Puerto Rican-American??

[George Thompson]

   OED, under "hyphenated", adjective:

 2. Applied to persons (or, by extension, their activities) born in one country but naturalized citizens of another, their nationality being designated by a hyphenated form, e.g. Anglo-American, Irish-American; hence, to a person whose patriotic allegiance is assumed to be divided. Also in extended use. orig. U.S.

1893 FARMER & HENLEY Slang III. 386/2 Hyphenated American, a naturalised citizen, as German-Americans, Irish-Americans, and the like. 1900 Daily News 15 Aug. 3/1 My opponents were of the hyphenated variety Dutch-Americans and Irish-Americans predominating. 1904 Westm. Gaz. 3 Jan. 3/2 American politics, where men who call themselves Irish-Americans, German-Americans, Dutch-Americans, and so on, are contemptuously referred to as ‘hyphenated Americans’ [and later citations.]

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African
Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998.


----- Original Message -----
From: Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: Thursday, March 20, 2003 12:14 pm
Subject: Re: Puerto Rican-American??

> david bergdahl asks:
> >is anyone able to state why some people achieve hyphenated-American
> >status and others don't?
>
> although i'm hesitant to say this: surely someone's studied this
> systematically...  the big generalization seems to be that the
> first element X in "X-American" refers either to (what we view as)
> an ethnicity or to a nation or region of family origin.  "Jewish-
> American" works because we think of being jewish as, primarily,
> an ethnic rather than a religious identification.
>
> so we have "Arab-American" and don't have "Muslim-American".
>
> there are plenty of complications.  american jews whose families
> came from poland count as jewish-americans, not as polish-americans,
> for example; this reflects, i think, polish ideas about ethnicity
> and nationality.
>
> there's also a system of beliefs about what counts as an ethnicity
> and about how distant you can be from the old country X (and
> identification with it) and still count as an X-american.
> "African-American" is forever, though, so long as you're physically
> recognizable; but you also have to be of slave descent.  (yes, i
> know, it's more complicated than that, but the point here is that
> there are special rules for being african-american.)
>
> sometimes, but not always, plain old "X" can be used instead of
> "X-American".  i grew up around a bunch of people who were referred
> to, and referred to themselves, variously as italian, irish, polish,
> and hungarian, though they were generations away from the old country
> (and the relevant languages).
>
> arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)
>