As your resident latina I feel the need to weigh in on the moniker "Hispanic" as in "Hispanic Heritage Month". Actually, people have been asking me off-blog about the 'hispanic vs. latino' and I just have to weigh in.

If the opening of this post is any indication, and if you are too lazy to peruse our archives, you will see that not once have I used the term hispanic to descibe myself nor my heritage. I detest the word. I loathe the word. I find the word hispanic repulsive and repugnant, to the point of inciting me to acts of violence. Why? Let me give you some reasons :

1. Hispanic assumes that all people in Latin America speak Spanish.
   What about the languages spoken by Haitians (French), Trinidadians(English) or Brazilians (Portuguese)? What about indigenous and creole languages like Aymara, Quechua or Papiamento?

2. Hispanic assumes all people in Latin America have a Spaniard and European ascendancy.
   Along with the fallacy of Spanish-only, even in a place like Puerto Rico (which was a Spanish colony until 1898), Spanish Castillian culture was not the source of most of the Spanish culture in the island.

   Most of the Spaniards that settled in Puerto Rico were not Castillian. These so-called Hispanics were actually non-Spanish speaking Catalanes (Catalunya), Gallegos (Galicia), Mallorquines (Las Mallorcas) and Canarinos (Islas Canarias) with, as per some demographics theories floating around now for more than 30 years, a huge influx of Crypto-Moors and Crypto-Jews from Andalucia and Granada.

   The rest of Latin America is even more complex. The Argentinian lilt is attributed to the massive influx of Southern Italians during the turn of the 20th century. Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, they all got some massive waves of Persian Jews and Christian Lebanese during the 2nd half of the 20th. The sugar explosion could not have happened without the indentured servitude of hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Filipino laborers throughout the whole region. Peru's Japanese community is influential enough to have had elected Alberto Fujimori as President.

   And of course, I wouldn't be here had it not been for African slavery.

3. Hispanic somehow has come to mean WHITE in this country.
   Nothing tells you how badly gringos want to have latinos, who are in their majority a dark-skinned mixed breed of humanity notwithstanding Univision's blurred racial vision of us, than what the US Census has been pulling off since the "Hispanics" came into demographic prominence in this country, especially with the first major internal migration of Puerto Ricans back in the 1940s. Why?

   "Mexican" was instituted as a race back in the 1930s but it's a category that denies other latinos groups. So what did people at the Census started doing? They took Puerto Ricans' self-classification as "Others" to mean we are "White".

   This is the aspect of "Hispanic" that makes me want to punch somebody in the face.

   Here's some of the relevant background from the US Census Bureau :

   The history of census data on Hispanic origin (which is identified as an ethnic origin rather than as a race in federal statistics) is quite different from the history of census data on race. While there were various indicators of portions of the Hispanic origin population, including data on mother tongue, data on the population with Spanish surname, and the designation of Mexican as a race in the 1930 census, the first attempt to identify the entire Hispanic origin population was in 1970.

   The Hispanic origin population of the United States was defined three different ways in 1970 census reports, the first and second based on 15-percent sample data and the third based on 5-percent sample data: (1) as the Spanish language population (the population of Spanish mother tongue plus all other individuals in families in which the head or wife reported Spanish mother tongue); (2) as the Spanish heritage population (the population of Spanish language and/or Spanish surname in the five Southwestern states of Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas, the population of Puerto Rican birth or parentage in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and the population of Spanish language elsewhere; and (3) as the population of Spanish origin or descent based on self-identification. The Spanish origin population in 1970 was overstated in some states, especially in the Midwest and South, because some respondents interpreted the questionnaire category of "Central or South American" to mean central or southern United States.

   Data on Hispanic origin were collected on a 100-percent basis in 1980 and 1990, reflecting the release of Race and Ethnic Standards for Federal Statistics and Administrative Reporting (U.S. Office of Management and Budget, 1977).

   [...]

   In the case of Other race, there was a dramatic population increase from 1970 to 1980. This reflected the addition of a question on Hispanic origin to the 100-percent questionnaire, an increased propensity for Hispanics not to identify themselves as White, and a change in editing procedures to accept reports of "Other race" for respondents who wrote in Hispanic entries such as Mexican, Cuban, or Puerto Rican. In 1970, such responses in the Other race category were reclassified and tabulated as White.

   (Emphasis mine)

   It was Spain, not England, that instituted the slave trade in "The New World" right after they killed off through slave labor and disease 90% of the native populations of the Caribbean. Spain and Portugal were the largest slave-traders in the world, starting as far back as the late 1500's and way before it was introduced in any of the Thirteen Colonies.

   Somehow that makes all "hispanics" white.

4. Last, but not least, Hispanic somehow romanticizes Spanish Imperialim in the Americas.
   This is probably the biggest reason for me to reject the use of the term. It's used to glamorize an colonial past. That somehow the King and Queen of Spain were a better imperial tyranny than the US Congress because, gosh darn it, at least they were our original owners.

And there you have some of my main reasons to hate Hispanic Heritage Month.