We The Mestizos

[metta 0]

"If your mother is Asian and your father is African-American, what, racially speaking, are you? (And if your spouse is half Mexican and half Russian Jewish, what are your children?)"

My son is half Asia and half Caucasian with a Cherokee mix. So is he Asian American or Caucasian American? And I wonder what race boxes my grand children will check when their time comes.

Here is an interesting article that looks ahead to the future.

Mongrel America

Mongrel America

The most important long-term social fact in America may be the rising rates of intermarriage among members of ethnic and racial groups. A glimpse into our mestizo future

by Gregory Rodriguez

.....

A re racial categories still an important—or even a valid—tool of government policy? In recent years the debate in America has been between those who think that race is paramount and those who think it is increasingly irrelevant, and in the next election cycle this debate will surely intensify around a California ballot initiative that would all but prohibit the state from asking its citizens what their racial backgrounds are. But the ensuing polemics will only obscure the more fundamental question: What, when each generation is more racially and ethnically mixed than its predecessor, does race even mean anymore? If your mother is Asian and your father is African-American, what, racially speaking, are you? (And if your spouse is half Mexican and half Russian Jewish, what are your children?)

Further reading

selected by Gregory Rodriguez.

Five decades after the end of legal segregation, and only thirty-six years after the Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws, young African-Americans are considerably more likely than their elders to claim mixed heritage. A study by the Population Research Center, in Portland, Oregon, projects that the black intermarriage rate will climb dramatically in this century, to a point at which 37 percent of African-Americans will claim mixed ancestry by 2100. By then more than 40 percent of Asian-Americans will be mixed. Most remarkable, however, by century's end the number of Latinos claiming mixed ancestry will be more than two times the number claiming a single background.

Not surprisingly, intermarriage rates for all groups are highest in the states that serve as immigration gateways. By 1990 Los Angeles County had an intermarriage rate five times the national average. Latinos and Asians, the groups that have made up three quarters of immigrants over the past forty years, have helped to create a climate in which ethnic or racial intermarriage is more accepted today than ever before. Nationally, whereas only eight percent of foreign-born Latinos marry non-Latinos, 32 percent of second-generation and 57 percent of third-generation Latinos marry outside their ethnic group. Similarly, whereas only 13 percent of foreign-born Asians marry non-Asians, 34 percent of second-generation and 54 percent of third-generation Asian-Americans do.

M eanwhile, as everyone knows, Latinos are now the largest minority group in the nation. Two thirds of Latinos, in turn, are of Mexican heritage. This is significant in itself, because their sheer numbers have helped Mexican-Americans do more than any other group to alter the country's old racial thinking. For instance, Texas and California, where Mexican-Americans are the largest minority, were the first two states to abolish affirmative action: when the collective "minority" populations in those states began to outnumber whites, the racial balance that had made affirmative action politically viable was subverted.

Many Mexican-Americans now live in cities or regions where they are a majority, changing the very idea of what it means to be a member of a "minority" group. Because of such demographic changes, a number of the policies designed to integrate nonwhites into the mainstream—affirmative action in college admissions, racial set-asides in government contracting—have been rendered more complicated or even counterproductive in recent years. In California cities where whites have become a minority, it is no longer clear what "diversity" means or what the goals of integration policies should be. The selective magnet-school program of the Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, was originally developed as an alternative to forced busing—a way to integrate ethnicminority students by encouraging them to look beyond their neighborhoods. Today, however, the school district is 71 percent Latino, and Latinos' majority status actually puts them at a disadvantage when applying to magnet schools.

But it is not merely their growing numbers (they will soon be the majority in both California and Texas, and they are already the single largest contemporary immigrant group nationwide) that make Mexican-Americans a leading indicator of the country's racial future; rather, it's what they represent. They have always been a complicating element in the American racial system, which depends on an oversimplified classification scheme. Under the pre-civil-rights formulation, for example, if you had "one drop" of African blood, you were fully black. The scheme couldn't accommodate people who were part one thing and part another. Mexicans, who are a product of intermingling—both cultural and genetic—between the Spanish and the many indigenous peoples of North and Central America, have a history of tolerating and even reveling in such ambiguity. Since the conquest of Mexico, in the sixteenth century, they have practiced mestizaje—racial and cultural synthesis—both in their own country and as they came north. Unlike the English-speaking settlers of the western frontier, the Spaniards were willing everywhere they went to allow racial and cultural mixing to blur the lines between themselves and the natives. The fact that Latin America is far more heavily populated by people of mixed ancestry than Anglo America is the clearest sign of the difference between the two outlooks on race.

