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  1. #1
    Super Moderator Newmexican's Avatar
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    How Richard Nixon Invented Hispanics

    So, is "Hispanic" a race?

    MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2005

    How Richard Nixon Invented Hispanics


    Update: See bottom of post for other information.
    Update: I found out that Mark Levin mentioned this post on June 16, 2014, so I welcome visitors who found this post that way. I've moved on to other things and haven't updated this blog in years, but this was always my most widely viewed post.
    _______________________

    In a press release in 2003, the Bureau of the Census announced with great fanfare that "Hispanics" had become the largest minority group in the U.S. As they are also at great pains to clarify, Hispanics, unlike "blacks" and "Asians," are not a "race.".

    And yet they must be something, else no one would pressure the government to count them. And the story of how something called "Hispanics" came to be an objective reality worth measuring is a fascinating lesson in the economics of tribal self-identification. "Hispanics" are readily identifiable in the U.S. But as soon as one crosses the Rio Grande from the north there is no such thing as "Hispanic." There are instead races: "whites," and "Indians," andmestizos, and "blacks," and all of the above together. And there are nationalities: Dominicans, and Salvadorans, and Hondurans, and Mexicans and Brazilians. But in the United States these disparate nations and people, who sometimes go to war at least proximately because of soccer games and who argue over the racial stereotyping in their television soap operas, through the waving of a bureaucratic wand in an obscure office at the end of an obscure hall in Washington magically become a single demographic group. So too with "Asian," whose official definition as of 2002 was a masterpiece of bureaucratic obfuscation masquerading as clarification:
    "Asian" refers to those having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam. "Pacific Islander" refers to those having origins in any of the original peoples of Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, or other Pacific Islands. The Asian and Pacific Islander population is not a homogeneous group; rather, it comprises many groups who differ in language, culture, and length of residence in the United States. Some of the Asian groups, such as the Chinese and Japanese, have been in the United States for several generations. Others, such as the Hmong, Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians, are comparatively recent immigrants. Relatively few of the Pacific Islanders are foreign born.

    The immigrant from China or Korea on the one hand and Japan or Vietnam on the other must be mystified that, when he arrives in the U.S., he is placed in the same demographic category as those whose genetic lineage is traced to countries recently at war with his own. But such is the nature of tribal politics in the U.S. (and, because of its influence, in other multi-tribal Western democracies too) these days. Everyone must be pigeonholed, the pigeonholing must be by physical appearance, and the government will tell you which compartment is yours.

    This is all an artifact of decisions taken during the first Nixon Administration. The terms "Hispanic" and "Asian/Pacific Islander" have their origins in a term first placed on the 1970 Census form during the Nixon Administration, and sought in the case of "Hispanic" to unite those with nothing in common other than backgrounds vaguely related to countries where the Spanish language is important. It is not strictly a geographic term, identifying people from Latin America and the Caribbean. While Dominicans, who speak Spanish, and Brazilians, who speak Portuguese, are Hispanic, Haitians, who speak French and Creole, and Jamaicans, who speak English, are not. (And whether this vague type of person should be called "Hispanic" or "Latino" is an absurd and impenetrable controversy all its own.) The decision to invent Hispanics has had profound effects on American culture.

    In any society (certainly including ours) where people can organize to pressure the government to transfer income from other groups to theirs, the question arises of what shared characteristics to organize the group around. People can organize around vague notions of race (the NAACP or La Raza), around occupation (small-business owner or farmer), around whether they are left- or right-handed, or any other criterion. But the criteria around which they do choose to organize is, in the economic way of thinking, a function of the marginal costs of organizing each type of group. One reason labor unions are such a powerful force in many societies of all income levels and many forms of governments is that they are easy to organize, with many of the potential constituents converging to the same workplace every day. Groups organized around tribe form relatively easily as well because it is easy to tell who is and is not a member, and the tendency of people to socialize based on common language, church membership or other criteria also lowers these organizational transaction costs.

