Latino Racial Formations in the United States: An Introduction (original) (raw)
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Hispanics in the United States: Origins and Destinies
History Now, 2019
In 2019 the Hispanic population of the United States surpassed sixty million—or sixty-four million if the inhabitants of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico are included. Only Mexico is larger among Spanish-speaking countries in the world. The rapid growth of the Hispanic population—which had been estimated at only four million in 1950—has been stunning. The US Census Bureau has projected that, given moderate levels of immigration and natural increase, Hispanics would grow by 2060 to an estimated 111 million people (about 28 percent of the US population), significantly exceeding the proportions of other ethnic or racial minorities. And while Hispanic Americans now account for one of every six persons in the United States, their impact—social, cultural, political, and economic—is much more profound because of their concentration in particular states and localities. Hispanics are at once a new and an old population, made up both of recently arrived newcomers and of old timers with deeper roots in American soil than any other ethnic groups except for the indigenous peoples of the continent. They comprise a population that can claim both a history and a territory in what is now the United States that precede the establishment of the nation. At the same time, it is a population that has emerged seemingly suddenly, its growth driven by immigration from the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America—above all from Mexico—and by high rates of natural increase. Today, a third of the Hispanic population is foreign-born, and another third consists of a growing second generation of US-born children of immigrants. And the label itself—“Hispanic”—is new, an instance of a pan-ethnic category that was created by official edict in the 1970s. The ethnic groups subsumed under this label were not “Hispanics” or “Latinos” in their countries of origin; rather, they only became so in the United States. But the Spanish roots of the United States antedate by a century the creation of an English colony in North America and have left an indelible if ignored Spanish imprint, especially across the southern rim of the United States, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In US popular culture and in official narrative and ritual the American past has been portrayed as the story of the expansion of English America, suppressing if not silencing the Hispanic presence from the nation’s collective memory. But past is prologue, and no understanding of the Hispanic peoples in the United States today or of the category under which they are now grouped can ignore the historical and geographic contexts of their incorporation.
Hispanics and/or Latinos in the United States: The Social Construction of an Identity
Estudios del Observatorio / Observatorio Studies, 2020
The meaning of the terms 'Hispanic' and 'Latino' in the United States have been debated since their emergence. Some people who identify as Latino or Hispanic claim geographic origin is the identity's defining characteristic, while others argue that internal and external racial perceptions of the group, lived experiences of oppression, or common cultural components are more relevant. This study examines the conception of these identities in the second half of the 20 th century in order to understand part of their current meaning. It analyzes the population that the United States Census classifies as Hispanic/Latino, beginning with the social movements that arose during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s to bring an end to discrimination and achieve legal and representative equality in key U.S. institutions. As time has passed and more people from Latin America and Spain have arrived in the county, the meaning of the terms 'Hispanic' and 'Latino' have taken on new dimensions. Nevertheless, these terms refer to an identity that has always had a political component and has always brought together very disparate populations, which it continues to do today.
Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, 1996
Toward the end of July 1994, the New Yorker magazine published an article on possible changes in the ethnic categories to be used by the U.S. census in the year 2000 (Wright 1994). Among the four major changes being discussed is a rather controversial proposal that would group together as a race the populations encompassed by the ethnic category "Hispanic." At present, this category officially designates and encompasses 24.5 million people from a variety of Latin American national, ethnic, gendered, social, racial, linguistic, and generational backgrounds whose sole commonality as a "group" is that they have some past or present tie to the Latin American continent and Spain. 1 Given its diversity, the proposal to designate this population as a race seems rather strange and, at the very least, should provoke some controversy-particularly since conceptions of race have historically been one of the key factors in ensuring racial minorities' political and social exclusion from the public sphere in the United States. 2 If the proposal is adopted, the notion of race will be the means through which a population, artificially constructed and otherized in the early 1970s when the "Hispanic" ethnic label was coined, would become even further differentiated in U.S. society. For even today, ethnic labels and
Ethnic Studies Review, 2004
The first national census was conducted in 1790, and has been repeated at ten year intervals ever since. While census taking has been consistent, the way individuals have been counted and categorized on the basis of race and ethnicity has varied over time. This paper examines how the official census definition of Latinos has changed over the twenty-two census periods. The modifications of the official definition of this group are discussed in relation to changes in national borders, variations in methodology used for census data gathering, and shifting political contexts.
A Note on The Political Idea of "Latino" in American Life
Anthropological Quarterly, 2006
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