[lg policy] Who is Latino?

[Harold Schiffman]

Who is Latino?
By Carlos Lozada, Published: June 21

Carlos Lozada is Outlook editor of The Washington Post. His most recent
Outlook essay was “The end of everything.” Follow him on Twitter:
@carloslozadaWP

‘Shut up, you stupid Mexican!” The words spewed from the mouth of a pale,
freckle-faced boy, taunting me on our elementary school playground.
I wish I could recall what I said to inspire the insult. But more than
three decades later, I remember only my reply. “Stupid Peruvian,” I pointed
out, wagging my finger.

My family had emigrated from Lima to Northern California a few years
earlier, so my nationality was a point of fact (whereas my stupidity
remains a matter of opinion). The response so confused my classmate that my
first encounter with prejudice ended as quickly as it started. Recess
resumed.

Today, my grade-school preoccupation with nationality feels a bit quaint.
Peruvian or Mexican — does it even matter? We’re all Latinos now.

And don’t call us stupid. Latinos have become coveted, exciting, DREAMy. In
the 2012 election, the Hispanic vote helped propel President Obama (71
percent) over Mitt Romney (27 percent). When politicians ride Hispanic
ancestry to presidential short lists and convention keynote slots, when a
stalemated Congress has a shot at immigration reform because Democrats need
to keep us and Republicans need to woo us, and when Univision beats NBC in
prime-time ratings, you know that America’s 51 million Latinos are
officially marketable, clickable, unignorable. And if you’ve written a
dissertation arguing that we’re dumber than white Americans, you’ll lose
your job. Even at the Heritage Foundation, no se puede.

The attention is nice, I admit. Our background as immigrants or descendants
of immigrants is no longer considered a liability; in the wonderful
reductionism of American politics, it’s a great story.

But it’s a story with an odd plot twist: It’s not evident what being Latino
— or Hispanic or hispano, take your pick — truly means, and most Hispanics,
it turns out, don’t even identify with the term.

Is being Latino a matter of geography, as simple as where you or your
ancestors came from? Is it the language you speak or how well you speak it?
Is it some common culture? Or is it just a vaguely brown complexion and a
last name ending in “a,” “o” or “z”? Politicians build
Latino-voter-outreach operations, businesses launch marketing campaigns to
attract Hispanic “super-consumers,” yet depending on whom you ask —
politicians, academics, journalists, activists, researchers or pollsters —
contradictory definitions and interpretations emerge.

If all ethnic identities are created, imagined or negotiated to some
degree, American Hispanics provide an especially stark example. As part of
an effort in the 1970s to better measure who was using what kind of social
services, the federal government established the word “Hispanic” to denote
anyone with ancestry traced to Spain or Latin America, and mandated the
collection of data on this group. “The term is a U.S. invention,” explains
Mark Hugo Lopez, associate director of the Pew Hispanic Center. “If you go
to El Salvador or the Dominican Republic, you won’t necessarily hear people
say they are ‘Latino’ or ‘Hispanic.’ ”

You may not hear it much in the United States, either. According to a 2012
Pew survey, only about a quarter of Hispanic adults say they identify
themselves most often as Hispanic or Latino. About half say they prefer to
cite their family’s country of origin, while one-fifth say they use
“American.” (Among third-generation Latinos, nearly half identify as
American.)

The Office of Management and Budgetdefines a Hispanic as “a person of
Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish
culture or origin regardless of race” — about as specific as calling
someone European.

“There is no coherence to the term,” says Marta Tienda, a sociologist and
director of Latino studies at Princeton University. For instance, even
though it’s officially supposed to connote ethnicity and nationality rather
than race — after all, Hispanics can be black, white or any other race —
the term “has become a racialized category in the United States,” Tienda
says. “Latinos have become a race by default, just by usage of the
category.”

So, being Hispanic might be about national origin, or it might be about
race, or it might involve some combination that Hispanics define for
themselves, if they even use the term, which most don’t.

Or is it about a pan-Latino culture?

Janet Murguia, president of the National Council of La Raza, listed its
basic elements: “Culturally, we’re bound by language, a common affection
for Spanish — even though we learn English,” she told me. “Strong faith,
strong family, strong sense of community. These are values we hold in
common.”

Sergio Bendixen, a Miami-based strategy consultant on Hispanic politics and
media, agrees that a Latino culture exists but defines it entirely
differently. It’s “not really language or the Catholic Church, or that we
come from this country or that,” he said. It is “a culture that gives
tremendous weight to human relationships and the celebration of life; you
are free to show your emotion, more than suppress your emotion. That is
what really unites all Hispanics.”

If most Hispanics are united in something, though, it’s a belief that they
don’t share a common culture. The Pew Hispanic Center finds that nearly
seven in 10 Hispanics say they comprise “many different cultures” rather
than a single one. “But when journalists, researchers or the federal
government talk about” Latinos, Lopez acknowledges, “they talk about a
single group.”

The absence of a unifying culture makes even more sense as the Latino
community evolves and spreads. The days when Hispanics could be broken down
largely as Mexican American migrant workers in the Southwest, Puerto Ricans
in New York and Cuban Americans in South Florida are vanishing. Salvadorans
are catching up with Cubans as the third-largest Latino group in the
nation, for instance. And guess the four states where the Hispanic
population grew fastest over the past decade: South Carolina, Kentucky,
Arkansas and Minnesota.

