The Making of Hispanics

A profound shift happened in American History between 1960 and 1990. During this period federal agencies developed a separate Hispanic Category that effectively lumped together all Latin American Communities. What is important here, and author G. Cristina Mora explores in her research and book "Making Hispanics" on what the history of the Hispanic category can teach us about the process of racial and ethnic categorization. The truth here, and what I see that many organizations, especially employee resource groups are trying to define is what many "activists, bureaucrats, and media executives never fully defined and that is who Hispanics were and what united them."

What I found fascinating about Cristina's research is that the Hispanic category became institutionalized as bureaucrats, activists and media executives forged networks and worked together to build panethnic organizations that popularized the notion of a Hispanic Identity.

As we build programs, campaigns and work on mobilizing this community, to me it's important that we understand how this identity became institutionalized in the first place and most importantly to reclaim the vastness and diversity that exist within our communities. That we cannot possibly be lumped into one single checkbox, because the truth is that we in fact could not be more different.

The media depicts Hispanics as a close-knit community united by clear political goals and unique cultural bonds. A review of American history suggests otherwise. Looking back just a few decades reveals a much different picture. During the 1960s, Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans and Puerto Ricans made up the overwhelming majority of the Latin American diaspora, but they lived in separate world in separate parts of the country.

The 1960 Decennial census did not include a question or category that offered persons of Latin American descent the opportunity to identify as a national panethnic community. For census officials, this omission reflected a consistent empirical finding: Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans overwhelmingly considered themselves to be separate groups. They "didn't really identify" with one another, and they "didn't really know what Hispanic Meant!"

The political and media environments of the 1960s was also drastically different from what we see today. Terms like Hispanic/Latino community, the Latino vote and Hispanic vote are common now but where not back in the 1960s. It is difficult for you to find a government report, media story or political statement that does not describe persons of Latin American descent simply as "Hispanics" or "Latinos."

This historical shift towards Panethnicity began in the 1970s. Over the course of that decade, Congress and the Executive office of the president began experimenting with different ways of providing resources for the Latin American diaspora-- and most importantly securing their vote. Late in that century the network Univision developed panethnic Hispanic news and variety programming hoping to connect Mexican American, Cuban American and Puerto Rican audiences across the country.

A critical factor that enabled the development of panethnicity in the 1970s and 80s was to keep the category's ambiguity. Government officials, activists, and media executives never precisely defined who Hispanics actually were. Instead, they made a broad, ambiguous references to the group's unifying culture and content that Hispanics were Hispanic because they were all hardworking, religious, and family focused, characteristics that could have been applied to any group.

Activists thus described Hispanics as disadvantaged and underrepresented minority group that stretched from coast to coast, a wide framing that best allowed them to procure grants from public and private institutions.

Media executives, in turn, framed Hispanics as an up-and-coming consumer market in order to increase advertising revenue. Last, government officials, framed Hispanics as a group displaying certain educational, income, and fertility patterns significantly different from those of blacks and whites.

There was a sticker that was widely circulated in Miami by the 1990s that read "Don't Call me Hispanic, I'm Cuban!"

As soon as the US census decided to include a permanent Hispanic category for the 1981 decennial census, they arranged two sets of meetings. In one to meet met with Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Cuban American political leaders and asked them to hold town hall meetings across the country to teach people how to identify as Hispanics on census forms.

In another set, they met with Spanish-language media executives to ask them to create commercials publicizing the Hispanic category on their networks. In other words, state officials relied heavily on assistance from activists and media executives; without their help the Hispanic category would not have been successfully recognized?and?adopted.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of how the Hispanic category became institutionalized. I highly recommend you read Cristina Mora's book "Making Hispanics" and that you educate yourself, and your organization on the history behind what we see today as "normal" or "Institutionalized."

If you think about it, this Hispanic identity continues to have ambiguity, and it has allowed us to reclaim and also explore what it means, and what it doesn't. To me it gave me so much power to know how this was institutionalized and, in a way, imposed to make things "simpler" because this complexity is hard to measure, but the truth is that we are complex, and we are different.