race for racism

it's always perpetually fascinating to me that racism is actually more evident in homogeneous groups rather than in heterogeneous ones. for example, the midwest is very white white white, something i'm not used to given that there's more "diversity" (i cringe at that term) back east. i had a friend say he experienced a similar reverse culture shock -- "there are three races where i'm from [he's from LA] but here there are two." and upon that, i had to educate a cyclops that his jocular anti-semitism wouldn't fly in my area, where every second friend is jewish. i also mentioned that my high school was 40% asian, and then i started wondering about all these poli-sci designations.

education seems obsessed with classifying, labeling, and distilling. did you know that the term hispanic didn't even exist until US government-mandated censuses came up with it? and the term latino emerged as a response to the government-mandated label. so, along those lines, calling an argentinian who lives in argentina "latino" would be nonsensical -- it's a US-centric term. the government census initially classified people based on last names, then based on mother-tongue. but what about all those mexican-americans living in tejas, new mexico, nevada? the border literally crossed them early on in american history, so what category were they supposed to place themselves? this is where the chicano movement of the '60s came into play; latinos self-appropriated the term "latino" (instead of hispanic) because their existence in the americas was/is bizarre: an existence of colonization, racism, ethnicity.

the term "hispanic" refers to españa -- that glorious mother country that every "latino" from santo domingo to puerto rico purportedly strives toward. but where to place people from belize or haiti (which shares the island of hispaniola with the dominican republic) or even brazil? people speak portuguese in brazil, french-creole in haiti, english in belize. are they latino or hispanic when they come to the united states? if so, why? perhaps the question isn't so much why but how: do we continuously see civilization itself as something that always must hark back to europe? do we erase "indian" or "native" history in the process? ask a latino, because this russian has only un pocito español to answer these latino preguntas.