Of Latinos and Hispanics and Tejanos

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, July 13, 2022

 

A little bit more about Jill Biden and the “Latinx” peoples.

 

I was born and raised in Texas, and grew up in a county in which about 40 percent of the people may, if they choose, legitimately check the “Hispanic” box on Form 4473, had some Riveras in the extended family, etc., and I suppose I made it to the end of the 20th century there without ever meeting a single “Latino,” much less a “Latinx.” (Is that pronounced Latin-Ex or La-TINKS?) I did know a lot of “Mexicans.” Sometime in the late 1990s, I began to meet a few Mexican-Americans, but, until then, the Perezes and Mendozas and Esquivels were self-identified as Mexicans — few of whom had ever set foot in Mexico, much less been born there, and who signified residents and citizens of the Republic of Mexico with the identifier “Mexican Mexican,” the way Germans call a guy with an M.D. and a Ph.D. “Herr Doctor Doctor.”

 

Mexican wasn’t exactly accurate, but everybody seemed to understand what everybody else meant.  Those were less exacting times, as I recall.

 

I follow the usual rule of calling people whatever they want to be called (within reason, “Dr.” Biden), and if “Mexican” is too rough and imprecise, “Hispanic” too synthetic, “Latino” too . . . obviously associated with the grammatical facts of the Spanish language, etc., I’ll use the name the people in question prefer. I remember when “Chicano” had a moment.

 

But the problem with “the people in question” is the issue of exactly which people it is we are talking about. The idea that there is some kind of overarching identity conjoining all of the world’s Spanish-speaking people and descendants of Spanish-speaking people is preposterous. That’s one upside of the Mexican-American, Cuban-American, etc., formulation: Those descriptors at least take notice of some distinction among people from really very different backgrounds.

 

But it’s still pretty lumpy: There are Texas families from Mexican backgrounds (or, more accurately, from backgrounds in the Spanish empire) who have been in the same communities — and, in some cases, on the same land — for hundreds of years. They aren’t necessarily culturally, economically, or politically very much like recent arrivals and itinerant agricultural workers. Some Tejano people have a pretty strong preference for “Tejano.”

 

“Latino” is a little like how Italian-American Catholics in Philadelphia and Czech-speaking people in Texas used to be lumped together as “white ethnics.” I can imagine some Dr. Biden type seeing them all as cannoli and kolaches, respectively.

 

(Incidentally, there’s your real Texas fusion: the breakfast-taco kolache.)

 

This complexity sometimes perplexes political observers, who wonder how it is that “Latinos” in Texas vote so differently from “Latinos” in California.

 

My working theory is that the Latino voters in Texas are Texans and the ones in California are Californians. My experience is that people with Spanish surnames in Texas tend to vote like city folk if they live in cities and like country folk if they live in the country, like bankers if they are bankers and like church-goers if they are church-goers.

 

People who are surprised to meet Republican Party county chairmen in Texas with such names as Peña-Garza and Rodriguez and De la Garza mixed in with Kuciemba (Polish) and Hadju (Hungarian) and Hagenbuch (German) don’t really know the state or its people.

 

Hence “Dr.” Biden’s risible breakfast-taco pandering.

 

I once asked a Republican campaign manager who had had pretty good luck connecting with Mexican-American voters in Texas what kind of outreach he did. He explained that he didn’t do any “Latino” outreach at all — his district was about half Mexican-American, and he did small-business outreach that included all the business associations, Christian outreach that included all the churches, school-choice outreach that included all the neighborhoods, farm-policy outreach that included all the farmers, etc.

 

And that is a better idea than having your candidate show up in front of an interest group once or twice a year and mumble some bad Spanish at people who, in many cases, wouldn’t understand that Spanish even if it were any good. At least “Dr.” Biden — with the exception of her weird failed attempt to pronounce the word bodega — spared her audience that.