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Throwback Thursday: hispanic heritage Month! · Tales From Aztlantis

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• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: You must excuse me.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: Greetings, dear listeners, and welcome to another episode of Tales from Must Lantes.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: I am Ruben Ariano Tlagategat and I will be your host for this episode.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: This one is going to shed some light on the so-called Hispanic Heritage Month.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_01: If you know nothing about how it got started and its evolution, then this episode is for you.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: However, if that is old news to you, then stick around till the end to get some much needed context and a critical perspective, especially on the consequences that stem from the creation of this month-long commemoration.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: Let's go.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: Episode 53, Hispanic Heritage Month.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: Trigger warning, the term Hispanic will be used repeatedly in this episode.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: My apologies in advance.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: It has become a lot more common to see people wear this type of clothing throughout the year than it was before.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not as special as it once was.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: But when I was a kid, in my younger and snarkier days, we used to criticize these seasonal cultural observers by saying things like, Wacha, they remembered they were Mexican.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: We would say this especially about folks who we knew could care less about their Mexican or Central and South American roots at any other time of the year.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: This was also true of Cinco de Mayo.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, when you're a kid, this is what you do.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: You rag on or score on your peers, and you also talk about the adults in the room.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: It used to be an integral part of growing up, chicana, chicano, chicanex.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: And it made sense.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: But things have gotten complicated today, haven't they?
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: Back then it made sense until it didn't.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: You grow up and mature and leave those childish things behind, and hopefully you also grow intellectually and realize that perhaps being judgmental about how someone celebrates their heritage maybe isn't the best use of your time.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: We live and learn, and if you persist in your growth, you might also realize a few things about yourself.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: That's what happened to me.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: That's my story.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: One day I realized that I wasn't Hispanic and that the term Latino did not apply to my experience.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: At home, my family was mexicano.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: Among my friends, I was Mexican-American, but my socio-political views were chicano.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: To call yourself Mexican encompassed all these things to varying degrees.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: As a Chavalillo, I wondered why the outside world insisted that I was Hispanic.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: I was Mexican, and this whirlwind of identities was confusing to me, and now I know that it forms part of a larger Chicano identity crisis complex.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: This is something that myself and a few other Chicano scholars have been discussing, writing, talking about for several decades now, since at least the 90s.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's not a new thing.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: Look it up.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: I was born in the mid-70s, and back then there were only two racial categories in the United States, black or white.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: And unless it was obvious that you had African American parents, you were white by default, no matter what shade of brown you were.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: I mean I guess this depends on the region where you lived, where you grew up.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: At least that was the case here in Texas and Dallas.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: It might be different for you.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: But just because my birth certificate said I was white doesn't mean that's who I was.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: I did not grow up culturally white.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: I was Mexican.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: I grew up in a Mexican household.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: But when I went to school, I was now being called Hispanic.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: Something happened between the time when I was born and when I went to school in the 1980s.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: Brown politicos convinced themselves that they were better off as a unified voting bloc, and the corporate business community saw an opportunity to capitalize on that trend.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_01: And thus the birth and the branding of the Hispanic generation emerged.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: In time to coincide with the Mi generation, how interesting.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: But I was Mexican.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: I had to be told I was a so-called Hispanic, because that's not a term anyone I knew used to identify themselves as.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, sure, there were things that we understood as being of Hispanic nature, such as your last name, the Spanish language, the five centuries of hybridity that occurred in Mexico and other Central and South American countries due to Spanish colonization.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: But people themselves were not calling themselves Hispanics, not that I recall.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: That was something you did on a form.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: You went to apply for a job, or if you were again enrolled in school or what have you.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: Some official document was now asking you to check a box.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: Are you white?
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: Are you black?
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: Are you Hispanic?
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: Are you Asian?
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: Which one are you?
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: So that was my understanding of it.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: But I was unaware of the greater social pressures that were pushing Hispanidad from the top down.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_01: Later the term would be replaced by Latina, Latino, and now Latinx as a supposed more inclusive replacement term.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: But despite the protests from those who adhere to this label, it is still simply and unequivocally equally problematic.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: The term itself has deep Eurocentric origins.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: But we'll leave that for another day.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: The long and short of it is that Hispanic programming was being used to indoctrinate me into not identifying as an indigenous person.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: Because to be a Chicano is to have a basic understanding of your indigenous identity, or as we call it, your indigenity.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: As a young person, I was encouraged to adopt the Hispanic label, to forget about being Chicano, and to embrace the cultural brown stew.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: It seemed like the progressive thing to do, right?
