‘Latino’--a Label Too Wide and Too Narrow for Reality

America’s uncertain border with Mexico was big news last year. Latino-Americans were consequently prominent in the public imagination, no longer “America’s forgotten minority.” To some Americans now, we doubtlessly seem a threat, a monolith--the youngest, “most fertile” group in America. And growing. The question mark on the political horizon.

Yet what America will increasingly find out about Latinos is that we are individuals, not of one mind, one soul.

In recent years Latinos have gained prominence, but it has been a prominence based on stereotypes amounting to little more than a caricature. Ask most Americans to describe a Latino, and most Americans will probably come up with something like this: Latinos are Spanish-speaking. And most Latinos are immigrants. And, yes, of course, Latinos are brown, a racial minority.

These simple-minded generalities result in part from the way Latinos have politically represented themselves. The political ascendancy of Latinos in the last two decades has followed the lead of the black civil-rights movement. Latinos got defined by analogy to blacks. In the late 1960s Latinos charged America with racism. The solutions proposed were based on a racial critique. In the era of affirmative action Latinos thus joined blacks as America’s “other minority,” the partner race.

There was one problem, however. And that is simply that there is no such thing as a Latino race. Latinos constitute an ethnic group, not a racial group.

There are “pure” white Latinos just as there are Asian Latinos and sizable numbers of black Latinos. And, of course, Indian Latinos. Most Latinos in the United States, which is to say most Mexican-Americans, are of mixed race, mestizo. We carry the blood of the Spaniard and the Indian both. It is for this reason that among several children in single Mexican-American families one often sees a variety of skin colors and facial features. This is also why “racial discrimination” has never fallen evenly on all Latinos.

The reforms of the ‘60s, as they apply to Latinos, were fatally flawed--comically flawed at times. A friend of mine--he of Spanish father and Swiss mother, he of blue eyes and blond hair--applied to an Ivy League graduate school. He was quickly accepted, greeted as a “minority” student because he had the requisite surname.

Demographers, the secular prophets of our bureaucratic age, persist in treating Latinos as a racial group. It is said, for example: Latinos are going to become the nation’s largest minority group, out-numbering blacks by early in the next century. Or: Latinos are going to become the dominant population in this or that Southwestern state.

It is nonsense. Latinos as an ethnic group cannot logically be compared to racial groups. The next time that you see charts comparing Latinos to whites or blacks or Asians, remember the simple fact that there are Latinos in all those racial groups.

The irony is that certain Latino activists of the 1970s advanced bilingualism and biculturalism as national goals in the name of American “diversity.” But those same activists admitted much less about Latino diversity. For example, we don’t all speak Spanish. Yet again and again we are trivialized by the institutions that deal with us. Take, for instance, the Roman Catholic Church. In most American dioceses, if you phone the chancellery office in charge of Latino affairs the voice answering will invariably answer in Spanish. I know Latinos, some of whom are among the most disadvantaged, who stay away from such offices, who feel pushed away, because they cannot speak Spanish.

Spanish has been at the center of the Latino political agenda for the last 20 years. No issue has been more passionately espoused than bilingual education. Is it because, without Spanish, Latino politicians sense that there is little otherwise that would glue us together as a political force?

The vote for the immigration bill last fall, the first attempt at immigration reform in 35 years, signaled a new and welcome candor about Latino diversity: Five out of 11 Latino members of Congress voted with the majority. They acknowledged what polls for years have suggested: that Latinos generally are at least ambivalent about the prospect of illegal immigration.

My own suspicion is that there is too much diversity to permit a national Latino agenda. And the possibility of there being a national Latino political movement is even more doubtful. Needs remain. Urgent needs. And thus there will have to be alliances--but alliances based on commonality of interests rather than simple ethnicity. I can envision an alliance, for example, of Latino immigrant-rights groups with similar Asian groups.

The Latinos I know best, middle-class like myself, are meanwhile drifting into America. Among Latinos of the middle class there has long been a high inter-marriage rate outside the group. Today some of the most prominent Latino leaders are married to non-Latinos. Their children will carry confused genealogies. We will call them, simply, American.

The longest Latino influence on America may not turn out to be political so much as social and cultural. Latinos are a society of mix and diversity. Italians became Spanish-speaking in Argentina, Chinese married Indian in Peru, brown married white in Mexico, black and brown married in the Caribbean.

The Latino blood memory is a mine. This is our richness as well as the politician’s dilemma.