Trevor Noah’s Grammys Jokes Were Aimed at Trump. But They Hurt Colombians & Immigrants Instead

In the midst of a wave of state violence against Latine immigrants in the United States, the host of the 67th Annual Grammy Awards Trevor Noah has made the Internet angry after he took aim at Shakira during his opening monologue, making the most predictable and offensive joke he could possibly make about Colombians. Noah, who is himself an immigrant from South Africa and has openly spoken about suffering racism and xenophobia in his stand-up comedy routines, did not hesitate to make the old and tired joke that connects all Colombians to cocaine: "Shakira is in the house, the greatest thing out of Colombia that isn’t a felony." Get it? It’s about the Colombian export of cocaine. How original.

As a Colombian woman, I have heard variations of this joke about a million times. I am now in my mid-30s and I am still not sure how people want me to respond to it. Am I supposed to howl with laughter as if I’ve never heard it before? Am I supposed to whip out some cocaine so the joker can be proven right? Am I supposed to laugh at Colombian culture — a culture that is so rich and so important to millions of people, inside and outside of Colombia — being reduced to the pleasure-seeking consumption habits of people who have never been to my country? 

Unfortunately, the connection between Colombia and drug-trafficking is a well-established trope in U.S. popular culture. As someone who has covered Latine TV and film for years, I became tired of reviewing content about Colombia that was about the cocaine trade. While these jokes come from the very real history of the cocaine boom that peaked in the 1980s, where Colombian drug-traffickers were the main source of cocaine for users in the United States, it’s essential to ask why these are the stories about Colombia that U.S. pop culture uplifts or remembers. 

The history of the cocaine boom has been well-covered by American TV shows, films, and documentaries, where Colombians are depicted solely as greedy drug-traffickers that took the opportunity of supply demand to become rich and violent. This is the case of “Narcos,” for example, which tells the story of Pablo Escobar, one of the more dangerous drug lords Colombia has ever seen. The same can be said about “Griselda,” which tells the story of drug girlboss Griselda Blanco, a precursor of Escobar who supposedly taught him how to be an international cocaine lord. There’s no denying that this is a part of Colombian history, but it’s old, tired, and xenophobic to keep repeating the connection between cocaine and Colombia. 

Like most countries, Colombia has its own distinct and beautiful culture that exists outside of the United States’ gaze. The food is as delicious as it is diverse. The music is so good that one of our best, Shakira, has become an international pop singer — who won a Grammy this week for Best Latin Pop Album — despite most of her music being in Spanish. Our customs and traditions are vibrant and unique. There are so many stories that aren’t told to the U.S. public about Colombia because of the drug trafficking narrative. Unfortunately, you might never hear them. And when talking about Shakira — as Noah said himself, a three-time Grammy winner and an internationally acclaimed superstar who has brought Colombian culture to the global stage despite these stereotypes — the only thing he could come up with was a joke about cocaine. If even Shakira gets jokes like this at her expense, what hope do other Colombian women have at being taken seriously as professionals?

Sadly, Colombia has been recently making the news because President Donald Trump is mass deporting Colombians back to their home country in military planes, a decision that Colombia's President Gustavo Petro described as “treating [Colombians] like criminals.” There’s a straight line to be drawn between jokes like Noah’s and Trump’s racist anti-immigration rhetoric. If you’ve only been exposed to TV and film that depicts Colombians as violent drug traffickers, you’re more likely to believe Trump’s lies about immigrants from Colombia. 

Even if Noah, who also quipped about "illegal immigrants," attempted to mock the way the Trump administration views immigrants, Colombians, and Latines overall, language remains powerful and jokes like his minimize the violence Latine immigrants are experiencing right now. In the two weeks that Trump has been in office, mass raids, arrests, and deportations have taken place across the country; the CBP One app for asylum-seekers was shut down, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers are making arrests at previous sanctuaries like churches, schools, and hospitals; and Temporary Protected Status (TPS) protections were removed for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, despite the demographic helping to secure Trump’s win in South Florida. 

Reproducing these stereotypes with jokes — critically or not — remains harmful. The U.S. entertainment industry has made sure that cocaine and Colombia are forever linked in the American imagination. Beyond justifying the mass deportation of supposed Colombian immigrants, these kinds of (mis)representations also justify the war on drugs. For decades, Colombia has been the epicenter of the war on drugs, with thousands killed and more incarcerated as they joined organized crime to supply cocaine to Americans. Estimates indicate that 90% of the cocaine consumed in the U.S. comes from Colombia. As a result of this supposed war on drugs, the U.S. has also pushed Latin American governments to implement harsh anti-drugs laws, which has resulted in death and incarceration of Latin American populations. On Monday, Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum agreed to immediately send 10,000 soldiers to the U.S. border to prevent drug trafficking from Mexico after Trump threatened 25% tariffs on the country. Meanwhile, people who do not live in Colombia or any other country maligned by its drug trafficking, are able to make cultural products like Charli XCX’s Brat, where the use of cocaine is glamorized and understood as a rite of passage for white women who like to party.

It almost goes without saying that the stigmatization of Colombians also affects other people in the Latine community. If Colombians are criminals, the rest of the community is criminalized by extension. Trump and other anti-immigration folks will not see the difference between a Colombian and a Venezuelan — if they speak Spanish, if they are not originally from the U.S., or if they are seen to not be assimilating, then they are criminals by association. For them, there will always be a chance we are drug traffickers, or living in the U.S. illegally, or just a vague concept of a “criminal.” It benefits nobody in the Latine community for Colombians to be the butt of a joke only racists laugh at. 

In Latin America, the reality of the war on drugs is visceral. It’s impossible to estimate how many people were murdered and incarcerated because of it, but according to a 2022 report by the Colombian truth commission, the war on drugs exacerbated already existing political divisions, revealing that change in policy prolonged the civil war between the Colombian state and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc). 

For anybody with common sense and humanity, the thousands of lives lost would be enough reason to not joke about a period of Colombia’s history that the country is still in the process of healing. People were killed, families were destroyed, and whole communities perished — but at least Noah had some material for the Grammys stage.