    But what is striking about recent years is the ability of government decisions to create artificial identities. This is in part presumably because in a democratic political system bigger numbers, other things equal, can mean bigger influence. The notion of what it means to be "white" has itself undergone dramatic transformation over time. The term once connoted primarily northern Europeans – people descended from residents of the British Isles, Scandinavia, (non-Jewish) Germany, and the like – with those considered eminently “white” now – people with last names like Rosselli and Papadopoulos – previously consigned to a sub-"white" basement, not quite "black" but not quite Smith or Johnson either.

    To get a sense of how artificial it all is, note that some Japanese consider Persians and Arabs to be "white," something utterly preposterous to many people who actually call themselves "white." Are Jews “white”? They are now, but once upon a time they were not. The media sometimes acts as if, because of their successful integration (which "Hispanic" immigrants are rapidly duplicating)," "Asians" already are. When the government is counting people, President Bush’s first-term Labor Secretary nominee, Linda Chavez, is “Hispanic.” But when she is asked to serve in government, she is, because the “Chavez” in “Linda Chavez” comes from her ancestors who came to New Mexico from Spain in the 1600s, not Hispanic enough.

    By defining phenomena called "Hispanic" and "Asian," the government of the U.S. is subsidizing a particular basis for both tribal identification specifically and presure-group formation more generally. What makes this arbitrariness so troubling is the ability of the state through its decisions to promote tribal tensions that might otherwise not be there. Imagine a hypothetical American named John Kim. He is the native-born grandson of Korean immigrants, an accountant, the married father of three children, a Roman Catholic, a Dallas Cowboys fan, and a bowler. So what is he? If asked, he would probably define himself by all these criteria simultaneously. But in modern America, with tribal identity more and more the primary engine of political engagement, he is probably inclined to think of himself primarily as Korean or, even more artificially, as "Asian." And so when bad things happen to him in life he may be more likely to think that it is a result of his "Asian-ness" rather than to the rain that occasionally falls on all of us. By inventing Asians and Hispanics/Latinos, President Nixon subsidized the organization out of thin air of a brand-new ethnic identity, and the creation of "Asian" and "Hispanic" pressure groups in every sphere of American life has proceeded correspondingly. That is too bad, because accountancy and bowling are aspects of identification over which one has control, while tribal identities are encoded in the genes and therefore more difficult to overcome. When society divides along tribal lines, it becomes harder to reconcile competing factions than when they are divided along lines not so easily transmitted from parent to child.

    Richard Rodriguez, in his wonderful book Brown, wonders how long it takes a Bolivian immigrant to become a "Hispanic." He argues that when she arrives she will be thrown in with "...Mayan Indians from the Yucatán,…Argentine tangoistas, Colombian drug dealers, and Russian Jews who remember Cuba from the viewpoint of Miami." He offers the following definition of this only-in-America term:
    Hi.spa.nick 1. Spanish, adjective. 2. Latin American,adjective. 3. Hispano, noun. An American citizen or resident of Spanish descent. 4. Ducking under the cyclone fence, noun. 5. Seen running from the scene of the crime, adjective. Clinging to a raft off the Florida coast. Elected mayor in New Jersey. Elevated to bishop or traded to the San Diego Padres. Awarded the golden pomegranate by the U.S. Census Bureau: “most fertile.” Soon, an oxymoron: America’s largest minority. An utter absurdity: “destined to outnumber blacks.” A synonym for the future (salsa having replaced catsup on most American kitchen tables). Madonna’s daughter. Sammy Sosa’s son. A jillarioso novel about ten sisters, their sorrows and joys and intrauterine devices. The new face of American Protestantism: Evangelical minister, tats on his arm; wouldn’t buy a used car from. Highest high school dropout rate; magical realism.

