enough on racial criteria to "pass" visually. Places like Mexico and Colombia will never be western, because you can't be part of a group if your people get hatecrimed on sight (with no repercussions) in said countries .

Latin America has been westernized by continuous economical, cultural, and imperialist influence by the United States (and other global north countries), it doesn't make sense to think of our countries as some non-Western society, it's inaccurate and a bad framework to try to change our life.

I'm going to paste what I said in another comment replying to another user just because it mostly applies here too.

Look, neither you or I get to define what "the West" means. It is a racist concept, but that's the unfortunate reality of the situation. "The West" is not defined by who thinks they should belong to it, it's defined by the material reality of exploitation. It's nearly synonymous with "Imperial Core." If you're in the periphery, you are not part of "The West" no matter how much your society mirrors so-called western culture. Just as a regular worker is not part of the bourgeoisie no matter how much they want to be. There are the exploiters and the exploited. Latam, on the global stage, is exploited by the imperial core and there is no escaping that fact. The exploiters will never see it as part of their club because they're exploiting it! It's not like we (hexbears or leftists in general) see this as a good thing or want to perpetuate it. We want to tear it the fuck down. But we can't deny material reality, and it seems like that's what you're trying to do by insisting that Latam is western and getting mad at us for the fact that it's largely racism that determines who belongs to the in-group "Western" and who doesn't.

We may not be part of the west in a historical sense, but we are westernized countries living in the world that the West has created for us with violence.

Absolutely. So you do see it is "The West" that unfortunately gets to define who belongs in the club, and it does so via violence. The West has violently created the world you live in, but that does not make the world you live in part of it, no matter how many people around you mistakenly think it does.

If it has been “westernized” then you are basically admitting right there it is not the west.

Yes, much of the world has been colonized and injected with white supremacist ideology, ie “westernized”. That doesn’t make much of the world “The West”

it doesn't make sense to think of our countries as some non-Western society, it's inaccurate and a bad framework to try to change our life.

wrong, it's the UTMOST FUNDAMENTAL basis upon which to change your lives

if Latinos can't even agree that they are their own bloc, then how do you expect change to ever occur? Imagine if China was 20 different countries, with squabbles about the North being "uhhh totally Mongol/Russian acktschyually" do you think they would have ended up better or worse materially? Obviously a lot worse!

why is India doing better than Nepal Pakistan Sri Lanka etc? Why do they have 300 nukes and a space program?
Because it's a union of smaller countries like Punjab Tamil Nadu Kerala and etc. India is still bad, but if there were a communist revolution there, there's nothing the West could do! While in a small country like Niger or Kenya, they can just overthrow it easily!

and if the Indian nation-states (meaning Punjab and Kerala and Maharashtra and Assam) can unite, there's no reason that Latin American countries can't do so. The Indian ones have 4-10k years of uninterrupted history and ethnic differentiation, so I think a continent where everybody already speaks Spanish and Portuguese can manage the same thing

Also: if an average person from your bloc can get hatecrimed on sight in another country with no repercussions then guess what? that country is not a part of your bloc! Neither geopolitically NOR ethnoculturally! basic logic!

This is a conflation of different uses of the term western. There's cultural, economic, and geographic definitions for it, etc.