Latinos: The Complexity of Identity

A small group of Dominican artists and intellectuals met in Manhattan in the
closing days of 1989 to plan the attack. It seemed less than serious at first, an idea
born over drinks and a little smoke in a dark room, whispered, enjoyed, explored
over the sound of drums and an old piano. They laughed. Later, the next day and
the day after, it became more than an amusement. They hated the imperialists, their
witnesses, the soft dough feel of them, their thin hair hanging. And they hated
Christopher Columbus most of all.
This was the plan: When the ships arrived to recreate his landing in celebration
of the 500th anniversary of the discovery of Hispaniola, and all the weaklings, all
the ass-lickers, rushed out to greet them, the true Dominicans, hundreds of them
in native dress, would rise up out of their hiding places and attack the white
invaders. With spears and stones, they would drive the Europeans back to their
ships and away from the island of Hispaniola forever.
The Dominicans had overlooked history; they had permitted the symbolism to
become confused. No one remembered that by 1570 only the imperialists and their
African slaves were left; the genocide of the native population of Hispaniola was
virtually complete. It did not occur to the little group of angry romantics in
Manhattan that it was themselves they planned to drive away, for the Columbus
Day conspirators were the children of conquest, doomed to a life of unendurable
irony-Latinos.
ANY HISTORY OF LATINOS STUMBLES AT the start, for there is no single line to trace back to
its ultimate origin. There are many Edens, a thousand
floods, discoveries and conquests in numbers beyond the
capability of human memory. Only the smallest fragment
of this history survives. We shall never know the Olmecs
or read the Mayan books the Spaniards burned; no more is
known of Chief Hatuey of Hispaniola than what a Spanish
friar heard; the grandeur of the Yoruba pantheon was not
recorded during its reign.
Latino history has become a confused and painful
algebra of race, culture and conquest; it has less to do with
evidence than with politics, for whoever owns the begin-
ning has dignity, whoever owns the beginning owns the
world. So every version has its adherents, for every human
being wishes to be at least equal in his own mind: the
African to the Spaniard, the person of mixed blood to the
fair-haired descendant of Europeans, the Indian to the
person of mixed races, the darker to the lighter, the one
with kinky hair to the one with the softly curled hair of
Earl Shorris is the author of Under The Fifth Sun, a novel
of Pancho Villa, soon to be reissued by W. W. Norton. He
is also the author oftheforthcoming Latinos: A Biography
of a People (Norton)from which this essay is excerpted.
Europe to the one with the straight black hair of the
Americas.
For some the choice of beginnings is obvious. Imagine
a family descended directly from Indians who lived in the
Mexican state of Oaxaca: If the family concedes that
Columbus “discovered” a New World, they accept the
notion that whites (Europeans) come from a superior
civilization. On the other hand, if the descendants of
Indians say that Latino history began with the Toltecs or
the Maya or with the emergence of people from the earth
in a place called Aztlin, they raise the value of their own
ancestry, making themselves at least equal and possibly
superior to the whites.
The choice becomes more difficult for a person of
mixed ancestry for whom those small conceits of identity,
which are the ordinary rules of chauvinism, do not apply.
Should a woman in Chicago who traces her family back to
both Chihuahua and Castile identify with Europe or the
Americas? According to the rules of conquest, the blood
of the conquered dominates, but the rules are not pro-
found; they are written on the skin. If the woman in
Chicago appears to be European, she will have to choose
where Latino history began, who were the subjects-the
ones who acted, the dignified ones-and who were the
objects-the people whom the forces of history acted upon.
VOLUME XXVI, NUMBER 2 (SEPTEMBER 1992)19
Latino Politics A e Latino Politics
Her decision will not be frivolous; it will determine her
vision of herself, the face she sees in the mirror as well as
the one she presents to the world. Her politics, left or right,
Democrat or Republican, may be affected by what she
considers the beginning of history; she may even choose
to speak and dress and cook according to how and where
she thinks Latino history began. The name by which she
identifies herself–Hispanic, Latino, Spanish, Chicano,
Mexican, Mejicano, Mexican-American-will depend
upon her understanding of the past.
