John Yang:
National Hispanic Heritage Month, which runs through October 15, celebrates a population of 64 million people that's diverse, growing and constantly changing. But can a single term, whether it's Hispanic or Latino, describe a population of such varied ancestry, immigrant generations and geographic origin?
Mark Hugo Lopez is Director of Race and Ethnicity at the Pew Research Center, and Cristina Mora is a University of California, Berkeley sociology professor and author of Making Hispanics How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Constructed a New American.
Cristina, I want to start with you. As the title of your book suggests, these terms are of relatively recent origin. How did they come about? How did they start?
Cristina Mora, University of California, Berkeley: Well, the idea of Hispanic itself has a very long history in sort of the colonial projects of Spanish colonization. But the idea of it as a category in the United States that would be used to collect data and to identify a people really is at the latter half of the 20th century.
So really around the 1960s and 1970s, as Mexican, Puerto Rican, and even some Cuban populations rallied to sort of get together and ask that government start collecting their data. And of course, if government's going to collect their data and the state's going to be able to track, for example, Hispanic poverty rates or Mexican and Puerto Rican employment rates, for example, it had to be called something, right?
And, you know, my work and the book tracks, really. How did this category come to look at these populations, the Mexican American demands for data, the Puerto Rican demands for data, and see them as sort of a common set of communities that could be, you know, put together in an umbrella panethnic category that's large enough, right, to be compared to other groups like blacks and whites.
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