not Hispanic or Latino

[Wilson Gray]

What I've never been able to get ready for is why it is that any
Latinos / Hispanics / etc. who have been off the boat or across the
border longer than fifteeen minutes would ever opt to be black,
automatically dropping themselves to the bottom of the American glory
hole.

You, i.e. anyone, may have noticed that Puerto-Ricans don't come in
colors. That has not always been the case. Once upon a time, La Migra
assigned race to them, on the basis of their physiognomy. However,
back in the 'Fifties, the PR equivalent of the NAACP sued to be
classified as an ethnic group and not as whites and non-whites and
won. However, it's still a through-the-looking-glass situation.
Diembark in San Juan with a black skin, an Anglo-Saxon name, and a
less-than-native command of the local brand of Spanish and you're just
as much a nigger as you would be in rural Mississippi.

According to several Jamaican friends of mine, the same thing can
happen on English-speaking islands. They've told me stories of the
locals trying to jerk them around because my friends had spent so much
time in the States that they'd lost their native-to-the-islands
affect.

-Wilson

On 8/14/06, Orion Montoya <gorion at gmail.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Orion Montoya <gorion at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: not Hispanic or Latino
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> The basic idea is that Hispanics came [to the US] or descended
> directly from the Iberian peninsula, and Latinos came by way of Latin
> America.  But since these identity politics can be either sensitive or
> complicated, it is polite to offer both rather than just saying
> "cilantro-eater" or something.
>
> My dad's family came from Spain and settled in what is now
> southwestern Colorado.  I'm not sure whether that land was called New
> Spain or Mexico or something else when they got there, but that's as
> far as they ever went, so I don't think I can consider myself Latino.
> But my sister, who is actively involved in the Latina community in her
> area, does call herself Latina.
>
> In case you or someone else is wondering, the reason your card says
> "white -- not Hispanic or Latino", and not "white -- not Hispanic or
> Latino or Asian or Black or Native American or Pacific Islander or or
> or" is that some Hispanics/Latinos (probably more Hispanics) consider
> themselves white, while others consider themselves black.  And others
> call themselves brown, but that's not usually an option.  This
> distinction is interesting to demographers, and whenever I take a poll
> and indicate that I have a hispanic background, the followup
> inevitably asks me to choose a color.
>
> I once saw a t-shirt that said "I am a Mexican" and on the back
> disambiguated Mexican from Latino, Chicano, Hispanic, etc., but
> unfortunately I was too far behind the person wearing it to see what
> kind of funny or earnest things it said.
>
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>


--
Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have
found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be
imposed upon them.

Frederick Douglass

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