Latinos: The Complexity of Identity

...The damage done by calling them LatinosHispanic is a similar sin-deserves attention, but it does not compare to the incurable wound they would suffer if it were not necessary to speak of them, if they had no name at all...

...The Future lntmigrant Population of the United States,' and "Immigration and Immigrant Generations in Population Projections...

...To many Latinos drawing the distinctions among the nationalities constitutes a kind of game, like a quiz program...

...one must know not only the cities, but the towns and villages as well...

...a labor force of semi-skilled Mexican workers before they would commit to building a manufacturing facility in the county...

...Latino" is another matter, a deed, a name into which millions disappear...

...Fulano, zutano, mengano play the role of Tom, Dick and Harry or the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker...

...They're tough, very tough, either because of life on the island or prejudice in New York...

...There is a steadfastness and loyalty among Mexican-Americans, but their docility is sometimes disappointing...

...To be a gringo was inefficient...

...Later, the next day and the day after, it became more than an amusement...

...The Mexican sense of familiar was widely ot the fear of personal poverty...that drove the Mexicane thought that their children might suffer...

...He is also the author oftheforthcoming Latinos: A Biography of a People (Norton)from which this essay is excerpted...

...They say, "Mande" I beg your pardon...

...Retailers, who are anthropologists by instinct and accountants by preference, used the same kind of knowledge, selling toys and expensive children's clothing on credit...

...Instead of transforming themselves into poor imitations of Anglo-Saxons, they engaged in a kind of cultural commerce, bartering words for food, attitudes for music, history for history, art for art...

...the poor ones studied border slang (CalO) in the schoolyard...

...F ULANO ISA VERY old Spanish word for someone of uncertain identity, a so-and-so, that less than memorable person the English call a bloke or a chap, the one known in American Englishas a guy or you-know (as in whatsisname...

...According to the rules of conquest, the blood of the conquered dominates, but the rules are not profound...

...The male of the species is always in search of a whorehouse, while the female looks for alive-in maid...

...it will determine her vision of herself, the face she sees in the mirror as well as the one she presents to the world...

...Some Anglos, including political bosses, were able to hire Latinos as overseers, but most were forced to act as overseers themselves...

...Only the smallest fragment of this history survives...

...To explain the notion of this cosmic race to people who could not read, Vasconcelos turned to Mexico's painters...

...On the other hand, if the descendants of Indians say that Latino history began with the Toltecs or the Maya or with the emergence of people from the earth in a place called Aztlin, they raise the value of their own ancestry, making themselves at least equal and possibly superior to the whites...

...In every city, even Miami (which is dominated by Cuban exiles) and Los Angeles (which would rank as one of the largest cities in Mexico if one simply counted the number of Mexican citizens living there), other nationalities have made their presence felt...

...A few people are better situated than others to draw the distinctions...

...meet the demands of his situation: The Latino husband worked all day at one job, all evening at another, and nights and weekends at yet another...

...They do not say "What...

...So many Mexicans and other Latinos who came to the United States during the twentieth century worked at two or more jobs, that psychologists now recognize the inability of the male head of the family to spend a significant amount of time at home as the root cause of the breakdown of the Latino family...

...Europe to the one with the straight black hair of the Americas...

...A gringo cannot soften a vowel or countenance a jalapeno in his stew...

...she replies...

...Each is different and alike, and each relates to the other in the same way as an individual human being: They are not so different that they cannot communicate and not so alike that they have nothing to say to each other...

...Salvadorans live in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Hempstead, N.Y...

...The ploy worked perfectly...

...The best place for lunch was the Cafe Central, which provided a meeting place for retailers and bankers from both sides of the border...

...they had permitted the symbolism to become confused...

...Although many people had blond hair and blue eyes and spoke English without a trace of the soft vowels and musical endings of sentences born on the border, there were no gringos...

...In ajoke told on the streets, a newly arrived Mexican girl meets a Nuyorican, who says to her, "I gonna fok you...

...Rich Anglo children learned Spanish from the women who raised them...

...Cubans and Puerto Ricans have moved into New Jersey in roughly equal numbers...

...Prejudice and exploitation took place in Spanish...

...Ftojection-s for 21X)0 and 2010 are from Edmonston and Passel...

