For a Better Race

Henry Escobar 
In the United States, race plays a role in how immigrant groups identify themselves.  Several immigrants would rather identify themselves as American and not as Latinos for whatever reasons they may have, whether they think it would be more advantageous or want to avoid discrimination.  But when exactly did the idea of identifying yourself as something else start?  I will go into some of the history between certain races and explore why they identify themselves the way they do in their country and how it could carry over to immigrants going to the United States.

To start, in Helen Marrow’s article “To be or not to be (Hispanic or Latino) : Brazilian Racial and Ethnic Identity in the United States” it talks about some of the reasons why Brazilians identify themselves the way they do. Some of those reasons have to do with Brazil’s history of racial mixing.  One of the main reasons why Brazilians don’t consider themselves as Latinos is because they don’t fit into the definition of being Hispanic or Latino.  The definition given in the article says that a Hispanic is “’ any ‘person of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American, or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race’... since Brazilians are not deemed to have ‘Spanish origin or culture’, they are not considered to be Hispanic”.  They don’t have a Spanish origin or culture because their race is so diverse, they have a complex history of European, Asian, African and Middle Eastern immigration.  

In a study done by Christina A. Sue and Tanya Golash-Boza where they single out Veracruz and Ingenio to do research on their racial identity and history, they find similarities and factors that would sway them to identify themselves differently.  In Veracruz, they find that many of their people know of their own African ancestry but they choose to not identify themselves as such, “black ancestry without black identity”.  In Peru it was the other way around “black identity without African ancestry” which meant that they didn’t really know much of their history, but they knew they were they had some black identity.  This shows how knowledge affects how they identify themselves.  If they knew that their ancestors were former slaves, they might feel like they are lower class citizens, so they would rather choose to identify differently.

 

One’s identity depends on their cultures view on race.  For example, in the article “Blackness in Mestizo America: The Cases of Mexico and Peru” it is show how people “living in a nation where blackness is highly stigmatized” decreases the tendency to identify as such. These ideologies carry over through generations and might affect their and their children’s racial identities.  People would generally want to be seen in a positive light, for Brazilians, they would rather not be labeled as Latinos since for them, they see it as being a class lower than blacks in America.  For the people of Veracruz, they know their history of slavery and deny the identity for shame or other reasons. In Ingenio, they didn’t know about the history with slaves, which gave them no reason to want to deny it since it didn’t mean that they were children of slaves, and in turn they embraced the culture.

Image: http://www.alternet.org/files/styles/story_image/public/story_images/racism.jpg