Latino? Hispanic? Chicano?

These words can evoke deeper meanings than a label on a census form

AUSTIN (By Juan Castillo, American Statesman) July 26, 2004 - What is the proper name for the 38.8 million people of Latin American origin who live in this country - 43 million if you add Puerto Rico?

The National Council of La Raza, which brought together 22,000 Hispanic -- or is it Hispanic? -- leaders to Austin this month , says it can live with both terms. "We've got so many real important issues to work on, we don't spend a lot of time nit-picking over this," says Lisa Navarrete of the council.

She acknowledges that the question "inspires fiery debate" and unleashes strong regional preferences, which the council tries to respect.

"Here in Texas, I know people prefer Hispanic," she says.

Though the U.S. government began using the term Hispanic more than 20 years ago, there is no consensus among the millions of people the label was intended to represent. Even the government now uses the terms Hispanic and Hispanic interchangeably for the largest minority group in a country of 288.4 million people.

The debate won't go away, though some clearly wish it would. Choosing an identity -- Hispanic or Hispanic or something else -- resonates with social, political, geographical and generational meaning. It inspires personal stands and, at times, strenuous, impassioned objections.

Author and poet Sandra Cisneros, who wrote "Caramelo" and "The House on Mango Street," is sensitive to the resonance of words. Don't call her Hispanic. She's offended by the term, so much so that Hispanic magazine says she refused to be on its cover. Eventually, she changed her mind and in September 2002 appeared on the cover on her terms: sporting a large cauldron-and-flames tattoo on her left bicep that reads, "Pura Latina."

"The term Hispanic makes my skin crawl," Cisneros told the magazine, which uses Hispanic and Latino interchangeably. "It's a very colonistic term, a disrespectful term, a term imposed on us without asking what we wanted to call ourselves."

She prefers Latina, Chicana, Tejana and Mexican American.

But some find the term Hispanic just as objectionable. And others, like author Richard Rodriguez, find the debate tiresome.

"My own preference is for Hispanic, only because it gets to the complexity of what it is to be related to Latin America," says Rodriguez, who wrote "Brown: The Last Discovery of America." "It gets to the predicament of many of us that we come from a Spanish-speaking world, but are living in an English world. It gets to our confusion, our potential vitality of a people. We have two memories of ourselves. But finally, I'm just finding that the debate is less and less interesting."

Rodolfo de la Garza, vice president of the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute and a political scientist at Columbia University, says the ongoing battle "has lost any utility."

"The Latino advocates point out that Hispanic doesn't include the Indian heritage and they're not Spanish. . . . (But) It's not clear that a person who calls himself Hispanic is any politically different than a person who calls himself Latino."

At the La Raza advocacy group's conference in Austin, it was easy to find the spectrum of preferences -- not always aligned with the view that in Texas the preferred term is Hispanic.

"Our Spanish roots go so far back, it's so removed and such a different culture." says Austin's Sonia Montejano, 19, a student at Stanford University. She prefers to be called Latina or Mexicana or Chicana.

Montejano and her mother, Margarita Decierdo, a sociologist who prefers to call herself a Latina or a Chicana, echo a common refrain: Hispanic is a term that was given to people, not the identity they chose.

But José Limn, the director for the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas, says the term Hispanic seems to be taking hold in Texas, particularly in the past five years. "The average person on the street of Mexican origin who is a U.S. citizen appears to be preferring to be called Hispanic in English," says Limn.

"My suspicion is that when referring to themselves in Spanish, they prefer 'Mexicano,' " Limn says.

An old debate

Austin's Maria Martin, who founded the nationally syndicated radio program "Hispanic USA," was asking the same question -- Hispanic or Hispanic? -- on other radio shows more than 30 years ago. The question and its persistence have to do with finding an identity in this country, says Martin, also the executive producer of the program, which chronicles Hispanic life and culture.

When "Hispanic USA" started 10 years ago, "we knew that we had to create a program that in some way transcended differences, but at the same time gave people a national identity," she says. "Many of us on the staff at that time felt and we still feel that the word Hispanic in some way pasteurizes who we are, and Hispanic at least has the ring of culture and the ring of language."

