Hispanic Nation: Culture, Politics, and the Constructing of Identity (Paperback)

~ Geoffrey Fox (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Among Hispanics in the United States, notes Fox, a new sense of group identity is emerging that allows Americans of Puerto Rican, Mexican, Honduran, Chilean and other Latino origins to feel they belong to a homogeneous, unified community. In the most revealing book on Hispanic culture since Earl Shorris's Latinos, Fox examines how Spanish-language television, radio, newspapers, books and magazines create a common set of images that reinforce certain values such as family loyalty. Focusing on the divergent experiences of Puerto Ricans, Chicanos and Cuban Americans, Fox argues that Hispanics, hewing to an old American tradition, are creating a solidarity group as a way to confront perceived injustice, to get ahead and to negotiate better terms of assimilation. His incisive report surveys the web of political, community and voluntary associations through which Hispanics are gaining clout, and also scans memoirs, novels, paintings and music that are helping to forge a sense of shared identity. Fox, a journalist on Hispanic issues, has been a community organizer and has written two children's books.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Fox has done field work in Latin America, worked as a community organizer, teacher, and researcher in Puerto Rico, Chicago, and New York City, and written studies of Venezuela and Argentina for young readers and a short-story collection (Welcome to My Contri, 1992 reprint) about relations between Anglo and Hispanic Americans (the latter include his partner and sons). Hispanic Nation explores many factors, from media and culture to local and national politics, drawing Americans with roots in Central or South America or the Caribbean to recognize themselves as "Hispanics" and involve themselves in shaping the meaning, agenda, and place of Hispanics at the political table of those who share this identity. Despite the ethnic, racial, religious, and political differences that divide them, the statistical fiction that lumps "persons of Spanish-Hispanic origin or descent" into a single category is the basis for a key identity shift: a shift with important consequences for all Americans because, in merging their separate national backgrounds into a new identity, Hispanic Americans are inevitably challenging rigid black-and-white definitions of what it means to be an American. Mary Carroll --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 264 pages
• Publisher: University of Arizona Press (August 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0816517991
• ISBN-13: 978-0816517992
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #667,050 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great for non-Latinos......., April 19, 2002

By A Customer

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."

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How racism has turned a statistical fiction into a social and cultural Reality (or A white American nightmare?), October 2, 2006

By	Herbert L Calhoun "paulocal" (Falls Church, VA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Color of our Future seems to be brown..., June 2, 2000

By	Yvette Sanchez (Philadelphia, PA United States) - See all my reviews

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