I started having some concern about whether "Hispanic Heritage" is the best way of expressing the concept shortly after learning that there was an official month called that.
Name concerns are not new: African-American versus Black? Native American versus Indian versus Indigenous? Two things specifically came up for this post.
One came when I was watching Huehca Omeyocan at the end of September:
https://sporktogo.blogspot.com/2019/10/huehca-omeyocan.html
The dancer mentioned that Eduardo Cruz - who was talking and playing the instruments there - would not be at a future event because of an art exhibit, but she was kind of teasing him because it was for Hispanic artists and he didn't like that term. I had been wondering if Latinx is better, but this seemed like a good chance to get some input. I went up to talk to him afterward and asked.
He wasn't totally against the term (again, I could tell that she was at least somewhat teasing), but it was more that it is reductive. For him, everyone on the Americas is Nahuatl, which is historically what we call Aztec.
I might have considered that an oversimplification, but I had just read The Book of the Hopi, and the similarities are obvious. However, if you looked into the Inuit or Anishinaabe, that might not seem as connected.
Without making too much out of that, let's look at the other thing: one of my sisters asked me about the term "Asian-American"; because she had heard that it shouldn't be used.
It had confused her, and I don't know the full context of what she heard. I imagine it was something about how the experience of Japanese and Chinese immigrants, where they are more likely to be seen as the "model minority", compared to Southeast Asian immigrants, often coming as refugees and frequently troubled by gang associations - not to mention immigrants from India and Pakistan; there are a lot of different experiences there. Their month goes with Pacific Islanders too, but there are ways in which the native Hawaiian experience is more similar to American Indians than that of Americans with Japanese ancestry. (But then there are a lot of people with Japanese ancestry in Hawaii, and some of the WWII issues would relate.)
As I read more, I find more commonalities, but there are more specificities too. I hope that as we learn more about each other we will come to the point where we find out that we have a lot in common. We should, right? But to get there, we need to know how we got here first, and there are a lot of different aspects. There are frequent common denominators, but we learn from the differences too.
One issue with both "Hispanic" and "Latinx" is that it emphasizes the influence of their colonizers by focusing on the language. That's especially Spanish, but as we talk about "Latin America" it includes Portuguese, which with Spanish comes from Latin.
For United States history, that heritage can refer to the immigrants that come from Mexico, like with the Braceros program, but it can also mean our influence and conflict with Cuba, and our acquisition (and neglect of) Puerto Rico, and states that started out as parts of Mexico, like Texas, California, New Mexico, and Florida. You could argue that it includes our time in the Philippines, and maybe it includes the Contras and the Academy of the Americas and Coca-Cola and Dole. (Realistically, many more corporations and military operations could be included.)
It also includes a lot of indigenous history, some of which one would not tend to classify as Native American.
I am going to stick with "Hispanic Heritage" for these next few posts; I don't know what I will call it next year.
After all, if I wasn't open to things changing, there wouldn't be point in doing this.
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