For Hispanics and Latin Americans, race and ethnicity are complicated. From the beginning of Spanish colonization, racial mixing between white Spaniards, brown natives and black African slaves was seen as normal. This racial mixing was the beginning of a complicated road for Hispanics as they came to the United States and tried to identify themselves in the stark racial system of black and white. In the English colonies of North America, racial mixing between whites, Native Americans and African slaves was taboo. For Puerto Ricans migrating to New York in the 1950s, their status and what neighborhoods they lived in often depended on if they were white enough to pass as Italian, or if they were darker skinned and were identified as black.
While race in the US isn’t defined in these distinctive lines anymore, much of the stigma has shifted to the population of immigrants, whose faces are tanned and brown. 63 percent of Hispanics in the US who reported their country of origin in the 2010 census said they were Mexicans. Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans make up the largest portion of the US Hispanic population, but Guatemalans, El Salvadorans, and Colombians are among the fastest growing groups according to the 2010 Census. In 50 years, Hispanics are projected to become the largest minority group. Not just Mexicans, all Hispanics.
After Chile’s independence in 1810, large waves of German, Italian, Spanish, Greek, and French populations immigrated to the country, and it is estimated that at least half of Chileans are white or have European ancestry. Peru has a significant Asian population, particularly Chinese and Japanese people. During the 20th century, Argentina had a large Italian immigrant population. By contrast, a study by the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute says that ninety percent of the current population in the Dominican Republic has some West African ancestry, although most Dominicans do not self-identify as black. The majority of Guatemala’s population is mixed, but forty percent of Guatemalans are indigenous Indians, mostly K’iche, Mam and Mayan groups.
It is a huge generalization to say that all people speaking Spanish come from Mexico. They are simply not the same, with different accents, different traditions and different histories. We are all really proud of our diverse cultures and countries, and it belittles us to take all our cultures and bottle them up into this “Mexican” immigrant stereotype. Even in the United States, there is a huge range of accents and subcultures from the Northwest to the South to the Northeast. How then, could you forget about the other 20 countries in Latin America? If you don’t know where a person is from, it is better to ask than just assume they are Mexican.
The problem isn’t just that we are assumed to be Mexican. With 31 states and a long history, their culture is just as rich as the rest of Latin America. It is the stereotypes here in the United States that people have about Mexicans and Latinos that make it difficult. The majority of us are not undocumented immigrants “stealing jobs” from Americans. There is such a stigma against undocumented Hispanic populations, and because of the language gap, others feel that Hispanics are uneducated and don’t belong.But this just isn’t true. Hispanics across the country are making amazing contributions to society. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor is Puerto Rican and grew up in New York City. In the presidential election in 2008, some 9.7 million Hispanics voted. Here at N.C. State, the Dean of Engineering, Dr. Louis A. Martin-Vega, is Puerto Rican.
The point is, not all of us fit into the stereotypical, cookie-cutter Hispanic/Latino image. We represent many cultures and have unique customs and foods. Don’t just assume because we have dark hair and tan easily that we are Mexican. Don’t classify us as white because we don’t “look” Latino. We are not black, we are not white and we are not all Mexican. Our culture defines who we are, not our skin color. We are Latinos.
