On most Fridays, Leo Guerra and about 20 other kindred spirits unfurl Mexican flags, hoist placards and demonstrate at two of the Eastside's most familiar landmarks: East L.A. College and the Sears, Roebuck & Co. store on Olympic Boulevard.
It's not that they have anything against the retailer or the college. They do, however, have a beef with the constant use of the words \o7 Hispanic \f7 and \o7 Latino\f7 as ethnic descriptions. They hate it because they believe the terms misidentify and demean the majority of Latinos in greater L.A., who are of Mexican descent. They are so outraged that they picked two spots where the residents and merchants are overwhelmingly of Mexican descent to try to sway public opinion to their side.
Guerra admits it's an uphill battle, because the terms are so widely accepted and used, including by me. But he isn't discouraged and gets energized whenever a trucker blasts his approval in response to the placards that urge motorists to "Honk if you're Mexican."
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As head of the Chicano Mexicano Empowerment Committee, a group based in Huntington Park with about 50 members, Guerra has a shopping list of complaints against a wide variety of offenders, including this newspaper. For the moment, however, his group's ire is aimed at Telemundo, a Spanish-language TV network in the United States, and its local station, KVEA-TV Channel 52, in Glendale.
Guerra says the argument isn't about semantics. It's really about power.
For the past 30 years, Mexican-Americans have been actively fighting for more political clout, better-paying jobs and improved access to education and housing. The fight over the two terms is another illustration, activists like Guerra say, of how they don't have much say over even what they should be called.
The term \o7 Hispanic\f7 became entrenched as a result of the 1980 census, when the Carter Administration, trying to figure out how many of us there were in the United States, used it to describe Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cuban-Americans, Dominicans and others. Federal officials say \o7 Hispanic\f7 is acceptable because it traces U.S. Spanish-speakers' roots to Spain.
But some find fault with that explanation. They favor \o7 Latino \f7 as the better description because it reflects the fact that most of this country's Spanish-speakers came from Latin America.