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, but deep down inside I knew I was giving something up.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: I couldn't quite put my finger on it yet.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: I was still a kid.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: I was still growing up.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: But when I escaped Hispanismo, I finally understood its problematic purpose, which is to subsume and minimize our individual Native American identities in favor of a quote, we are all immigrants, and quote, homogenized melting pot identity, because it suits the purposes, right, of those that want to keep us in control.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: This perpetuates a colonial mindset that favors the continued control of native people by those of European descent.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_01: Whether you agree or disagree with this assessment, the fact remains that indigenous Americans, North and South, Central included, continue to exist on a lower plane than Euro Americans or those who identify as such.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: And Hispanidad is but one tool in that toolbox of oppression.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: Hispanidad is essentially Eurocentricity with a brown face.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: It is also useful here to interject on what some listeners might be thinking.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe not, hopefully you're not.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: But just in case there is one or two of you out there that is thinking this.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_01: And that is the erroneous notion that by being critical of something, that you are playing the so-called victim card.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: I've heard this before.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, you're just playing the victim.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: Mmm what?
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: By calling attention to the issue, to the problem, that's victimhood?
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't know if it comes from some very misinformed or uncritical place, but if this is you, please, please, please disabuse yourself of that interpretation.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: Whoever you may be.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: Because to be critical of something is to address its flaws and to try to find solutions.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: I wish I could tell you that I found evidence pointing to this as an example of an organic development that's coming from the bottom up because that is something that I genuinely looked into and I was hoping to find, and I did not.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: Because unlike the de los muertos, for which we have ample evidence pointing to its modern day creation in the 1970s by Chigana artists, the evidence for Hispanic Heritage Month being something that was created by the community is virtually non-existent.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_01: Now, if anyone listening has information that is contrary to what I just said, I would love to see it.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: And please, please send it my way because seriously, I have found no evidence of that being the case.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: National Hispanic Heritage Month In 1968, Congressman George Brown of California introduced a resolution to establish National Hispanic Heritage Week.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: The resolution was co-sponsored by 19 other members of Congress, including two Hispanic members, Edward R.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: Roybal of California and Henry B.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: Gonzales of Texas.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: It passed unanimously on September 17 and signed into law by President Lyndon Baines Johnson, also known as simply LBJ.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: The House Joint Resolution No.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: 1299 of the 90th Congress states resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America and Congress assembled, that the President is hereby authorized and requested to issue annually a proclamation designating the week, including September 15 and 16 as National Hispanic Heritage Week, and calling upon the people of the United States, especially the educational community, to observe such a week with appropriate ceremonies and activities.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_01: Approved September 17, 1968.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: Now, after it passed, several elected officials gave statements of approval and support, such as Representative Robert D.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: Price, a Republican from Texas, who stated, It is in the tradition of our country to recognize, cherish, and conserve the many cultural contributions of the people who have helped achieve the greatness of our nation.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: It is high time that our immigrants and their descendants from Latin nations, as well as those citizens whose Spanish heritage and lineage within the current boundaries of the United States dates to pre-Pilgrim days, were honored in the same manner.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: Very, very interesting.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: So here we have an example of an Anglo-politician from Texas noting the significance in creating National Hispanic Heritage Week.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_01: This is back in 1968.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: He is welcoming of immigrants, which is kind of uh the opposite of what's going on today with the Republican Party.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: And to his credit, he acknowledges the deep historical roots of our people on these lands prior to any English settlement on what is now the mainland United States.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: However, he's doing it from the Spanish perspective and not recognizing Chicana, Chicano, Chicanex, indigenity, thus emphasizing the Hispanicness of the week-long National Hispanic Heritage Week.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's not about recognizing indigenity, it's about recognizing approximation to whiteness.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_01: And also to emphasize the immigrant status, the foreignness of these people.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if they're not if they're not native to the nation, they're by definition alien foreigners, immigrants.