...Latino history has become a confused and painful algebra of race, culture and conquest...

...According to Orange County supervisor Gaddi Vasquez, executives of a large corporation asked whether they could count on TABLE 2 Latino Population of the United States: 1950-2000 Number Percent of Percent Year (000) U.S...

...The intent was to paralyze him emotionally so that he could be shoved from place to place to break a strike or keep wages low...

...The identification of Puerto Ricans with New York City is so strong that they are sometimes referred to as Neoricans or Nuyoricans...

...We shall never know the Olmecs or read the Mayan books the Spaniards burned...

...They hated the imperialists, their witnesses, the soft dough feel of them, their thin hair hanging...

...With no capital and no secrets, Mejicanos were easy pickings...

...history is The Rodriguez Family...

...Puerto Ricans judge a person by his or her familiarity with the island...

...The bullfights at the Plaza Alberto Balderas in Juarez were advertised in the El Paso Herald Post and Times...

...And they hated Christopher Columbus most of all...

...A new version of Mexican history appeared on the walls of public places...

...On the Mexican side his grandfather crossed the Sierrra Madres three times while fighting with the Villistas during the Mexican Revolution of 1910...

...In the Northeast, for example, Latinos are VOLUME XXVI, NUMBER 2 (SEPTEMBER 1992) 23 & Latino Politics thought to be Puerto Rican...

...anybody can be a racist, but the subtleties of de facto segregation require a talent for communication...

...she may even choose to speak and dress and cook according to how and where she thinks Latino history began...

...A gringo is one who cannot bear the dust of the desert or the cactus' thorny will to survive...

...low pay and poor education were usually sufficient...

...Half a century ago, everyone in El Paso ate chiles and crossed the border every week, if not every day...

...it was the thought that their children might suffer...

...Civilization need not be a zero sum game...

...Both are sunburnt...

...Since the nationalities that make up the ethnic group known as Latinos are not randomly distributed across the United States, but tend to cluster in certain areas, most Anglos think of all Latinos as being like the people who live nearby...

...The task was given to one of Mexico's leading intellectuals, Jos6 Vasconcelos, who was appointed minister of education...

...Chain stores altered their mix of merchandise for the border, learning from their local managers that business with Latinos was skewed toward the children...

...For the first time in 400 years a large number of people began to see the conquest in a different light: Instead of the discovery of a dark, savage continent by intellectually, technologically, morally superior white men, the muralists portrayed the destruction of the glorious civilizations of the Americans by the brutal Spaniards...

...pshot of America taken uisine, music and enters, by definition, a gift...

...There are only Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Salvadorans, and so forth...

...VOLUME XXVI, NUMBER 2 (SEPTEMBER 1992) fulano doesn't play first base or marry your niece...

...they're tough, but not biuer...

...In employment, the problem for the overseer was how to manipulate the Mdxican-American worker's attachment to his family and, at the same time, to play his feelings of pride and stoicism, the conflicting aspects of his sense of dignity, off against each other...

...it has less to do with evidence than with politics, for whoever owns the beginning has dignity, whoever owns the beginning owns the world...

...Everyone has a theory about everyone else...

...the victories of Latino culture are victories of pluralism, additions...

...There are many Edens, a thousand floods, discoveries and conquests in numbers beyond the capability of human memory...

...The Central, in Ciudad Jurez just over the international bridge, had been a famous place for lunch since Pancho Villa and Pascual Orozco dined there together after taking the city in the first major victory of the Revolution of 1910...

...With spears and stones, they would drive the Europeans back to their ships and away from the island of Hispaniola forever...

...Milpas, Texas...

...Fulano isn't real, no one bears that name...

...Should a woman in Chicago who traces her family back to both Chihuahua and Castile identify with Europe or the Americas...

...when they do not understand...

...When the Indianistanthropologist L6on-Portilla writes of "the discovery of the New World," it is a sign that history has not yet triumphed over power, and the complex beginning of Latino history remains at the center of the politics of the people who came here from Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and all the other countries of Central and South America and the Caribbean...

