TV Dispute Sheds Light on the ‘Hispanic’ Myth

Ever since the Census Bureau started lumping Chicanos like me with Puerto Ricans and Cuban-Americans under the catch-all definition “Hispanic,” I’ve resisted using the word. I consider it imprecise and bureaucratic. Now a controversy in Spanish-language television illustrates why it’s also misleading.

It has received scant attention in the English-language print media (with the exception of a report written recently by The Times’ Victor Valle) but a long-simmering rivalry between Cuban-Americans and Mexican-Americans at the country’s two Spanish-language TV networks has become embarrassingly public. Some key changes at the Univision network (which owns KMEX, Channel 34, in Los Angeles) and its rival, Telemundo (which owns KVEA, Channel 52), have angered Chicano activists who complain that both networks are becoming “Cubanized.”

That word was coined by La Opinion, Los Angeles’ respected Spanish-language daily, which ran a front-page series on the trend and the negative community reaction it is generating. The newspaper’s editors decided to run the series when three top Chicano executives left jobs at the networks within a few months of each other and after Univision, the older and larger company, announced that it was consolidating its production activities in Miami.

La Opinion’s sources speculated that a campaign is afoot to reduce the Mexican influence at the networks, despite the fact that Mexicans are the bulk of their audience; 60% of the more than 20 million Latin Americans who live in the United States are of Mexican extraction.

The series generated “overwhelmingly positive” reaction from the newspaper’s Mexican readers, according to editors there. It also stirred the turmoil at the two networks even further. Valle learned, for example, that more than half of KMEX’s employees signed a petition asking Univision to name a new general manager “who reflects the interests . . . experience and culture of the Los Angeles audience.”

They mean a Mexican, in case that’s hard to figure out. And the way people persist in using the word Hispanic-- and the false concept of Latino homogeneity it implies--I must assume that many people will have a hard time understanding what this brouhaha is all about.

It’s about the fact that Latinos here are a remarkably diverse people with very different histories (both national and personal), as well as varied racial characteristics and class backgrounds. And it means that one can go only so far in trying to find commonality within such a large and diverse population.

In fact, the only experience that all “Hispanics” have in common is residence in the United States.

I suspect that a key reason why many Latinos who know better willingly take on the “Hispanic” label is that they think it gives them clout in the U.S. political system. For example, there are only about 1 million Cuban-Americans in the United States, or less than one half of 1% of the entire population. Hardly worth paying much attention to outside south Florida, where most of them live. But lump them in with 10 million Chicanos in Texas and California, and a couple of million Puerto Ricans in New York, and you’ve got what looks like an honest-to-goodness national power bloc.

Of course, politically astute people know that these diverse groups don’t vote the same way (Cubans tend to be Republicans, Puerto Ricans are mostly Democrats and Chicanos fall somewhere in between). But that has not stopped many politically ambitious Latinos from perpetuating the myth that there is something out there called the “Hispanic vote.”

There’s no such thing. Any more than there is an “Hispanic” religion (there are lots of Latino Protestants in this country, and even a few Latino Jews and Muslims) or anything that can be called “Hispanic” culture. Thank goodness for that. I enjoy the differences in food, music, language (we don’t all speak the same type of Spanish) and even political views that results from the mix.

What should non-Latinos make of all this? They should be reassured. There will continue to be pockets of Latin American influence in this country--mostly Mexican in the Southwest, Cuban in Florida and Puerto Rican in the Northeast--to spice up our national life. But there will be no coming together of some “Hispanic” nation-within-a-nation. More likely, the different national groups within our Latino population will retain their cultural difference until they reach the point of assimilation. And by then, strong ethnic identification becomes secondary.

So I’m glad the Chicano-Cubano rivalry in Spanish-language TV is finally out in the open. It should force Latinos to admit their differences openly and honestly rather than papering them over in the interests of “Hispanic” unity.

Once Latinos are over that hurdle, they must start wrestling with more important issues, like getting better programming on both Univision and Telemundo and using stations like KMEX and KVEA as more than vehicles for entertainment and advertising. How about using them as educational tools to help Latinos deal with the often difficult process of assimilating into a complex and rapidly changing U.S. society?