Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 3, No. 4 | A Developing Identity Hispanics in The United States, page 2

The next step—the second admission I am suggesting—involves our historical models of group identity. There are two—minority group and ethnic group—and neither works very well with Hispanics. The first is based on the African American experience: the majority—the mainstream of society—identifies a minority group on the basis of race or by other markers that have served as grounds for unjust exclusion. The excluded group, in turn, asserts collective bonds as it seeks redress of grievances. And in the case of African Americans, even after fifty years of political and economic gains, the group is still often defined, and often defines itself, as being outsiders whose status in American society is still uncertain. The ethnic group model is based on the experience of the Irish, the Italians and other European immigrants. They began as outsiders, even outcasts, with a distinct identity based on national origins. Over time, however, through a process of assimilation and absorption, they gained acceptance to the mainstream and their group identities faded. In effect, they became white.

Even if you believe that history likes repetition, there is no good reason to assume that Latinos will march down either of these roads. Hispanics do not share an obvious common marker like skin color that sets them apart, and they have not begun their journey through American society from a common and tragic starting point, such as slavery. Perhaps this helps to explain why society has not imposed an identity on Latinos as rigidly or as pejoratively as it did on blacks, and why Latino identity does not derive from a collective experience such as resistance to persecution. Indeed, many Latinos are immigrants who have come to this country seeing it as a land of opportunity and have succeeded in realizing their aspirations. On the other hand, Latinos are also not entirely an immigrant population that has been invited into the mainstream. Important segments of the Hispanic population have lived aspects of the minority-group experience. These Latinos have a history as victims of discrimination, and they have created institutions as well as a political identity that developed out of a civil rights struggle. Moreover, about half of the Latino foreign-born population is in the United States without legal authorization and most have no avenue for becoming fully incorporated into the country’s national life no matter how much they assimilate. So the Hispanic experience intertwines enough aspects of both the minority and ethnic group models that neither model alone suffices.

The Latino experience in the U.S. is not going to be exactly like that of blacks or Italians or other minorities: it is going to be something else. Whatever Hispanic identity ends up being, to understand it, we’re going to have to open up our thinking about race and ethnicity and about the ways that group identities take shape. We are seeing something new unfolding before our eyes, but the phenomenon is far enough along that we can look back and see where it started and how certain trajectories have begun to take shape.

Many Different Perceptions
Over the course of several years I have worked on a variety of public opinion surveys of the Hispanic population, and this research tells us that Latino identities are fairly fluid and that their view of the United States is expansive. This means, for example, that most Hispanics see no conflict between learning English and continuing to speak Spanish, between learning American ways and retaining a Latin culture. They see the United States as desirable, and admirable in many ways in comparison to their countries of origin except on one point: they believe that moral values and family ties are stronger in Latin America than here. But most importantly, they see the United States as a nation that embraces many cultures and not as a place that tries to impose a single national type.

The same fluidity is apparent in the ways that Latinos see themselves. In a 2002 survey, the Pew Hispanic Center asked a large national sample of Hispanics about the terms they use to identify themselves so we could determine which terms they favored most. We gave them three choices: American, Hispanic or Latino, or their country of origin and asked which term they used first or if there was only one term they preferred. The responses varied sharply between immigrants and those born in the United States. More than two-thirds of the immigrants favored their country of origin, saying they were most likely to identify themselves with terms like, “Mexican,” “Cuban” or “Dominican.” That is not surprising; after all, they were referring to the countries where they were born and raised. Only a small share of the immigrants (6 percent) called themselves “American.” Meanwhile, about half of native-born Latinos preferred “American,” while a substantial number (29 percent) also primarily identified themselves by their country of origin.

The most curious finding involved the terms “Hispanic” and “Latino” because they were not very popular. The group label was preferred by no more than one-quarter of either the immigrants or the native born. It’s not that they are hostile to the idea of an overarching Latino identity encompassing the whole of the Hispanic population, but that identity is not at the forefront of their thoughts. “Hispanic” and “Latino” are not the first terms they reach for when they want to tell you who they are, at least when they have other choices that reflect national identities.

This sense of fragmentation along national lines was evident elsewhere in the same poll, the 2002 National Survey of Latinos, which my organization conducted in partnership with the Kaiser Family Foundation. An overwhelming 85 percent of respondents said that Latinos from different countries have separate and distinct cultures rather than sharing one Hispanic or Latino culture. In a similar vein, respondents were about evenly divided over whether or not Hispanics from different countries were working together to achieve common political aims. But it would be a mistake to dismiss all tendencies toward group identity just because that notion seems to lose out in competition with individual national identities.

When Hispanics are asked about how others perceive them, you find a different story. In that 2002 survey and others, Latinos by large majorities—as high as eight-out-of-ten—say Hispanics as a whole are the victims of discrimination. Near majorities—four-out-of-ten—say that discrimination is a major problem preventing Latinos from succeeding in this country. Three-out-of-ten say that they, personally, have experienced discrimination or that someone close to them has been discriminated against in the last five years. From within the group, the Hispanic/Latino identity may seem weak, but members of the group clearly feel that the rest of society sees that identity forcefully. Ethnic or racial identities can often arise from two sources: what members of a group feel that they share in common and the roles imposed on them or projected on them by the majority. Given the nature of American society today and the characteristics of the Latino population, this is a particularly fluid mix.

Then again, the Latino population is itself a complex intermingling of people whose families have been here for generations, who have come here from Latin America and who are the children of immigrants. As I noted before, about 70 percent of this population is made up of immigrants and their children—the people who to some degree are involved in a process of assimilation. This reality is reflected in Latinos’ views on many different matters, not just the nature of group identity. Perhaps the best way to track this process of assimilation is to look at the languages that Hispanics speak: English, Spanish and the mix of both. Many different kinds of public opinion surveys on different subjects have shown broad and consistent differences between Latinos who speak only Spanish, most often recently arrived immigrants, and those who speak only English, most typically those with long family histories in the United States. And there is often a range of views among bilinguals. In surveys conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center, this pattern has emerged on subjects ranging from the acceptability of divorce, to the chances of success in the Iraq war, to the quality of education in U.S. public schools.

Take the issue of abortion, for example, which we have asked about in several surveys. Large numbers of Latinos who speak and read only Spanish find abortion unacceptable—nearly 90 percent in some polls. Bilingual Hispanics are also disapproving but less overwhelmingly, by about 75 percent. Among those who speak and read only English, a bit more than half find abortion morally unacceptable, which is close to the split you find in the non-Hispanic population. Consider something that is less of a hot-button issue, and you get the same result: in the 2002 survey, for instance, we asked whether it is better for children to live in their parents’ home until they get married. Among the Spanish dominant, 95 percent agreed. Among the bilinguals, 75 percent said yes. And with the English speakers, 52 percent agreed, which was just a bit higher than what we found with non-Latinos.

Next page: Latino leaders and institutions have used the tools developed by African Americans and benefited from the same types of legislation and court decisions in seeking redress of grievances.

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