Latino, Hispanic, and a Yogi Berra Moment

By Victor Landa, NewsTaco

I had a classic Yogi Berra moment.

NPR published a poll about Latino attitudes yesterday. And as these polls tend to do, it reverberated across the Interwebs like a grito from a mariachi at Garibaldi.

The main take-away? U.S.residents of Latin American decent identify with a variety of names, words, tags, labels …

And there it was: Deja Vu all over again.

I was reared on the border – Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico – at a time and place where there was no such thing as Latino or Hispanic or whathaveyou. Pretty much everyone I knew was like me. We were all people, gente.

Years later I watched my grandfather (who lived in San Antonio where “Mexican-Americans” were relegated to a second-class existence) navigate a very clear ethnic divide with a vision and a smile. He owned a small business and belonged to several civic organizations; he helped his compadres run for office; organized fund raisers to pay voter poll taxes; organized youth sports leagues, scholarship funds; he was involved because he was made to feel different.

In the early 1970’s he disagreed with young upstart Latinos who began calling themselves chicanos. He called them “young turks” and truly believed they would set back the advances that his generation had gained in society, politics and business. If you were to see the condition of Latinos in San Antonio at that time you would have questioned those advances. But then none of us were around to witness the older generation’s plight or fight. It was a classic generational push-and-pull; his was the generation that created LULAC – they called themselves Latin American Citizens. The next generation pulled away from that idea. And the generation after that would go a different way as well.

As long as I can remember U.S. Latinos have navel-gazed about a defining term.

I remember doing a small, unscientific poll of my own, some twenty years ago. The question of Latino identity came up and I wrote a column about it. I polled friends and co-workers: do you call yourself Latino, Hispanic, Chicano, Tejano? The best answer I got was from a Spanish TV news videographer  who said “I’m a Mexican genius.”

Nowadays we hyper-divide by national origin, and that gives us an excuse for another poll, and another essay, and another round of navel-gazing discussion.

But it’s the same conversation, all over again. And that’s where the true discovery lies: Latino identity is varied and evolving.

In that sense, Latinos are like no other U.S. ethnic or racial group. We call ourselves different things depending on many things – generation, national origin, region of residence, politics … And given today’s penchant for drive-by intellectualism where deep thinking is relegated to a Tweet-response, these differences give the impression of a cacophony. When in reality it’s the same old question with the same varied answers.

Marketers don’t like this. They write books, do polls and organize seminars to stuff Latinos into a well-fabricated box. Lots of people have gotten rich plying the question. But the answer keeps evolving.

And those young Latino thinkers who are tackling the identity question today as if it were a new-found ground for discovery, will in their own time have their own Yogi Berra moment.

Genius.

[Photo by Cromo]

 

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