Even the Spanish language is losing its power as a cultural marker for this
community. About 80 percent of U.S. Hispanics say they read or speak
Spanish “very well” or “pretty well,” according to Pew, but only 38 percent
claim it as their primary language, while another 38 percent say they are
bilingual, and 24 percent say English is their dominant tongue. By the
third generation, nearly seven in 10 Latinos say they are English-dominant.
Little surprise that the latest battleground for Hispanic media companies
is over the English-speaking Latino market.

Is fluency in Spanish a precondition for full Latino-ness? If so, then
people such as Republican Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval and Democratic San
Antonio Mayor Julian Castro would not be in the club.

I, for one, would not presume to revoke their membership.

If neither language nor race nor a common culture is enough to define or
unite us, perhaps politics can help.

A stark vision of a Latino political identity emerged last month from
former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, who suggested to ABC News that
Sen. Ted Cruz, a Cuban American and conservative Republican from Texas,
should not be “defined as a Hispanic” because he doesn’t support
immigration reform. Soon afterward, Richardson told Fox News that it was a
misunderstanding: “All I was saying is, I don’t consider myself just a
Hispanic, and he shouldn’t be defined just as a Hispanic. We’re other
things.”

Yes, the notion of a political litmus test for Hispanic identity seems
bizarre. But Richardson’s words made clear how, in the political world,
that identity has evolved from a broad ethnic and cultural category to
include an implied liberal sensibility.

For Republicans, the challenge appears straightforward. In his breakdown of
the GOP’s shortcomings in March, Republican National Committee Chairman
Reince Priebus emphasized the need to elevate Latino leaders in the party,
cultivate Latino media outlets and craft a message on immigration that
considers “the unique perspective of the Hispanic community.” Sen. Lindsey
Graham of South Carolina has put the GOP’s plight more bluntly: “We’re in a
demographic death spiral as a party,” he said on “Meet the Press” last
week, “and the only way we can get back in good graces with the Hispanic
community, in my view, is pass comprehensive immigration reform.”

Fix immigration and Hispanics will love you. Simple, right?

“The great problem for the Republican Party with Hispanics is not about
immigration,” Bendixen counters. “The problem is that they’re looking at a
Hispanic electorate that is further to the left than just about any group.
They believe strongly in a government role in the economy and basically in
every aspect of life — national health insurance, social services, a
government role in creating jobs.”

In a 2012 survey, Pew found that immigration reform was not the key issue
for registered Latino voters. When asked what subjects they considered
“extremely important,” Hispanics rated education, the economy, health care
and even the budget deficit before immigration.

Not that different from the rest of America.

Nearly a decade ago, Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington wrote a
biting 6,000-word essay in Foreign Policy magazine arguing that Latino
immigrants threatened America’s “cultural and political integrity.” Titled
“The Hispanic Challenge,” the article elicited countless responses in the
national and international media, accusations of racism, and much scowling
at Washington think tanks. Nearly a decade later, it is still ritually
flogged in debates over immigration.

A confession: I helped make that essay happen. As a Foreign Policy editor
at the time, I worked with Huntington over several weeks as we prepared the
piece for publication. In our many phone conversations and e-mail
exchanges, he never asked if the piece offended me, and I never asked if he
was uncomfortable that some guy named Carlos was editing him. (The closest
we came to broaching the subject: Half in jest, I suggested one day that we
use “Jose, can you see?” as one of the sub-headlines in the piece. He
paused on the phone and then deadpanned, “No way, Jose!”)

Looking back, I wonder why I wasn’t more offended by his arguments. Part of
it is the editor’s trade; over the years, I’ve likely worked on hundreds of
essays I disagree with. But maybe I didn’t think Huntington was really
writing about me. I didn’t identify with the label.

Sure, I’ll check the “Hispanic origin” box on official documents — doing so
feels less wrong than not — but other aspects of my identity, whether my
birthplace, my faith, my alma mater, my profession, or my roles as a
father, husband, son or brother have all felt more vital at different
moments. A pan-Latino identity is too broad to feel essential. I read Latin
American novelists and speak to my kids in Spanish, but as Richardson might
say, I’m also other things.

Besides, others play identity politics for me. I’m Hispanic when census
forms and my children’s birth certificate documents nudge me to choose. I’m
Hispanic when junk mail arrives at my house trumpeting special offers for
my Irish American wife and ofertas especiales for me. I’m Hispanic when the
Jehovah’s Witnesses come knocking on my door with a pitch for salvation
ready in Spanish. I’m Hispanic in America because people I don’t know have
decided that is what I am.

There is one moment, however, when assuming the Latino label feels right,
even urgent. When the political debates over immigration turn ugly, when
talk of self-deportation and racial-profiling laws and anchor babies
permeates campaigns, the distinctions and nuances seem to dissipate.

“When one of us is under attack, we identify, we come together,” Murguia
says. “When one of us is singled out because of their accent, their skin
color, our people come together out of a sense of justice. People say,
‘That can be me.’ ”

This is why the anti-Latino sentiment that has emerged in some quarters of
American politics is self-defeating. It fosters unity among the otherwise
disparate peoples it targets. It strengthens, even creates, the very
identity it seeks to dislodge.

“The meaning of Hispanicity is not identifiable by culture or language, but
by experiences of inclusion or exclusion, by opportunities for education,
whether they can live the American dream,” explains Princeton’s Tienda.
“Are they a class apart, or are they going to be part of all the classes?”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/who-is-latino/2013/06/21/bcd6f71a-d6a4-11e2-b05f-3ea3f0e7bb5a_print.html


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