Ethnic Name Game

On most Fridays, Leo Guerra and about 20 other kindred spirits unfurl Mexican flags, hoist placards and demonstrate at two of the Eastside’s most familiar landmarks: East L.A. College and the Sears, Roebuck & Co. store on Olympic Boulevard.

It’s not that they have anything against the retailer or the college. They do, however, have a beef with the constant use of the words Hispanic and Latino as ethnic descriptions. They hate it because they believe the terms misidentify and demean the majority of Latinos in greater L.A., who are of Mexican descent. They are so outraged that they picked two spots where the residents and merchants are overwhelmingly of Mexican descent to try to sway public opinion to their side.

Guerra admits it’s an uphill battle, because the terms are so widely accepted and used, including by me. But he isn’t discouraged and gets energized whenever a trucker blasts his approval in response to the placards that urge motorists to “Honk if you’re Mexican.”

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As head of the Chicano Mexicano Empowerment Committee, a group based in Huntington Park with about 50 members, Guerra has a shopping list of complaints against a wide variety of offenders, including this newspaper. For the moment, however, his group’s ire is aimed at Telemundo, a Spanish-language TV network in the United States, and its local station, KVEA-TV Channel 52, in Glendale.

Guerra says the argument isn’t about semantics. It’s really about power.

For the past 30 years, Mexican-Americans have been actively fighting for more political clout, better-paying jobs and improved access to education and housing. The fight over the two terms is another illustration, activists like Guerra say, of how they don’t have much say over even what they should be called.

The term Hispanic became entrenched as a result of the 1980 census, when the Carter Administration, trying to figure out how many of us there were in the United States, used it to describe Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cuban-Americans, Dominicans and others. Federal officials say Hispanic is acceptable because it traces U.S. Spanish-speakers’ roots to Spain.

But some find fault with that explanation. They favor Latino as the better description because it reflects the fact that most of this country’s Spanish-speakers came from Latin America.

Many reject Hispanic because it was imposed on them by a well-meaning but ignorant government in Washington. Others find Latino unacceptable because it excludes small but important Portuguese-speaking constituencies that also trace their roots to the Iberian Peninsula.

Into the fray comes the pro-Mexican Guerra, who argues that Mexicans have been so caught up in the word game that they don’t know who they are. “I grew up being ashamed of being Mexican,” he remembers. “I don’t know what it means to be Mexican. That’s why this is important.”

Perplexing to him is how Chicanos --U.S.-born persons of Mexican descent who became politically involved in the 1960s and ‘70s--have fallen into the name game. “This is a very serious matter of respect,” he says.

The pro-Mexican campaign is troubling for some Chicanos, such as Mauricio Mazon, an expert on Mexican-Americans and the head of USC’s history department. Mazon says a rejection of Latino and Hispanic is, in essence, a rejection of the multicultural society that L.A.’s Spanish-speaking population has become.

“By preserving the exclusivity of the Mexican identity, he is arguing against the multiculturalism of Latinos,” Mazon says, noting, for example, that about 500,000 Salvadorans live in the city.

Guerra is sensitive about how the city’s Central American population might react to his efforts. “I feel for my Salvadoran brothers and sisters,” he says, “but we have to start somewhere.”

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I don’t think Guerra will get very far, but I understand why he and others are protesting.

I am not alone in calling myself a Chicano . There are many like me--proud of our Mexican roots and yet happy to tell anybody that we enjoy turkey at Thanksgiving.

But I also know that in today’s reality, Chicanos will have to learn to get along with not only Koreans, blacks and whites, but also Salvadorans, Nicaraguans and Cubans. In order to succeed in an ever-diversifying city, Chicanos will have to accept other Latino immigrants who have followed their Mexican predecessors to L.A.