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_01: So the resolution was designed to recognize the contributions of Hispanic Americans to the United States.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: It specifically mentioned the states, cities and towns with Spanish names, the roles of Hispanic people in developing said cities, towns, and regions, and the considerable population who bear Spanish surnames.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_01: Now, compare that to the way that Hispanic Heritage Month is acknowledged today and has been for a very long time now.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, my daughter a few years ago brought home a thing from school, a little handout, showing the various uh activities and things that they were doing for Hispanic Heritage, and on there was the list of so-called Hispanic artists that they were going to be commemorating.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_01: Of that list, it was a list of like 10.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_01: Half of them were from Spain, and you might guess as to who I mean great artists, but if this is supposed to be about Hispanic heritage when it first started, it wasn't about celebrating Spain, it was about celebrating the efforts and the accomplishments of people who are so-called Hispanic from within the confines of the United States.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, as I just stated, specifically places, cities, states, towns, regions that had been settled by those people, whether they were recent immigrants within a couple of generations or if they had been there since the beginning of colonial settlements prior to the arrival of Anglo-Europeans.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_01: And over the years it's been so I mean, not that I care for it because I don't celebrate it, but still just as an observer, knowing that originally it was meant to do that, and now it's like the celebration of Hispanidad from without the US, not from within the US, mostly from without the US.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, whatever, things change and evolve, but it's just something that I find interesting.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_01: And as a historian who teaches Mexican American history, I find it problematic that so-called instructors of Mexican American history, Mexican American studies during Hispanic Heritage Month, like what happened with my daughter, like will emphasize other histories outside of from the histories of the communities from where we come from here in the US.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: You know, just take that for what you will, it's an observation.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: I just wanted to point that out here before I move on with the rest of the description here for Hispanic Heritage Month.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the week was chosen to include the dates of September 15 and 16, which are the independence days of several Central American countries and Mexico.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: September 15 is the anniversary of the Grito de Dolores, which is basically the Declaration of Independence of Mexico, and marks the start of the Mexican War of Independence and thus resulted in independence for the colony of New Spain, which at the time encompassed the modern day countries of Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Nicaragua.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: Now I understand that if you when you get down to the more historical nitty-gritty, you know, you had other various provinces uh or colonies, you know, you had Nueva Vizcaya and all this stuff, so that's fine.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_01: But for the purposes of this episode, we're just gonna collapse all that into the colony of New Spain, alright.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: The 30-day period also includes many dates, and by 30-day I mean now fast forward looking back from the present because it started as a week and then it became a month, the importance of uh other dates, it includes now Chile's independence, which is uh you know is on September 18th, and the celebration of Dia de la Rasa on October 12th, which also in recent decades has turned into Indigenous People's Day here in the US in repudiation of Christopher Columbus and the so-called discovery of the Americas.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: Which, if you look at the history of El Dia de la Rasa, that's what Eldia de la Rasa was in Mexico when it started.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_01: Back in I want to say this is something that began back during the quincentenary in 1992 as a response to the commemoration of the so-called discovery.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: People were saying, Well, no, we're no longer gonna celebrate Christopher Columbus, we're going to celebrate our people.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so the Dia de la Raza celebrates basically Mestizaje, which is still kind of problematic.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't know.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: But that's basically what's going on at this time.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's celebrating the histories of these various nations, uh, and especially in terms of their independence, in terms of rebelling against colonialism, which I find interesting to then repackage all that as Hispanic heritage month.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know, I just find it kind of weird.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: Here you are, celebrating independence from Spain and then repackaging it as the celebration of Hispanicness or Hispanidad.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: The resolution also asserted the United States' wish to achieve mutual understanding, respect, and appreciation of the cultures, heritage, and the arts of its Latin American neighbors.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_01: President Richard Nixon later emphasized this point in his September 12, 1969 proclamation, which stressed the importance of ties between the United States and its Latin American neighbors.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_01: Congressman Brown's district included a large portion of East Los Angeles and other parts of LA with heavy concentrations of Hispanic Latino residents.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_01: He was motivated to introduce the resolution by his desire to recognize the contributions of Hispanic Americans to the United States and to promote understanding and respect for their culture and heritage.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: Again, was this just Brown acting alone or was he responding to calls from the community?
