{"id":31874,"date":"2013-06-21T21:19:24","date_gmt":"2013-06-21T21:19:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=31874"},"modified":"2016-12-11T19:35:09","modified_gmt":"2016-12-11T19:35:09","slug":"who-is-latino","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=31874","title":{"rendered":"Who is Latino?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Who is Latino?<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Washington Post<\/a>
\n2013-06-21<\/p>\n

Carlos Lozada<\/a><\/strong>, Editor of Outlook<\/a>, The Washington Post\u2019s<\/em> Sunday section for opinion, analysis<\/p>\n

\u2018Shut up, you stupid Mexican!\u201d<\/p>\n

The words spewed from the mouth of a pale, freckle-faced boy, taunting me on our elementary school playground.<\/p>\n

I wish I could recall what I said to inspire the insult. But more than three decades later, I remember only my reply. \u201cStupid Peruvian<\/em>,\u201d I pointed out, wagging my finger.<\/p>\n

My family had emigrated from Lima to Northern California a few years earlier, so my nationality was a point of fact (whereas my stupidity remains a matter of opinion). The response so confused my classmate that my first encounter with prejudice ended as quickly as it started. Recess resumed.<\/p>\n

Today, my grade-school preoccupation with nationality feels a bit quaint. Peruvian or Mexican \u2014 does it even matter? We\u2019re all Latinos now…<\/p>\n

…If all ethnic identities are created, imagined or negotiated to some degree, American Hispanics provide an especially stark example. As part of an effort in the 1970s to better measure who was using what kind of social services, the federal government established the word \u201cHispanic\u201d<\/a> to denote anyone with ancestry traced to Spain or Latin America, and mandated the collection of data on this group. \u201cThe term is a U.S. invention,\u201d<\/strong> explains Mark Hugo Lopez<\/a>, associate director of the Pew Hispanic Center. \u201cIf you go to El Salvador or the Dominican Republic, you won\u2019t necessarily hear people say they are \u2018Latino\u2019 or \u2018Hispanic.\u2019\u2009<\/strong>\u201d<\/p>\n

You may not hear it much in the United States, either. According to a 2012 Pew survey, only about a quarter of Hispanic adults say they identify themselves most often as Hispanic or Latino. About half say they prefer to cite their family\u2019s country of origin, while one-fifth say they use \u201cAmerican.\u201d (Among third-generation Latinos, nearly half identify as American.)<\/p>\n

The Office of Management and Budget defines a Hispanic<\/a> as \u201ca person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race\u201d<\/strong> \u2014 about as specific as calling someone European.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no coherence to the term,\u201d says Marta Tienda<\/a>, a sociologist and director of Latino studies at Princeton University. For instance, even though it\u2019s officially supposed to connote ethnicity and nationality rather than race \u2014 after all, Hispanics can be black, white or any other race \u2014 the term \u201chas become a racialized category in the United States,\u201d Tienda says. \u201cLatinos have become a race by default, just by usage of the category.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire opinion piece here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Who is Latino? The Washington Post 2013-06-21 Carlos Lozada, Editor of Outlook, The Washington Post\u2019s Sunday section for opinion, analysis \u2018Shut up, you stupid Mexican!\u201d The words spewed from the mouth of a pale, freckle-faced boy, taunting me on our elementary school playground. I wish I could recall what I said to inspire the insult. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,33,14646,8,394,20],"tags":[14992,14994,14993,2875,2581],"class_list":["post-31874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-census","category-latino","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-carlos-lozada","tag-mark-hugo-lopez","tag-marta-tienda","tag-the-washington-post","tag-washington-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31874"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31874\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50526,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31874\/revisions\/50526"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}