pebkac thoughts

Aaaaargh. I just got done listening to an NPR piece in which the correspondent said that (roughly quoting) “Hispanics are the single largest ethnic group in the military.” That was just one of several lines that made me cringe.

PLEASE get it through your heads that Cubans are not Guatamalans are not Salvadorans are not Peruvians are not Puerto Ricans are not Mexicans are not Spaniards! Please! I know people from different states in Mexico who have less in common with each other than they do with me!

Let’s take a quick step back and ask what “Hispanic” means. Google gives us a pleasantly mushy medley of bad definitions, some of which make language (note: language != ethnicity) the key tie, while others make shared heritage from the Iberian peninsula (the Romans dubbed it Hispania) the link. Note that both of these have serious problems. There are a significant number of people from México and parts of the Caribbean who, to many of my monolingual friends here in the US of A, would appear to be Hispanic, but Spanish is likely their second language if they speak it at all! Furthermore, various nations South of our border have been shaped by very different shifts in religion, politics and business over the last few centuries. There’s no question but that the conquest/settlement of large swaths of this hemisphere by Spaniards had an impact on the cultures of, say, Perú and México, but generalizations about the immigrants of both of those countries to the USA? If you’re going to make such generalizations, please back them up with data.

Now that I’ve just exhorted you to use data, let’s go with a couple of anecdotes. Firstly: me. Spanish is one of my two first languages and my mother is Peruvian, but I can “pass” as white easily and that other first language is English. Also, my work life involves Linux and I’ve got BS from UNC. So… am I Hispanic? Clearly yes, but… is that meaningful? Secondly: my dad. My dad is from the US. He doesn’t tan well. He learned Spanish in college. BUT he’s worked to start four different ministries that largely serve Spanish speakers (one of those is here in Chapel Hill), and he teaches English as a Second Language (ESL) at a local elementary school where many of his students are latino. My dad has far stronger and more meaningful ties to a hypothetical Hispanic community, but by what definition is he Hispanic?

Dear media outlets: please use real data and give us useful, meaningful information. Blabbering on about how both McCain and Obama are ‘courting the hispanic vote’ is making me yank out my hair. You’re talking about some vague unsettling “other” that speaks Spanish, some “average” immigrant that doesn’t exist. Please stop. Here’s a hint: are you talking about immigrants from what we call Latin America? Try the term “latino” on for size. If you’re talking about immigrants from a particular country to a particular state in our union (an even better idea!), you don’t have to cast about for terms!