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The Latino Movement: More about Integration than Differentiation
By Mari D. González
It is not uncommon to read outrageous statements in discussion forums and blog comments. The anonymity of users gives them more freedom to express their individual opinions without a second thought; this tendency is less common when people use their real names.
A few weeks ago, I read this comment on a well-liked Latino blog: “Mexicans have no clue, their Spanish it’s [is] the worst among the Central American people.”
I wrote the following response:
1) Mexico is part of North America not Central America, and NAFTA refers to the North America Free Trade Agreement between Mexico, Canada, and the U.S.
2) Mexican Spanish includes words from the 60 Indigenous languages officially recognized by the Mexican government. The extent of the Indigenous influence is due to Mesoamerica (Central Mexico southward through Central America) being the center of the first most developed pre-Hispanic civilizations in the Americas.
3) Most Mexicans are proud of their Indigenous background and cultural make up. As a Mexican, I speak Mexican Spanish because that is my mother tongue; I use Spanglish with my Latino(a) friends in the U.S.
While we acculturate and adapt to the United States by keeping up with the challenge of “straddling two cultures” that is a common topic among Latina bloggers, let us not forget where we come from and the values we learned there such as respect for language differences and the nuances of language use. Let us “preserve our unique cultural identities” and “continue defining ourselves” without shoving others out of the way.
Welcome to the sequel or Chicano movement Part II, which is now more about integration than differentiation, and should be termed the “Latino Movement.” The term Latino was officially established in 1997 by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget. It indicated that the terms Hispanic and Latino were to be used interchangeably beginning January 1, 2001.
Edited by Connie Cobb
CROSS-CULTURAL vs. INTERCULTURAL
By Mari D. González
Searching for blog articles on intercultural online communication, I found one on a well- respected social media blog. To my disappointment, not only did the author use “cross-cultural” to mean “intercultural” but she also argued that most people, even academics, use the terms “interchangeably”; when I tried to clarify the differences in the comments section, she responded that I didn’t need to bother explaining. This is what I wrote:
“’CROSS-CULTURAL’ means a comparison and contrast between two cultural groups. For example, my cross-cultural study of Brazilians and Mexicans when they celebrate a birthday shows that Mexicans love to focus on cooking and sharing of the food, while Brazilians love the dancing –even grandmas are dancing the samba. ‘Intercultural’ refers to what happens when people from these two groups come together. As a Mexican, I may complain that there’s not enough food, but I love the dancing and join the group. Thus, INTERCULTURAL is what happens when the two (or more) culturally-different groups come together, interact and communicate. Both terms describe important aspects of the study.”
As an interculturalist, I also found it troubling to read the author’s definition of “culture” as “layers of identity–not as groups of people.” My instructor and intercultural communication pioneer, Milton J. Bennett (1992) defines culture as “learned and shared values, beliefs, and behavior of a group of interacting people”; this is the definition I use in offline and online communication contexts.
Myron W. and Koester (1993) define intercultural communication in their book Intercultural Competence: Interpersonal Communication Across Cultures as “a symbolic, interpretative, transactional, contextual process,” which implies the engagement of culturally-different people. On the other hand, they define cross-cultural communication as “the study of a particular idea or concept within many cultures…in order to compare one culture to another…. Whereas intercultural communication involves interactions among people from different cultures, cross-cultural communication involves a comparison of interactions among people from the same culture to those from another culture.”
In the graduate program in Intercultural Relations, from day one we learn the definitions of intercultural vs. cross-cultural in the context of communication across cultures. Because social media has become “the” online platform for collaboration, learning, and exchange of knowledge, the blog author needs to learn both the correct definitions of the terms and the principles of the new media. Trying to oblige one’s ideas through new media is a thing of the past so, as a colleague of mine put it, “she is a traditionalist.”
Edited by Connie Cobb
Facebook vs. Face-to-Face
It is not uncommon for older generations to hold a differing perception on the use of social-network sites from that of “the young and the digital.”
Many of us assume that social-network communication or the use of social media will eventually displace the need and/or desire for in-person interactions.
Media Associate Professor, S. Craig Watkins asserts differently. He observes that young people use social-network sites as an extension of their face-to-face interactions not as a replacement and that they mostly interact in Facebook with their already-made friends and school peers. For them, social media is what for older generations the phone was.
I shall expand on this topic soon.
Invitation to Participate in a Social Media Study
You are invited to participate in a research study which will ask you about your social-network use and preferences, and the cultural characteristics you perceive in social media. My name is Mari D. González, and I am a student in the Masters in Intercultural Relations Program at the University of the Pacific, School of International Studies. You were selected as a possible participant in this study because of your interest in social-network sites.
