“MES NACIONAL DE LA HEFRENCIA LATINX/HISPANA”
This week begins the month of celebrating the heritage of the diaspora of people from Mexico, Central America, South America and the Caribbean, who are now in the USA. Some have been here for centuries, predating the Anglo arrival, some arrived as recently as today. The month is sandwiched between famous battles for independence by Latinx or Hispanic peoples from European colonial powers, and the dates are September 15-October 15.
The recognition began under President Johnson and was originally called Hispanic Heritage Week. It has expanded into a month, and in line with the arbitrary nature of the American system of race, it is ever evolving. “Hispanic” was the earliest term because it is a word derived from the Latin word for the Iberian Peninsula of Spain and Portugal (Hispana).
The word “Hispanic” began to fall out of favor, however, because it does not cover all the language groups in the brown Americas. “Latino” has begun to develop as an alternative, and it is a strange term because no one speaks Latin in the brown Americas except priests and some scholars. Vice-Presidential candidate Dan Quayle infamously noted that he would have to learn “Latin” before he visited Latin America. Why did a word referring to a “dead” language from Italy become the definer for people from the brown Americas? Because Latin is the basis for what were called the “Romance” languages when I was growing up: Spanish, Portuguese, and French, which became the dominant European languages in the brown Americas. “Latinx” has begun to replace the masculine “Latino” as a word of choice to include all people.
Whether one prefers “Hispanic” or “Latino” or “Latina” or “Latinx,” all of them still define people from the brown Americas by the history of the European domination of the region in the colonial era. This crunching of experience is further squeezed by the American system of race, which demands to know who should be classified as “white” and who should not. This demand, born out of the struggle between slavery and equality in American history, means that everyone must be assigned their place in the system of race, obliterating cultural and language differences, so that those classified as “white” may know where to assign the goodies of American racial capitalism. One of the great things about “MES NACIONAL DE LA HEFRENCIA LATINX/HISPANA” is that we hope that it will lead to peoples of the Americas helping to break down the oppressive system of race. We will be hoping and looking for more accurate and just terms and descriptions to emerge.
I got my first real insight into this system of classifying brown Americans in 1994 when I was a commissioner to our denomination’s annual General Assembly in Wichita. I was assigned to the deadening (but really Presbyterian) Committee on Assembly Rules and Procedures. For the most part, it was a deadening time, but we all perked up when a light-skinned woman commissioner came to meet with us. She was an elder in her Hispanic church in Texas, and she came to ask us to consider changing the wording on the form which churches use annually to report the racial composition of their membership. At that time the form had these categories: “White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American.” She wanted to divide the “Hispanic” category into two sub-groups: “Hispanic-white” and “Hispanic-black.”
Few of us had heard of this at that time, and we asked her why her church was recommending this. She was unusually frank with us about race, which was then (and still is) highly unusually. She noted her light skin, and she indicated that most of the Hispanic members in her church looked like her. They had perceived how the system of race works in America: “white is right; black get back; brown stand down.” So, she wanted to keep her Hispanic heritage but also receive the goodies of being classified as “white.” Some of us appreciated her candor; some of us were shocked (and offended) at it. A few of us argued to make the change because it would help to expose the hypocrisy of race in America, but the majority opposed the change precisely for the same reason: though they never voiced it, they simply did not want to admit that the dynamics of race worked in that way.
Almost thirty years later, we know that it does indeed work that way, and the advocate who met with us has prevailed, with all kinds of permutations evolving out of the attempt to lump all brown peoples of the Americas into one category. The “white” fear of the growing presence of “brown” people in the United States is one of the foundations of the Presidency of Donald Trump. Joining with the historical white fear and dread and exploitation of those classified as “black,” we face a fundamental divide in November. May “MES NACIONAL DE LA HEFRENCIA LATINX/HISPANA” help us move towards the inclusion of all in a different system of the classification and celebrations of all cultures and all people.
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