La Raza

(I highly encourage reading my two last posts before this one)

To make matters even more confusing--after I just told you that Hispanic is not a race but an ethnicity, which is true--we do see ourselves as a race.

One of our rallying cries is "La Raza" which quite literally means "The Race". But we are our own race, we are a unique race, we are a mixed race.

Spain tried to keep it into categories at first.
1. Spanish + Indian (aka white and Native American) = Mestizo
2. Mestizo + Spanish = Castizo
3. Castizo + Spanish = Spanish
4. Spanish + Black = Mulato
5. Mulato + Spanish = Morisco
6. Morisco + Spanish = Chino

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Casta_painting_all.jpg (here's an image link where you can zoom in) 

And on and on and on until it just gets ridiculous. After so many generations, what are we?

Most of us have dark hair, but not all

We tend to be on the shorter side, but not all.

We tend to have yellow undertones to our skin, but not all.

Brown eyes, but not all.

Some of us look white and for some of us, puedes ver el nopal en su cara "you can see the cactus on their face"--meaning that they are very "Indian" looking.

If pressed, I think a lot of people in Mexico when asked their race would answer Mestizo, but it's not often that people in Mexico are asked and there is little sentimental attachment to that label.

So then what? Honestly, I think most of us just look at ourselves as a new breed. A race created by Spain's imperialism. Whatever we are, we are. We look like this, we talk like this, and screw it, let's just all say that we are a race. 

Especially living here in the U.S., where we are other instead of common, La Raza becomes important because it helps unite us. Latin America is infested with colorism (which goes hand in hand with classism), but no one in the United States notices or cares that Juan is a few shades lighter than Jose. I honestly sometimes wonder if Americans can even tell. 

And so we have to stick together, once again. When we pushed out Spain a lot of our country was already mixed. It's not like the United States where the white settlers turned against their white motherland. Our revolutionary leaders were mostly mixed. 

I might be rambling by this point--sorry. I'll end it here, but with a big asterisk that I am talking about my own country, Mexico. I do not have any type of first-hand experience with Hondurian, Guatemalan, Puerto Rican, Cuban, etc etc culture. I have no idea if they feel the same way or what they see themselves as. 

The race of Hispanics

According to the FBI, I am white. 

I work at an immigration law firm, where I help to fill out forms and also do FBI checks. Here is the list of race categories from the FBI handbook on how to do fingerprints.

Here's the link to the handbook: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/fingerprints_biometrics/guidelines-for-preparation-of-fingerprint-cards-and-association-criminal-history-information

As you can see, under the white category is Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, etc, "regardless of race." That little last bit at the makes it pretty clear that they just didn't know what to do with us.

I also run into this problem when filling out forms. This little bit is taken from the DACA form, taken straight from the immigration website

http://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/files/form/i-821d.pdf <--you can go here to see the form and here: http://www.uscis.gov/i-821d to read about it.

This is a form I had to fill out myself, and this was the question was one that still plagues me. For 15 I could quite confidently check Hispanic/Latino. But what about 16? I'm none of those. Not in my eyes at least. 

The same thing happened with the 2010 census. Here's a link to it: https://www.census.gov/schools/pdf/2010form_info.pdf

As you can see, they ask you if you are Hispanic and then also to check a race category. While at least the census gave us an "other" box, we had to fill it in ourselves. And what could we put? There was a lot of confusion in our community at that time. We had no idea what the hell we were supposed to put. Some people just put Latino again, some mestizo, which what Spain called the child or a white person and a Native american, though by now most of us are who knows what generation of mestizo and who knows what percentage is white and what is Native American.

So a fun lesson to be learned here is that when looking up how many white people are in the United States, be sure to make sure it's the "non-hispanic white" answer. 

Here are some articles about the chaos the 2010 census created and how some of us just went ahead and marked ourselves as white.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/29/opinion/liu-study-hispanics-favor-whiteness/

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/22/upshot/more-hispanics-declaring-themselves-white.html?abt=0002&abg=0

Receipts for Hispanic vs Latino

So I know I've talked about this in class, but since tomorrow's class will revolve around the topic, I would like to once again remind everyone that Latino and Hispanic do not mean the exact same (and I do have sources at the bottom, so I'm not just pulling things out of my ass). 

To make it very simple, Hispanic is about language, Latino/Latina is about geography. 

You are Hispanic if you come from a country that speaks Spanish. "Hispanic is a term that originally denoted a relationship to ancient Hispania (Iberian Peninsula)." Remember that Spain is actually España  (what the country is called in Spanish), remember that h's are silent in Spanish, and so Hispania is pronounced Ispania and the connection becomes rather obvious. This means that white people from Spain are also Hispanic. This is why you can be black and Hispanic, Asian and Hispanic, etc, etc.

Hispanic is not a race.

Latino means your ancestry is from Latin America. So this map

Notice that Haiti is on the map. They speak French in Haiti, therefore they are Latinos but not Hispanics. The people on the other side of the island, however, The Dominican Republic, were under Spanish rule. They are Hispanic and Latinos. In Brazil they speak Portuguese because they were colonized by Portugal. They are Latinos but not Hispanic. 

Latino also is not a good way to judge what a person's race is, since Haiti is majority black, Argentina is very white looking, and there is really not one shade or look that we could all fit under.

There is, understandably, a lot of confusion surrounding this topic. There is a lot of overlap. Mexicans, as we'll see in tomorrow's presentation, make up the majority of the Hispanic population and since we are also Latinos, it is easy to see why Americans would think that the terms are interchangeable.

Tell your friends.

http://www.diffen.com/difference/Hispanic_vs_Latino
http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/03/living/hispanic-latino-identity/