Three myths about Hispanics in the US
Horacio Sierra
Hispanics make up 18.3 percent of the U.S. population — the country’s largest minority group. Hispanic Heritage Month is a good occasion to shoot down some of the most common myths about them.
Myth No. 1: Hispanics are a racial group.
From CNN and Brookings Institution election exit polls to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention public health studies, Hispanics are often listed as a distinct racial group. When a diversity task force recommended the elimination of New York City’s school programs for gifted students, the committee and the news media lumped Hispanics into one racial category, calling the city’s Hispanic-majority schools “segregated” without paying attention to how racial differences among Hispanics affect identities and outcomes.
Hispanics constitute an ethnic community, not a race — a distinction evident on forms that ask if you’re non-Hispanic white or non-Hispanic black. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Hispanics identify as white (65 percent), “some other race” (27 percent), mixed race (5 percent), black (2 percent), indigenous (1 percent) and Asian (0.4 percent), among other designations. To see Hispanics as a racial group is to erase our diversity and discount the racism and pigmentocracy that plague Hispanic societies. To ask Afro-Hispanics to choose between being black and being Hispanic is to negate their unique identity. To ask white Hispanics to distance themselves from their European heritage is to diminish the important ways Spain helped shape the United States.From Spain’s blueeyed King Felipe VI to members of Peru’s Japanese-descendant Fujimori political dynasty, Hispanics can look like anyone. Such differences require more nuance than we get when we consolidate Hispanics into one race.
Myth No. 2: ‘Hispanic’ and ‘Latino’ are synonyms.
The frequent use of the slashed term “Hispanic/Latino” implies that the identities are interchangeable. From the Presbyterian Church to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, many organizations mirror the general public in switching between “Hispanic” and “Latino” mid-sentence. Similarly, a page of tips for quitting smoking from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention repeatedly equates the two words, noting, for example, “Among Hispanics/Latinos, cigarette smoking is more common in men than women.”
“Hispanic” stems from Hispania, the Roman Empire’s name for Spain, so it refers to the peoples and cultures of Spain and its former colonies. “Latino” describes the peoples and cultures where colonizers spoke Latin-derived languages such as Spanish, French and Portuguese. The term “Latin America” was coined in the 1800s to differentiate Romance-languagespeaking areas from English- and Dutch-controlled territories: People from Brazil (Portuguese) and Haiti (French) can be considered Latino but not Hispanic.
The federal government has used the term “Hispanic” since the 1970s, when health official Grace FloresHughes argued that the community needed better services. Instead of continuing to be categorized as just white, Hispanics could now be classified as a distinct group separate from the Latino label, which could include Italians and Brazilians.
Myth No. 3: Hispanics support liberal immigration policies.
A Dallas Morning News report on immigration claimed that President Donald Trump’s immigration policies are “expected to fuel a historic turnout among Latinos.” The National Hispanic Leadership Agenda maintains that “federal immigration law and policy continues to be a top priority for the Latino community.” Such claims create the sense that Hispanics naturally embrace liberal immigration policies. After the 2018 midterm elections saw Democrats lose Hispanic votes in Florida, Simon Rosenberg, president of the Democratic group NDN, cited Trump’s relentless attacks on immigrants and declared with surprise, “I don’t know what happened.”
What happened is that Hispanics do not speak in unison when it comes to immigration. In a Washington PostABC News poll from April, 36 percent of Hispanics described “the situation with illegal immigration across the U.S.-Mexico border” as “a crisis,” similar to the share of Americans overall who said the same. Organizations such as the Latino Coalition offer complex views: They support legal immigration, encourage stronger security to deter illegal immigration and oppose local municipalities that defy federal immigration laws.