TALK: Complexity of Latino identity and its consequences
By hola | Published | No Comments
As most people of Latin American ancestry can tell you, it’s not uncommon to have, within the same family, people who society and the U.S. Census Bureau may see as members of completely different racial groups.
These questions—how others perceive us and how we form our own identities—drive the work of sociologist Nancy López.
“[W]e are all members of the same human race, however that does not mean that we all occupy the same racial status, social status in society, and that does not mean we have the same cultures or lived experience,” according to Dr. López , who presented her ideas last month at the Smithsonian’s S.Dillon Ripley Center. Her talk on what she has dubbed “street race-gender,” challenged some common notions about identity.
López, director and co-founder of the Institute for the Study of “Race” & Social Justice at the University of New Mexico, spoke in front of a screen displaying a collage of faces of people from many backgrounds, with different skin colors, gender and race. While they may look strikingly different, every one of the people in the photos could be Latino or Hispanic, or have ancestry from those places, she pointed out.Their ethnicity (cultural background, national origin or even ancestry), however, is not to be confused with race as a master social status or position in society that is often based on the meanings assigned to a conglomeration of physical characteristics, including but not limited to skin color, hair texture, facial features, etc. While some people, at first glance, may be assumed to be Hispanic, that’s not true for all Hispanics, she argued, toggling to a photo of her own family—her mother with darker skin and her father with lighter skin—by way of illustration.
“My mother, obviously on the street, and myself, would be racialized as black women. My father probably has African ancestry but probably would not be racialized as a black person,” she said, adding that this reality does not make her Dominican immigrant parents any less Hispanic.
In her Feb. 19 presentation, she used U.S. Census data and various other studies, arguing against the proposed changes to the 2020 Census that would eliminate the question: “Is this person Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish Origin?” Instead, the question would be rephrased into a much more open-ended query about one’s “origin or race”. For López, the change would undermine the analytical rigor of Census data for Civil Rights monitoring and enforcement in policy arenas including voting rights, housing, education, employment, and health and disregard the concept of “street race-gender.”
How we are perceived on the street is very different from the way we fill in answers on the Census form, López said. Race and ethnicity, she posited, are two different and highly complex social constructions that contribute to how we each form our identities.
To illustrate her point she pulled up statistics on race and ethnicity from 2010 Census, discussing how Hispanics answer the question on race. Of people who self-identified as “Hispanic,” 53% of those identifying as of Mexican or Puerto Rican origin marked “white” while only 9% of the Puerto Rican group and 1% of those claiming Mexican ancestry identified themselves as “black”. But some people may “contextualize” the question differently, she says, citing researchers who have found some residents may interpret the question as: “Are you asking me if I’m a citizen? Yeah, I am American, so I’m white.”
“Contextualization” also matters in unexpected ways, she says. For instance, a person could be racialized differently in different countries; and those differences can have far reaching affects to such things as health. López mentioned the case of an African American colleague, whose race or street race-gender changes depending in whether she is in the U.S, Brazil, or South Africa. Other research conducted in Puerto Rico measured race in three ways: “pigmentation,” or how dark or light the subject’s skin appears; how the person self-identifies; and where he or she would fall in the local racial social hierarchy in Puerto Rico.
The study found that how you are classified by race in the local racial social hierarchies contributes to health outcomes such as blood pressure and life expectancy. So no matter how you identify yourself, the way society racializes you impacts your life experiences and thus your health.
Those findings only underscore the importance of understanding street race-gender, López says, and the consequences we don’t often think about.
—John Levandofsky
If you want to watch Dr. Nancy López’s Presentation follow this link.
For further reading on this topic, check out Dr. López’s list
See more from the Smithsonian’s “Being and Belonging: 21st Century Complexities of Representing the African Diaspora,” check its Calendar of Events.
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