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, he represented mainly a lot of Mexican Americans, and so I'd like to think that it was the latter, but I haven't seen any sources.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: Again, if you have any information on this, uh would very much appreciate it.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_01: The resolution was an important step in the recognition of Hispanic Americans and their contributions to the United States.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_01: It also helped to raise awareness of the Hispanic community and its culture, and it paved the way for the establishment of National Hispanic Heritage Month in 1988.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_01: So we go from a week in 1968, and for two decades between that year, 68 to 1988, the celebration was only one week long.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I think I do remember that.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_01: Always wondered when it changed, and then I guess that's when it happened in 1988.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: Then in 1988, the commemorative week was expanded to a month from September 15 to October 15 through a legislation sponsored by Representative Esteban Edward Torres, a Democrat from California, and amended by Senator Paul Simon, also a Democrat from Illinois, and was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_01: But it was President George H.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_01: W.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: Bush the Sr.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: who proclaimed the first National Hispanic Heritage Month in his Presidential Proclamation 6021.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: And since then, all presidents have given a presidential proclamation to mark Hispanic Heritage Month.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: This is the basic story, the basic background, the synthesis of how Hispanic Heritage Month gets started as a week in 1968 and ends up being a month-long thing by 1988 into 1989.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: So, now that we have a little bit of the context now, why don't we take a deeper dive, a more analytical approach to Hispanic Heritage Month.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_03: Have you picked up your Mexica calendar for the year 12 Flint?
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_03: Or how about a paperback copy of the four disagreements?
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_03: Just visit talesfromostlandas.com for all the latest merchandise and show some love for your favorite podcast.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_03: That's talesfromaslantas.com for all the latest merchandise.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_03: Now back to the show.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to read portions of an article entitled The Rhetorical Construction of US Latinos by American Presidents.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: This is by Arthur D.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: Soto Vasquez, and it was published in the Howard Journal of Communications in 2017.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_01: And this is the abstract.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_01: Latino political integration into the American body politic is a theme that has entered the public agenda recently.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_01: Political leaders, researchers, activists, and media organizations have devoted tremendous energy to understanding the US Latino demographic and its potential political influence.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: However, there are also tremendous racial and socioeconomic differences, along with varying political and citizenship histories in American Latino communities.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_01: But instead of considering all of these variables, Spanish language ability and other cultural similarities have been treated as signifiers of community homogeneity.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_01: This article uses a critical framework to analyze how official political communication from American presidents has worked to create a Latino abstraction for political efficiency.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_01: It also analyzes public papers and speeches from the administrations of JFK to Barack Obama to explore how presidents have constructed Latino panethnicism through their rhetoric.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: To investigate this question, a qualitative content analysis of presidential rhetoric directed toward or about US Latinos is conducted through a theoretical framework of Latino rhetorical styles.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_01: The data indicate that a Latino pan ethnicism emerged in presidential rhetoric in the early 1990s.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_01: B Democratic presidents have deployed pan ethnic rhetoric more consistently than their Republican counterparts.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_01: And C Latino pan ethnicism is the dominant discourse in presidential politics today.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_01: This article concludes with a call for further investigation into the political construction of a Latino pan ethnic identity, and it also contributes to the question of Latino inclusion in the United States by complicating traditional notions of assimilation and political acculturation.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: So if you're not an academic and if you're not versed in some of these terms like framework of analysis, what they mean is that these are ways that you are going to interpret the data.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_01: For instance, if I want to strip wire so I can make connections, I'm going to use a wire stripper for that purpose.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_01: In this case, the critical frame of analysis, that is the the type of tool, but more specifically, the way that they choose to do so from a Latino rhetorical style is what the author here is saying.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_01: It means that they're going to analyze, they're going to study, they're going to study the data, the information that they've uh attained through their research, and they're going to interpret that data using this tool, this way of looking at the data.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, and so that just means that this is one person's perspective using specific data.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_01: If a different researcher was to come along and they were to borrow the data that this particular author used in their article, they could, you know, they can arrive at a very different conclusion, maybe not too different because they're using the same data, but they could also present a different argument.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_01: The specific thing that is being said here is that American presidents have basically, since JFK at least, that's as far back as he took it, have been sort of constructing a pan ethnic Latino identity through their rhetoric.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the suggestion is that, in part, due to the response to political rhetoric such as this, especially coming from the president of the United States, that uh Latina Latin ex Latina Latino Latinx identity can partially, at least in its current construction of it, can also be attributed to the way that the presidents have discussed it, and then politicos, politicians respond to the rhetoric, and it becomes sort of like a cycle where these words and these ideas get filtered through the Latino lens, and people begin to internalize them into this notion that there exists such a thing as a Latino and ethnicity.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you might know people in your life or that you've met who subscribe to this idea that Latino is an ethnicity, and it's not because by the sheer fact that the term itself is so all-encompassing, and it's a catch-all term, the same way that the Hispanic term was, of varying peoples of various backgrounds, some of whom could be completely European in background, some of whom could be predominantly indigenous or even Asian, where the Spanish were in like in the Philippines, for instance, or in Africa, for instance, the Portuguese that were in Africa and India for a very long time, and you can still find remnants and and uh you know people who descend from those encounters.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_01: Are those people also included in this pan-Latin identity worldwide?
