Hispanics in USA Today
Over the years Spanish speaking people have been integrated through war or have immigrated into the US. As practical as can be, these groups of people with totally different roots and ancestries have been classified in this category called “Hispanics”¹.
This name is given to people whose ancestry is from one or more Spanish speaking countries including Mexico, Central America and the Spanish speaking Caribbean Nations², The term excludes individual ethnic characteristics within each group that make these people unique and different by taking away their heritage and their individualistic culture and it melts them into one broad and general group, Hispanics.
From my Anthropological point of view, after living in a society in which interracial offspring made ancestry almost totally untraceable, I find no Pros on the use of the term Hispanics, but to wrongfully eliminate any individual identity of each of these Spanish speaking ethnic groups that form million people in the US³. The Cons of the use of the term is that it generalizes groups of people completely different to each other in terms of culture, religion and behavior.
A controversy has resulted from the use of the term Hispanics on regards to Brazilians who have Portuguese ancestry, language and culture. They qualify under the term Hispanic because they live in Latin America(which are all countries in the American Continent with the exception of the US and Canada)But they don’t speak Spanish and they won’t call themselves Hispanics.
The term Hispanic is not commonly accepted in Spanish speaking groups, by doing my own research with the people I interact with everyday, I found out that if they are asked if they are Hispanics, they reply that they are Mexicans, or Salvadorian, etc; and if they are asked their race, most of the reply that in the US they are Hispanics but they do not know what race they are because at their country of origin, they never had to use a term or classifications of race to fall into, they are either poor or rich but not or white.
By living 20 out of my 38 years in El Salvador, I openly heard the controversy going on about the term given by other nations to countries like mine which were conquered and colonized by Spain, who also introduced African as slaves; Hispano-Americans or Latin-Americans? The term Ibero-Americans pitched in sometimes as well(because the Spaniards came from the Iberian peninsula)But that was a label or classification introduced by the United Nations.
Latino, as viewed by some experts, would mean someone who speaks words that came from the dead language Latin, that would mean that we would have to include Italian, Romanian and other Romance languages that were derived from Latin; therefore a term to classify people should not exist, but that is probably impossible in a highly political country such as the United States of America.
My own experience as an immigrant, I had to adopt the term Hispanic as soon as I arrived at the Los Angeles airport in 1992 and it was hard to get used to at the beginning, but after a few years living here it just comes out automatically. I was once called Mexican by a boss from a different ethnic background at work, when I corrected him and told him I was Salvadorian, he replied: “isn’t the same?” I understood his ignorance because the lack of information he grew up with in the pacific island he came from, but as an educated adult I am – I explained to him the difference. If Italian descendants can say “I’m Italian” why can’t I say I’m Salvadorian and be respected for that?
I believe that a term or label should not be used to classify every group of individuals in this country, instead, we should be asked what country our ancestors came from or what ethnic group we belong to, only then – Society would treat everyone fairly and everyone would be proud of their own ethnicity.
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Oboler, Suzanne
1995 “Ethnic labels, Latino lives: identity and politics of (re)presentation in the United States. University of Minnesota Press. Minnesota. Pg. 1-30.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_United_States