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Roundtable: Considerations on Latino / Hispanic Identity

Continued

Conducted by Carol Amoruso, Hispanic American Village Editor

WHAT HAVE YOU LOST?

OSCAR PAREDES: To be Latino is a big drawback in the first place.  To be black and Latino, two strikes against you.  They know we work very hard, so they give the harder work, the more dangerous work, the dirtier work to us, and the lower salary.

ILARIO SOTO: When I came to America, and I saw all the different people who are here.…it's so silly that they come here, and most of them change, because they are not strong in their roots.

LEONORA GALVEZ: I don't really feel as if I were in my own home here, but, I feel as if I've accomplished things I couldn't in my country.  I feel comfortable, but it doesn't make me feel happy.  I miss my family.  

OSCAR PAREDES: What they easily lose is the sense of community that is very strong in our country.  People, once they are here, easily lose their values and principals.  They become individualistic, they become materialistic, and they create a culture of exploitation over their same country people or cohorts.

ENRIQUE FERNANDEZ: The United States is a place where people of other cultures, if they are unable to assimilate easily, they'll be ostracized. It's hard for young Latinos, Hispanics, when they're crossbred between the two cultures, to really get a hold of their identity.

O.M.: The problem is, when I'm here in the United States, I miss almost everything.  When I go there, I don't want to be there for more than 24 hours.

HENRY FIOL: There's still a lot of tokenism.  They'll give them jobs, so you can say, "Oh, yeah, we have Hispanic people working in our company."  But as far as the people who call the shots, the power brokers, they're usually either WASP or Jewish.

ENRIQUE FERNANDEZ: In New York, first of all, the Hispanics are less inclined to be open socially. There's an aggression…there's a toughness. There's not that outward spontaneity that you find in the Caribbean….I think it's because of a sense of trying to protect themselves.  Society in the United States pushes people to be less open.

O.M.: My life is 100% here now.  But, the problem is that...I don't know what the problem is.  It's very confusing.  If I would have another life, one thing I would never do, is emigrate.

SEXUAL RELATIONS

LEONORA GALVEZ: All those machismo issues depend on the way the women raise their children and the way they teach sons what their limits must be.  There's still a lot of abuse, but abuse happens only when you let it.

CELINA GUIBAUD: I don’t feel so much comfortable because of the language…

But, anyway, Latin people, they have a very warm heart…. Latin men are more romantic.  Flowers, movies, holding hands, dancing. The American people, they are cold.  When you find one, it’s because he’s coming from an Italian family.

LEONORA GALVEZ: As a woman, even if we come from different countries, we have the same feelings and the same way of seeing many things.  We may have different concepts and different experiences, but in the end, we are all the same.

IS THERE A LATINO IDENTITY?

ILARIO SOTO: I am an Aymara, I'm not Latino.  The ones who call themselves Latino are not part of our culture.  They need to find an identity.

OSCAR PAREDES: My first identity is African.  But, because I am Afro-Ecuadorian, even Ecuadorian people, they don't look at me as Ecuadorian.

O.M.: I'm Jewish.  I'm a Jewish pariah around the world.  I'm a human being.

ENRIQUE FERNANDEZ: Latino is a cross-cultural thing, a new hybrid in the United States, but there is something that holds the cultures together here.  I don't think it's fictitious.

LEONORA GALVEZ: Latino is a very general term.  Because Latinos can be many different people.  For me, it's not the right way to be called.  I would like to be called, "She's from Colombia.”

HENRY FIOL: We're part of the same subculture because of language, but in terms of the culture per se and the collective personality of, say, the Antillano, even the Spanish element is subjugated to the African element.

LUIS VANEGAS: I think about it as Italian-Americans and Irish-Americans and German-Americans and Polish-Americans; they don't consider themselves European Americans.  Colombians and people from Argentina are always going to think of themselves as different from each other.  But, the more they're here in this country, they feel they have a common bond that's beyond where their parents came from.

MARIO MURILLO: …when somebody asks what I am, I joke around and say I'm a Colomboricua born here in the U.S.  As part of the post-modern world, how do you draw boundaries…? I totally identify myself as Latino.

O.M.: Cisco [the administrative assistant at the clinic] is Puerto Rican….I talk to Cisco and he doesn't understand my jokes.  We don't even have language.  Because we have a different type of Spanish. But, there's always going to be some affinity.

ILARIO SOTO: (In answer to: What does an Aymara have in common with a German from Argentina and an African from Cuba?)

We live on the same earth.