This study will compare second-generation Latinos/Hispanics in the U.S or native-born (born in the U.S.) with at least one foreign-born parent (parent born in Latin America: Mexico, Central America and South America) vs. dominant culture (people who predominately identify as U.S.-white and do not identify with a particular U.S. ethnic minority).
You will receive a Peet’s Coffee & Tea gift card of $5.00 as a thank you for your participation. Social-network users who identify with either cultural group are encouraged to participate.
If interested, please go to Social Media Study include your email at the end of survey to contact you and set up a 45 min. phone interview. Please email me at maridgonzalez@yahoo.com for more information.
Part III: A Socio-Cultural Perspective
Ethnifiying Class
By Mari D. González
How come Colombians and Iranians get upset when confused by Mexicans, at least the few I have come across. As a Mexican, I do not mind being identified as Colombian, Iranian, or any other ethnic group.
In general, people learn the “classifications of class” early in life as part of what becomes unconscious enculturative values. Most of us in the U.S., through enculturation -at home or school- or acculturation -dominant social values communicated by TV, school, or in the workplace, have learned the meaning of “ethnifying class,” or giving a particular nationality, color, or ethnicity a corresponding socioeconomic rank based on the dominant culture’s hierarchical perceptions.
Mexicans, aside from Canadians, are the only ones who cross just one border to get to the U.S. Thus, working-class families and farmers from Mexico can make it to the north less expensively than people from further south or further east.
Colombia and Iran mainly export citizens who are able to pay their way to the U.S. via “visas.” Most farmers and working-class people from those countries cannot afford to pay to cross many borders and they stay behind. In Mexico, however, the less financially-able are the ones who are more willing to risk everything “el todo por el todo” to go to the U.S.
In line with the dominant cultural stereotype, Mexicaness must equal lower class. Yet, when well-off Mexicans travel to the U.S. for business, shopping, or attending school as international students, their ethnicity is less of an issue.
Edited by Connie Cobb
Social Media Is Collectivist: An Interculturalist’s Point of View
By Mari D. González
Whenever I hear advice on the best use of social media to attract users, I go back to my introduction to cross-cultural communication graduate course.
In collectivist (Latin America, Arab countries, Southern Europe) as opposed to individualist (U.S., Northern Europe) cultural groups, social media is intuitive. People in collective cultures are group-oriented. Their self-identity is directly related to their group or groups of reference. They thrive by being sensitive to the group’s harmony. For members of collectivist societies, communication with one another is frequent and spontaneous. Because language is a reflection of culture, one might say that Spanish-speakers tend to be more social. Collectivist cultures as opposed to task-oriented or individualist cultures understand that in social media:
- Broadcasting is not conversation.
- Two-way communication is conversation.
- People can tell who is not being genuine.
- Unless you are a broadcaster, social media is about the quality not the quantity.
- Conversations require three steps – listening, processing information, and responding.
- Conversations and meaningful engagement are time consuming.
- Time is not necessarily money and relationships take you further than money.
As an interculturalist or intercultural communications professional, my focus is on what happens when people from two different cultural groups or different enculturation, i.e., staff at U.S. companies, whose values are dominant, and Latinos communicate, assuming they are using the same language–English and/or Spanish. In essence, my interest is in studying how the speaker’s message is received and interpreted by the listener according to contextual meanings that are intrinsic to her or his early socialization.
Edited by Connie Cobb
Being Latino on Facebook
An Interview with Lance Rios
By Mari D. González
In preparation for my independent study research proposal on Social Media and cultural indicators, I interviewed Lance Rios, creator and administrator of Facebook’s Being Latino.
I became fascinated by Lance’s ability to attract a wealth of followers –“31,576 People Like This” as of today, to keep them engaged, and to maintain consistent and personalized contact with them. All of his posts are culturally relevant and promote individual opinions and collective discussion. Thirteen percent or 18 out of my 138 Facebook friends joined Being Latino after I suggested it.
How Does He Manage It?
Lance is a young English-speaking and bicultural blogger and social media addict –as he describes himself. He is of Puerto Rican descent and both his Latino cultural background and American values are alive and communicated throughout his posts.
He resonates with acculturated English-speaking Latinos across the board –Mexican, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Central American and South American. His posts range from informational and serious activism to entertaining on American popular culture, national news from Latin America, politics, statistics, biographies and other socio-cultural topics.
When I asked him about the role of Being Latino, he humbly replied, “It is something I created [which has] attracted a lot of people via word of mouth and it is bigger than I anticipated.”
Being Latino vs. Lance Rios
Lance recognizes that it is more effective to tone down individual views and reserve those for his personal page, “I’m more balanced, neutral, and less biased on Being Latino. I wanted to separate [myself from it]. It is not about me.”
