Latino/“Hispanic”—Who Needs a Name? The Case against a Standardized Terminology

Abstract

Public health specialists, policy makers, social scientists, and politicians, for different reasons, have welcomed the “Hispanic” label. The label presumably identifies an ethnic group that is also a minority group (i.e., a group historically subject to economic exploitation and racial discrimination). Consequently, its consistent use by federal and state agencies would produce large quantities of comparable data useful for research, and for policy making and implementation. Critics have argued that the label is racist, it mystifies the real reasons for the disproportionately high proportion of people of Mexican and Puerto Rican descent in disadvantaged social and economic conditions, and stands in the way of a fair implementation of affirmative action. Latino, a race-neutral term with historical roots, has been suggested as an alternative to be used in conjunction with national origin or regional forms of self-identification. In this article, I argue that any standardized terminology is unavoidably flawed and conducive to the development of racist or, at best, trivial stereotypical analysis of the data thus produced. The “Hispanic” label does not identify an ethnic group or a minority group, but a heterogeneous population whose characteristics and behavior cannot be understood without necessarily falling into stereotyping. The label should be abandoned; social scientists and policy makers should, instead, acknowledge the existence of six aggregates, qualitatively different in their socioeconomic stratification, needs, and form of integration in the U.S. economy: two minority groups (people of Mexican and Puerto Rican descent), and four immigrant populations (Cubans, Central American refugees, Central American immigrants, and South American immigrants).