Fear of a Latino Planet

We know why the right wing of the Republican Party is giving Sonia Sotomayor such hard time. They are scared silly of her. They look at her and see a Hollywood stereotype: an unbridled woman they can't control, like the character played by Linda Cristal, an Argentine fronting as a Puerto Rican in the LatinoExploitation classic "Cry Tough." It doesn't matter that the things she's being attacked for were logically consistent with things Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas have said in the past.
The Republicans are in an identity crisis, and all they have left as a bogeyman is identity politics.

The Ballad of Gregory Rodriguez

Today's op ed column by center-right assimilationist Gregory Rodriguez (cq no accent) is a whole new take on the idea of self-hatred. In his subtle "The Generic Latino: What does the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor really say?" he argues for the abolition of the Latino category because, like white Republicans, he's a little bit queasy about being in the same room with a Puerto Rican.

While he has a point that many Latinos identify first with their home country over the broader category of "Latino," his analogy between French considering themselves French first over European and Latino ethnicities and Latino identification is ridiculously flawed. Europe's various tribes speak vastly different languages and have been feuding, well, since the days when the ruling language there was Latin. Spanish-speaking Latinos have been collectively racialized by Anglo-American hegemony over the hemisphere and have a considerably stronger unifying possibilities than Europeans.

Then he proceeds to tell his version of the origin of "Latino" political alliances, when Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans joined forces to create a common political purpose, something that in retrospect, should have raised "brown" flags.

He goes on:

Frank del Olmo, the Los Angeles Times columnist and associate editor, put it more squarely than most when he called the adoption of the catchall term "shortsighted" and "self-defeating." Del Olmo was instrumental in establishing which term the newspaper would adopt -- "Latino" -- but he also argued, in these very pages, that because Mexican Americans made up 65% of all Latinos (compared with 10% Puerto Rican and 4% Cuban), the generic term was more advantageous to non-Mexicans than it was to Mexican Americans. "The term Hispanic allowed other Latinos to use a large and growing Mexican American population to increase their influence," he wrote. "Add up all the Cubans and Puerto Ricans on the East Coast, for instance, and they are still outnumbered by all the Mexicans in the Los Angeles area alone."

This is laughable because so many commentators and politicians from the Left Coast have historically used the term Latino when they were really speaking about Mexican Americans. To imply that the use of Latino sucked political juice out of the Mexican American community is absurd. If anything, the notion of being Latino in America is closer to being Mexican-American than anything else.

Then he says:

I know just as many Mexican Americans who were moved by the nomination of a Puerto Rican woman to the Supreme Court as those who were not. I suspect that many voters may be happy enough about Sotomayor's achievement, but at the same time, they will realize that the elevation of a "Latina" goes only so far and not far enough. I suspect that they may even understand that Sotomayor's nomination could come at Mexican Americans' expense. Because the media and the political elites make no distinctions among Latino groups, Mexican Americans may find themselves waiting a very long time for one of their own to be nominated to the Supreme Court.

Sounds like he's still upset that they picked Jennifer Lopez to play Selena. Not one word that he is in any way pleased about the nomination of a woman whose class background is identical to the majority of Mexican Americans in Los Angeles, and who has consistently put herself on the line as an advocate for Spanish-speakers and minority women, and is being viciously attacked for that.

"They may still decide that Frank del Olmo was right," Rodriguez (cq no accent) concludes. "Becoming generic Latino or Hispanic was self-defeating. Maybe it's time to dump the catchall terms."

Well actually now that Gregory Rodriguez (cq no accent) no longer wants to be Latino, my Puerto Rican ass is feeling a lot better about identifying as such. After all, this is the "public intellectual" who quoted New York Times reporter Alan Riding (whose authoritative weight stems from the fact that he covered the Contra War during the '80s) to prove the supremacy of the Mexican American experience:

"While many other Latin American nations and cultures were the products of conquest and colonization, 'Mexico alone is truly mestizo: it is the only nation in the hemisphere where religious and political--as well as racial--mestizaje took place.' (xii, Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds, 2007 Pantheon Press)

Well gee whiz, maybe that's why Sonia Sotomayor is a disappointment. What could she possibly have learned about "mestizaje" or multiculturalism growing up in the South Bronx? A place where Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, African-Americans, and so many other razas made a mestizaje that birthed hiphop, salsa, graffitti, among other things (Colin Powell?). Should we be mourning the fact that alleged perjurer and probable war criminal Alberto Gonzales (cited as "one of our own," by Rodriguez on p. xvi, ibid), despite many teases from George W., never even got nominated?