Weekly Digest: Subscribe/Unsubscribe 

Home / Letters to Editor / Announcements / Columnists / Past Issues / About Us / Contact Us/VivaBeisbol

HispanicVista Guest Columnists

Latino organizations' names raise controversy

Names born out of civil rights era given a second look

By EDWARD SIFUENTES

July 19, 2008

For some Latino groups that emerged from the civil rights era, a name is more than just a name.

Many of those groups carry in their names words loaded with meaning that are now forcing some of them to rethink their brand. Those words include: La Raza, Chicano and Aztlan.

They are terms that were born in a different time, when minority groups such as blacks, American Indians and Latinos began to assert their identity in the national consciousness, Latino leaders say.

One of those groups, the National Council of La Raza, recently came under fire when the leading presidential candidates, Sens. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and John McCain, R-Ariz., spoke at its annual convention in San Diego last week.

Dozens of anti-illegal immigration activists, including the North County-based San Diego Minutemen, protested outside the convention calling the group racist. They contended the group's name, La Raza, means The Race and that it promotes Latino interests over those of other racial and ethnic groups.

"Part and parcel of this reconquest of the United States by NCLR is a push for totally open borders, continuation of the lethally out-of-control invasion from the south and corruption of our political system," said Claudia Spencer, a Vista resident and anti-illegal immigration activist in a statement regarding La Raza.

In media interviews, La Raza officials spent a lot of time defending the name last week. The group, which bills itself as one of the largest Latino civil rights groups, says its critics are willfully misrepresenting the name.

"As noted in several online dictionaries, 'La Raza' means 'the people' or 'the community,' " the group says on its Web site. "Translating our name as 'the race' is not only inaccurate, it is factually incorrect."

The term, La Raza, was coined by the Mexican scholar Jose Vasconcelos to reflect that the people of Latin America were a mixture of many of the world's races, cultures and religions, according to the Web site.

"In fact, the full term coined by Vasconcelos, La Raza Cosmica, meaning the cosmic people, was developed to reflect not purity, but the mixture inherent in the Hispanic people," according to the group's Web site.

A different time

None of that matters because the people who criticize the group are not really interested in what La Raza does or what it stands for, said Silverio Haro, a professor of Chicano studies at Palomar College.

"I just think we'll never be American enough for them," Haro said.

During the turbulent civil rights era, Latino groups for the first time used certain terms to identify themselves, including Chicano, which was once a derogatory name used against Mexican-Americans, Haro said.

In the 1960s, Mexican-American activists appropriated the name much the same way that African-Americans took on the term black as opposed to Negro, he said.

"It had a lot to do with a sense of empowerment," Haro said. "We get to call ourselves what we want ---- to identify with people who had been marginalized."

Those were different times and it may be time to consider changing the names, said Walter E. Meneses, president of Meneses Research & Associates, a San Diego-based Latino marketing company.

Meneses said that terms such as La Raza and Chicano are more closely associated with Mexican-Americans living in the southwestern part of the country.

The Latino population has become much more diverse and now includes more people from throughout Central and South America, such as Argentinians, Chileans and Peruvians, Meneses said.

"La Raza is a very extreme (term); they should have changed it a long time ago," Meneses said, referring to the National Council of La Raza. "It might be OK for people of Mexican descent, but it's going be limited to that segment of the population and alienate everyone else."

One group that decided to obscure the reference to its Chicano roots was the California Chicano News Media Association, an advocacy group for Latino journalists.

Time to change?

Last year, the group decided to change its name to CCNMA: Latino Journalists of California.

Julio Moran, the group's executive director, said the organization was not responding to criticism from outsiders, but rather to the changing face of the state's Latino population.

"A lot of people had chosen not to join" because they believed the organization was just for Mexican-Americans, Moran said. "That has never been true."

The association was formed in 1972 after Ruben Salazar, a prominent Latino reporter in Los Angeles, was killed by a tear gas projectile shot by a sheriff's deputy during a riot in 1970. It aims to promote journalism as a career for Latinos, Moran said.

Other groups, such as the Chicano Federation of San Diego County, have resisted change. The group provides various services for low-income families, such as child care, housing and community development programs.

"Years ago, we had discussions about changing the name, but people know us as an organization and they know what we do," said Ray Uzeta, the federation's president and chief executive officer.

Reconquista

Uzeta compared the word "Chicano" to the word "colored" in the name of the civil rights group the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Most people only use the acronym, NAACP, he said.

Even though the terms may seem outdated, they remain in many of the names because of the organizations' history and tradition.

"We struck a compromise," Moran said. "We kept the CCNMA, but we added 'Latino Journalists of California.'"

Critics of the term Chicano say it is a reference to militant activists who promote taking back the southwestern part of the United States and returning it to Mexico, a "plan" sometimes also called reconquista or Spanish for reconquest.

Anti-illegal immigration activists sometimes contend that undocumented immigrants are foot soldiers in the effort to take back the land for Mexico and that groups, such as the National Council of La Raza, are their leaders.

"Such a claim is so far outside of the mainstream of the Latino community that we find it incredible that our critics raise it as an issue," according to the National Council of La Raza's Web site. "NCLR has never supported and does not endorse the notion of a 'Reconquista' or 'Aztlan.'"

Other Latinos, such as Haro, call the claim "ridiculous."

"Give me the evidence. Where is this written? Give me the minutes to the meeting," Haro said. "Show me where this is going on. I've not seen it."
_____________________________________________________
Contact staff writer Edward Sifuentes at  esifuentes@nctimes.com.

Article at (San Diego) North County Times http://www.northcountytimes.com/articles/2008/07/19/news/sandiego/z92c394d8cfef321788257489006347ef.txt

_________________________________________