When people think "Latino," they mainly picture the Mexican, Puerto Rican, and/or Dominican people who live in the U.S. Maybe they've sprinkled some Cubans in there after they watched Scarface and, based on Al Pacino's performance, assumed all Cubans sound like they accidentally swallowed a bottle of topical anesthetic. One member of any nation is not representative of the tapestry of its entire culture and its encompassing subcultures. Imagine a foreigner amazed that African-Americans exist because they thought America was only white people of European descent. That's what it feels like. If it helps, imagine the nation you live in and all of its cultural complexities. Now imagine all of that happening in another country that isn't your own. Boom! You just got learned about how other nations can be a vast tapestry of multi-ethnic cultures, just like yours!

But those are just minor differences, right? Utah is known to many people around the world as "the home of Mormons." Keep driving east, and you'll run into a sea of Christians. Further east, and you'll find more Jewish people. Florida is populated by nothing but Satan worshipers. But here's where the diversity takes a turn on a fundamental communication level:

Each nation has its own celebrated history. Many may share a language, but each nation puts its own spin on it, creating words with specific meanings in one nation that are nonsense in another. A guagua (pronounced "wa-wa," like the American convenience store chain that only shows up when you say its name three times in Maryland) is a "bus" to a Cuban and a "baby" to a Chilean.

In Mexico, a tortillera is a woman who makes tortillas. It's a slang term for "lesbian" pretty much everywhere else. Similarly, in nearly every Spanish-speaking nation, the word bicho means "insect," except in Puerto Rico, where it means "penis." So if you step into Puerto Rico talking about how your hobby is bicho collecting, people will think that you have come to purchase their supply of dong. Imagine taking a trip to Chicago from your hometown in Ohio. You ask a salesman to point you to the winter coat section of the store, and he hands you a baby covered in body paint. In some sections of Latin America, the language differences can be that drastic.

These are clearly some of the dumber examples, but they help illustrate a larger point: Just because we have a lot in common and there is a lot of cultural overlap doesn't mean our issues are exactly the same. Our differences can often be massive, but also almost imperceptibly subtle. Not understanding these differences, these love-hate relationships, is a recipe for disaster, as past U.S. involvement with the continent may tell you.

For instance ...

As great as the show is, every villain in Breaking Bad except for the goddamned Nazis is Latino. Sicario is the gut-wrenching tale of a white woman being violently pushed out of her own movie's climax by a Colombian cartel operative. Narcos tells the story of a notorious Colombian cocaine kingpin played by a Brazilian who speaks Colombian Spanish with a Brazilian accent. Need an antagonist for your gritty crime drama? Use the header "Cartel," and then pull the rest of the attributes out of a very small hat.

A whopping 50 percent of Latino immigrant characters on American TV are criminals. My own uncle immigrated to New York in the 1980s. If Hollywood made his story, statistics say he would probably be portrayed as a Latin King in a low-rider instead of the boring wine importer and fully legalized citizen he actually was. Latinos rarely get the chance to be normal onscreen. They have to be criminals.

Mexico does have a very complicated and bloody issue with drug cartels, as did Colombia until fairly recently. But America tends lump every culture south of the U.S. with the same problems they've heard exist in Mexico and Colombia. When crime rose in my city, the popular comment was "We don't wanna turn into Mexico." But Mexico and Colombia aren't as defined by drugs as it would seem. They're fantastic countries, filled with friendly, colorful people who -- and I hope you're sitting down for this -- aren't coked-up monsters.

I understand where this comes from. I only know Chicago from movies and news reports. It sounds terrifying. A war zone where those "Da Bears" guys from SNL live. It's the setting of about a million gangster films, from the original Scarface in the 1930s to The Untouchables in the 1980s to every meandering side plot of Boardwalk Empire in the 2000s. But my wife has traveled there and told me how beautiful it was. She was surprised when I asked about crime, as if I expected her to give me a harrowing war story of dodging bullets through the trenches as she made a desperate final push for deep dish pizza. But there were no bullets and there were no trenches; just lots of delicious, delicious pizza.

I hated it at first, like one country was trying to impose over the rest. We are all f*****g American. I now know it comes from the lack of a proper name, and I've come to tolerate it. But I've still never been able to completely shake off the notion that some Americans do think they're better, and do try to maybe use the idea that they are "Americans" and I am Uruguayan as another way to draw a line between us. I want to tell them to shut up, that we're all Americans, but the truth is that a lot of idiots see it like Animal Farm: We're all Americans, but some are more American than others.

All of this isn't just culturally insensitive. Misjudging a full subcontinent as foreign instead of neighboring, and continuing to take hard stances against it, perpetuates a vicious circle. It's always US and Them. Rather than see us as fellow Americans, cousins who are a part of the same landmass, we're the bad guys. And I can't decide if that's un-American or very American.

Gaston Gonzalez Napoli calls himself a screenwriter, though he hasn't sold a single script yet. He's fairly confident that he will maybe someday sell one. He's on Medium and Twitter.

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