...So every version has its adherents, for every human being wishes to be at least equal in his own mind: the African to the Spaniard, the person of mixed blood to the fair-haired descendant of Europeans, the Indian to the person of mixed races, the darker to the lighter, the one with kinky hair to the one with the softly curled hair of Earl Shorris is the author of Under The Fifth Sun, a novel of Pancho Villa, soon to be reissued by W. W. Norton...

...The choice becomes more difficult for a person of mixed ancestry for whom those small conceits of identity, which are the ordinary rules of chauvinism, do not apply...

...To maintain a system of exploitation without state sanction Jim Crow laws existed in Texas but both Anglos and Mexican-Americans considered people of Mexican descent members of the white race required the ethnic majority to develop many of the characteristics of the overseer...

...or "How is that...

...It is the overseer who must be both anthropologist and psychologist, who must understand the slaves or indentured workers well enough to get maximum effort from them without pushing them to the point of rebellion...

...In conversation, the Mexicans, even the poorest Indians from the south, remain polite...

...Nothing is taken in return for this enrichment...

...But the end of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, after almost ten years of war, brought with it the need to integrate the rural Indians into the Leonard "El Nano" Yafiez Romo...

...Not the kosher butcher, nor the car dealer's daughter, who was elected queen of the Sun Carnival, nor even Sheriff Chris P. Fox, the leading racist in town, was truly a gringo...

...ANY HISTORY OF LATINOS STUMBLES AT the start, for there is no single line to trace back to its ultimate origin...

...And even more pointedly, the civilization, he said, came from Spain...

...24 A cruder expression of the cultural distinction between the quiet formality of the Mexicans and the aggressiveness of the Caribbeans is told on the streets of New York City, where a recent influx of Mexicans has joined the dominant Puerto Rican-Dominican-Cuban population...

...Gringos drink directly from the bottle and eat tostadas with a fork...

...But there were doubts, even in the mind of the minister of education himself...

...Though in some parts of Latin America, the meaning of the word has been inverted so that a fulano becomes a somebody, as in "Es un fulano...

...They laughed...

...Vasconcelos wrote that the "blood and soul" of Mexico were Indian, but the language was Spanish...

...REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 20 IN MY CHILDHOOD I LIVED IN THE CULTURAL future of the United States...

...The sense of a dark continent, however subtle, exists even in the work of Miguel Le6nPortilla, the author of the brilliant study Aztec Thought and Culture...

...For some the choice of beginnings is obvious...

...they are frequently likened to the Koreans in this respect...

...he gained a reputation for docility...

...It did not occur to the little group of angry romantics in Manhattan that it was themselves they planned to drive away, for the Columbus Day conspirators were the children of conquest, doomed to a life of unendurable irony-Latinos...

...In the plaza in the center of town where all the buses stopped, an old man sat on a bench all afternoon with a gutstring harp between his knees and played Mexican folk songs...

...No one ever called it the Central Cafe...

...He commissioned Diego Rivera, Jos6 Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, among others, to paint murals depicting Mexican subjects, and he gave them complete artistic freedom, which they used to attack the government, the colonialists, the capitalists, and the Spanish conquerors...

...With three words, he proclaimed the integration of the Indian into Mexican society at the most profound level: la raza cosmica...

...It was n and cultural vengeance is American workers...

...After dark a man played "Chiapas" on the ocarina...

...It seemed less than serious at first, an idea born over drinks and a little smoke in a dark room, whispered, enjoyed, explored over the sound of drums and an old piano...

...the genocide of the native population of Hispaniola was virtually complete...

...They address waiters as "Sir" and grandmothers as "Miss...

...by the seductive charm of their culture and by sheer numbers, they created the foundations of a new American ethnicity...

...In addition to the contrast of character, it is important to note that the Nuyorican in the story does not speak enough Spanish to understand a common expression...

...As a result, the Latino worker with a family, the man who suffered from an overabundance of machismo in his personal life, was easily manageable on the job...

...it floats on the mass culture of North America, rootless and unbearably alone...

...And fulano the nationality has no resident memory...

...Source: U.S...

...Bridal shops sold dresses far too expensive for the people who bought them...

...There were no gringos in southern Arizona or West Texas then...

...A sna now...would reveal strong Latino influences in language, c, tainment...

...he's nobody...

...A category name is required, but to make a lump of more than 20 nationalities has its drawbacks too...