The history of Latinos was not always a difficult one,
Until 1920 it was understood that Columbus had discov-
ered the “New World” and begun the process of civilizing
its savages and exploiting its natural resources. It was also
understood that other savages had been imported from
Africa, enslaved, and used to replace the American na-
tives who died in such enormous numbers in the fields and
mines of the Caribbean. But the end of the Mexican
Revolution of 1910, after almost ten years of war, brought
with it the need to integrate the rural Indians into the
Leonard “El Nano” Yafiez Romo; Douglas, Arizona. “A sna
now…would reveal strong Latino influences in language, c,
tainment. Nothing is taken in return for this enrichment; it i
political economy of the nation. The task was given to one
of Mexico’s leading intellectuals, Jos6 Vasconcelos, who
was appointed minister of education. With three words, he
proclaimed the integration of the Indian into Mexican
society at the most profound level: la raza cosmica.
To explain the notion of this cosmic race to people who
could not read, Vasconcelos turned to Mexico’s painters.
He commissioned Diego Rivera, Jos6 Clemente Orozco,
and David Alfaro Siqueiros, among others, to paint murals
depicting Mexican subjects, and he gave them complete
artistic freedom, which they used to attack the govern-
ment, the colonialists, the capitalists, and the Spanish
conquerors. A new version of Mexican history appeared
on the walls of public places. For the first time in 400 years
a large number of people began to see the conquest in a
different light: Instead of the discovery of a dark, savage
continent by intellectually, technologically, morally su-
perior white men, the muralists portrayed the destruction
of the glorious civilizations of the Americans by the brutal
Spaniards.
pshot of America taken
uisine, music and enter-
s, by definition, a gift.”
After V asconcelos ana his
muralists, the victory of the
Indians would seem to have
been assured. But there were
doubts, even in the mind of
the minister of education him-
self. Vasconcelos wrote that
the “blood and soul” of
Mexico were Indian, but the
language was Spanish. And
even more pointedly, the civi-
lization, he said, came from
Spain.
Mexico cannot seem to
shake off the idea of the civi-
lizing of the savages. The
sense of a dark continent,
however subtle, exists even
in the work of Miguel Le6n-
Portilla, the author of the bril-
liant study Aztec Thought and
Culture. When the Indianist-
anthropologist L6on-Portilla
writes of “the discovery of
the New World,” it is a sign
that history has not yet tri-
umphed over power, and the
complex beginning of Latino
history remains at the center
of the politics of the people
who came here from Puerto
Rico, Cuba, the Dominican
Republic, Mexico, Guate-
mala, El Salvador, Honduras,
Nicaragua, and all the other
countries of Central and South
America and the Caribbean.
REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 20
IN MY CHILDHOOD I LIVED IN THE CULTURAL
future of the United States. There were no gringos in
southern Arizona or West Texas then. Although many
people had blond hair and blue eyes and spoke English
without a trace of the soft vowels and musical endings of
sentences born on the border, there were no gringos. Not
the kosher butcher, nor the car dealer’s daughter, who was
elected queen of the Sun Carnival, nor even Sheriff Chris
P. Fox, the leading racist in town, was truly a gringo.
That pure Protestant Anglo-Saxon sense of self, the
attitude of the civilized stranger in a world of foreign
savages adopted by Germans, Poles, Italians, Austrians,
Russians, Turks and the French when thinking of Mexico
or things Mexican simply did not exist in the Southwest
then. These Europeans, including Anglo-Saxons, failed to
satisfy many of the criteria of the true gringo.
A gringo is one who cannot bear the dust of the desert
or the cactus’ thorny will to survive. A gringo cannot
soften a vowel or countenance a jalapeno in his stew. A
gringo is always in the process of getting diarrhea, having
diarrhea, or recovering from diarrhea. Gringos drink directly
from the bottle and eat tostadas with a fork. They
address waiters as “Sir” and grandmothers as “Miss.” The
male of the species is always in search of a whorehouse,
while the female looks for alive-in maid. Both are sunburnt.
Half a century ago, everyone in El Paso ate chiles and
crossed the border every week, if not every day. The best
place for lunch was the Cafe Central, which provided a
meeting place for retailers and bankers from both sides of
the border. The Central, in Ciudad Jurez just over the
international bridge, had been a famous place for lunch
since Pancho Villa and Pascual Orozco dined there together
after taking the city in the first major victory of the
Revolution of 1910. No one ever called it the Central Cafe;
they always said “Central,” with a Spanish a and the
accent on the last syllable.
