WHAT'S IN A NAME?

The History and Politics of Hispanic and Latino Panethnicities

Ramón A. Gutiérrez

There is an apocryphal tale of recent popular vintage that circulates along the Mexico/United States border. It tells of an act of miscommunication, born of a mistranslation, between a Mexican immigrant traveling north and an officer of the U.S. Border Patrol trying to stem that flow. The Mexican woman named Molly was waiting in line to cross over to the American side. Finally, after hours of waiting, her interview moment with the U.S. Border Patrol agent arrived. The officer asked: "Are you Latina?" She replied: "No, no, no señor. Yo no soy la Tina. Yo soy la Molly. La Tina ya cruzó." ("No, no, no sir. I am not Tina. I am Molly. Tina already crossed.") The border agent was asking the woman about her ethnicity as a Latina. Molly, who was clearly unfamiliar with this U.S.-based ethnic category, interpreted the question as best she could. She heard "Latina" not as one word but as two — la and Tina — interpreting "la" as "the," and "Tina" as her friend's name. Indeed, her name was not Tina; it was Molly.

This story of miscommunication across national borders, when repeated, frequently provokes nervous laughter among Spanish/English bilingual speakers in the western United States. It shows how the ethnic groups and categories that are known and operate in one national space often make no sense when transported just a few miles north or south. When national regimes categorize populations, the very act of naming gives them a living reality.

Ethnic groups, whether deemed minorities in nation-states or simply identified as members of a subordinated and marginalized group in a given polity, have always resisted and defied the easy classifications of their oppressors. They generate the names they use to refer to themselves as a collectivity, often in their own native language, thus underscoring their linguistic resistance to domination. Such group names are often rooted in religious and communal conceptions of personhood and kinship, as well as in history, language, and culture. Institutions such as the Catholic Church, professional guilds, even merchants hoping to monopolize markets for ethnic goods, have long had vested interests in naming, generating, and sustaining national understandings of group collectivity. My goals in this essay are several. At the theoretical level, I want to examine three moments in the history of what became the United States, looking at the contexts of power that produced particular understandings of social boundaries and group membership: the Spanish conquest of the indigenous peoples of Mexico's north, which started in 1598; the United States military's takeover of what became the American Southwest at the end of the Mexican War in 1848; and the mass decolonization civil rights movement undertaken by racialized minorities in the United States during the mid-1960s and early 1970s. At the lexical level, I want to show how a small set of ethnic labels, whether tied to self-understandings of group membership, to actual social behavior, or merely as text, emerged, evolved, and disappeared, only to reappear again with new meanings generations later. The emergence of ethnic labels that demarcate social boundaries occurs in different temporal registers, sometimes quite rapidly and other times more slowly.

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Since the early 1970s, sociologists in the United States have been particularly fascinated by the emergence of panethnicities, which are confederations created when several distinct ethnic groups come together in alliance for social, economic, or cultural advantage, thereby augmenting their numeric power and influence around issues of common concern. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, for example, indigenous peoples such as the Cherokee, the Apache, and the Menominee came to be understood sociologically as "Native Americans." For several centuries conquering states had lumped them together as "Indians" in punitive ways that marked their subordination and marginalization. They had resisted such leveling, homogenization, and the eradication of their ancestral group differences, cleaving to their own internal ways of being and knowing, and defending their language and culture from the influence of those they labeled as outsiders and whites. But indigenous peoples in the United States had many common experiences. They had long histories of genocide and domination, of wars aimed at their eradication, of territorial segregation on reservations, and of similar structural relationships to the federal government. Calling themselves "Native Americans" made sense not only as a way of consolidating their factionalized power but also of maximizing their use of civil rights, voting rights, and affirmative action policies.

Immigrants and long-time residents hailing...