The 2010 census questionnaire asks two questions related to race and ethnicity. The first inquires whether you are of “Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin.” If yes, then four selections are offered: “Mexican, Mexican American, Chicano” or Cuban or Puerto Rican or other.
The next question asks for race. White, black, “American Indian or Alaskan Native,” or “Asian or Pacific Islander.” As with the previous question, a person could choose “other” and fill in the blank.
Here is how my family reacted:
“Are we white? Where’s brown?”
“It says Hispanic is not a race.”
“Hispanics can be of any race.”
“Well, we’re not black or Indian or Asian, so we’re white.”
“There’s not a drop of white in us.”
“We’re white, but we’re not white-white.”
“I put white and wrote Spanish because what else could I put? I wasn’t born in Mexico so I’m not a Mexican-American. I don’t know what I am. I’m a mix.”
“I wrote in Spanish for race and Spanish for ethnicity.”
“We’re not Spanish. I don’t care what Grandma Jacquez said.”
“What does Randy call himself? A Spaniard, right, with those blue eyes?”
“No, he’s adamant he’s a Mexican. ‘I’m just a short, fat Mexican,’ he says.”
A history exists to this exercise in self-identification. I know it in its New Mexican form, as an often-heated conversation among those whose family roots reach back through the territorial and Mexican periods to the Spanish. The census resurrects larger questions about who we are and what we call ourselves and whether and why it matters.
This is certainly not a discussion unique to New Mexicans. A man, El Salvadoran by birth, calls me, wondering how to fill out his census. “I’m not white,” he says. This is not a statement denigrating whites. It is a reflection of his reality. He does not consider himself white. Others do not consider him white. People call him Mexican.
This confusion leads me to read “Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race,” by University of New Mexico law professor and native New Mexican Laura Gomez. I learn that when Mexico lost half of its northern territory to the United States in 1848, it sought to protect the property and political rights of its citizens in the ceded land. The U.S. granted those inhabitants who became citizens the right to vote. At the time, only free, white men had that right.
This is how the Mexican became white.
But only legally white, Gomez writes. Socially, the majority Spanish-speaking inhabitants of New Mexico were considered inferior to the European American. “Greasers,” The New York Times blared. The racism was so enduring my grandparents on both sides of the family, born roughly five years after statehood, insisted they were Spanish. As my fair- skinned Grandma Jacquez put it, “pure Spanish.” Yes, we include Spaniards among our ancestors, but as Gomez tells me, “nobody could have lived in New Mexico through the 18th century without having been mixed. It’s just not possible.”
“Mexican” appeared as a race on the census only once, Gomez writes, in 1930. It coincided with the Depression and rising nativism that led to the deportation of tens of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. In the aftermath, Mexican- American elite lobbied to reclassify Mexican as white, Gomez writes. But with every census since 1980, she says, a rising percentage of Latinos have selected “other” as their race.
Something larger emerges in my conversations with my family and others. They ask: Why is it that no such ethnic questions exist for other white subgroups, for people of Polish or Irish or Italian ancestry, for all those groups who were considered not white, but now are? And why, they ask, are Latinos forced to choose white or black or some other race, when, in the end, they will be separated out again. When the data is reported, the Census Bureau will tease out what it calls “non-Hispanic whites.”
My auntie Angela says: “My dad used to say, ‘How long do we have to be here before we are just Americans like everyone else?’ “
These are pointed, poignant questions, and as Gomez wrote, are “very much about their desire to belong to the national community.”
So, how did you answer, I ask the professor. She says she wrote in Chicana for race and checked Chicano for ethnicity. As for me, I checked white race and “Mexican, Mexican American or Chicano” ethnicity.
But if I had it to do over, I would have written “mestizo,” of mixed racial ancestry, because that is what I am. It is what so many of us — and certainly our children — are. Regardless of what box we check. Combined, recombined, reinvented, renewed, that is the American story.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
