"The 'Hispanic' Race Debate: Limitations of the Term in an Orlando School Board Controversy"

About the Author

Kristi McDuffie is a Ph.D. Student in English Studies at Illinois State University with a focus on Rhetoric and Composition. Her research interests center on rhetorics of race, Latin@ rhetorics, language ideologies, and digital literacies. Her publications to date have explored writing center pedagogy, narrative discourse in television, and models of literacy in young adult dystopian fiction.

Contents

Introduction

The Term "Hispanic"

Research Methods

The Use of Hispanic

Hispanic as an Ethnicity

Hispanic as a Race

Conclusions

Works Cited

Introduction

Is "Hispanic" a race or an ethnicity? Although the government definition of "Hispanic" is based on national origin, the term has increasingly been used as a racial term in many discourse communities in the U.S. As many scholars have illustrated, both the treatment of Latinos and the term "Hispanic" have been problematic throughout U.S. history. In the twenty-first century, amidst increasing fear of immigration that is largely directed at Latinos (and particularly Mexican and Mexican-Americans), the term continues to evolve and influence public discourse about many events. For example, the question of whether "Hispanic" is a race or an ethnicity is the central question in a topic debated in Orlando in April of 2009. Due to a law enacted in 1964, a particular school board committee must be made up equally of black and white members. When this biracial mandate was brought to the attention of the local news, Hispanics protested and requested to be included on the committee. Based on the definition of "Hispanic" as a national-origin term, the school board responded that Hispanics could be included as one of the two races.

The debate as illustrated in the local online news articles and anonymous comments responding to this event focuses on the race-versus-ethnicity question regarding the term. In this paper, I will briefly review the history of the term “Hispanic” and the racialization of the term. Next, I will describe my research methods and the background of the Orlando school board controversy as the case I will be analyzing. My findings describe the themes evident in the responses and potential motivations for those responses. Ultimately, I find that the debate about the potential inclusion of Hispanics on the committee demonstrates how problematic the panethnic label continues to be. Utilizing the term to invoke group identity for political participation failed to have any impact in this particular case because change was not in the best interest of the institutions that use this term. Using the term as a race or an ethnicity is not likely to produce significant change for the people included in this label due to the historic and ongoing marginalization of the group.