“The ‘Hispanic’ Race Debate: Limitations of the Term in an Orlando School Board Controversy”
by Kristi McDuffie | Xchanges 9.1
The Term “Hispanic”
The panethnic label “Hispanic” has a controversial history. Racial and ethnic categories are used to give and take resources within the United States (Oboler xv), and “Hispanic” became widely used by government agencies after 1970 to “officially identif[y] people of Latin American and Spanish descent living in the United States today” (Oboler xiii). Although the term was officially institutionalized on the census, today government institutions at all levels regularly collect racial and ethnic data using these terms. Non-government agencies also contributed to the proliferation of this term. For example, the advertising industry helped create the “Hispanic” market: “Advertisers had been lobbying for the acknowledgment of a common Hispanic culture or identity since the 1960s, and this category became the legitimization of their claims and the springboard for the industry’s rapid growth after the mid-1970s” (Dávila 40). Thus advertising executives appropriated the government term in order to claim and profit from a new advertising category (Dávila 41).
Suzanne Oboler is one of the first scholars who commented upon the problematic homogenizing of the people included in the term “Hispanic.” The history of the term comes from Spain’s colonial rule in the Americas, yet this history is insufficient to capture the histories, experiences, and current situations of groups included under this label, from Mexican Americans to Cubans to Puerto Ricans (Oboler xiii). This panethnic term connotes assumptions about people included in this label, such as that all Hispanics speak Spanish and are Catholic, but these assumptions do not hold true (Oboler xvi). In sum, “the ethnic label Hispanic homogenizes the varied social and political experiences of more than 23 million people of different races, classes, languages, national origins, genders, and religions” (Oboler 3). By the 2010 census, the number of Hispanics in the U.S. had increased to 50.5 million — 16 percent of the U.S. total population (Ennis, Ríos-Vargas, and Albert 2). The implication of this label, and all ethnic labels, is that it “serve[s] to point to the practices of political inclusion or exclusion of the group’s members from full participation as first-class citizens in their nations” (Oboler xvii).
The case that I analyze in this paper illustrates a continuation of these problems with this panethnic term. The case is based on news articles in the Orlando Sentinel, a local newspaper in Orlando, Florida. The news articles use the term “Hispanic” rather than “Latino.” “Hispanic” seems to be widely accepted in the newspaper discourse as few alternatives are ever used. The responding comments also use the term “Hispanic” to comment on these stories, although occasionally alternatives based on national origin, such as Puerto Rican, are used.1 Ultimately, it is unclear whether those being labeled as “Hispanic” adopt this term or whether the term is placed upon them by the white majority. Although I occasionally use the term “Latino” in this paper, I usually use “Hispanic” to mirror the discourse I am studying.
[1] Most of the commentators discuss Hispanics as “others.” A few claim to know Hispanics or be related to one. Very few commentators claim to be Hispanic. One commentator self-identifies as Latino while another calls himself “Hispanic, puerto rican.” The latter adopts the label Hispanic but clarifies himself based on national origin.