Concurrently, he wants people to know that although Being Latino is an “open platform” he is behind the page by personally approaching people “who had their own agenda.”
Cultural Relevance – What Makes Being Latino, Latino
Being Latino has filled a huge gap in mass media communications with a conventional social media platform. There isn’t media that communicates to bicultural and acculturated Latinos. “Most media outlets use Spanish language” which doesn’t echo with American-born Latinos. Being Latino caters to “second- and third-generation Latinos” not only in the U.S. but also in Europe, South Africa and Latin America.
American-born Latinos have been raised in an English-speaking world surrounded by American media which unfortunately neither represents nor includes them. They are the majority, as compared to foreign-born, and prefer speaking English; yet, they also choose to unassimilate by continually sharing and communicating certain cultural values on- and off-line.
Lance recognizes that “[his] audience is more comfortable with Spanglish and English,” which speaks of their upbringing. Culturally relevant elements are communicated in the language that is more fitting. Spanglish is used for what cannot be translated without losing connotation, “I never spoke [Spanish] growing up; everything was in English, [except] certain words with meanings that cannot be transferred, [such as] words used in normal conversations [and] those words are identifiers and connectors.”
I do not consider myself another social media addict, however I am becoming addicted to Being Latino.
Why Facebook?
[To be continued].
Ethnifying Class Part II: A Personal Experience
By Mari D González
Intercultural Communication
Last summer, I presented at an international conference and one of the participants asked me at the end, “How do you feel about presenting when most of your fellow Mexicans are labor workers?”
I wishfully thought he had come across post-colonial studies given that he was a university professor abroad. I had overheard him talking about teaching a graduate course in Thailand. My assumptions resulted from a positive stereotype that is just as insidious.
I did not care to answer his question because it was not one I would have ever asked myself. Instead, I wondered if he, in the effort of protecting his ego, avoided asking: “How do I feel by listening to a Mexican given the unquestioned perception I have chosen to hold about her?”
My “Mexicaness” experience has been shaped by a series of life events. I did not grow up in the U.S. and thus was devoid of its color-classification through enculturation. Growing up in Mexico, I mingled and felt equally comfortable with my well-off relatives from Mexico City as with my father’s students at his materially-poor-but-dignifying-rich rural school where I attended first and second grades before entering the only private school in my hometown. I certainly could not have any sympathy for this professor’s views or feelings.
Yet, through his inquiry, he had informed me of his narrow individually-held perception and how he declined to challenge it by diffusing it toward me. He refused to expand his stereotype when he had the opportunity to. Unfortunately, he chose to see the little and tiny side of the broader whole despite of his long-traveled and -lived life.
Ethnifying Class Part I: Classifying Obsession
By Mari D. González
Our Legacy from Colonialism
Because our most forceful legacy from colonialism —color obsession— is widely represented in media and pop culture and supported during children’s enculturative years, our tendencies are rather simplistic. We wish we could accurately match someone’s ethnicity and/or skin color with a socioeconomic class.
The effort to classify what a person looks like, her skin color, her ethnicity and culture, and/or her country of origin as her socioeconomic status leads more than often to wrong assumptions, sad stories, and violent acts.
When one’s nationality or looks mismatches what the perceiver expects in her character or behavior, a need for logical explanation never delays. The work of the “I” is to rely on our reasoning when our old-held perceptions are challenged. Yet, verbally expressed inaccurate and overstated generalizations are always obvious to the receiver but usually dismissed by the messenger.
“But, you don’t look Mexican”
Phrases such as, “But, you don’t look Mexican” informs us where the speaker comes from —a solid and steadily held ignorance. That comfortable internal bubble gets burst as the messenger desires to be, but is not, asserted. His wish-it-was-iron-made fizz is held. He does not have to look inside to begin to accept that he does also carry that human-shared misery of pain.
Or, perhaps, he had wished that I wished to separate myself from my group of reference as much as he can comfortably separate himself from what he sees as “other.” And this other in his eyes is usually darker, indigenous-looking, lives on the other side of the tracks, has not appropriately learned the common fake politeness, was conditioned to obey, follows orders, rarely confronts authority, has less social status and in turn less political power.
According to those narrow “ethnicity-equals-class” standards, I must not, could not, and should not be Mexican. A fine gentleman, with the experience of being “of color,” told me once, “It is because according to them, you are too intelligent and good looking to be Mexican.”
I rather think that it is my lighter skin and middle-class demeanor what makes commentators like him feel unthreatened and almost sure that I want to climb their socially-imposed hierarchical ladder at the expense of my self-perceived identity and of the connection with the people I relate to culturally, historically, and ethnically.