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_01: And that's kind of what this author is is trying to get at.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_01: Look at this construction, but especially from a very specific point of view through the lens of what American presidents have said in their speeches about Latina Latino-Latinx identity.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_01: So let's let's take a closer look at what Sotovasquez here has to say about that.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_01: The article analyzes texts as proxies for the imagined US Latino audiences constructed by American presidents.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_01: And then the author goes on to show some results, and they have it in two categories.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_01: The first category is called before the paradigm shift, and then obviously there's going to be an after the paradigm shift.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_01: So let's look at the before, and this is what Arthur Sotovaskis has to say about that.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_01: The first finding of the analysis is a historical divide in the ways in which presidents talked about US Latinos.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_01: Beginning in the 1990s, there was a paradigm shift both in style and in pure numeric quantity.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_01: This divide is replicated in the structure of this section, where the administrations before the paradigm shift is discussed first, followed by what came after.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_01: In the case of pre-paradigm shift presidential administrations, we can observe three dominant rhetorical features of US Latinos.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_01: First, they were identified as foreign subjects separate from the United States.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_01: Second, the terms Mexican, Mexican American, and Hispanic were used interchangeably, suggesting that the image of Latinos in presidential rhetoric was closely tied to the Mexicans and Mexican Americans.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_01: Finally, presidents heavily emphasized the Spanish language as a unique and distinguishing feature of U.S.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_01: Latinos.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_01: Several examples of these pre-paradigm shift patterns follow.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_01: In 1961, President Kennedy was asked why there were not any prominent Mexican Americans serving in his cabinet.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_01: He responded by stating that he had offered a position to an American of Mexican extraction.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_01: It was unclear whether he meant a Mexican citizen living in the United States or an American of Mexican heritage.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: He then positioned any potential Mexican American serving in his cabinet as a great reservoir of talent who could work closely with Latin America.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_01: President Kennedy's rhetoric positioned Latinos as foreigners who, in some cases, were opportunities to advance American interests abroad.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_01: In 1961, JFK appointed El Paso Mayor Raymond Tellas to serve in Costa Rica as the first Mexican American ambassador to a foreign country.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_01: According to the Making of a Mexican American Mayor by Mario T.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_01: Garcia 1998, Deyas initially expressed reservations about taking the post and leaving El Paso, where he had been elected the first ever Mexican American mayor of a major southwestern city and accomplished significant gains for the Latino communities there, which up until that point had been dominated by a small white elite.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_01: Sitting in the White House, President Kennedy told Deez, To realize that you'll be the first Mexican American appointed as an ambassador.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_01: If you do a good job, you're going to open the door for other Spanish-speaking candidates.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_01: This is in Garcia, 1998, page 125.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_01: JFK's public papers and private conversation recounted by Deyez demonstrated his understanding of Latinos as Spanish-speaking people who could be used to connect to the countries of Latin America, which he felt could be at risk of converting to communism.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_01: Ooh, the boogeyman.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_01: Visiting Costa Rica in 1963, the president conceded in a speech to university students that the United States had not always applied its democratic principles to Latin America.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_01: JFK, after persuasion from Deez, also visited the San Jose Cathedral and a local children's hospital where Thaez recounted that after the news of the assassination of President Kennedy was made public in Costa Rica, people were out in the streets openly and loudly crying.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_01: JFK viewed the appointment of the first Mexican-American ambassador as a strategic move to tighten ties with Latin America and safeguard against the spread of communism.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_01: The data indicate that the Johnson administration was more likely to use the term Mexican American than Latino or Hispanic.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_01: This is probably based on his Texan roots and his experience teaching in Cotula, Texas as a young man, an experience he often referred to when speaking to Latinos.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_01: Speaking in El Paso, Texas, following the return of the Chamisal National Park to Mexico, Johnson said, This is home country for me, as you know.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_01: When I talk with you about the problems and the potentials of the Mexican American, I am talking about people that I have known all my life and people that I care about.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_01: These people are proud people.