Reframing Latino identity for the 21st century

“Multiracial Americans” is not a term I commonly use to refer to Latinos in my social justice education and antiracism organizing work. In the community and institutional settings where this work most often takes place, it is hard enough to get people, whether in education, human services, law enforcement, the judicial system, religion, philanthropy, non-profits, or government, to examine how they think about race and racism or to explore the powerful personal feelings and challenging social behaviors that these ideas generate. It is much harder to get these community and institutional leaders, policymakers, and enforcers to consider how racism—race prejudice plus institutional power, or, as journalist Bill Moyers more poignantly declares, “White supremacy enforced through state control” (Moyer's & Company, 2014)—continues to operate within their own organizations and institutions, disproportionately and negatively impacting the Latino and Black American communities being served. In these racially diverse educational and organizing contexts designed to promote fundamental changes in institutional practices in order to foster racial equity, the conversation about Latinos mostly revolves around how “Latino” (or “Hispanic”) should be considered a “race,” a distinct racialized ethnicity, counted separately from White people, Black Americans, Native Americans, Asians, and others, in order to account for and counter persisting racial inequities.

Even when working solely with Latino and Latina leaders, the main emphasis of the work is on how we, as Latinos—that is, people of Latin American origin in the US—have historically come to be collectively racialized as a separate and distinct “non-White” racial group. This emphasis, deliberately aimed at challenging racism and creating racial equity, is focused on strengthening our collective identity as Latinos as a racial group in the context of the US. Toward such strategic purpose, to refer to Latinos as “multiracial” at the outset typically only adds confusion to an already conceptually complex, emotionally charged, and politically challenging process.

It must also be noted that use of the term “Americans” to refer to the people, historically or currently, of the US can be a source of irritation to many Latinos, particularly to many of us who have lived in Latin America.