Although I am not crying in my pillow that Linda Chavez won’t be running the U.S. Department of Labor, I found an oft-heard criticism of her during the few days she spent as a Cabinet nominee to becurious.
It was the criticism that “She doesn’t even speak Spanish.”
No, Spanish has not become a criterion for the labor secretary’s job. The key word here is “even.” In other words, if she doesn’t even speak Spanish, how can she truly be “Hispanic?”
That immediately raised a question in my mind: If she’s not Hispanic, then who is?
If speaking Spanish makes you Hispanic, should we start calling George W. Bush Jorge?
I do not speak Swahili but that doesn’t make my ancestry less African.
Do you have to “look” Hispanic, as the popular phrase goes, to be Hispanic? Ricky Martin and Christina Aguilera, who have recorded hits in English and in Spanish, don’t have looks that fit particular stereotypes, yet no one would doubt their credentials.
How about Hispanic surnamed? On that, Chavez qualifies. She traces her ancestry to Spain by way of Mexico on her father’s side and Irish-American on her mother’s. She is Catholic and her husband is Jewish.
Still, as families go, she is hardly less Hispanic than President Clinton’s Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, whose father was a white Anglo-Saxon Bostonian and his mother a native Mexican.
All of which raises larger questions about how useful ethnic labels really are these days. Hispanic, for example, covers a wide range of nationalities and cultures that form a salad bowl of diversity. Similarly, Asian takes in an even larger salad bowl, stretching from Siberia down around the Pacific Rim to India and Pakistan.
Does this mean we should just throw up our hands and get rid of such labels? Some critics of race-conscious government standards think so. But ignoring group differences do not make group problems go away.
These are serious questions directed to the federal government, which has been no confused over such questions than the rest of us. Federal definitions of Hispanic have evolved over the years.
The Office of Management and Budget, which controls the census, has found great national confusion over how to define Hispanic. Many respondents, it found, viewed race, ethnicity and national origin as the same thing and, as one evaluator put it, “may represent misunderstandings among the American people.”
The American Anthropological Association concluded in 1997 that ethnic categories are beginning to have more meaning than race to Americans in our census forms.
They found that 97 percent of those who checked “other race” on the 1990 census form were Hispanic.
With that in mind, the anthropologists recommended that the federal government phase out the term “race” and encourage greater use of ethnic categories by 2010. After all, they found, common phrases like “your people” and “where you come from” tended to form the basis on which people described their race or ethnicity.
With interracial marriage on the rise and ethnic labels like “African-American” increasingly replacing racial labels in common usage, race simply is beginning to lose its meaning, the organization observed.
Someday, I predict, we Americans will become like Mexico, which dropped racial categories from its census decades ago after race lost significance there.
But the questions of race and ethnicity still play too large a role in the daily lives of too many Americans who feel threatened by the very fact that they belong to a group that too often has been discriminated against. As long as minorities feel they need protection, these labels will matter–even when the day comes when non-Hispanic whites are a minority.
No matter who the minority is, I suspect, some people will continue to find ways to define “our people,” while our government and politics frantically try to catch up.
Like many others, I dream of the day when we Americans can stand together and say we are all one “people.” Maybe the next century will see it. In the meantime, before we get to that day when differences won’t matter, we have to try to understand our differences.