Nativists once deplored the Mexican tendency toward hybridity. In the mid nineteenth century, at the time of the conquest of the Southwest, Secretary of State James Buchanan feared granting citizenship to a "mongrel race." And in the late 1920s Represent-ative John C. Box, of Texas, warned his colleagues on the House Immigration and Naturalization Committee that the continued influx of Mexican immigrants could lead to the "distressing process of mongrelization" in America. He argued that because Mexicans were the products of mixing, they harbored a relaxed attitude toward interracial unions and were likely to mingle freely with other races in the United States.

[w¡n9Nµ7 §£@¥€r 123]

The fact that Latin America is far more heavily populated by people of mixed ancestry than Anglo America is the clearest sign of the difference between the two outlooks on race.

Interesting point!

So a Hispanic majority may really just be an interracial majority.

[homesick_american 1]

I look like a honkey, but I'm really a mongrel. I'm part English, part Polish, part Swedish, part German, part French, part Scottish, and lots of other stuff. There's some Romany in there, and also some Jewish...and some Tatar blood, which is not even European in origin.

Most of us are mongrels. You don't have to be the product of an interracial marriage to be a mongrel.

The fact that Latin America is far more heavily populated by people of mixed ancestry than Anglo America is the clearest sign of the difference between the two outlooks on race.

Interesting point!

So a Hispanic majority may really just be an interracial majority.

Yep; Hispanics can be any race.

[Queen Jenn 0]

I think most of us are mixed - even if it's a European mix.

I'm English, Scottish, Irish, with a little French, German, Prussian, Swedish (and probably more I don't know about). So my kids will be half euro-mongrel, half Yoruba.

Interesting . . . . .

[homesick_american 1]

I think most of us are mixed - even if it's a European mix.

I'm English, Scottish, Irish, with a little French, German, Prussian, Swedish (and probably more I don't know about). So my kids will be half euro-mongrel, half Yoruba.

Interesting . . . . .

I went to HS with a girl who was almost that exact mix. She was lovely.

[metta 0]

The fact that Latin America is far more heavily populated by people of mixed ancestry than Anglo America is the clearest sign of the difference between the two outlooks on race.

Interesting point!

So a Hispanic majority may really just be an interracial majority.

It is interesting to note that only in the U.S., we officially categorize citizens according to race

Caucasian, African American, Asian, Pacific Islander, Hispanic and others. Where as I am not aware of mexicans or Cubans being categorized ethnically as we do here.

Many Americans now and more so in the future will belong to the "other' category of race and ethnicity as the majority become multi-ethnic, perhaps rendering exisitng racial/ethnic categories redundant or obsolete.

Well, just a thought!

[JoeMama 0]

I remember a guy telling me that when his grandfather immigrated from the Philippines back in the 1920's, they didn't have a category for Filipinos. So they told him to check the box that says "Black". How the times have changed!

[GaryC 7]

I am equal parts of Irish, French, Dutch, German and English. You know what that makes me? An American!

[JoeMama 0]

I am equal parts of Irish, French, Dutch, German and English. You know what that makes me? An American!

Amen brother Gary!

[JVKn'CVO 11]

mmm that is an interesting question! never thought about it...

my fiance is half german, half russian...I'm 3/4 spanish, 1/4 italian...

maybe by the time we have kids they'll just have a box that says "weird mix"

[homesick_american 1]

mmm that is an interesting question! never thought about it...

my fiance is half german, half russian...I'm 3/4 spanish, 1/4 italian...

maybe by the time we have kids they'll just have a box that says "weird mix"

Nope, they'll just be white.

[Sinergy 3]

That is an interesting thing to think about

I know i am Russian, Yugoslavian, Czhek, Irish and Cherokee Indian (my dad is the indian and irish)

My daughter is all of what i am and Spanish

My son is all of what i am and Romanian.

Atleast my kids have one solid side

[JVKn'CVO 11]

mmm that is an interesting question! never thought about it...

my fiance is half german, half russian...I'm 3/4 spanish, 1/4 italian...

maybe by the time we have kids they'll just have a box that says "weird mix"

Nope, they'll just be white.

Oh no! I'll be the only one that can dance in the house!

Just kidding...I still think they'll be something like "hispanic-american" or wathever is closer to that

Edited May 25, 2007 by JVKn'CVO

[chri'stina 190]

I am so many different things. From my dad I have Scottish, Irish, English, and Italian. From my mom I have Czech and Ukrainian.

My kids will have to add Indian to the mix.

[Dr_LHA 3]

I am equal parts of Irish, French, Dutch, German and English. You know what that makes me? An American!

My wife is still mad that she got failed for writing an essay at high school* about her "ethnic heritage" entitled "I am an American". The fact is her family came over on the Mayflower and includes one of the signers of the Declaration of Independance, so she doesn't have any feelings of national pride other than America. She's about as American as you can be without being Native American. Still apparently her teachers decided she should have made up some ####### about how she feels strong ties to some random European country (its not clear exactly where her family originate from).

*(yes she's still mad 15 years later)