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_01: They are strong people.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_01: They are older in history than the United States of America itself.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, again, another person of in power in Congress before and now the president, LBJ, acknowledging the deep roots of Chicano Mexicanos in places that are now part of the United States.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_01: That is something.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_01: That is something.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_01: The interchangeable use of Mexicans and Mexican Americans with Latinos has been another consistent feature in US Latino racial formation.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_01: Because a large portion of those considered Latinos in the United States are of Mexican ancestry, their image is often used to represent all Latinos.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_01: Johnson was undoubtedly the first American president to have significant lived experience around Latinos in the United States.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_01: In the fierce urgency of now Johnson Congress and the battle for the Great Society, historian Julian E.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_01: Zezler noted that his students were the children of dirt poor Mexican-American farm workers who couldn't afford to send them to school with lunch, and the town was rigidly segregated.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_01: This is talking about LBJ and his experience as a teacher.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_01: In 1974, President Nixon was the first to include a section in the State of the Union address focused on Latino policy.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_01: However, he referred to Latinos as a Spanish-speaking population.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_01: This was also the first instance of a president referring to a collective of Latinos beyond Mexican Americans.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_01: Nixon's audience abstraction was based on the language, which included some awkward phrasing, such as, nearly 3,800 Spanish surnamed Americans have been employed by the federal government.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_01: The use of Spanish as a shorthand for Latinos continued with the Ford and Carter administrations.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_01: Although proclaiming National Hispanic Heritage Week, President Ford said that, quote, men and women of Hispanic origin, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and other Spanish-speaking Americans have contributed significantly to the growth of America.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_01: Not only did Ford use the term Hispanic to refer to national difference, but he also used Spanish as a signifier of Latinos.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_01: Interestingly, the term Latino appears in public papers from both the Carter and Reagan administrations.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_01: However, Latino appeared only in questions directed to the president from citizens and journalists.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_01: In responding to these questions, neither Carter nor Reagan ever reciprocated and used the word Latino in their responses.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_01: For example, at a question and answer session with representatives of Hispanic media, President Carter was asked to respond to accusations from Latino groups about his immigration policy.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_01: Carter responded by discussing his administration's work with the Mexican government.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_01: Now to the paradigm shift.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_01: Following the Carter and Reagan administrations, the identifier Latino was used heavily by the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_01: American presidents began referring to a pan-ethnic Latino identity consistently during the Clinton administration.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_01: The first reference to Latinos as a distinct group comes from the second debate of the 1992 election between President Bush, then Governor Clinton, and businessman Perot.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_01: Clinton referred to Latinos as a distinct racial group, saying this country is electing more and more African Americans and Latinos and Asian Americans who are representing districts who are themselves not necessarily of a majority of their race.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_01: Latino rather than Hispanic became the dominant term of the American presidency when referring to Latinos.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_01: So that was the shift in the 1990s, as I've said before, and as people who have looked at this have noted before, the 80s were known as the Hispanic decade or the Hispanic Generation, and then in the 90s is when the term Latino gains ground over the Hispanic.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_01: There are two primary themes that arose from the paradigm shift in the way presidents talked about Latinos.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_01: First, there was a growing sense that Latinos could be thought of as a voting block or a constituency that could be spoken to and mobilized.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_01: This lies in contrast to the previous administrations which did not discuss Latino voters in any substantial way.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_01: Second, Latinos were consistently identified as a distinct racial group apart from African Americans.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_01: However, combined with African American voters, Latino voters could form a powerful political bloc for progressive politics.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_01: Both these themes are shown in the following examples.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_01: President George W.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_01: Bush, a former governor of Texas, was a rare Republican who was well versed in nativist rhetoric and conservative white dominance who also held sway with the Latino demographic.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_01: President Bush would often deliver his weekly addresses in Spanish and received the highest percentage of the Latino vote in his 2004 re-election, compared to any Republican since.