1,426 words / 10:04

In the all-white neighborhood of my youth, the faraway people who are now known as “Hispanics” . . . or, more dubiously, as “Latinos” . . . or, unforgivably, as “Latinx” . . . were referred to with the catchall slur “Spics.”

It wasn’t until I reached my mid-teens and found cause to boldly venture into the City of Brotherly Love that I encountered any real-life Hispanics, who all seemed to be Puerto Rican. When I started driving a cab in Philly during my late teens and early 20s, it seemed as if that crumbled city’s most blighted areas were mostly inhabited by Puerto Ricans rather than blacks.

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The same standard applied when I moved up to New York City in the mid-‘80s: The South Bronx, that legendary Dresden-like hellhole, seemed disproportionately Puerto Rican. It also suffered no shortage of blacks, but there was a lot of overlap — the Spanish-speaking blacks with Caribbean or Central American roots whom I’ve affectionately dubbed as “Spañegroes.”

A famous late-‘70s pop-culture example of a Spañegro was Chico Escuela, a fictional New York Met with a heavy Spanish accent played on Saturday Night Live by black comedian Garrett Morris. Chico was both black and Hispanic, which is where it starts to get confusing.

My only other memories of Hispanics being mentioned in the days of wayback came from my brother Johnny, who worked as a car salesman while living in Colorado during the mid-1970s. He used to joke about how Mexican buyers would marvel, “That’s one charp Chevy, mane!” and how they rendered the “sh” sound in both “sharp” and “Chevy” with a hard “ch” sound as in “cherry” or “chick.”

Back then, I didn’t distinguish between Mexicans and Puerto Ricans; to me, they were all Spics.

For a few years ending in 2010, I worked an office job here in Atlanta for a company owned by Colombians. For months at a time, they’d fly down an amiable salesman from Chicago, a demographically fractured city which is as roughly “Hispanic” as it is black and white. The sales guy would stay at a nearby motel and attempt to charm customers into buying the company’s medical equipment. He spoke with that typically wholesome Midwestern accent and had a pink hue to his skin. He also had jet-black hair and both a first name and surname that were unmistakably Spanish. Although he clearly wasn’t an immigrant, he defiantly identified as Mexican.

What took me aback is how he looked down upon Puerto Ricans as filthy, criminally inclined, subhuman scumbags.

Wait — I thought they were all Spics!

Apparently not. A 2003 New York Times article is titled “Little But Language in Common: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans Quarrel in East Harlem.”

This startlingly disorienting idea of intra-Hispanic animosity was confirmed to me by a woman I know whose biological father was pure Italian and whose mother was Guatemalan. Her father died when she was only six months old, and her mom soon married an Argentinian man. She grew up in a Spanish-speaking household where her parents inculcated her with their own notions of how Not All Hispanics Are Created Equal.

As she described it, the Hispanic “totem pole” had Argentinians at the top, followed by Cubans. Mexicans were somewhere in the middle. Puerto Ricans and Dominicans were at the bottom.

A 2008 survey titled “Latin America’s Racial Caste System: Salient Marketing Implications” breaks the pecking order down thusly:

Latin American societies are structured in a fuzzy racial caste system. Whites are at the top. Next are individuals of mixed European and Indian or mixed European and African ancestry, the Mestizos and the Mulattos, respectively. At the bottom are the Indians and the blacks.

Because I am congenitally prone to furious bouts of semantic squabbling, I refuse to use the term “Latino” or “Latin America.”

This link attempts to explain the difference between so-called “Hispanics” and “Latinos”: “Hispanic refers to the Spanish language, while Latino is a geographical label.”

But there is nothing intrinsically “Latin” about Latin America; it’s a stupid idea that the French concocted. “Latin America” is better understood as a geographic region known as Mesoamerica.

If The New York Times is correct in assuming that in the United States at least, “Hispanics” are people who speak predominantly Spanish, it isn’t too much of a leap to infer that America’s true “Latinos” have ancestors who spoke Latin, and therefore Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin are more plausibly “Latino” than Desi Arnaz or Xavier Cugat could ever hope to be. It’s not a perfect analogy — I doubt that Ol’ Blue Eyes or Dino ever spoke Latin — but it makes more sense than referring to Spanish-speaking people of Mesoamerican ancestry as “Latinos.”

I’d always assumed that “Spic” was a handy contraction of “Hispanic,” but Wikipedia says that in its earliest incarnations from before 1915, it was a contraction of “spaghetti” and referred exclusively to Italians.

I’ve long puzzled over why the Spanish-speaking mongrels of the Americas seem to bear an undying animosity for genetically European “Anglos” who played cleanup after the genetically European Spanish conquistadores subdued large swaths of the indigenous inhabitants of North America as well as nearly all of Central and South America. The best I can come up with is that they prefer speaking Spanish to English.

So, what the hell is a “Hispanic,” anyway?

According to the United States Census Bureau by way of Wikipedia, the term “Hispanic” does not refer to a race:

The United States Census Bureau uses Hispanic or Latino to refer to a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race. and states that Hispanics or Latinos can be of any race and any ancestry.

Okay, I’ll bite — so why is the term “Spic” considered “racist”?

Possibly because the Hispanics whose ancestry doesn’t come purely from Spain are to some degree non-white. I stubbed my toe on this link, which alleges that Puerto Ricans and Mexicans share different percentages of non-white ancestry:

Although Mexicans and Puerto Ricans are both considered Latino or Hispanics, Mexicans, on average, have a higher proportion of Native American ancestry (35%–64%) but a lower proportion of African ancestry (3%–5%). Puerto Ricans have lower proportion of Native American ancestry (12%–15%) and higher proportion of African ancestry (18%–25%).

In other words, Mexicans are more genetically Mesoamerican than Puerto Ricans are, whereas the PRs are more genetically African than Mexicans are.

There are all sorts of nexuses along which American “Hispanics” tend to quarrel among themselves: skin color, country of origin, their accent when speaking Spanish, whether they insist on speaking Spanish or English, how long they’ve been in the United States, and the degree to which they’ve assimilated into Anglo-American culture — i.e., how “white” they act. Despite Rodney King’s better wishes, people will always find a way not to get along.

Race is mostly about proximity. I’ve found that the most convenient definition of “race” is “continental ancestry.”

Just as the concept of “the human race” is meaningless unless Martians were to suddenly invade, in a society consisting only of Europeans, the racial term “white” would cease to have much meaning.

The same applies to the linguistic construction “Hispanic.” It’s one of the few instances where race is predominantly a social construct.

But a 2018 research paper with the obstreperous title of “Investigating intra-ethnic divisions among Latino immigrants in Miami, Florida” echoes how much of the American public buys into the “All Spics Are Alike” notion:

Researchers, not to mention the media and the more general public, essentialize Latinos as a monolithic group, and often racialize them, as a racial group alongside whites, blacks, and Asians.

Then, after painstakingly outlining how Miami’s different Spanish-speaking groups are constantly at one another’s throats, the authors add:

Embedded in the implicit assumption of Latino cohesion are the reasons why pan-ethnic unity could help Latinos. By virtue of being treated as a monolithic group, Latinos can use their numbers to their advantage.

This concept was stated much more crudely in a comment on a 2017 thread on the Reddit group “r/LatinoPeopleTwitter” titled “Beef Between Mexicans and Puerto Ricans?”

Basically we all hate each other, but if you talk shit about Hispanics well [sic] join up. . . . Enemies till we gotta square up against el gringo lol jk

Ah, okay — despite all your differences, you realize that in the face of a hostile enemy, there is strength in numbers.

Ay, caramba, I wish the gringos were so astute.