The invention of ‘Hispanics’ created a political force of 27 million strong
Before 1970, they were considered white by the government
On a California morning in 1969, as dawn outlined the nearby mountain ridges in purple, a pickup truck bounced down a dirt road in the Coachella Valley, filled with activists urging farmhands still picking grapes to join a statewide strike for higher wages. “These workers are so afraid of their employers,” labor organizer Dolores Huerta explained to The New York Times.
Meanwhile, on the East Coast, against a backdrop of overcrowded tenements in Spanish Harlem, a radical group of 20-something Puerto Ricans protested unsanitary living conditions by blocking Third Avenue with a garbage fire. The trash they burned had sat on the curb for days, creating a veritable rat-topia, as garbage trucks rumbled along, cleaning up regularly in richer, whiter neighborhoods.
Puerto Ricans and Mexicans like these faced many of the same hardships—including the high rates of poverty that went hand in hand with their experience employment discrimination, dilapidated housing, and substandard schools that were ill-equipped to deal with Spanish-speaking students—but what they lacked was a cohesive political identity, an identifiable voting bloc.
Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and others were referred to collectively in awkward formulations and categories like “Spanish speaking Americans” and “Americans with Spanish surnames.” According to the United States Census Bureau, both groups were white. Mexican and Puerto Rican were nationalities, not ethnic or racial groups. The federal government believed that they would assimilate into the larger American population in a generation or two.
That categorization of Mexicans as white was deeply troubling to Julian Samora, who grew up in Colorado, part of the area extending through the Southwest where Mexicans have lived since the times of the conquistadors. Samora lived in poverty in the 1920s, raised by a single mother and his grandmother. Signs reading “no Mexicans, Indians or Dogs,” were part of the landscape of his childhood, and barred him from playing at the park in his hometown of Pagosa Springs. Churches were segregated, as were swimming pools, restaurants, and schools.
The nation had spent the last two decades riveted by the bus boycotts, sit-ins, and freedom riders of the civil rights movement that changed not only the South but federal law. Voting rights protections and anti-discrimination laws were enacted. Federal funding was earmarked in an attempt to repair the centuries of damage inflicted on African Americans. Yet the systematic discrimination confronting minorities who were not African American received scant attention.
Samora decided the discrimination was obscured in part by information missing from official records. So he and a few fellow scholars documented the conditions of Mexican Americans in a report called La Raza, published in 1966. “The Spanish-speaking people,” Samora concluded, “suffer from worse education, housing, employment, health, income, and education than non-whites.” That report was eventually published as a book that brought national attention to the “other” civil rights movements going on in the U.S.
The report also convinced the Ford Foundation to fund the organization that would become the National Council of La Raza, an advocacy group started by Mexican Americans including Samora. Leaders of La Raza realized that their political power would increase exponentially if their membership grew by including other Spanish speaking people. Their push was successful. By 1970, the government counted “Spanish-speaking people” on the Census, and by 1977, Hispanic was a category of identity, alongside White, Black or African American, Asian, American Indian or Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander. The new ethnic category of Hispanic was fairly vague (people of Spanish origin), but it encompassed the three largest groups of Spanish speaking people, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and Cubans, into one population.
Initial attempts at unity revealed how little the new identity meant to the people setting garbage fires and picking grapes, who lived on different coasts, and in separate worlds. Cubans, who migrated largely to Miami and were a relatively affluent group, had even less in common with their new compadres. Initial gatherings meant to set a common agenda, like the first UNIDOS conference in 1971, ended in conflict and despair rather than shared goals. “Coalition will have to wait, another generation maybe,” Hector Badillo, a Puerto Rican congressman representing the Bronx, lamented after the meeting. Much was at stake, including the political clout that came with an ethnic voting bloc nine million people strong.
The lure of a common identity did lead to an unlikely collaboration. Advocacy groups including the National Council of La Raza, the Census Bureau, and the then-fledgling Spanish language television station Univision led the charge to create a Hispanic identity, a process that Cristina Mora documents in her book Making Hispanics. The officials from the census negotiated the definition of Hispanic with representatives from advocacy groups including La Raza. Univision, which wanted to use census data to show potential advertisers that Hispanics were a sizable group of consumers, promoted the new ethnic category in commercials for the upcoming census. Ads featured famous athletes urging viewers to fill out their forms. “It’s not too late for you to be counted in the future of America,” exhorted Seattle Seahawk Efren Herrera. Even Big Bird showed up in one spot, following Maria from door to door as she counted Spanish-speakers on Sesame Street, nodding his big head in approval at the ease and speediness of filling out the form.
The term did catch on, with 17 percent of Americans now identifying as Hispanic on the census. That has made Hispanics a formidable political force, one that is routinely courted by politicians nationwide, including in presidential races. The vague definition of Hispanic proved useful too, as new immigrants arrived and could be included in the group. Immigration from the Dominican Republic doubled between 1990 and 2000, and migrants from El Salvador rose sharply beginning in the 1980s, with 1.1 million Salvadorans living in the United States by 2008.
The new identity, however, has yet to obliterate the disadvantages that Samora documented in La Raza. Mexicans and Puerto Ricans were among the poorest Americans then, and they remain so today, suggesting that political clout isn’t a cure-all for social problems.