04% ik
Latino Politics
The town had two cultural lives. The bullfights at the
Plaza Alberto Balderas in Juarez were advertised in the El
Paso Herald Post and Times. Children in elementary
school went to the music room to learn “Git along Li’l
Dogie” and came out singing “La Golondrina” and “Cielito
Lindo” as well. The first time boys and girls held hands
and danced together there was a small sombrero on the
floor between them. In the plaza in the center of town
where all the buses stopped, an old man sat on a bench all
afternoon with a gutstring harp between his knees and
played Mexican folk songs. After dark a man played
“Chiapas” on the ocarina.
Rich Anglo children learned Spanish from the women
who raised them; the poor ones studied border slang
(CalO) in the schoolyard. Most Anglos spoke Spanish
badly, generally in the present tense, certainly without the
subjunctive, but they knew enough to sell a shirt or buy a
roast, shorten a dress, admire a child, or inquire after the
health of a grandmother.
To be a gringo was inefficient. Prejudice and exploitation
took place in Spanish; anybody can be a racist, but the
subtleties of de facto segregation require a talent for
communication. To keep the Mexican-American poor on
the south side of town, crammed into adobe tenements,
three, five, seven people to a room, sometimes with only
one toilet for the entire tenement, was straightforward
stuff; low pay and poor education were usually sufficient.
The more difficult task was to explain to a person with a
middle-class salary that he and his family would not be
comfortable in a middle-class house in a middle-class
neighborhood.
To maintain a system of exploitation without state
sanction Jim Crow laws existed in Texas but both Anglos
and Mexican-Americans considered people of Mexican
descent members of the white race required the ethnic
majority to develop many of the characteristics of the
overseer. It is the overseer who must be both anthropologist
and psychologist, who must understand the slaves or
indentured workers well enough to get maximum effort
from them without pushing them to the point of rebellion.
Some Anglos, including political bosses, were able to hire
Latinos as overseers, but most were forced to act as
overseers themselves.
In employment, the problem for the overseer was how
to manipulate the Mdxican-American worker’s attachment
to his family and, at the same time, to play his
feelings of pride and stoicism, the conflicting aspects of
his sense of dignity, off against each other. The intent was
to paralyze him emotionally so that he could be shoved
from place to place to break a strike or keep wages low.
The sophistication of the system, when judged from
the distance of time, was extraordinary. Mexicans and
people of Mexican descent are recognized now as prepared
by their culture to work very hard; they are frequently
likened to the Koreans in this respect. According
to Orange County supervisor Gaddi Vasquez, executives
of a large corporation asked whether they could count on
TABLE 2
Latino Population of the United States: 1950-2000
Number Percent of Percent
Year (000) U.S. population Change*
1950 4,039 2.6 43.5
19&1 6,346 3.5 57.2
1970 9,616 43 515
1980 14,608 64 51.9
1990 22,354 9.0 53.0
2000 30,271 10.9 35.4
2010 38,574 12.9 274
* Since previous decade
Sources: Latino populations for 1980 and 1990 are from
U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Census Bureau Releams 1990
Census Counts on Hispanic Population Groups.”
Total Populations for 1950-1990 and remaining Latino
populations are from Passel and Edinondston, “Immigration
and Race: Recent Trends in Immigration to the Lnited
States.”
Ftojection-s for 21X)0 and 2010 are from Edmonston and
Passel. “The Future lntmigrant Population of the United
States,’ and “Immigration and Immigrant Generations in
Population Projections.”
a labor force of semi-skilled Mexican workers before they
would commit to building a manufacturing facility in the
county. During the first 90 years of this century, however,
the Mexicans were almost always described as lazy, more
interested in their siestas than their jobs. The ploy worked
perfectly; it downgraded the value of Mexican labor,
giving their bosses an excuse to pay lower wages, and it
spurred the Latinos on to work harder to overcome the
stereotype.
The Mexican sense of familia was widely known to
Anglo as well as Mexican-American bosses who used the
desire to provide for one’s family as a means of disciplining
employees. It was not the fear of personal poverty or
even hunger that drove the Mexican and Mexican-American
workers; it was the thought that their children might
suffer. As a result, the Latino worker with a family, the
man who suffered from an overabundance of machismo in
his personal life, was easily manageable on the job; he
gained a reputation for docility.
