NEW YORK — I may finally be getting the hang of this "Hispanic" thing.
For several years now, some Latino readers have taken me to task for my reluctance to embrace the conventional wisdom that lumps the 28 million people of Latin American extraction in this country under the bureaucratic catch-all term "Hispanic."
I have even refused to use that word unless it can't be avoided. It sounds cold and imprecise to my bilingual ears, unlike the many colorful slang terms we Latinos use to describe ourselves, like Chicanos, for U.S.-born Mexicans; Boricuas, for Puerto Ricans; and Nuyoricans, for Boricuas born in this city.
I still prefer those varied terms, however confusing they may sound to Anglo ears, and hard-to-pronounce on Anglo tongues, for they emerged from our disparate communities. They also represent an effort at self-definition by people who too often find themselves defined by others--be they government bureaucrats looking to put cultural complexity into simple boxes, or bigots who demean whole peoples with crude epithets.
But I had a wonderful experience last Sunday that, at least for one day, softened my resistance to the concept that there is such a thing as a Hispanic group in this country. I attended my first Puerto Rican Day parade and was bowled over by the sheer size, energy and enthusiasm of it all.
It was the 40th annual event, and an estimated 2 million people lined Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan, from 44th to 86th streets, for the three-hour long show. It was a celebration of the largest Latino community (pop. 860,000) in America's biggest city (7.3 million), and I was not the only journalist who was impressed. The New York Post called it "an awesome display of ethnic pride" and even the staid New York Times referred to it as "a huge and ebullient display of the growing political import of Hispanic residents in New York."
Indeed, ethnic politics provided an interesting backdrop to the day's festivities. New York has a mayoral election this November, and it is widely believed that city's Latino vote, about 13% in the last election, in 1993, is up for grabs. The Puerto Rican vote is normally Democratic by 70% or more, according to political pros here, but the city's Republican Mayor Rudolph Giuliani won enough of it four years ago to help him unseat Democrat David Dinkins.
