Commentary: Latino culture? What's that?

Bear with us for a few more days of summer re-runs, in late spring no less. My guess is that most Mexicalpan visitors missed these Herald Mexico pieces the first time around. Today's encore presentation, still fresh as the day it was published (January 22, 2006), deals with a subject that won't be going away anytime soon.

Latino Culture? What’s That?
BY KELLY ARTHUR GARRETT

One of the first things Ana said when we finally firmed up the decision to move ourselves and the kids back home to beautiful downtown Naucalpan after an ill-advised three-year stint stateside was the following: “It’ll be nice to be a Mexican again instead of a ‘Lah-teen-uh,’ whatever that is.”

I’ve never been either, but I understood her frustration. Being assigned to an ethnic category not of your choosing (Latina) at the expense of your natural self-identity (Mexican) must cloy by degrees of magnitude progressing over the years from mildly disconcerting to grating.

The notion of a brand of human beings named Latinos is a U.S. invention of necessity. Just as African-Americans or Asian-Americans face unique problems as participants in a pan-ethnic U.S. society, so do those U.S. residents of Latin American descent or of recent Latin American residence. It certainly made political sense for common victims of a certain style of historical discrimination to unite their efforts, even if all they have in common are two major languages and a hemisphere of origin.

“Latin-American-American” being an unwieldy term mixing two meanings of the word “American,” the “Latino,” aka “Hispanic,” was born. The terms are geographically challenged. Italians, even those from Latium, don’t count as Latinos in this sense of the word, nor do the Spanish qualify as “Hispanic,” though they're often confused as such. Strictly speaking, the words make no literal sense as used.

Not only that, the creation of an impossibly broad ethnic category like Latino has had a backfire effect, creating for some an even more impossibly broad category. As the political scientist and former Latin Americanist for Jimmy Carter’s National Security Council Robert Pastor once pointed out, this strange partitioning trend “has melted together ethnic groups like Poles, Jews, Irish and sometimes even blacks into a new undifferentiated mass called ‘Anglos.’”

I thought of this recently when some market-manufactured Mexican starlet (I forget which one; all those midriffs start looking the same after a while) mentioned Lenny Kravitz as her favorite “Anglo” musician, a tag that might surprise the African-American singer/guitarist.

The other day I received an e-mail from a reader commenting on my interpretation of Mexican politics “from an Anglo point of view.” I took it as a compliment, but I wonder how my Irish and Scottish ancestors would feel about their distant descendant being assigned to a tribe they fought for centuries.

But the etymological fuzziness isn’t the real problem. After all, English uses plenty of geographically ambiguous terms — “Indian” and the aforementioned “American” come to mind — but we seldom have trouble understanding them correctly in context. If “Latino” is used basically to mean Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking (or descendants of same) and “Anglo” means everybody else, then so be it. As already pointed out, it’s often politically useful to divide the U.S. population that way.
It’s also a marketing gold mine.

Where we run into problems is when the Latino label is used either too specifically (that is, to homogenize individuals) or too widely (beyond the U.S. border). There is debate among Chicanos and Mexicans in the United States about the appropriateness of terms like Latino or Hispanic, both vis-à-vis each other and in absolute terms.

Some object to the Eurocentrism of the labels, which leaves no room for the indigenous element. “Mexican! Not Hispanic. Not Latino. Stop the cultural castration,” read a storefront sign several years ago at the East Los Angeles office of an organization called Mexica Movement. It may still be there.

But even granting (perhaps too generously) that Indian blood is assumed in the term Latino, it’s still troubling to hear the word applied instead of Mexican, when the person in question is indeed Mexican. It’s the tyranny of the facile generalization. “Latino,” in fact, seems to be turning into just one more manifestation of the outdated and never-valid U.S. perception that Americans of Northern European descent are somehow the norm . . . and then there’s everybody else, available to be grouped according to their relationship with the norm. (Remember the term “World Music?” Same thinking.)

It never occurs to some Americans, then, that most Mexicans don’t think of themselves as Latinos. Sure, they recognize their bond with the rest of Latin America, but they certainly don’t think of themselves as essentially the same as Brazilians or Argentines or Dominicans. A Mexican looks out his window, he sees Mexicans, not Latinos.

The strategic value of the Latino cause in the United States has long been eclipsed by the Latino consumer category promoted by those who see riches in diluting the popular culture of each individual nation and selling the resulting gruel to the “Latino market.” And trust me, they’re not thinking much about Pedro Infante or Real de Catorce (the band or the place). They’re loading up the sappy soap operas, the schlock variety shows and the flavor-of-the-month pre-fab pop stars that have nothing to do with any Mexican or even “Latino,” tradition.

Forgotten is the rich Mexican popular culture that spawned a golden age of film and a canon of popular songs to rival any output on Earth, and is still multiplying today, under the radar. In its place is the dumbed-down pablum churned out by an amoral clique of greedy bottom-feeders with hegemonic control of the entertainment media on both sides of the border.

But no matter, it’s all “Latino culture” now. That’s how the marketeers define it, so that’s what it is. “Latino” may just end up superseding “Mexican,” even in Mexico.