Texas

[beeatnik]

On the subject of naming group of people, I see an issue using the terms african american, asian american or mexican american. First because they are often used without actually knowing the nationality of the person in question. Some people moved to the US but don't have any US paper and don't consider themselves US citizens. And you can't figure that out just by looking at someone's physical attributes. I recently saw someone referring to a black man as African American while he was Nigerian and didn't describe himself as an American. Also while some descendent of slaves are proud to consider themselves african and some have lost track of their exact ethnicity, many other African would find that too limited. Especially when said people have lived extermely violent wars again other ethnic groups in Africa. Also cultures and physical characteristics in Asian countries are very different. Japanese and vietnamese descendants have pretty much as much in common as an Irish and a chinese. In the case of mexican-american, well, first unless you are 100% sure the person is a mexican imigrant, and not someone whose descendants where native of the area before the european arrived, you can't really define them as mexicans. Also Texas was part of New Spain but spanish settlements and population remained low for a long time, and then Texas was part of the Republic of Mexico for what? 15 years? We don't call them french-american because they were french for 5 years. Also people from other latin-american countries origin also live in the area. They can be easily mistaken because they lived in the area long enough to lose some specificities of their country of origin vocabulary and accent and adopt others. Hey my mexican gf has relative that have been living illegaly in the USA long enough for her to say they have a weird spanish accent and they sound like gringos. Hispanic is not that much valid as some newer generations speak very little spanish. Chican@ is also very specific to mexican origin, latin@ is not necessarily widely accepted and well, I mentionned the difference of a vietnamise and a japanese, same applies to a Mexican from Nayarit and a chilean and argentinan leaving

This is pretty definitive. And these terms matter, especially in the context of this tragedy.

https://www.thoughtco.com/hispanic-vs-latino-4149966

Hispanic refers to people who speak Spanish, but Brazil (Latin America's largest country with a majority Black population) speaks mostly Portuguese. Instead, the term centers white people from Spain who have more in common with other Europeans than Latinx people.

Since Hispanic refers to what language people speak or that their ancestors spoke, it refers to an element of culture. This means that, as an identity category, it is closest to the definition of ethnicity, which groups people based on a shared common culture. However, people of many different ethnicities can identify as Hispanic, so it's actually more broad than ethnicity. Consider that people who originate from Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico will have come from very different cultural backgrounds, excepting their language and possibly their religion. Because of this, many people considered Hispanic today equate their ethnicity with their or their ancestors' country of origin, or with an ethnic group within this country.


The word, hispanic, is a misguided attempt by the US government to categorize people of Black, Indigenous, and European descent. "According to the Pew Research Center, census records from 1930 show that in that year, the government counted Latinx people under the catchall category “Mexican.” The same reductive reasoning was used to create the blanket term, Hispanic, during the Nixon administration. It's a term created by white people, as such many Latinx folks do not identify as Hispanic.