Hispanic first came into wide usage in the 1980s when the Census Bureau found it had undercounted people of Latin American heritage in the 1970 census. The term became the government's way to classify a disparate group of people -- Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Mexican migrants , Spanish descendants -- who already used many terms to refer to themselves. "Little wonder that the imposition of the official term Hispanic spawned controversy almost immediately," wrote Frank del Olmo, an associate editor with the Los Angeles Times.

The term also has been criticized for emphasizing the role of European influences in shaping ethnic identity to the neglect of indigenous cultures.

In the late 1970s, del Olmo and two other Times reporters were asked to examine what Hispanics in Los Angeles called themselves. Their research was the precursor to the Times' adopting a guide on how to refer to its Hispanic population.

Mexican Americans, or simply Mexicans, was the preferred name for most Los Angelenos of Latin American origin, the reporters found. The catch-all term used to refer to other Latin Americans was Latino.

The La Raza advocacy group used the term Hispanic almost exclusively, because much of the data the group generated was based on government numbers. "Then, a few years ago, we noticed that the word Hispanic had caught on. If you look at our publications (today), it's about a 50-50 mix," says Navarrete. "And for us, it refers to exactly the same group of people."

And who are they? "It's a self-identifier," Navarrete says. "People who trace their roots back to the Iberian Peninsula in some respect. There are Hispanics who have very strong indigenous roots, African roots, but the commonality is tracing their roots back to the Iberian Peninsula."

Del Olmo uses the term Hispanic but is not wed to one term and is comfortable calling himself a Chicano. In the Southwest in the last century, Chicano came to refer to Mexicans living in the United States either as citizens or refugees from the Mexican Revolution.

He wonders if the term Hispanic caught on for a reason having nothing to do with identity and pride.

"It could be simply that the word Latino rolls more easily off the tongue of Spanish speakers than an English word like Hispanic," del Olmo says.

But Limn at UT thinks Hispanic has its own aural appeal. "It's a sexier, smoother, more suave way to identify yourself." Limn, who is working on a book on the Hispanic middle class, says that in Texas, doctors, attorneys and professional people are becoming more comfortable with the term Hispanic. "But you also see it used heavily among the working class."

Labels and boxes

Should there be one term to describe people of Latin American origin?

"There is no one correct term, politically or substantively," says de la Garza, who points out that the Census adopted Hispanic with the help of a committee of Mexican Americans and other Spanish speakers. "Both terms are created. Hispanic is created and Hispanic is created. They're trying to construct an identity. That's what it's about."

Author Rodriguez wonders if categories and labels are out of step with the fluidity of the language of identity.

"These labels should be a way to identify our complexity," he says, "rather than a way to sort of freeze our identity."

"The kids in L.A. are renaming themselves more brownly even than (Hispanic or Hispanic)," he says. "They're calling themselves Blaxicans (as a way to describe their African and Latin American origin). The old Chicano was saying, 'We are border people.' The Hispanic is saying, 'We are no longer just Chicanos, but now related to Salvadorans and now belong to this new union of Latin America;' the Hispanic is saying something else, the Blaxican is saying, 'We are also children of Africa.' And at every stage I hear the language is getting broader."

De la Garza sees a potential and lamentable social consequence in all of this wrangling over labels.

"What would be a tragedy is if you eliminate cultural distinctiveness under the creation of a single label that you're putting together for political reason." He sees it happening in New York, where a Hispanic heritage event celebrates Dies y Seis de Septiembre. "Well, that's a Mexican holiday.. . . It's not a Colombian holiday or an Argentine holiday.

"You talk about the Latino language. What the hell is that?"

He worries that history of national origin will be eliminated in the name of a uniform history. In the meantime, the landscape of national origins is rapidly changing -- and mixing -- as Salvadorans, Hondurans, Colombians, Dominicans, and Guatemalans and their Latin American compatriots begin to live alongside each other. "In time you are really creating a new mixed identity that might best be called Hispanic or Hispanic. And the meaning at that time will be very different from the meaning that people attach to the debate today," he says.