...These Europeans, including Anglo-Saxons, failed to satisfy many of the criteria of the true gringo...

...The sophistication of the system, when judged from the distance of time, was extraordinary...

...To keep the Mexican-American poor on the south side of town, crammed into adobe tenements, three, five, seven people to a room, sometimes with only one toilet for the entire tenement, was straightforward stuff...

...Bureau of the Census, "Census Bureau Releams 1990 Census Counts on Hispanic Population Groups...

...Mexico cannot seem to shake off the idea of the civilizing of the savages...

...Imagine a family descended directly from Indians who lived in the Mexican state of Oaxaca: If the family concedes that Columbus "discovered" a New World, they accept the notion that whites (Europeans) come from a superior civilization...

...The more the Anglos knew them and were like them, the easier it was for Anglos to adopt the methods of the wise, cruel overseer...

...Even in New York City, once the capital of Puerto Rican immigrants, perhaps half a million Dominicans have moved in, along with a huge Colombian colony, and a growing number of Spaniards and Sephardim (or Spanish Jews) in the city...

...Culture is particular: Everybody cannot cook a dinner that warms the soul as well as the belly...

...Douglas, Arizona...

...If the woman in Chicago appears to be European, she will have to choose where Latino history began, who were the subjects-the ones who acted, the dignified ones-and who were the objects-the people whom the forces of history acted upon...

...The Dominicans had overlooked history...

...It was also understood that other savages had been imported from Africa, enslaved, and used to replace the American natives who died in such enormous numbers in the fields and mines of the Caribbean...

...It was not the fear of personal poverty or even hunger that drove the Mexican and Mexican-American workers...

...Latinos are neither a nation nor a state, but a complex of peoples who share more or fewer words and mores, who often make war on themselves, but never on each other...

...From his unique viewpoint del Portillo offers these observations about the cultural extremes of the three nationalities...

...During the first 90 years of this century, however, the Mexicans were almost always described as lazy, more interested in their siestas than their jobs...

...Chicagoans have a problem, for that city has neither a Mejicano nor Puertorriquefio nor Cubano majority...

...One must not only speak Spanish, one must speak the language well, with a vocabulary of synonyms and the ability to use arcane verb forms...

...The irony of the situation is that the cultural victories of Latinos in the Southwest made them more vulnerable to exploitation...

...Leobardo Estrada, a demographer at UCLA whose work takes him to every Latino community in the country, says that a visitor must prove himself in different fashion for each group...

...they always said "Central," with a Spanish a and the accent on the last syllable...

...Latino" would be good enough if all Latinos were the same, if Cubans were Indian and Mexicans had been made citizens of the United States...

...A snapshot of America taken now, in the last decade of the twentieth century, would reveal strong Latino influences in language, cuisine, music and entertainment...

...population Change* 1950 4,039 2.6 43.5 19&1 6,346 3.5 57.2 1970 9,616 43 515 1980 14,608 64 51.9 1990 22,354 9.0 53.0 2000 30,271 10.9 35.4 2010 38,574 12.9 274 * Since previous decade Sources: Latino populations for 1980 and 1990 are from U.S...

...The Mexican sense of familia was widely known to Anglo as well as Mexican-American bosses who used the desire to provide for one's family as a means of disciplining employees...

...VOLUME XXVI, NUMBER 2 (SEPTEMBER 1992)19 Latino Politics A e Latino Politics Her decision will not be frivolous...

...The more difficult task was to explain to a person with a middle-class salary that he and his family would not be comfortable in a middle-class house in a middle-class neighborhood...

...No one remembered that by 1570 only the imperialists and their African slaves were left...

...Most Anglos spoke Spanish badly, generally in the present tense, certainly without the subjunctive, but they knew enough to sell a shirt or buy a roast, shorten a dress, admire a child, or inquire after the health of a grandmother...

...In Miami, Latinos (who prefer to be called Hispanics there) are thought to be Cuban, although the Nicaraguan refugees may have broadened the definition by the end of the 1980s...

...the grandeur of the Yoruba pantheon was not recorded during its reign...

...The name by which she identifies herself--Hispanic, Latino, Spanish, Chicano, Mexican, Mejicano, Mexican-American-will depend upon her understanding of the past...