    Rodriguez is writing approvingly of a society where tribal identity is becoming more confused, making the old categories less relevant and the new ones more dynamic, shorter-lived and hence more interesting. This will be true as long as he has not underestimated the power of tribal subsidy (e.g., via the census form, or tribal preferences in university admissions, tribal appeals by politicians running for office, etc.) to define the relative rates of return to the various ways of defining ourselves. One could suppose that the moral ideal of a multi-tribal society is that it become a post-tribal society, one where tribal identity is utterly irrelevant in how we trade and how we vote. (At least on religious grounds, it’s not clear that tribe would or should become irrelevant in how we marry, but on ethnic grounds perhaps it should.) And, given the rate at which our immigrants, who are the world in miniature, are living, working, marrying and conceiving inter-tribally, it is possible that the emotional and material benefits of annihilating tribal lines will override the political incentives and, occasionally, biological urges to build them up. Possible, but no sure thing. It is a race between those who are taking hammers to the walls and those who are for their own reasons busy building them.

    May 2015 update:

    There was apparently a question about "Hispanic" origin asked on the 1970 census (Q13b), although the word "Hispanic" was not used, the only choices being several national origins or "other Spanish," So the idea that "they" are all in some ways the same was in the air then. As for the term, the Washington Post seems to be confirming much of the reasoning in this post with their reporting in 2005 that in 1975 the, um, Ad Hoc Committee on Racial and Ethnic Definitions at the now-replaced Dept. of Health, Education and Welfare chose the name as official government terminology. Why was it necessary? One committee member, Abdin Noboa-Rios, said: "For the purposes of the census it was important to know who we were, because we were an underrepresented population." How they decided who "we" were is, one supposes, an interesting question in its own right.


    http://futureuncertain.blogspot.com/...hispanics.html



  2. #2
    Super Moderator Newmexican's Avatar
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    The Washington Post article.

    Original URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26600-2003Oct14.html

    The Roots of 'Hispanic'

    1975 Committee of Bureaucrats Produced Designation

    Washington Post
    Wednesday, October 15, 2003; Page A21
    By Darryl Fears Washington Post Staff Writer

    During Hispanic Heritage Month, Grace Flores-Hughes did not dance at any galas, sit on any panels or receive any awards. And when the annual celebration ends today, the 57-year-old Mexican American will look back on another year of being forgotten.

    Hardly anyone knows that 28 years ago, Flores-Hughes and a handful of other Spanish-speaking federal employees helped make the decision that changed how people with mixed Spanish heritage would be identified in this country.

    In 1975, when Flores-Hughes was a baby-faced bureaucrat working for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, she sat on the highly contentious Ad Hoc Committee on Racial and Ethnic Definitions.

    "We chose the word 'Hispanic,' " she said proudly in a recent interview. The choice resounded throughout the federal government, including at the Office of Management and Budget, which placed the word on census forms for the first time in 1980. But the decision touched off a debate in the wider community over whether "Latino" should have been the designated term, and that debate still rages.

    Flores-Hughes, a federal appointee who lives in Alexandria, does not engage in it. She is more concerned with setting the record straight.

    "People keep saying that Richard Nixon is the reason why we're called 'Hispanic,' " she said. "And I think, 'Where did they get that from?' "

    But no one can be blamed for not knowing. Few records survive to document the committee's existence or its work. A search of the federal Education Resources Information Center yielded a single report that includes a list of members and the chairman, Charles Johnson of the Census Bureau.

    Even former representative Robert Garcia (D-N.Y.), who worked diligently for a "Hispanic" designation in those days, said, "I didn't know the committee existed."

    The story of how the term came to be embraced by government is more important than ever, Flores-Hughes said, because it is crucial to the debate over whether to identify people as "Hispanic" or "Latino," a debate that vexes the Spanish-speaking and Spanish-surnamed community and non-Hispanic Americans with connections to it.

    "Latino" refers to the Latin-based Romance languages of Spain, France, Italy and Portugal. The term embraces Portuguese-speaking Brazilians in a way that the word "Hispanic" does not.

    "Hispanic" is an American derivation from "Hispaña," the Spanish- language term for the cultural diaspora created by Spain. That diaspora is the result of a bygone age of conquest, which disturbs many of the people who prefer "Latino."

