Customer Reviews

Hispanic Nation: Culture, Politics, and the Constructing of Identity

5 star:		(2)
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3 star:		(1)
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A new ethnic identity has been constructed "in place" in America, one that could not have occurred -- and indeed has not occurred in any other place in the world. In no other country in the world have Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Haitians, South Americans of all stripes, and other peoples of Spanish language origins been forced together into a single shared "non-white identity."

The consequence is the demographic nightmare that rightwing columnist and author, Pat Buchanan (and his sympathizers) have been warning weak-kneed Americans and those Americans predisposed towards racism, about all along: The coming (non-white) hordes storming the gates from the south.

This book tells how this new identity has come about and why it says more about America than it does about the people being corralled into an unwanted identity, themselves. Based on extensive interviews, observations, and extensive research, this book examines why diverse peoples of Spanish speaking origins, are beginning to imagine themselves as one new whole non-white identity and ethnicity, rather than as ordinary Americans: For people that are neither black nor white, there is no existential category for them on a fatally race-based American social grid and culture.

By insisting that all people be divided into either blacks or whites - meaning that most are inadvertently classified as black -- America is losing all of its immigrants who do not recognize such racial divisions and boundaries, and thus all those who do not see themselves as fitting into America's sacred racist dichotomy. To most of them, but not all, racism is a special and peculiar kind of irrational false consciousness, into which they find it difficult and unnecessary to fit themselves into, or even to conform to. Most, do not make a big deal of it, they just don't do it, period.

While it would be naïve to suggest that there is no racism among Hispanics, the difference between the way it is practiced in most Spanish-speaking countries and the way it is practiced in the U.S. almost amounts to a difference in kind rather than just in degree.
Typically for them class distinctions are much more salient than racial distinctions, but even here, it is difficult for them to get their minds around having themselves being labeled as "black", and having to be considered black by U.S. standards, as soon as they reach American shores, and having to do so no matter what their class distinctions may have been before arrival. Not inconsequentially, Middle Easterners and Orientals have made the same complaints against America society and its built-in racist code and "false racial consciousness."

It is as much for this peculiarity of American folkways, as for any other, that they find American society a bit "cock-eyed," and its coded and invisible racist rules difficult to negotiate:

The alternative is to eschew American folkways and mores altogether. And establish "in place" little, non-American, non-white, Hispanic (and to a lesser extent also Middle Eastern and Oriental) communities within the belly of the American racist beast. That is why, more and more, Hispanic peoples are beginning to bind together to avoid the many negative and culturally distasteful consequences, if not plainly mad aspects of American society -- with racism being the most obvious and most irrational and debilitating of them. But it also includes many other aspects: the lack of family cohesion, glorification of sex, widespread drug use, etc., ad infititum.

But their main complaint is that American identity is so rigid that no one can "belong" fully to the American national family; no one is fully "of" and not just "in" America, unless he has white skin: Without white skin he just remains "in" but not "of" America, and being "in" but not "of" America usually means being at the service of or under the control of white people.

All of America's politically correct false pretences and rhetorical gestures and inclinations of being a multi-cultured country, aside, as blacks and Native Americans have found out before them, Hispanics are being just "parked" on the outskirts of American culture, as spectators mostly at the beck and call of whites and for white amusement. The reality for most non-white peoples is that America's faux multi-culturality is a sham and one that they (and most other non-whites) have little patience for.

So what do they do? They make a mental note that American society has no real social or moral legitimacy for them, and then they immediately begin to bypass it altogether and fallback on the moral and social teachings of their home countries. This, failure of the new generation of Hispanics to drink from the poison racist cup as their parents once did, has of course alarmed the Pat Buchanan's of America to no end. They see the new immigrants as being "ungrateful," and "undemocratic" - not as for what they really are: insulted by the immorality of the built in rules of America's racist society.

This is the underlying theme of this book and it is an important one. Certainly if their brown skins gave them the same entitlements as it does whites, this might be an entirely different book. As it is it shows how, in the 21 Century, white America is going to have to come to grips with, and forth with more than just genuflections of multiculturalism if the "new American Nation" is to be prevented from flying off into ethnic enclaves as Buchanan has predicted it will do.

Five Stars.

The author is a white American Hispanicist and the father of two Anglo-Latino sons. Fox says a lot of great things here. This book was really informative for me. However, I am not Latino. If I were, I think I might be bored to tears by this book. For example, Fox discusses the type of Spanish that is spoken on the Spanish stations in the US. As a non-viewer, I didn't know those things and found his analysis interesting. But if I were an avid Spanish-language TV viewer, he would just be preaching to the crowd. Books that are deeper and will keep more Latino readers interested are Fusco's "English is Broken Here" and Gonzalez's "Muy Macho."

I found this book to be very informative, with a lot of perceptive insights as to what it meant, what it now means, and what it will mean to be Hispanic American in the US. The dichotomy of race in the US is about to shift drastically with the growing Latino/Hispanic population. However few Hispanics think of themselves as such. We tend to think of ourselves in terms of nationality. Once, we go beyond individual nationalities and unite as one voice, we can then truly impact on the politics in this nation and change the "Face of this Country"! Bravo