Rutgers University - Center for Race & Ethnicity
191 College Ave.
September 21, 2007
Center for Race and Ethnicity
Hispanic Identities in the New Millennium
Making Sense of Hispanic Diversity
How Research Funding Shapes Ethnic Representation
This event was featured in the Center for Race & Ethnicity's recent newsletter (Volume 1, October 2007). Click here to download.
“When I think about the number of people in the younger generation who may have one parent that is Puerto Rican and another Ecuadorian, or one parent who is Colombian and another African American, or individuals who are Peruvian and Japanese, it strikes me that just as many Americans are realizing that terms like Hispanic and Latino gloss over the incredible diversity of important sub-groups in the population (like Cubans or Dominicans, who are often labeled as black and Latino), these sub- groups are also rapidly breaking down in the "new millenium". – Peter Guarnaccia
MAKING SENSE OF HISPANIC DIVERSITY
Peter Guarnaccia’s presentation, based in part on data from the National Latino and Asian
American Mental Health Survey, revealed the diversity of Latino sub-groups as well as the distinctive regional demographics among Latino groups across the nation.
“The diversity of the Hispanic population nationally does not map onto the diversity of the
Hispanic population in our region. Whereas nationally, Mexican Americans are 56% of the
Latino population (and, by the way, 60% of them are citizens), and only 10% are Puerto Rican;
in New Jersey, the largest group by far are Puerto Ricans (who have a complex relationship to the U.S. as citizens-yet- noncitizens), with Dominicans second. The national discussion on Hispanics and immigration, then, doesn’t quite mesh with our regional realities.” – Peter Guarnaccia
Claudia Moreno’s comparative study of Puerto Rican and Dominican women and HIV identified crucial differences among “Hispanic” groups in attitudes about HIV, AIDS, and risk – and raises broader questions about how perceived and actual “risk” is structured for these two groups of women.
“In a recent study we found that HIV positive Dominican women and Puerto Rican women had different views, in general, about sexual risk. Both groups of Latinas exhibited low condom use with main and other sexual partners, perceiving their own and their partners’ risk as low. Puerto Ricans were more heterosexually active, had more sexual partners, had higher
incidence of STI and HIV than Dominicans. However, Puerto Rican women were more likely
to use condoms with a sexual partner.” -- Claudia Moreno (http://hjb.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/29/3/336.pdf)
Such findings raised important questions for the audience – about sub-group differences and perceptions, about questions of sexuality as they intersect with health and ethnicity, and about how social scientists understand and study “risk.”
In addition, Decena who teaches an undergraduate course on The Racial Politics of the AIDS Crisis, argued that researchers’ tendency to focus on cultural identity and practices at the expense of racialization needs to be rethought, given the way Latino/a sexualities strongly intersect with racial and ethnic categorization. For as Decena’s and Morena’s talks crucially suggested, public health discourse bear the potential to not only misinterpret, but at times even reshape, the ways in which ethnicity is perceived and deployed within Latino/a communities.
• Can the terms of Latino culture invented by social scientists be useful in describing the diversity and complexity of the “Latino” experience?
• Variations in America’s Latino and Hispanic populations show economic differences, subgroup
differences; racial/skin color differences; as well as the sub-group demographic differences and regional differences.
• How to embrace a pan-Hispanic or “hybridity” oriented approach to identity and representation, while still holding to the traditional tropes (Latino/ Hispanic) that mean so much in terms of representation and in mainstream academia and the shaping, for example, of health policies?
• Such diversity raises obvious challenges for health care providers/administrators and also for academics working in Latino communities around issues of sexuality
• How – given the constraints of funders – can we encourage and develop the often-hidden scholarship and discourse on Latino sexualities?
• In what other ways do Latino populations and cultural dynamics in NJ differ from national trends?
• How should the altering self-identification of younger generations be taken into account when grappling with the complexity of Latino populations?
HOW RESEARCH FUNDING SHAPES ETHNIC REPRESENTATIONS
Carlos Decena’s discussion identified elisions in current public health literature on Latino/a sexualities. While Latino gay sexual practices are a strong focus for researchers, Latino/a heterosexualities and Latina lesbians remain under-represented in research, because these groups are perceived to be “low-risk” for contracting HIV and other sexually-transmitted diseases. This under-representation Decena argued, functions as the consequence of an interrelated set of discourses among funders, researchers and research subjects.
“Representation matters. Representations have their own institutional life. The processes by which categories come into existence and are replicated and the role of funders of scholarship (foundations, government grants, and so on) in reinforcing standard and accepted labels need to be looked at closely. These constraints inhibit a productive dialogue about the diversity of Latino culture, particularly in relation to my area of research – which is sex and sexuality.” -- Carlos Decena
“The terms and stereotypes we use to characterize Latino culture (“machismo” and “marianismo” [machismo’s supposed female counterpart]) were created by researchers, not originally part of the Latino cultures. These terms are a production of social science. When we use these cultural categories, we need to understand how they do and do not describe the diversity and complexity of the “Latino” experience.” -- Peter Guarnaccia
