The conversation about what Mexican Americans should call themselves has been going on since at least 1961 when groups of Mexican American political activists met in Phoenix, Arizona in the triumphant aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s victory in the presidential election.
It’s an important conversation that continues to this day, and one that I do not plan on fully engaging at this point out of both respect for its inherent complexity and my recognition that many others have already effectively explored this particular conversation.
To the best of my knowledge, this conversation appears to have, if not culminated, then at least settled for the time being into something resembling a consensus regarding the use of the pan-ethnic term Latino and its non-gendered analogs Latinx and Latine.
Every version of the term has been used interchangeably at various times along with the term Hispanic to describe those segments of “the U.S. population tracing their ancestral origins to a country in Latin America or Spain” according to the definition commonly employed by the Pew Research Center.
And, not surprisingly, every version of the term has generated some form of criticism. Most of the recent criticism, for example, appears to be focused on Latinx, the non-binary version of the term.
For the record, I personally don’t have a problem with Latino or any of its variations or even the term Hispanic in certain contexts. I recognize the utility of this terminology in those instances in which there is a need to generally reference that segment of the U.S. population that traces its heritage to Latin America.
I do, however, often question the efficacy of the term when used in a political context. The term’s cumbersome lack of precision is evident whenever a discussion of the “Latino vote” occurs. When encountering these conversations, I am often forced to ferret out the geographical context of the discussion in an attempt to determine which particular segment of the larger “Latino” vote is being referenced.
It somehow seems awkward and less than accurate, for example, to refer to the Mexican Americans of Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, or Texas, or, alternatively, to the Cuban Americans of Florida in a political context as Latinos when there are much more accurate descriptors available.
It’s much more expedient, as some writers have discovered, to simply jettison use of the broader term altogether in the interest of clarity. In one article I consulted, for example, the writer explained that in 2020 Joe Biden had managed to win the state of Arizona for the first time in decades due in large part to the “votes cast by Mexican Americans.” The writer could have used the term Latino, of course, but in this particular situation It would have somehow seemed not necessarily inaccurate but imprecise. Incidentally, the writer of this particular piece, for whatever reason, apparently felt the need to circle back at one point in her article and justify her conspicuous omission of the general term Latino by specifying that Mexican Americans made up the vast majority of the “election demographic” she had intended to reference in the piece.
The writer of another piece similarly avoided the use of the term Latino opting instead to refer specifically to Cuban Americans when discussing one source of ‘overwhelming’ support for Trump in Florida. Once again, use of the broader term in this situation might have been misleading and confusing since there are obviously other groups of Latinos in Florida including Mexican Americans.
All other semantic considerations aside, however, my primary objection to the term Latino is that its use at times naively and incorrectly presumes the existence of a sense of solidarity among all of the various segments of the larger Latino population. Stated differently, the use of the term Latino, in certain cases, perpetuates the myth of pan-Latino unity.
A prime example of this specious thinking can be found in a recent New York Times opinion piece by Michael LaRosa, a former special assistant to Pres. Joe Biden and former press secretary to Dr. Jill Biden. In the piece, LaRosa seems to assume that all segments of the Latino population would have instinctively celebrated the selection of Sen. Marco Rubio as Trump’s running mate. After all, according to LaRosa’s simplistic logic: “[T]here is something Latino voters have in common: their Latin American roots and the pride that comes from casting a vote for someone who looks and talks like them.” Although it’s certainly a moot point now, LaRosa proceeded to imply that Rubio’s selection might have even rallied Latinos of a more Democratic persuasion to the Trump ticket explaining how a “feeling of cultural and identity pride can marshal voters and transcend ideological and partisan preferences.” According to LaRosa, selecting Rubio as his running mate would have “given Mr. Trump something no other presidential candidate has offered: the chance for Latinos to vote for one of their own to be a heartbeat away from the presidency.”
Once again, I was left to grapple with the ambiguities of the term Latino as I tried to determine which segment of the Latino population LaRosa had in mind exactly.
I was also left questioning the shockingly reductive thinking at the core of LaRosa’s delusion. I am not sure if he’s ever made the trip out west, but I’d like to take this opportunity to disabuse Mr. LaRosa of the notion that there are significant numbers of Mexican Americans out here who would consider political figures like Sen. Rubio, dubbed ‘Little Marco’ by Trump, or the obsequious Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas to be “one of their own.”
