Hi Denise and DKos. Rather than an obnoxiously long post buried in the comments thread, I’m making this my debut.
I’ve been enjoying this (www.dailykos.com/...) and several other of Denise’s posts problematizing the ”latinx/hispanic” label. As someone who is from the Carolinas and attended school in New York (with Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Panamanians, and others who are Afro-Latino) my perspective is one of inter-relatedness that has been made more critical by moving west to LA where the experience of a brown person speaking Spanish is taken as an anomaly by “latinos of southwest.”
On the issue of “racialization” specifically as it relates to hispanic/latinx identification and US racial politics I had previously the following series of thoughts that are relevant to the issues being mulled over.
1) The challenge and difficulty (and persistence) of the various terms to signify “latin” or really persons originating from south of the shifting border to my mind is a very old and recalcitrant northern european bias.
The “hispanic” designation would have existed historically to delineate those people who had a presumed admixture by virtue of being on the Mediterranean coast, and at varied points conquered territory by a non-european power. As an historic “creole” population in Europe and their proximity to Africa, I imagine that the Iberians and Italians of the 15th century were less threated by “non-whiteness” than their counterparts in the cold north who were frankly late-comers to the cultural exchange that had taken place during the empires of Greece, Venice, Rome, etc. Just to restate the “swarthy” people’s empires.
2) There was creolization and mixed populations in all colonial territories, but the anxiety of maintaining an identity of “whiteness” versus class and social power it seems would have been an especially Northern European predilection. The experience of colonization in this hemisphere was very similar save in one significant arena; that the more Protestant north of Europe seemed more prone to delegitimize and bastardize their bi-racial progeny, and the Catholic south (Iberians, French) less so.
That is not to suggest that the catholic colonizers were angels, but more simply that Iberians and Italians were not considered “white” by the rule of hypodesecent as imposed by N. Europeans then, and the term latino, even when restricted to the more European end of the spectrum persists as a way of saying—close, but not really an unadulterated european now.
3) As to the issue of the erasure of Afro-Latinidad from the public eye… The erasure is on the one hand the marriage of classism and colorism that exists in the Anglo-/Franco-colonial world as well. Beyond that, my sense is that it’s also a numbers and anxiety game. The area of anxiety for multiple reasons is the southwest where Afro-Latinos are a miniscule segment of the population, versus the Caribbean where in many instances there would have been a brown majority (if not a black one) due to the legacy of slave-labor economies. The present political anxiety game is about being overrun by Mexicans and Central Americans, not Boriqua (who are already our subjects and fewer in numbers). And so long as i/we/they “look” black nothing else matters because our lives collectively, whatever our colonial language of facility, are of equal measure in the racist gaze.