Here's the problem with the term 'Hispanic'

Who is considered Hispanic? What does the word even mean?  Behind the myth of the "Hispanic vote" is the disputed idea of Hispanic identity...

Transcript

00:00Black, white, hispanic, the hispanic community.

00:06Happy Hispanic Heritage Month.

00:30There's not one unique quality that means that a person identifies as hispanic.

00:41At first, hispanic was a term that was used irrespective of race.

00:47It was understood to be an ethnic marker that whitewashed ethnic and racial differences

00:57by privileging a spanish heritage as opposed to an afro-diasporic heritage or an indigenous

01:06heritage.

01:27To categorize people, there's always going to be

01:33overlap or there's always going to be imperfections.

01:36And one of the things that I think hispanic has always had is

01:47an ambiguity about what it actually means.

02:02Hispanic was a term that was meant to include people who had a cultural connection to Spain

02:18and Spanish colonization.

02:19It was useful to people from Latin America who were at the time residing in the United States

02:28to combine some of their resources, some of their interests.

02:33That's a way of addressing some of the social and economic inequalities that were the product of

02:41systemic racism, the exploitation of labor practices, lack of housing, etc.

02:48That erased the experiences of racialized Latino communities,

02:56so afro-diasporic and indigenous peoples.

02:59And so in the 80s and 90s and today, Latino became a term that was more prominent.

03:08So today you see about 50 percent of people in the United States who prefer

03:15Hispanic and about 50 percent who prefer Latino.

03:45Rosalia is Spanish, so she could be Hispanic, but she's not Latina because she doesn't have

04:00the experience, the cultural experience of being from Latin America.

04:05She doesn't have the experience of institutional racism, structural racism that so many Latinx

04:13and other people of color experience.

04:16If you are white, then your ancestry is imagined to be European.

04:24OK, but if you are Hispanic, then that's indicating that your ancestry comes from

04:32the Spanish-speaking world through Spanish colonization.

04:35Spanish people are not Latino in the sense that Latino refers to Latin American ancestry

04:47and origins and experience.

04:51They are European.

04:52They are Spanish.

04:53For most people who come from Latin America, their first form of identification is their

04:59nation of origin.

05:00Now, with the convergence of Latinx activism, Black Lives Matter, decolonial activism and

05:16practice, we're seeing a more complex and nuanced conversation about how power affects

05:24racialized bodies.