“So get informed before spewing racial propaganda.”
What race are Mexicans?
——
https://daily.jstor.org/where-did-the-term-hispanic-come-from/
September 15 marks the start of National Hispanic Heritage Month. As an umbrella demographic category, the term “Hispanic” is contested today, as some communities prefer “Latino,” “Latinx,” or “Latine.” But as sociologist G. Cristina Mora explains, “Hispanic” is a relatively recent invention, and a political one.
Back in the 1970s, Mora writes, U.S. Spanish speakers were mostly Mexican-American, Puerto Rican, or Cuban-American. And they didn’t necessarily see themselves as having much in common. Cuban-Americans were mostly relatively well-off professionals, concentrated in Florida, who viewed themselves as racially white. Puerto Ricans living on the mainland were clustered largely in the urban Northeast. Mexican-Americans—or Chicanos, as the more radical among them called themselves—lived largely in the Southwest and often understood themselves as an economically exploited minority group. Speaking with members of these groups at the time, one former census official recalled, “People didn’t even know what Hispanic meant!”