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i stumbled across “rising young voices,” a WaPo article about latino interns on capitol hill. it describes how young latinos wrestle with their identity – as americans, as latinos, and so on – and early on focuses on their objection of that ever present shibboleth, the word “hispanic.” rightly so[...?], they object that their internship program is sponsored by the congressional hispanic caucus institute. like the young turks (err, young latinos) they are, they protest the term as smacking of colonialism, blah, blah, blah. their whole argument reeks of undergraduate classes in area studies, which i guess makes a fair amount of sense; they are all undergrads! esther aguilera, the head of the institute, states that they chose the term because the US census standardized the term. that’s a pretty weak argument, if not for the fact that in 1997 OMB revised the racial and ethnic classification to “Hispanic or Latino.” even moreso, CHCI is a non-governmental non-profit, so theoretically it should be less encumbered by washington bureaucracy.
nonetheless, the article is pretty good, and invokes stuff i’ve struggled through as i’ve become an adult: whether i’m ‘really latino’ because my dad is peruano, or because i don’t look that way (except in summer – i am now a swarthy motherfucker), or because my dad didn’t try too hard at teaching me spanish. (pizzawhale & i have spoken about this at length before, too.) i also related a whole fuck of a lot to the part about wanting to help out my fellow latin brothers & sisters, especially on account of moving to DC – and in particular, moving into columbia heights. you can’t help but feel a connection whether you want to or not. at least, that was my experience. regardless of my background – highly educated, suburban/rural (fuck, i grew up in the woods!), middle-class, half-second generation, half-multiple generation – the connection to la raza is there.
