“Oh my god, he is so….GHETTO.” It’s a common expression these days. I hear it all the time from white folks, black folks, even Jay-Z himself. Mr. Beyonce may be using ‘ghetto’ as a self-referential complement, but for most people the word is an unmitigated insult.

It was my first time in Mexico, and something felt off. I was sitting outside the faded colonial church in Teotitlan del Valle, a village in the beautiful, proudly indigenous state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico. I surveyed the scene, trying to decipher the source of my uneasiness. In the…