“The ‘Hispanic’ Race Debate: Limitations of the Term in an Orlando School Board Controversy”
by Kristi McDuffie | Xchanges 9.1
Research Methods
My investigation of this case focuses on how the term “Hispanic” is used within this debate about whether to include Hispanics on this biracial committee. The technical question is whether “Hispanic” is a race or an ethnicity, but the debate illustrates the deeper historical, political, and social motivations and consequences of this panethnic label. Before describing findings from this analysis, I will describe the methodological underpinnings of this inquiry.
In order to illustrate the continued problematization of the term “Hispanic” as used in public discourse, I analyze local online news articles and the responding anonymous commentary regarding the school board issue. The use of public, online discourse to investigate racial issues is modeled after Jane Hill in her work of analyzing the racial slur “squaw.” Hill explains that “the Internet has become perhaps the single most important medium available to racists,” and she analyzes a local newspaper’s online message board to critique comments about changing “Squaw Peak” to “Piestewa Peak” in Arizona (50, 60). She investigates this event as a case of how language ideologies, combined with a folk theory of racism, “play out in the discourse of ordinary people” (58).
Another study that models a similar type of investigation is John-Michael Rivera’s investigation of the “Mexican Question” as handled in print in U.S. history. Rivera analyzes print documents about the U.S.’s Manifest Destiny to show how ideologies about Mexicans were created and maintained through the popular press in the nineteenth century and beyond. Rivera’s findings mimic Suzanne Oboler’s points about how Latinos are (and have been) treated as second-class citizens.
Similar to these sources, I engage in a rhetorical analysis of public discourse about Hispanics. I have chosen one particular event to analyze in order to present a contextualized, in-depth example. The particular debate, about an Orlando school board committee, is important to study because it engages in the most pressing question regarding the panethnic label “Hispanic”: Is “Hispanic” a race or an ethnicity? This case also illustrates localized ramifications for federal policy regarding this term. Finally, this debate demonstrates how this question is rooted in historical, cultural power relations in the U.S. and how the present use of the term perpetuates those power relations.
Because this event emerged in local politics, it was primarily covered by the regional newspaper The Orlando Sentinel. Thus, the Sentinel is my primary source of data, including the news articles and the comments to those articles, as well as its companion blog, Hispanosphere. I also included comments from the news aggregator website Topix, which restated the Sentinel report and asked readers to give their opinion. There are 15 anonymous public comments to the Hispanosphere post, 87 comments to the Sentinel stories, and 72 additional comments on Topix, which totals to 174 different comments illustrating public discourse on this event. When analyzing the comments, I looked for common themes and repeated rhetorical tropes in order to determine whether there was a consensus on whether “Hispanic” was a race or an ethnicity, why, and for what reasons.
The Case
In April 2009, Victor Manuel Ramos reported on Hispanosphere that “[t]he proposed closures and mergers of Orange County Public Schools in a year of lean budgets has somehow become a debate about race, ethnicity, [and] identity” (“School District”). The debate originated with news that a biracial committee that was federally mandated in 1964 had been failing to meet as required about school closure changes that affect the racial makeup of schools (Ramos, “School District”). In response, a local Hispanic organization protested their exclusion from the committee (Ramos, “School District”). The school board obtained a legal opinion on the matter and, because the government’s definition of “Hispanic” is based on Latin American or Spanish descent and includes all races, told the Hispanic protestors that they could be included on the committee by identifying themselves as one of the two races (Ramos, “School District”). The protestors found this response inadequate for addressing the racial makeup of Hispanics (Ramos, “To Join”).
On August 2, 2010, less than a year after Hispanics demanded inclusion on this committee, a judge ruled that the school board no longer requires federal oversight (Postal, “Judge Ends”). After the initial news articles about the protests from Hispanics, there were no further articles about that particular biracial committee. It is likely that the school board dismantled the biracial mandate once it obtained unitary status.