So I’m Hispanic/Latina. My mom is from Puerto Rico and my dad is from Bolivia. My mom was filling out the US census this morning and she had to answer a question about her race. Hispanic/Latinx/Latino wasn’t an option, it specifically said that it is not a race, but my mom told me that she didn’t identify as white or black and nobody saw her as either of those. I personally think that it should be considered a race. It’s kind of annoying that my mom has to say that she identifies as something that she doesn’t identify as.
Anytime I have to fill out my race on anything I just write in “Chicana to the bone”. There wasn’t a “non-caucasian hispanic” box or something similar on the form?
The complexity of Latinx history and identity really can’t be accounted for when you reduce people to a check mark on a box. She could write in Puerto Rican where it asks for a native tribe.
Yeah, she ended up just putting white even though that’s not what she identifies and she just put Spain when it asked for the country since we’ve done an ancestry DNA test before and her highest percentage was from Spain.
Latinas/Latinos come in all shades and so people say things like “White Latina”, “Black Latina” etc which makes sense but does leave out Latinx people who are racially ambiguous. On the flip side, there’s the one-drop-rule which prevents white Latinx people to “qualify” as white due to the colonial belief that “ethnic” white people weren’t “pure enough” to fit the standard of what white meant at the time, so again, I’m not sure. However, I still make distinctions between Latinx and Black, White, Asian etc because the Latinx community has its own history and cultures.
Personally, I identify it under black because that’s what I was told growing up from my mother who is mexican, “Latinx’s are black as well, even if everyone doesn’t agree.” However I connect Hispanics to Spain, which is in Europe which I consider to be white, but that’s just my opinion, everyone is free to choose whether or not which one they identify with
