What I don’t understand is that according to the US description both of these are Hispanic, one who could be the poster girl for" pure Aryan" and the other who is known as the Black Pearl
Why on earth would anyone do that? There are plenty of Latin-Canadians who are black, mulatto, mestizo, etc.
Why is that so hard for you to understand? It’s been mentioned several times in this thread that the definition of Hispanic has nothing to do with race. Membership in an officially recognized minority group is not typically determined by the colour of one’s skin.
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I really don’t think so. For one thing, I think your premise about mainstreaming is false—Mexicans do assimilate* over the generations, in the sense that US-born Mexicans and their children and grandchildren etc. are fluent in mainstream US language and culture, just like the Italians and Irish etc. For another, most people outside of the Southwest (and many people in it) are unaware of the history you mention. For a third, the majority of Latinos in the US are 20th and 21st century immigrants; the fact that many US Latinos have been in what is now the US for centuries doesn’t necessarily mean much to them.
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I did not say that Mexicans do not assimilate, of course in the dominant culture everything works to that purpose, education, practicality, opportunity,…Adaptive change is a necessity for survival.
I was agreeing with your original statement that “…Mexicans’ image hasn’t changed much, I don’t think.”
Where I have a difference, is that IMO, Mexican people may be partly responsible for holding back some of that mainstreaming themselves, and by their own choice. Not only because the dominant culture wants to “…keep them labelled as ethnically other.”
Also, you may be amazed at how many Mexicans, and Mexican Americans are are aware of the history I mentioned.
Nope. Harvard graduates are also a numerical “minority”, but that’s not what the word means in most US English (and legal or policy) contexts.
True, when a minority group attains numerical majority status within some defined unit (like, say, the US), there is a bit more likelihood of confusion and ambiguity.
In Malaysia, for example, the historically less-privileged class is made up mainly of ethnic Malays, who are numerically a majority. They receive official affirmative action benefits. They fit the bill with most of the common US definition of “minority”.
I repeat. When was “anybody from L.A or of L.A ancestry who was not black or fully Amerindian was considered to be just another white”?
I think the OP needs to back this up or withdraw it as factually incorrect.
Some people in the US might consider them Hispanic, but the main hurdle to that classification isn’t their color, but the fact that neither speaks Spanish as a first language or comes from a Spanish culture. Others might consider them so because they’re “south of us.”
They wouldn’t be considered Hispanics here because they are both Brazilian. Generally, the definition seems to be whether they are from a Spanish speaking culture or not.
The last few forms I filled in that asked for race, had a box for Hispanic Latino and under the box, you would check off which racial categories such as African American, Native American, Caucasian, etc. apply.
Latinos are a minority separate from whites because they are a distinct ethnic group who are discriminated against. The reason they are being discriminated against more than the Irish and the Italians, is that there is currently a large influx of them immigrating, and as a result white Americans feel that their culture and jobs are being threatened. If we currently had the same influx of Irish that we did during the potato famine, Irish would be a minority distinct from white.
Discrimination against Mexicans (or people of Mexican descent) in the West and Southwest goes back generations. It’s nothing new. If anything, there is less discrimination now than in the past.
My experience in a location where most Hispanics are Cuban Americans (Miami) and in another where they tend to be of Mexican descent (Houston) was the opposite. We have two anecdotes of the same size and opposite signs. Note that the experience of the other Spanish students in Miami matched mine; if I ever saw one of them in Mass it was the Spanish-language one on saturdays.
Classifying people by shared culture and geography makes a hell of a lot more sense than doing it by skin color.
True, and Latinos were treated in a way that we would now call minorities back then. The question was why are other groups, Italians, Greeks, Portuguese or French not considered minorities. And the point that I was making is that back when they were immigrating in droves these populations were represented in a way that we would now associate with “minority”. The difference is that Latinos are still immigrating in large numbers and so are still treated that way, while immigration from the other populations has largely stopped. If Latin America suddenly became as prosperous as Canada and immigration dropped off, I suspect in a few generations Latinos would be considered as white as Italian Americans are now.
So why are Cuban-Americans considered minorities who according to Wikipedia “have a higher median income than even non-Hispanic whites, $50,000 as compared to $48,000 for non-Hispanic whites.” and "39% of US-born Cuban Americans have a college degree or higher, as compared to only 30% of non-Hispanic whites."Which means they enjoy higher educational and economic opportunities than the “core group”?
Because they have last names that sound just like Mexican last names. Are you looking for anything more logical than that, because if you are, you aren’t going to get it. You might consider opening a debate thread in GD about whether this is what should be happening.
John Mace answered this well. You’re right that logical categories don’t apply when 1. Together as a culture, we notice that, in a certain historical period, there is SOME (not perfect) correlation between one variable (socioeconomic “minoritieness”) and another (in this case, family roots – or personal roots – in a Spanish-speaking country in the Americas), and so we 2. enact policies and make generalizations as if the correlation WERE perfect.
The failures of this are a good argument for making those policies and generalizations JUST based on socioeconomic factors. Problem is, we humans just LOVE to put people in more readily comprehensible categories, and one based on more or less shared heritage (language, last names, certain other cultural things, to a tiny degree physical appearance) is a favorite. When people we thus label start to regard THEMSELVES (with pride) to some degree as part of that “distinct” category, it just reinforces the whole thing.
If we did stick strictly to socioeconomics, then poor inner-city blacks, poor Appalachian rural folk, and poor Mexican itinerant farmhands – and why not? some white hippie types as well – would find themselves in the same “category”. That works for some purposes, but we humans see the life experiences of these groups as just too different for most “purposes”. So, our first “pass” at labeling folks is one which does lump rich Cuban Americans with poor Salvadoran Americans, e. g.
All the more reason to try to turn all this labeling and categorizing down a notch, that’s for sure. Hard to change human nature, though.
I think lots of white-looking Latinos or Hispanics aren’t thought of as Latino or Hispanic and just thought of as “white” as much as an Irish or an Italian ethnic. And oftentimes even white Latinos are cultural minorities while most white ethnic groups are fully assimilated to American culture.
That’s because minority includes the idea that the grouping is not by choice. But it doesn’t negate the post you were responding to. The word minority has always been used for ethnic groups that are not in a majority.
Why they are considered one group is just because we tend to want as few minorities as possible and they have something in common: they speak the same language and didn’t migrate here from Europe. BTW, that’s the commonality of white people, if you didn’t known, except that all of Russia counts as Europe.
Why do we want as few minorities as possible? Mostly because people generally don’t like to be a minority, and so they like to group with whichever group they can. Everyone seems to want to assimilate as much as possible.
I’ve spoken to numerous people who grew up in a time before the terms Latino/Hispanic(Or should I say the misunderstanding of those terms as a race)came into play.One is a gentleman who told me that in his day unless they were black or fully or predominantly Amerindian,all the people he knew considered people of Latin American descent to be just another white ethnic just like Italians,Germans etc. another being a Mexican-American who told me that on his grandfathers service military records from WW2 it listed his race as Caucasian(aka white)
Yep. Some years back I led a work project where we had to sort through the records of Hispanic WWII veterans. There were several hundred sets of enlistment/discharge papers that I looked at, and with the exception of literally two or three, every single one of them listed the person’s race as white.