Cuban in Congress Spells End of <i> Hispanic</i>

As near as I can determine, I disagree with almost every political position taken by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Cuban-American elected to Congress last week from the Miami area. Still, I’m glad the Republican state senator was chosen to fill the seat held by the late Rep. Claude Pepper, a Democrat.

But not because she will increase the seven-member Congressional Hispanic Caucus by one and give that group its first woman member and its first Republican since Manuel Lujan of New Mexico left Congress to become secretary of the interior. In fact, if Ros-Lehtinen is consistent to the extreme right-wing positions she took during her campaign, she may even undermine the Latino unity that the Hispanic Caucus is supposed to symbolize.

That’s precisely what I expect her to do. And every time Ros-Lehtinen does something that sets her apart from her Latino colleagues in Congress, all of them moderate-to-liberal Democrats, it should remind us just how diverse the Latino population in this country is. Particular attention should be paid by those Latinos who propagate the myth that there is an interest group in this nation that can properly be called “Hispanic.”

In fact, it is rare for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus to vote as a bloc on anything, unlike the Congressional Black Caucus and several state congressional delegations that hang together on issues important to, say, Texas or Massachusetts.

The most noteworthy political milestone the Hispanic Caucus has achieved in the 13 years since it was founded didn’t occur until last year. Then caucus members persuaded Congress to expand the nation’s annual Hispanic Heritage Week, first proclaimed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968, to Hispanic Heritage Month. (I pause here for the impact of this monumental achievement to sink in.)

For the record, Hispanic Heritage Month runs from Sept. 15 through Oct. 15. It encompasses the dates that mark the independence days of Mexico and several Central American countries, as well as the date of Columbus’ discovery of the New World, celebrated here as Columbus Day and in Latin America as El Dia de la Raza, the Day of the New Race.

Of course, the members of Congress who pushed this thing through meant well. Rep. Esteban Torres (D-La Puente), for example, said he hopes schools, colleges, corporations and Latino organizations use the month “to commemorate Hispanic culture and achievements.”

Fine. But I hope Mexican Americans also use the time to ponder what the term Hispanic implies, and why some of us resist using the word.

“Hispanic” has been in the dictionaries for centuries, but first came to be widely used in this country in 1970 when the Census Bureau needed a convenient term to encompass all people of Latin American extraction living in the United States. Since then it has been popularized--and grossly misused--by Latino activists who adopted the term for blatantly self-serving reasons, foisting it on the mass media in the process.

These Latino activists saw themselves as competing with African Americans for government services and jobs under antipoverty and affirmative-action programs. They adopted a term that lumped Mexican Americans in with Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans and others simply because it increased their numbers and, presumably, their clout.

It was a shortsighted strategy.

Even in crass political terms, it was self-defeating. The term Hispanic allowed other Latinos to use a large and growing Mexican American population to increase their influence. Add up all the Cubans and Puerto Ricans on the East Coast, for instance, and they are still outnumbered by all the Mexicans in the Los Angeles area alone.

But my concern goes deeper than who is using whom politically. For the term Hispanic also casts Chicanos in an erroneous light. It reduces us to just another political interest group. We are more than that.

While many Chicanos and other Latinos have been victims of racial discrimination similar to that experienced by black Americans, our historical experience has been different. Indeed, Mexican Americans are a unique ethnic group in this country, neither fully immigrant nor fully native. Some Chicanos share the traditional immigrant experience of the Irish, the Chinese and many other nationalities that came to this country from abroad, others come from families that were here before the first English colonists arrived at Plymouth Rock.

When the Chicano Movement began to assert itself 25 years ago, inspired by the civil-rights struggle, Chicano leaders and thinkers began trying to define precisely who we are and how we fit into this special country. That profoundly important process of self-definition was sidetracked when some of us began letting ourselves be called “Hispanic”--in effect, allowing someone else to define who we are.

Having written about this in the past, I know that many Mexican Americans disagree with me. I urge them to reply vociferously. We must re-energize the process of self-definition that ended so prematurely. By getting the dialogue going again, we can at least make Hispanic Heritage Month useful.