Karl Rove in the Wall Street Journal says,
While the next two to four months of maneuverings and hearings may provide more insights into the views of Mr. Obama's pick, barring an unforeseen development -- not unheard of in Supreme Court nominations -- Judge Sotomayor will become the second Hispanic (Benjamin Cardozo was Sephardic) and third woman confirmed to the Supreme Court.
http://online.wsj.com/...
You are so WRONG, Turdblossom.
Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor is a New York City born daughter of Puerto Rican parents.
Puerto Ricans and their descendants often identify themselves as Boricua and are typically of Spaniard, Taíno and African ancestory.
Benjamin Nathan Cardozo was a justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1932 until 1938. Cardozo was born in New York City and that is where the similarities end.
Cardozo was born in New York City, the son of Rebecca Washington (née Nathan) and Albert Jacob Cardozo.[1] Both Cardozo's maternal grandparents, Sara Seixas and Isaac Mendes Seixas Nathan, and his paternal grandparents, Ellen Hart and Michael H. Cardozo, were Sephardi Jews; their families immigrated from England before the American Revolution, and were descended from Jews who left the Iberian Peninsula for Holland during the Inquisition.[1] Cardozo family tradition held that their ancestors were Marranos from Portugal,[1] although Cardozo's ancestry has not been firmly traced to Portugal.[2] "Cardoso", "Seixas" and "Mendes" are common Portuguese surnames.
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
So, Cardozo was distantly related to white Portuguese Jews and the only proof we have of that is his un-WASP-like name.
But we come to the point, Portuguese-speaking people and thier decendents are not Hispanic or Latino. They both may be Iberian but they do not speak the same language or share the same culture.
To say so, then would include all Latin-based language speakers to be included and be considered Hispanic such as French, Italian and Romanian.
Latin America is not called Hispanic America just because of very large South American and Portuguese speaking Brazil (and that name, in itself, does exclude English speaking Belize).
I know, because I am of Cape Verde decent and we have always fallen into that twilight zone region between races called "other".
But to people like Rove we all look alike anyway.
From the comments...
Disagree. (1+ / 0-)
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aaraujo
First off, there isn't a clear right answer. Racial and ethnic classification is culutrally defined.
The most commonly used definitions of Hispanic include Portuguese-speaking people and their descendants, most prominently the lion's share of the people of Brazil.
Latino is also a term that encompasses Brazilians, although it does not obviously include either Spaniards or people who come directly from Portugal.
Also, Cardozo himself was politically active as a young man in cultural groups that would today be called Hispanic. It was not simply a matter of a fluke name, but was how he and his family self-identified and chose to interface with civil society.
Of course, in Cardozo's time, Hispanic wasn't part of the way people thought about race and ethnicity. He would have been thought of at the time, not as a "Hispanic" but as a non-WASP white ethnic. In fact, the way that Americans think about race and ethnicity has been redefined in almost every single census since its inception.
Similarly, Latin America makes distinctions that the American cultural system of thinking about race and ethnicity don't make. Most of Latin American make distinctions between black, mulatto, and mestizo, e.g., that are not made in the same way in American culture. Most Americans today, use a "one drop rule" to say who is and who is not black, and have difficulty distinguishing the concepts of Hispanic and mestizo.
Cape Verde's approach and that of the U.S. are different, in the same way that Yankee means something different in China or New Zealand than it does in Georgia.
Also, it is worth noting that Spain itself isn't exclusively Spanish speaking, with large cultural and linguistic minorities in different areas.
"Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow." -- Albert Einstein
by ohwilleke on Thu May 28, 2009 at 06:45:32 PM EDT