Retailers, who are anthropologists by instinct and
accountants by preference, used the same kind of knowledge,
selling toys and expensive children’s clothing on
credit. Bridal shops sold dresses far too expensive for the
people who bought them. Chain stores altered their mix of
merchandise for the border, learning from their local
managers that business with Latinos was skewed toward
the children.
The economic position of the Latino was impossible;
he had no choice but to develop debilitating work habits to
22 REPORT ON THE AMERICAS
.. IILS aen IoLt si sI -o n11-
quest, however; history is The Rodriguez Family; Las
not a matter of repetitions, known to…bosses. It was n
and cultural vengeance is American workers; it was th
an absurd notion. Civilization
need not be a zero sum
game; the victories of
Latino culture are victories
of pluralism, additions.
Nothing is taken in return
for this enrichment; it is,
by definition, a gift.
F ULANO ISA VERY
old Spanish word for
someone of uncertain
identity, a so-and-so, that
less than memorable person
the English call a
bloke or a chap, the one
known in American Englishas
a guy or you-know
(as in whatsisname).
Fulano, zutano, mengano
play the role of Tom, Dick
and Harry or the butcher,
the baker, the candlestick
maker. Fulano isn’t real,
no one bears that name;
meet the demands of his situation: The Latino husband
worked all day at one job, all evening at another, and
nights and weekends at yet another. So many Mexicans
and other Latinos who came to the United States during
the twentieth century worked at two or more jobs, that
psychologists now recognize the inability of the male
head of the family to spend a significant amount of time at
home as the root cause of the breakdown of the Latino
family.
The irony of the situation is that the cultural victories
of Latinos in the Southwest made them more vulnerable to
exploitation. The more the Anglos knew them and were
like them, the easier it was for Anglos to adopt the methods
of the wise, cruel overseer. With no capital and no secrets,
Mejicanos were easy pickings.
But all the while, Mejicanos and the other Latinos in
New York, Florida, California and Illinois were changing
the nation in which they lived; by the seductive charm of
their culture and by sheer numbers, they created the
foundations of a new American ethnicity. While others
leapt gladly into the melting pot, the Latinos refused.
Instead of transforming themselves into poor imitations of
Anglo-Saxons, they engaged in a kind of cultural commerce,
bartering words for food, attitudes for music,
history for history, art for art.
A snapshot of America taken now, in the last decade of
the twentieth century, would reveal strong Latino influences
in language, cuisine, music and entertainment.
Milpas, Texas. “The Mexican sense of familiar was widely
ot the fear of personal poverty…that drove the Mexicane
thought that their children might suffer.”
VOLUME XXVI, NUMBER 2 (SEPTEMBER 1992)
fulano doesn’t play first base or marry your niece; he pays
no taxes, eats no food, and leaves no mess behind; he’s
nobody. (Though in some parts of Latin America, the
meaning of the word has been inverted so that a fulano
becomes a somebody, as in “Es un fulano.”) If by some
error of madness, alcohol, or utter failure of the imagination,
a child were named Fulano, his life would be a trial,
for he would be no one and everyman, rich and poor, short
and tall, Colombian, Cuban, Dominican, Mexican, Puerto
Rican, Spanish, and so on. In the case of fulano the wound
is minor, one person obliterated. “Latino” is another
matter, a deed, a name into which millions disappear.
“Latino” would be good enough if all Latinos were the
same, if Cubans were Indian and Mexicans had been made
citizens of the United States. But the differences are more
than variations; Latinos are neither a nation nor a state, but
a complex of peoples who share more or fewer words and
mores, who often make war on themselves, but never on
each other. The damage done by calling them Latinos-
Hispanic is a similar sin-deserves attention, but it does
not compare to the incurable wound they would suffer if
it were not necessary to speak of them, if they had no name
at all.
Since the nationalities that make up the ethnic group
known as Latinos are not randomly distributed across the
United States, but tend to cluster in certain areas, most
Anglos think of all Latinos as being like the people who
live nearby. In the Northeast, for example, Latinos are
VOLUME XXVI, NUMBER 2 (SEPTEMBER 1992)
23
&
Latino Politics
thought to be Puerto Rican. The identification of Puerto
Ricans with New York City is so strong that they are
sometimes referred to as Neoricans or Nuyoricans. In
Miami, Latinos (who prefer to be called Hispanics there)
are thought to be Cuban, although the Nicaraguan refugees
may have broadened the definition by the end of the
1980s. Chicagoans have a problem, for that city has
neither a Mejicano nor Puertorriquefio nor Cubano majority;
it is a city with a large Latino population.
