Hispanic Heritage identity; Bilingual singer-songwriter; SD Italian Film Festival

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It's time for KPBS Midday Edition. On today's show, the arts and culture shaping San Diego. I'm Jade Hindman with conversations that keep you informed, inspired, and make you think. A conversation about Hispanic identity. Then San Diego musician Nicole Hernandez talks about her debut album, plus a preview of the Italian Film Festival. That's ahead on KPBS Midday Edition. Hispanic Heritage Month is a celebration of the diversity and lived experiences of Hispanic and Latino communities in the United States. But it's also a time to think about who gets left out of conversations around Latino identity. Afro-Latinos make up about 12% of the Latino population in the U.S., according to a 2022 study by the Pew Research Center. Still, they are often overlooked during Hispanic Heritage Month. A few years ago, I sat down with Jose Fuste to talk about this. He's an assistant professor of ethnic studies at UC San Diego. I also asked him to explain the difference between terms like Latino, Hispanic, and Chicano. That's where our conversation began. Take a listen.

It's quite normal for human beings to have different terms that come from different eras and that are also symbolically attached to different social movements. The term Latino comes from the late 19th, early 20th century. in the East Coast, mainly Cuban and Puerto Rican migrants to the East Coast. And of course, it's derived from Latin American, which was a term of solidarity of the new republics of the 19th century south of the US border, right? So there were people that were coming from those either new republics, or in the case of Cuba and Puerto Rico, Spanish colonies that wanted to be new republics.

The term

that was used in the Southwest was quite different. It was Mexican because it was a Mexican majority population as a result of the annexation of Mexico's Northern half. The term Chicano has a much more recent history. It was embraced in the 1960s by a youth movement that was trying to flip the script on a term that before then was used pejoratively in very classist and colorist ways to refer to darker skinned, poorer Mexican immigrants. So these tended to be the children of those immigrants, many of them, for example, farm laborers that wanted to flip the script on that and make it a source of pride, as a source of mestizo, mulatto, mixed race, brown pride. The term Hispanic has a very different history. It actually comes from the Census Bureau in the early 1970s. President Nixon tasked the Census Bureau with coming up with an umbrella term to designate Spanish speakers. And he relied on a senator from New Mexico, Joseph Montoya, who was a Republican. And Montoya was part of a group of people from New Mexico. It's a kind of old school elite from that state that know themselves to be descendants from the original Spanish conquistadors that conquered the area between El Paso, Texas and Santa Fe, New Mexico. In New Mexico, it does tend to have a