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I know I get annoyed by this. When people say they are white and Mexican, or black and Puerto Rican I find this quite silly. I find this as dumb as someone saying I'm half black and half American. When I decided to read up a little on Latin American history I found that their counties are quite similar to America. I then learned that muti ethnic socieities isn't just the domain oftthe USA but countries in the entire Western Hempisphere. I think we tend to broad stroke Latin American countries as being homogenous, when they're not.
Some silly inconsistencies are especially present when people are blacks from Latin America, then are considered less black than black Americans. Yet they both share the same background of slavery, yet people find them .less black. Many say blacks in Latin America are mixed and run away with it, yet black Americans are similiarly mixed.
I also find it quite irritating when Latinos in America are more than willing to classify themselves as a different racial category, but in reality many Latinos in America can fall into a broad list of categories in their home country. One.of the most.disturbing is when say mixed with Brazilian, yet Brazil has more racial categories than America!
Why dont more people challenge this. Hyphenated America is already widely inconsistent and this adds to it even more
I think the reason more people don't challenge it is that they simply don't know enough about Latin America. South and Central America are very underrated and undervisited parts of the world by American tourists. But when presented with the fact that Gisele Bundchen would be classified in the same category as a Quechua person from Peru for example, according to the American census then it really shows how silly the Latin/Hispanic catch all is.
I've always found this to be quite amusing, americans thinking latin is a race.....but that's not a problem only with latinos actually, for example, a white asian in america isn't white, he's just asian....
I'm African-American & Dominican (aka Afro-Dominican) thanks to my parents and filling out the the race & ethnicity box has been the bane of my existence for as long as I can remember. When I was younger, it was just "Black (Non-Hispanic)" -- well, that doesn't represent me because I'm a Black Hispanic. So, I often chose "Other" until I got older and demographic data started letting me choose Black (Non-Hispanic) as my race and Hispanic/Latino as my ethnicity.
As for the white/Mexican and black/Puerto Rican designation, I also agree that it comes from a bit of ignorance. You can be a white Mexican, a Black Puerto Rican, and even an Asian Brazilian, but Americans do tend to draw a line because they don't understand race in Latin America, I find.
Look at a TV commercial that shows a several people all having a barrel of fun enjoying the sponsor's product, like a Whopper or their new car insurance, or something to to make pimples or their fat butt go away. Look at the people in the ads. There are white ones and black ones and Latino ones and Asian ones and mixed ones.
It's not the white people in the ad agencies that demanded those varied people from central casting. It's the advocacy groups from the black and Latino and Asian populations demanding that their actors be given jobs in TV commercials and that the advertisers represent all different "races" in their presentations of happy people deliriously using their products.
The Latinos have actually filed lawsuits against advertisers, suing for them for under-representing them in the casting calls for TV commercials, and organized boycotts against advertisers who do not use Latinos in commercials as users of their products. White-owned American corporations and their advertising agencies have always been perfectly happy to just use white actors in commercials, but it is the Latiinos (and blacks and Asians) who have separated themselves out and demanded recognition of themselves as people of color in our national image of ourselves.
White Americans are not the ones demanding that they be portrayed separately from people of color. The people of color are demanding the separate recognition, and getting it.
Now turn on Univision and watch the Spanish language commercials. All white blue eyed blondes. No more dark, conspicuously Latino-looking people in the TV ads. They all speak Spanish, but look Swedish. In Latin America, the TV weather girl is blonde.
It's annoying. I have maybe some European ancestry in me, so I'd be considered a mestizo. In other words, I'm also Native American. But nooooooo, I can't put Native American 'cause of my family origins, so I'm "Hispanic/Latino."
When most Americans think of a Latino "race", they usually think of Mexicans, who are mostly mestizo or Indio. In other words, someone who looks like this:
Dude...What is black, or white, or indian, or asian in Brazil?!!! BRAZILIAN "RACE" is yet to be formed....By the way we are not worried about such nonsense since there is only one race when we refer to man an woman: THE HUMAN RACE. All the rest is just bu...it
Latinos are united by language and a very similar history,, that's why it is a race/ethnicity in the USA.
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