In fact, Cruz and Rubio are more likely to be regarded as stark reminders of the implacable divisions and antipathies that endure between Cuban Americans and Mexican Americans. I certainly don’t recall a chorus of indignation and the mass exodus of Cuban Americans from the Republican Party when Trump called Mexicans “rapists” and “criminals,” or when Trump repeatedly disparaged Judge Gonzalo Curiel, or when, more recently, he vowed to engage in unilateral military action against Mexico if elected to a second presidential term. Maybe I missed it, but there were no denunciations of Trump emanating from the Cuban American community when over 20 ethnic Mexicans were slaughtered in El Paso in 2019 by a white supremacist inspired by Trump’s extreme anti-Mexican rhetoric.
The fact that so many Cuban Americans continue to support Trump to this day calls into question any possibility of a political alliance with Mexican Americans who still prefer Biden to Trump in significant numbers despite a plague of recent polls reporting some level of decline in support for Biden among “Hispanics” and “Latinos.” Of course, as mentioned previously, the ambiguities of the terminology used in these polls make it difficult to determine precisely where Biden stands with Mexican Americans. I suspect, however, that he is polling significantly higher among this particular demographic than any other segment of Latinos.
Mr. LaRosa might be surprised to discover that many Mexican Americans are sophisticated enough to understand that Republicans have often deployed Cuban Americans as a form of political camouflage for lack of a better term. Many of us are attentive to the disingenuous strategy of incorporating Cuban Americans into the Republican party in an attempt to appear inclusive of “Latinos” while continuing to pursue agendas that are clearly antithetical to the interests of Mexican Americans.
Moreover, as Benjamin Francis-Fallon discusses in his book entitled “The Rise of the Latino Vote: A History,” Cuban Americans themselves have repudiated the idea of any meaningful political alliances with Mexican Americans. As early as 1976, Cuban Americans had started to reject the notion of aligning with even a conservative political program advanced by Mexican Americans and would ultimately succeed in displacing Mexican Americans from the infrastructure of the Republican Party.
I’ll be the first to acknowledge the unrealized political potential of the Mexican American vote. As noted in a recent Texas Tribune article, El Paso County, for example, where a majority of the residents are Mexican American, “has consistently had among the lowest voter turnout among Texas’ most populous counties.” During the March 2024 primary, “only 11% of the county’s registered voters cast a ballot, the second lowest among the state’s 254 counties.”
Despite this current political reality, however, it’s certainly not implausible to envision the day when activated Mexican American political constituencies begin to question the need for any type of alliance with Cuban Americans. According to population data provided by the Pew Research Center, as of 2021, there were at least 37,000,000 Mexican Americans in the United States residing throughout the Southwest but primarily in the states of California and Texas. By contrast, there were only approximately 2,400,000 Cuban Americans living in the United States as of 2021 with 64% percent of this population concentrated, not surprisingly, in Florida. Given this pronounced asymmetry in population size and corresponding political significance, Mexican Americans may someday be inclined to ask themselves why they should be concerned at all with establishing political alliances with the relatively small and recalcitrant population of Cuban Americans in Florida when Mexican Americans on their own already have the political constituencies in place to help secure important political victories in key battleground states like Arizona and Nevada, and even in ostensibly red states like Texas.
While the term Latino is certainly not my preferred ethnic identifier, I understand that it is unlikely that it will fall out of common usage anytime soon. I would therefore gently admonish my fellow Mexican Americans against getting too bogged down in battles over nomenclature at this point, and instead encourage them to focus on activating and unifying the Mexican American vote throughout the Southwest including and especially in El Paso and other parts of Texas.
Aldo Mena is a native El Pasoan who is interested in promoting various forms of solidarity and cooperation between elements of the Mexican American community and Mexican civil society. He is a graduate of the University of New Mexico where he received a B.A. in English and Political Science, and an M.A. in Latin American Studies with a research concentration in late colonial/early national period Mexican history. You can contact him directly at aldo@fronterizo.news.
The Perimeter is a column written by Aldo Mena, an El Paso News opinion columnist and founding writer at Fronterizo News.
