The End of Hispanic Heritage Month

I look forward to the day when it will no longer be socially necessary to set aside one month out of the year to celebrate Hispanic culture and the contributions of so-called "Hispanics" to American society. To begin with, I don't like to be called "a Hispanic."  As a graduate of the prestigious Colorado College with a degree in English, I am disturbed by the incorrect use of an adjective as a noun. "Hispanic" is an adjective, a word that describes or modifies a noun or pronoun. An adjective is a secondary type of word. It plays second fiddle to the main attraction, a powerful noun. The powerful noun in this case would not be an English word. It would be "Hispano," the proper Spanish noun. No problem with that. The English language is a borrowing language. One more Spanish word sneaking in doesn't hurt anything. It just enriches the language. Of course, I'm an educated kind of guy and I learned that at Colorado College. But I am not ashamed to admit that it took me an entire semester at CC to learn the difference between nouns and adjectives. An entire semester on the Block Plan is no laughing matter, and I am eternally grateful that Colorado College put me through all that toil and trouble.  And as a citizen of the United States with all the rights and privileges thereof, and as a soldier who put his life on the line for this country, I resent the demotion of my personhood from a proper noun to a mere adjective. I know, it's no big deal, but I've always been touchy about that sort of thing. It comes from having been born and raised in south Texas where cotton-pickers like me were not given due respect.

Along the same lines, please don't get me started on "Latino," another unfortunate locution. "Latino" is a strangely peculiar expression invented by hopelessly overworked bureaucrats to quickly lump any and all descendants of subjects of the once all-encompassing Roman Empire--Latins--into one huge grab bag, easy to categorize and deal with. To be technically precise, Portuguese, Spaniards, French, Italians, Romansh Swiss, Romanians, and so on, are all Latinos. Don't call them that, but if you want to obey the bureaucrats,  millions of Europeans are Latinos, along with millions of former subjects of the worldwide Spanish Empire--the people from the Spanish possessions in North America all the way down to Tierra del Fuego. And don't forget those other Spanish subjects, the Filipinos and Chamorros (Guamanians..

Anyway, to get back to Hispanic Heritage Month. As my friend Joe Aldaz, the president of the Colorado Springs Hispanic Chamber says, " I look forward to the end of Hispanic Heritage Month. We should be honored every day, every week, every month, not just for one month out of the year." What Joe is getting at is that simply by setting aside these ethnic and racial heritage months, we build unconscious walls of separation between groups. I wish we didn't need Hispanic, African American, Native American and Alaska Native, Asian and Pacific Islander Heritage Months, etc. But given the present situation, we absolutely need them. As Joe and I would agree, we need to faithfully observe Hispanic Heritage Month and all the other months because if we don't, our very presence sinks into obscurity. Pretty hard to hide 60 million Chicanos, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Central Americans, Venezuelans, Colombians, etc.,  legal or illegal.  But people are trying to do just that. Not only mainstream "Anglo" people are wishing we would just go away. "Hispanics" do it all the time--make themselves disappear.  It is a constant frustration of mine to see my own people willfully doing everything in their power to blend in. I know, it's the fear of discrimination, of racism, that exerts the pressure to disappear, to assimilate, to lose the Spanish language, to repress diverse identities. Too often we want to erase the richness, the beauty, the value of the differences we bring by our very existence. The people themselves do it all the time. It's unfortunate and totally counterproductive. And not just socially. Let's just consider the immigrants. There are about 11 million Hispanic immigrants now. If we were to "send them all back to where they came from," it would be very bad for the country. Bad for the aging labor force (we're running out of workers), for the economy (most immigrants do work that native born Americans will not do), for our prosperity, for the future of the Social Security Trust Fund. And bad for American values. U.S. Hispanic people love the United States. Undocumented immigrants who risked everything to come here, including their lives, want nothing more than to acquire legal status and citizenship. As a group, Hispanic immigrants are social conservatives. All they want is the individual freedom to contribute to the nation to which they already contribute mightily in so many ways in spite of the many obstacles thrown their way. The key words here are "individual freedom."  Our immigration policy has serious repercussions. Here's the irony: When are the Republicans going to wake up and realize that all those "illegal aliens" are Republicans waiting for the chance to declare their party allegiance.

Joe Barrera. Ph.D., is the former director of the Ethnic Studies Program at UCCS. He teaches Mexico/U.S. Border Studies and U.S. Military History.

He is a combat veteran of the Vietnam War.