...no more is known of Chief Hatuey of Hispaniola than what a Spanish friar heard...

...it i political economy of the nation...

...A gringo is always in the process of getting diarrhea, having diarrhea, or recovering from diarrhea...

...Children in elementary school went to the music room to learn "Git along Li'l Dogie" and came out singing "La Golondrina" and "Cielito Lindo" as well...

...After V asconcelos ana his muralists, the victory of the Indians would seem to have been assured...

...he had no choice but to develop debilitating work habits to 22 REPORT ON THE AMERICAS .. IILS aen IoLt si sI -o n11quest, however...

...Mexicans and people of Mexican descent are recognized now as prepared by their culture to work very hard...

...If by some error of madness, alcohol, or utter failure of the imagination, a child were named Fulano, his life would be a trial, for he would be no one and everyman, rich and poor, short and tall, Colombian, Cuban, Dominican, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Spanish, and so on...

...it was th an absurd notion...

...Cubans," he said, "are aggressive, assertive, and sometimes appallingly arrogant...

...This was the plan: When the ships arrived to recreate his landing in celebration of the 500th anniversary of the discovery of Hispaniola, and all the weaklings, all the ass-lickers, rushed out to greet them, the true Dominicans, hundreds of them in native dress, would rise up out of their hiding places and attack the white invaders...

...it is a city with a large Latino population...

...it is, by definition, a gift...

...Mande...

...they are written on the skin...

...Some are amusing, all are accurate, and every nuance is important...

...he pays no taxes, eats no food, and leaves no mess behind...

...In the case of fulano the wound is minor, one person obliterated...

...Nothing is taken in return for this enrichment...

...But the differences are more than variations...

...Raymond del Portillo, who headed up San Francisco's initial effort at bilingual education, is the son of a Cuban father and a Mexican mother...

...On the Cuban side his great-grandfather wrote the Cuban national anthem...

...Her politics, left or right, Democrat or Republican, may be affected by what she considers the beginning of history...

...Buftau of the Census, "The Hispanic Population of the United States," March 1990, Current Population Reports, Series p-2O, No.449, March 1991, Table 4...

...To establish oneself with Mexican-Americans, it is necessary only to be a professor, so great is the reverence for education in the Mejicano and Mexican-American culture...

...TABLE 3 SelectS Characteristics of Latino Families: 1990 %of of Families Median Families Headed by Family Below Single Income Poveily Level Female kU Latinos 23,446 23A 23.1 Mexican Origin 22,245 19.6 25.7 Puerto Rican Origin 19,933 30.4 38.9 Cuban Origin 31,262 12.5 18.9 Central and South 25,460 16.8 25.0 American Origin Other Latino Origin 26,567 15.8 24.5 Non-Latino Families 35.183 9.2 16.0 Note: Data are from March 1990 Current Population Survey, not the 1990 Decennial Census...

...No Monday, right now...

...But all the while, Mejicanos and the other Latinos in New York, Florida, California and Illinois were changing the nation in which they lived...

...The economic position of the Latino was impossible...

...The history of Latinos was not always a difficult one, Until 1920 it was understood that Columbus had discovered the "New World" and begun the process of civilizing its savages and exploiting its natural resources...

...Las not a matter of repetitions, known to...bosses...

...For the Cubans, the litmus test is language...

...So there are no Latinos, no Hispanics...

...04% ik Latino Politics The town had two cultural lives...

...it downgraded the value of Mexican labor, giving their bosses an excuse to pay lower wages, and it spurred the Latinos on to work harder to overcome the stereotype...

...His wife, Carlota, is Puerto Rican, ralsed in Puerto Rico and New York...

...The first time boys and girls held hands and danced together there was a small sombrero on the floor between them...

...While others leapt gladly into the melting pot, the Latinos refused...

...And the feistiness of the Puerto Rican is understandable...

...That pure Protestant Anglo-Saxon sense of self, the attitude of the civilized stranger in a world of foreign savages adopted by Germans, Poles, Italians, Austrians, Russians, Turks and the French when thinking of Mexico or things Mexican simply did not exist in the Southwest then...

...Total Populations for 1950-1990 and remaining Latino populations are from Passel and Edinondston, "Immigration and Race: Recent Trends in Immigration to the Lnited States...