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_01: Mitt Romney received just 27% of the Latino vote in 2012, and in 2004 Bush's presidential campaign produced a video that is interesting for the purposes of the study entitled Presidente Bush.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_01: The video opened with shots of Bush walking his ranch in Crawford, Texas, while his own voiceover said, before the Civil War, much of the American Southwest was northern Mexico, and the people who lived there were not called Latinos or Hispanics, they were Mexican citizens.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_01: He acknowledged that many were treated as foreigners in their native land.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_01: Bush cleverly argued that Mexicans and Mexican Americans stayed in the United States and began to prosper in the face of racism and discrimination due to their hard work and faith in God.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_01: He then pivoted to include other groups in his communication saying that as our country grew, Cubans and Puerto Ricans, among other groups, came to this country.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_01: In perhaps the most rhetorically powerful line of the video, Bush said, if the United States' Hispanic population were a Latin American country, it would be the third largest.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_01: Bush here acknowledged the history of the Mexican-American War, now called US Mexican War.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_01: Please stop using Mexican-American War people.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_01: And racism in the past and rhetorically ties Latinos success in the United States in terms of wealth to their cultural values.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_01: So that's really all I have for you today.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um I wish I could have brought you a little more information in terms of maybe some of the uh organic origins of the Hispanic Heritage Month if they exist.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but I was not able to find any, and I've been looking for that for quite a while.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's been at least a couple of years that I've been uh investigating the origins of Hispanic Heritage Month, and all the information that I presented here today is information that you can find on your own online, and I just try to present it from a different perspective, offer my own thoughts and opinions, and maybe you know close out with a little bit of a perspective from from a scholar who is looking at the creation of a pan Latino ethnic identity, which is kind of what the Hispanic label was meant to do when it was still in vogue.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um I know that there's still people out there who cling to it who prefer it over Latino, and that's I'm not gonna say that's fine because I'm against both of them.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_01: But um, for this topic uh Hispanic Heritage Month, we've had several people calling on us to see if we're gonna do anything on it, and I mean there really isn't much to say besides just recounting what the purpose of the month is and maybe offer a little bit of uh criticism, well, which is what I tried to do in this episode, and offer uh a little bit of uh academic perspective on how it relates to the creation of a pan ethnic identity, because prior to the creation of Hispanic Heritage Week is what I guess maybe that's what I didn't really explain about this article uh that I just quoted, that I just read.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_01: Before the creation of Hispanic Heritage Week, which ends up becoming Hispanic Heritage Month, those 20 years between 68 and 88, there was a slow sort of progression towards this idea that there is such a thing as a whether it's Hispanic or Latino, but an identity that is uh a unifying identity between people who are Spanish surnamed or who have roots among people who come from a place or a country, whether it's Central South America, Mexico, or even some of those colonies in what is now the United States in the Southwest, who can trace their roots to those spaces, those places, and have ancestors who were part of those Spanish colonial endeavors that somehow all these people from these various parts of the continent, North and South America, you know, the Caribbean included, and you know, to by extension through their colonial experience, the Philippines and other Asian peoples uh out on the Pacific, uh Pacific Islanders, somehow all of us are one and the same ethnic identity in the US by some kind of magic wand.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_01: I hope that this episode uh at least, you know, if you were unaware as to the origin of Hispanic Heritage Month and how it evolved from one week, uh, or if you even knew that it used to be a week and now it's a month, then you know, at least uh uh we were able to provide that for you here.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_01: And um, well, it's up to you, yeah, whether you want to celebrate it or not.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's your prerogative, and uh neither myself nor Curly nor anyone else should tell you what to do.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_01: We're just uh we just present information here for you to decide on your own.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_01: And with that, folks, we'll see you next time.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_01: And don't forget, the truth, well, it's like medicine.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't always taste good, but hey, it's always good for you.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_01: Hasta la vista.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you for listening to Tales from Oslandas, a project of the Gemali Institute of Mesoamerican Arts.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_03: If you enjoy the show, please consider becoming a Patreon supporter.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_03: You can do this by visiting TalesFromOslandis.com and clicking support the podcast.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_03: Your continued support will help keep the podcast ad free and independent.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_03: Until next time, D Moy Dotson.