Ed board debate highlights the stigma of the hyphen

In September 1915, former President Theodore Roosevelt wrote a piece for Metropolitan magazine decrying what he referred to as “hyphenated Americans.”

War was raging in Europe. Only four months earlier, a German submarine had torpedoed a British ocean liner, the Lusitania, killing nearly 1,200 passengers, including 128 Americans.

Roosevelt wanted the United States to jump into the conflict and he regarded German-Americans as a major obstacle. He defined the “hyphenated American” as a “sinister” individual who is “loyal only to that part of his title which precedes the hyphen. He is thoroughly disloyal to the ‘American’ part of his cognomen.”

More than 100 years after Roosevelt’s pronouncement, David Bradley carried a similar mind-set into an April meeting of the State

Board of Education, when the board took the big step of approving curriculum standards for a Mexican-American studies course.

Bradley, R-Beaumont, objected to the class being titled “Mexican American Studies” and persuaded his fellow Republicans on the board to shoot down the name, in favor of the ultra-wordy “Ethnic Studies: An Overview of Americans of Mexican Descent.”

Bradley said he considered “hyphenated Americanism to be divisive.” Michael Soto, associate vice president at Trinity University and former SBOE member, called the move “yet another example of Bradley living up to his well-earned reputation for being petty and crass in his politics.”

This week, in the face of public protests from Texas Latinos, the board reversed itself, keeping the “Ethnic Studies” prefix, but rebranding the class as “Mexican American Studies.”

You’ll notice that the new title contains no hyphen, but it’s there anyway. For Mexican-Americans, the hyphen — as defined by Theodore Roosevelt and a century’s worth of like-minded American politicians — always is there. It’s an invisible weight you carry, a level of distrust you must transcend.

If, as Bradley argued in April, “hyphenated Americanism” is divisive, it’s only so because of the way its been twisted by political demagogues; the way its been defined, not as an emblem of an ethnic pride that enriches our engagement with this country, but as a cultural question mark that leaves us stranded in political purgatory.

During World War I, German-Americans routinely faced harassment in this country because of their perceived loyalty to the homeland their families had left behind. During World War II, the most intense persecution fell on Japanese-Americans, approximately 120,000 of whom were forced into internment camps by the U.S. government.

The stigma of the hyphen was evident in an Aug. 29, 1943, piece that ran in Jackson, Mississippi’s daily newspaper, the Clarion-Ledger.

The article profiled a Japanese-American combat team training at Mississippi’s Camp Shelby and began with this declaration: “Don’t spell Japanese-American with that hyphen, brother. Make it plain Japanese American.”

One of the soldiers quoted in the story, Pvt. Mike Masuoka of Salt Lake City, echoed that point.

“Some of us are abbreviated Americans,” Masuoka said. “We aren’t tall men. But damned if we’re hyphenated. The term ‘Japanese’ is used merely as a descriptive adjective, see?”

That kind of forced defensiveness over the hyphen, which plagued German- and Japanese-Americans in wartime, has been a constant for Mexican-Americans.

Maybe it’s because our ancestors simply crossed a border, rather than sailing on ships to Ellis Island, to get here. Maybe it’s because the United States once stretched its boundary lines to gobble up territory that previously belonged to Mexico and there is a faction in this country that fears Mexican-Americans are stretching those lines back.

What gets missed is the fact that so-called “hyphenated Americans” are not exemplars of divided loyalty. In fact, no division is required to be part of the American experience. This equation is all about multiplication.

For me, that meant growing up and watching my friend’s dad, a Valley plastic surgeon who loved this country with an intensity I’ve rarely seen, nonetheless holler with abandon for his native Mexico during the World Cup.

It meant sitting in a Phoenix coliseum in 2000 and watching thousands of Latinos wave Mexican flags to celebrate one of the last hurrahs for their hero, the aging boxing legend Julio César Chávez.

It meant watching my dad, a World War II veteran and deeply patriotic American, double over in laughter while watching his favorite Cantinflas movies or lose himself in the music of his favorite songwriter, Agustín Lara.

Hyphens don’t make any of us less American. Only cynical politicians can do that.