Salvadorans live in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and
Hempstead, N.Y. Cubans and Puerto Ricans have moved
into New Jersey in roughly equal numbers. Even in New
York City, once the capital of Puerto Rican immigrants,
perhaps half a million Dominicans have moved in, along
with a huge Colombian colony, and a growing number of
Spaniards and Sephardim (or Spanish Jews) in the city.
In every city, even Miami (which is dominated by
Cuban exiles) and Los Angeles (which would rank as one
of the largest cities in Mexico if one simply counted the
number of Mexican citizens living there), other nationalities
have made their presence felt. A category name is
required, but to make a lump of more than 20 nationalities
has its drawbacks too. Culture is particular: Everybody
cannot cook a dinner that warms the soul as well as the
belly. And fulano the nationality has no resident memory;
it floats on the mass culture of North America, rootless and
unbearably alone.
So there are no Latinos, no Hispanics. There are only
Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Salvadorans,
and so forth. Each is different and alike, and each
relates to the other in the same way as an individual human
being: They are not so different that they cannot communicate
and not so alike that they have nothing to say to each
other.
To many Latinos drawing the distinctions among the
nationalities constitutes a kind of game, like a quiz program.
Everyone has a theory about everyone else. Some
are amusing, all are accurate, and every nuance is important.
A few people are better situated than others to draw
the distinctions. Raymond del Portillo, who headed up
San Francisco’s initial effort at bilingual education, is the
son of a Cuban father and a Mexican mother. On the
Cuban side his great-grandfather wrote the Cuban national
anthem. On the Mexican side his grandfather crossed
the Sierrra Madres three times while fighting with the
Villistas during the Mexican Revolution of 1910. His
wife, Carlota, is Puerto Rican, ralsed in Puerto Rico and
New York.
From his unique viewpoint del Portillo offers these
observations about the cultural extremes of the three
nationalities. “Cubans,” he said, “are aggressive, assertive,
and sometimes appallingly arrogant. There is a
steadfastness and loyalty among Mexican-Americans,
but their docility is sometimes disappointing. And the
feistiness of the Puerto Rican is understandable. They’re
tough, very tough, either because of life on the island or
prejudice in New York; they’re tough, but not biuer.”
24
A cruder expression of the cultural distinction between
the quiet formality of the Mexicans and the aggressiveness
of the Caribbeans is told on the streets of New York
City, where a recent influx of Mexicans has joined the
dominant Puerto Rican-Dominican-Cuban population. In
conversation, the Mexicans, even the poorest Indians
from the south, remain polite. They do not say “What?” or
“How is that?” when they do not understand. They say,
“Mande” I beg your pardon. In ajoke told on the streets,
a newly arrived Mexican girl meets a Nuyorican, who says
to her, “I gonna fok you.”
“Mande?” she replies.
“No Monday, right now!”
In addition to the contrast of character, it is important
to note that the Nuyorican in the story does not speak
enough Spanish to understand a common expression.
Leobardo Estrada, a demographer at UCLA whose
work takes him to every Latino community in the country,
says that a visitor must prove himself in different fashion
for each group. For the Cubans, the litmus test is language.
One must not only speak Spanish, one must speak the
language well, with a vocabulary of synonyms and the
ability to use arcane verb forms. Puerto Ricans judge a
person by his or her familiarity with the island; one must
know not only the cities, but the towns and villages as
well. To establish oneself with Mexican-Americans, it is
necessary only to be a professor, so great is the reverence
for education in the Mejicano and Mexican-American
culture.
TABLE 3
SelectS Characteristics of Latino Families: 1990
%of
of Families
Median Families Headed by
Family Below Single
Income Poveily Level Female
kU Latinos 23,446 23A 23.1
Mexican Origin 22,245 19.6 25.7
Puerto Rican Origin 19,933 30.4 38.9
Cuban Origin 31,262 12.5 18.9
Central and South 25,460 16.8 25.0
American Origin
Other Latino Origin 26,567 15.8 24.5
Non-Latino Families 35.183 9.2 16.0
Note: Data are from March 1990 Current Population
Survey, not the 1990 Decennial Census.
Source: U.S. Buftau of the Census, “The Hispanic Population
of the United States,” March 1990, Current Population
Reports, Series p-2O, No.449, March 1991, Table 4.