Narratives of National (Be)longing: Citizenship, Race, and the Creation of Latinas' Ethnicities in Exile in the United States

Abstract

Toward the end of July 1994, the New Yorker magazine published an article on possible changes in the ethnic categories to be used by the U.S. census in the year 2000 (Wright 1994). Among the four major changes being discussed is a rather controversial proposal that would group together as a race the populations encompassed by the ethnic category "Hispanic." At present, this category officially designates and encompasses 24.5 million people from a variety of Latin American national, ethnic, gendered, social, racial, linguistic, and generational backgrounds whose sole commonality as a "group" is that they have some past or present tie to the Latin American continent and Spain. 1 Given its diversity, the proposal to designate this population as a race seems rather strange and, at the very least, should provoke some controversy-particularly since conceptions of race have historically been one of the key factors in ensuring racial minorities' political and social exclusion from the public sphere in the United States. 2 If the proposal is adopted, the notion of race will be the means through which a population, artificially constructed and otherized in the early 1970s when the "Hispanic" ethnic label was coined, would become even further differentiated in U.S. society. For even today, ethnic labels and

Educating for Financial Literacy

“…The women self-identify as Latinas. Although problematic in the literature on Latino identities, the reasons for choosing one term to refer to the entire group of learners is not about social exclusion (Oboler, 1996) or creating an “other” (Hernandez-Truyol, 1997) but rather is a way of creating an inclusive way of seeing the cohort of learners. It is not meant to diminish in any way the uniqueness of each person’s own individual heritage or essentialize her experiences (Darder, Torres, & Gutierrez, 1997) but rather to reflect the possibilities in coming together as a group to support one another in their similar background and experiences.…”