    "For us Spaniards, there's always a very strong link to the Spanish-speaking people across the Atlantic," said Javier Ruperez, the Spanish ambassador to the United States. "They are part of the Spanish family."

    Ruperez said he understands that people who prefer "Latino" "want to follow their own path. But it hurts. I think it's untrue to say that 'Hispanic' reflects imperialism. Our history is a part of human history. Empires come and go."

    Abdin Noboa-Rios, a member of the ad hoc committee, said some members wanted to use the Spanish-language term "Hispano," but were overruled by others who felt that "Hispanic" would be less confusing, even though it is rarely used outside the United States.

    A survey by the Pew Hispanic Center and Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation last year found that a majority of Hispanics and Latinos -- 53 percent -- have no preference for either term. An overwhelming majority prefer to identify themselves by national origin.

    But among those who listed a preference, "Hispanic" was widely favored. Activists, however, assert that "Latino" is fast becoming the favored term, as students, intellectuals and scholars refer to it almost exclusively in their works.

    Flores-Hughes said those activists wrongly insist that "Hispanic" was thrust on them by white bureaucrats who knew very little about their culture.

    Members of the ad hoc committee said it was hastily formed early in 1975, after educators of Puerto Rican, Cuban, Mexican and Native American descent stormed out of a meeting called to discuss a report at the Federal Interagency Committee on Education.

    The group never got around to discussing the report, on the education of Chicanos, Puerto Ricans and Indians. They were livid over how it wrongly identified certain groups. As Flores-Hughes put it, "they came ready for bear."

    Caspar W. Weinberger, secretary of Health, Education and Welfare at the time, knew he had a problem. He ordered that a committee be convened to solve the identity matter for good.

    The committee included African Americans, Asians and Pacific Islanders, Caucasians and Native Americans, in addition to Latinos. During the year they met, arguments erupted over now-outdated terms such as "colored" and "Oriental."

    But the most contentious arguments took place in the group that blended Spanish and English. It included Flores-Hughes of HEW, Philip (Felipe) Garcia of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Noboa- Rios of the National Institute of Education and Paul Planchon of the Office of Management and Budget.

    "There was never any consensus in that group to the very end," said Noboa-Rios, who preferred the term "Latino" and still does. "We came up with an agreement, but . . . there were some bad feelings. I know two people who didn't speak for up to a year after it was over."

    Noboa-Rios said he agreed to "Hispanic," because "we had to transcend labels. For the purposes of the census it was important to know who we were, because we were an underrepresented population."

    He remembered Flores-Hughes, but vaguely. Her name was Grace Flores then, and she was 26 years old. She was a low-level employee in the Special Concerns section of HEW, with only a high school education, serving on her first board.

    "I was like a little kid involved in every aspect of the office," she said. Flores-Hughes went on to earn a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of the District of Columbia and a master's in public administration from Harvard University. She now lectures on managing a culturally diverse workforce in the public/private sector and serves as an appointee to the Federal Service Impasses Panel of the Federal Labor Relations Authority.

    Flores-Hughes grew up in Taft, Tex., not far from Corpus Christi. Her grandfather regaled her with stories about serving in the army of Pancho Villa. He was originally from Spain, she said, and his family moved to Mexico.

    "I was called a 'wetback,' a 'Mexkin' and a 'dirty Mexkin,' " she said. "In public school, I had to be careful what I said. If I spoke Spanish, they would send me home for three days." Her driver's license identified her as Latin American.

    That was going through her mind when arguments were raging on the committee.

    " 'Hispanic' was better than anything I had been called as a kid," she said.

    "Latino," she said, would have included Italians, so she would not endorse it. And "Spanish surname" would have given protection to people who had never been discriminated against, she said. Besides, she said, not everyone in the Spanish diaspora has a Spanish-sounding name.

    "It was hard eliminating all those terms," she said. "I felt alone. But I was determined to stick to 'Hispanic.' We kept going back to Spain. We couldn't get away from it."

    http://www.azbilingualed.org/AABE%20...3/roots_of.htm
    Last edited by Newmexican; 05-14-2016 at 10:35 AM.

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