“Whitest country?” How would that even be measured; with dance competitions?
I didn’t think anyone was ignorant of the fact that there are light-skinned people who identify as Hispanic. I think the ignorance is the idea that some of those people identify their race as White, rather than Hispanic or Latino or similar.
And, really, White is not a skin color. White people can even be darker than black people. I knew a girl in school who was Greek, but, in the summer, she would be darker than some black people I’ve seen.
Well, I can tell you where she wasn’t last month!
I really hadn’t thought of Mexican people as being all that short on average until I got on that women’s only subway car and I wasn’t just the tallest person there, along with my cousin - I was the tallest person there by almost a head. And there were a lot of people in that car, too.
My mom could almost pass there (until she opened her mouth, of course) as she’s much shorter and darker than I am. She comes by it by way of eastern Europe, though.
Well, even though La Raza means Hispanic People, that’s a leftover from a time when there was no distinction between race, culture and ethnicity: if you ask me what my race is, I’ll answer “white” unless I am conscious that I have to translate to US-speak, where I am “white Hispanic”. There used to be an entry in those ethnicity forms for “White, non-Hispanic”, has it been taken away?
The problem here is mixing in the same part of the form classifications that are actually different: ethnicity, color, national origin, culture… with a dash of PC-ness on top that can be very, very confusing to inmigrants.
As a “white” Mexican, I too find it odd how many people in the US are surprised by our existence. But since the large majority of us are mestizo with darker complexions I understand why they make think that way.
On trips to the US with my children, we were often asked what language we were speaking. When we replied Spanish and that were are Mexican, many times they expressed surprise and also doubt. Or they said something dumb like “Oh! you are Spanish!”
And once along the Texas border, McCallen I think, I was asked by a Mexican-American where I learned to speak such good Spanish. The thing was I probably spoke better English then she did too.
I remember talking to a classmate about Sammy Sousa. I was talking about his heritage, his blackness, and the coworker corrected me and told me he was Hispanic.
I said, “Yes, but he is also a person of African descent.”
I wish I were making this up, but the girl said, “African? How did Africans get into Latin America? You’re always making shit up!”
Conversations like this made grad school SO much fun.
Oh yes, to go back to what I was talking about earlier, race is a social construct. So while a Hispanic person may identify themselves as white, they often find out differently when they come to the States. And this also means they have a different perception of other people’s race compared to native-born Americans.
I am a light-skinned black person. Just a little paler than, say, Halle Berry (no other resemblence at all, unfortunately). Facial features a bit ambiguous and mixed-up. While I was employed in Miami, there was a blood drive. I sat down in the nurse’s chair and she asked me a series of questions.
One of the first ones was if I was white.
This is the first and only time someone has ever wondered if I am white. Biracial, yes. Some “type” of Hispanic or Asian, yeah. But never white. My guess is that because this woman was Hispanic, she was operating under different rules than I was accustomed to. Or maybe she didn’t want to “offend” by placing me into the “black” category without my permission. I have no idea.
This woman, while being of light complexion, would not be pegged as “white” by US definitions. She’d be called, well, Hispanic. Her Indian ancestry was apparent. If she hadn’t had a Spanish accent and we hadn’t been in south Florida, I might have identified her as “Native American”, perhaps.
Yes, I think there are some people who believe that black people are native to Latin America like they are to Africa.
I recall somebody on this board who said Colin Powell shouldn’t be considered an African-American because his family was from Jamaica not Africa.
Heh. I watched a panel show on the Tango on one of the Spanish language channels. An ethnomusicologist pointed out that musical forms including “ng”–like tango and huapango all had (some) African roots. I thought one of the ladies on the panel was going to faint at the insult.
Some Argentines do, in fact, have African roots. In fact, PBS had a recent series on descendants of Africans in various Latin American countries.
My sister in law married a white Cuban and I work with a pretty pale mexican, so I knew they existed.
My father in law used to own a canning factory, where he employed a large number of mestizo mexicans, so I also knew of the word mestizo in the context of a hispanic with native american blood.
My mother is Panamanian and can pass for German. My dad is Brazilian and is incredibly pale. My best friend growing up was a Mexican with green eyes. My extended family runs the gamut from one cousin who has blond hair and a red beard to a few cousins who here would be considered black. My Asian wife was shocked to see the large population of Japanese descendants in Sao Paulo and that she didn’t stick out at all in Brazil.
So THAT explains Robin Williams!
Try to tell some of my very pale skinned Mexican students that they are white. They’d laugh. In fact, a very light-skinned boy once said to me, “Miss, we’re still mestizos when we come to America.”
<shrug> I don’t consider Mexican, Latino, or Hispanic to be a catch-all category in terms of skin tone, ethnicity, or geography.
I have a Puerto Rican friend who’s black by most physical descriptions of “black” as it pertains to a person’s race. But she’s Puerto Rican, and refuses to be classified as “African-American” or “black,” because she says (and I tend towards agreeing) that being black in America is more cultural than anything to do with skin color, and she has no knowledge of that culture other than what she sees in popular culture.
I’ve known Hispanics who were born and raised in the US who frequently contrasted “Hispanic” with “white”. One even complained about being mistaken for white once.
A few years back, an anesthesiologist from Spain lived across the street, and he was white. A long time ago, Spain had colonies all over the place. So, there are Spanish-named and Spanish-speaking people of every possible human color.
My junior high Spanish teacher was from Centroamerica and* pale.* And of course Cameron Diaz is Latina.
I think “Hispanic”/“latino” is seen as a sort of color-caste in the USA, like “Asian” (read Far Eastern) & “black.”