Thoughts (and questions) about Latino identity

I am endlessly fascinated by conversations about Latino identity. They are not new, of course. People of Latin American descent have been engaged in them for a couple hundred years. I’ve identified as Latino my whole life, and have studied Latino history for the past twenty years, and I myself couldn’t tell you exactly what Latino identity means. There’s something seductive about the logic that, “Hispanics are those who say they are Hispanic, with no exceptions,” which is how the Pew Research Center put it in their article, “Who is Hispanic?”

The first lecture of my course at Northwestern on Latino History asks the question, “Who, or what, is a Latino anyway?” We never answer it, but we return to it often.

If the conversation about Latino identity isn’t new, though, it has taken some interesting twists. It’s no longer an internal conversation that takes place mainly among Latinos ourselves, but is part of a much broader national conversation. This makes sense, since Latinos now account for almost 1 in 5 Americans, and our growth isn’t expected to slow anytime soon. One way or another, non-Latino Americans are gonna have to get to know more about us as our population grows.

Here’s what I do know, or what I think I know, about Latino identity: there are 60 million people in the United States who identify as Latino, and who’s Latino identity is somehow meaningful to them. If latinidad is to remain a meaningful group identity, it has to be expansive enough to accommodate all of the possible meanings that different Latinos attribute to it, and, conversely, Latinos who claim to be gatekeepers of Latino identity—who feel at liberty to tell Latinos that they aren’t really Latino if they have a different understanding of latinidad than they do—just can’t be. These statements may seem neat and tidy, but they’re really not.

I find myself thinking about Latino identity these days for two intertwined reasons.

First, the book I’m working on right now, an overview of the last 500+ years of Latino history, will trace the evolution of conceptions about individual, group, and transnational/hemispheric Latino identities. I will not be the first scholar to do this. Some recent examples of others who’ve written about Latino identity include Cristina Beltrán, in The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity; Arlene Dávila, in Latinos, Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People; Lorgia García Peña, in Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective; and G. Cristina Mora, in Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Constructed a New American. Read all of them! I hope that whatever I end up saying will nevertheless feel fresh when framed in the context of the whole sweep of Latino history.

The second reason I’m thinking a lot about Latino identity is that I’m teaching a first-year seminar on DNA testing, ancestry, and genealogy. The main question I’ve asked students to consider is: “Where do you come from?” It’s not an easy question. We’ve talked about a lot of things, including new debates about human origins, the development of scientific racism in Europe in the eighteenth century, the genealogical research conducted by American colonists in New England, the Mormon Church’s role in building the ancestry industry, and the roots of Latino, Native American, Black identities. I’d be happy to share the syllabus with anyone who asks for it.

Surprising nobody, the students are almost all STEM majors, and I suspect they hoped to get much more than they’ve gotten about the science of DNA testing. (Don’t worry, I’ve satisfied their desires a little bit). Because they’re STEM majors, I thought they might go all in on biological understandings of identity, but that hasn’t been the case. Instead, they’ve concluded that their senses of self have been shaped much more by the family stories that have passed from generation to generation.

When it comes to Latino identity, the main question we asked is whether identity has more to do with ancestry or culture? Is it about bloodlines or the commitments and relationships we forge over the course of our lifetimes? Are these two options the only ones, and are they mutually exclusive? These are questions that Native American (and other) communities have asked for a long time, and in many cases the answers are mutually exclusive. Some sovereign Native nations use blood quantum as the main criteria for determining citizenship and belonging. Recent Native writers including David Treuer, in The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present, and Doug Kiel, in “Bleeding Out: Histories and Legacies of ‘Indian Blood,” his essay in the important collection The Great Vanishing Act: Blood Quantum and the Future of Native Nations, have been critical of blood quantum as the determinant factor of citizenship and belonging.

And check out this article from a few years back, about a man in Washington state who’s DNA test showed that he was 4% Black, leading him to apply to affirmative action programs. It asked the question: “Is being Black about more than DNA?”

Yearbook photo of my paternal grandmother, Gloria Perea Luján, found on the Ancestry.com website. I often think of her when I think of my own identity and where I came from.

It seems to me that there’s a similar blood v. culture argument taking place among Latinos today. Many Latinos, including this one, have taken DNA tests recently. There are even DNA testing companies that cater specifically to Latinos. In my case, the results weren’t surprising—Filipino, Colombian, Panamanian, Mexican, Indigenous on my father’s side, western European on my mother’s side—but for others they were a surprise, and they shook their self-understanding. Just check out the many videos on YouTube of Latinos revealing the results of their DNA tests. Here are a couple examples: “Afro Latinos Get DNA Tested,” “Latinos Get Their DNA Tested,” and “Latinos Take a DNA Test!” Fascinating stuff, including statements to the effect that, “I wanted to be more Black, I didn’t want to be a part of colonization.” I’ve been struck by how DNA tests do and do not change our senses of self. But I’ve also had colleagues tell me that their understanding of Latino identity was never about ancestry, and was, instead, about the building of mutual solidarities.

To me, neither way of thinking about Latino identity is perfect or complete. Blood and ancestry alone might lead to some kind of Latino In Name Only (LINO?) phenomenon, and maybe even the imposition of Latino identity on a Latino who doesn’t embrace the term. But culture, political solidarities, and relationships don’t feel quite right either. This could lead to the acceptance as Latino of people like Jessica Krug, the former George Washington University professor who claimed she was Afro-Latina. Krug’s case was reminiscent of Rachel Dolezal’s and Andrea Smith’s. In a New York Times Magazine article about Smith’s case, hyperlinked in the previous sentence, the author, Sarah Viren, after considering all the ins and outs, concluded that Native American identity boiled down to a single question: “Are you claimed by the community that you claim?” When we discussed Viren’s article in my class, it made students really uncomfortable to think that in order to claim an identity, they would have to be claimed by a community that claimed the same identity. They didn’t want to turn identity-making into a mutual embrace; or to cede a degree of power to others to determine how they saw themselves.

It’s quite a conundrum, in addition to which there are other competing definitions of Latino identity. Some Latinos today distinguish between Black Latinos and White Latinos, as a way of drawing our attention to how different Latino experiences can be, especially because of anti-Blackness, colorism, and classism. Other Latinos, like the radio journalists Maria Hinojosa and Maria Garcia, on an episode of the podcast Code Switch, respectively do and do not identify as people of color. Still others have argued that mestizaje, or mixed-race identity, at least in the way it was articulated by the Mexican intellectual José Vasconcelos in the 1920s, as the basis of Mexican national identity, is, or should be, a dead ideology, because of how it has sought to assimilate or marginalize Indigenous and Black people. Yet mixture as a core characteristic of Latino identity is undeniable; in my opinion, there is no Latino identity—and perhaps there is no American identity—without mixture. Black or white, people of color or not? These contrasts feel reductive, but if not mestizaje, then what? Can we distinguish between mestizaje as a national identity, but salvage something about mestizo as a basic fact?

All of these questions are related to but not the same as other debates about latinidad, having to do with national group difference, language, religion, or relationships to colonialism. And in many ways, they’re all unanswerable, and aren’t even meant to be answered. Instead, they’re meant to be debated. The debates about them could even mean that the very essence of Latino identity, as I’ve grown used to thinking of it, is the debate about Latino identity itself. Latinidad may just be the endless conversation Latinos have with one another about what Latino identity means to them. As the Latino population grows, and as Latinos spread across the country, this conversation about Latino identity will become more visible at the same time that it becomes less clear. And that’s okay.

Because I’m fascinated by identity and how we all see ourselves, I’d love to hear from you about how you think of your own identity, and all of its complications!