Counter-Currents
Image source: Wikimedia Commons
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.
Audio version: To listen in a player, use the one below or click here. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link/target as.”
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.
You can buy Jim Goad’s ANSWER Me! here.
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.
Enjoyed this article?
Be the first to leave a tip in the jar!
* * *
Counter-Currents has extended special privileges to those who donate at least $10/month or $120/year.
- Donors will have immediate access to all Counter-Currents posts. Everyone else will find that one post a day, five posts a week will be behind a “paywall” and will be available to the general public after 30 days. Naturally, we do not grant permission to other websites to repost paywall content before 30 days have passed.
- Paywall member comments will appear immediately instead of waiting in a moderation queue. (People who abuse this privilege will lose it.)
- Paywall members have the option of editing their comments.
- Paywall members get an Badge badge on their comments.
- Paywall members can “like” comments.
- Paywall members can “commission” a yearly article from Counter-Currents. Just send a question that you’d like to have discussed to [email protected]. (Obviously, the topics must be suitable to Counter-Currents and its broader project, as well as the interests and expertise of our writers.)
To get full access to all content behind the paywall, please visit our redesigned Paywall page.
38 comments
The term Hispanic is indeed meaningless. It was invented by the US government, and if it was not intended to muddy the waters about race being real or a social construct, it certainly has that effect. A Castilian has a much different phenotype than say a dark-skinned Peruvian, and yet both are considered “Hispanic.”
When Pele died last year, I got into an argument with my moronic black coworker about his ethnicity. He refused to believe that there was a thing called Afro-Brazilian. He just kept saying “He Hispanic” over and over again. Man I am glad I left that job.
Would I alineate FRENS on here if I confided I would not begrudge a man for having a romantic or sexual relationship with a dopplegänger of Ana de Armas? She is the first instance that comes tox mind demonstrating how useless the term “Hispanic” is. Very European phenotype that is so very different from dark-skinned mestizoes.
I would drink her bath water.
It always amazed me that so many Whites were able to preserve their genes in places like Cuba where the overwhelming population appears to be non-White from pure negroes to negro/Amer-Indian to negro/White (mulatto) to Amer-Indian/White (mestizo) to varying degrees of mulatto/mestizo/White (yuck).
I do not know how long Ana de Armas’s ancestors lived in Cuba but it is a testament to her ancestors that it appears they were able to live in that “racial jungle” and remained genetically incorrupted. And let’s not forget that it was the Catholic Church which encouraged the Spaniards and Portuguese to intermix with their conquered slaves and subjects against their own racial instincts. I wonder how many of those Catholic bishops and archbishops were actually marannos doing the work of “their race”? Well to the ancestors of Ana de Armed, salud, salud, salud!
Speaking of…
What happened to Fred Reed?
Learned something here that helps explain why Puerto Ricans are so dumb and corrupt: they are descendants of negroids. If you ever go to Africa or other places that are home to negroids one of the most obvious blemishes is how they do not like wasting resources on maintaining things. 6 years ago a hurricane ripped apart Puerto Rico leaving them without electric power for a very extended period. The destruction was mainly caused by the winds blowing trees into the power lines. But it was discovered that large sums had been supposedly set aside to to cut down the trees that could pose a threat but instead of doing that the corrupt govt officials had run off with the $$$$.
The corruption among the govt types there is impressive. The schools had more ‘administrators’ than teachers who, for the most part, apparently don’t even show up to teach.
I once witnessed an Arab grocer call a Puerto Rican vendor a Mexican. It was the ultimate insult. The Spic instantly and instinctively attacked. I can’t help but wonder how the higher ups at his company handled that situation.
Years ago I worked at a meat packing plant with a high amount of South Americans. One of the quality control people was a latina woman named Jennifer. She had a disdain for her fellow south of the border brethren so intense that when I made the mistake of referring to her as a Mexican she shot back at me “I ain’t no fucking wetback.”
Most Hispanics/Latinos aren’t white, even in Spain there are some, usually in the south who have too many North African genes to be called white. Very swarthy.
I agree. There has simply been too much mixing in the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies.
Even the Hispanics who are typically classified as White like Cubans and Spaniards are looking more mixed today than they probably once were
It can still dilute and blend out Whites here in the USA. It’s vitally important to keep out whatever is classified as Hispanic, and to try and remove as many as possible too
There were no North African genetics in the Iberian Peninsula until the recent mass migration which started in the late 90s. Most likely you’ve seen either Gypsies or people with Gypsy blood running through their veins.
No Moors after 711 AD?
I should have been more accurate both in time and geography. No North African blood in Spanish Iberian Peninsula (I don’t know about Portugal but in Spain one knows many times when someone’s from Portugal just by their looks) since the massive Morisco expulsions (from 1492 to 1613 more than 3 million were expelled) until the late 90s beginning of mass migration.
I should have been more accurate both in time and geography. No North African blood in Spanish Iberian Peninsula (I don’t know about Portugal but in Spain one knows many times when someone’s from Portugal just by their looks) since the massive Morisco expulsions (from 1492 to 1613 more than 3 million were expelled) until the late 90s, beginning of mass immigration to Spain.
And what about Canary Islands? Well, the native population (Guanches) were Berber peoples and they were totally assimilated afther the lengthy conquest of the archipelago. Anyway, the first Conquistadors in Canary Islands were Normands Jean de Béthencourt and Gadifer de la Salle who didn’t see the natives as other than White peoples. Have in mind that Canary Islands natives were Berbers who settled there in Roman Empire times, before the mulattization of North Africa via importing millions of Black slaves thanks to Trans-Saharan slave trade. Romans also didn’t notice anything strange about them, unlike they did about Egyptians, Arabs or Ethiopic populations.
Anyway, let’s go back to 711 AD. The Muslim invasion of Spain is more a story of treason, betrayal and turncoating than a conquest proper. Visigothic nobility seem to have alienated all Spaniards (Hispano-Romans, Basques, Iberians, Celts and even most of their own fellow Goths) with their endless fights and blood spilling. Jews were also waiting for their chance and allegedly they opened the city gates in Toledo and other cities of that age. Most of the very few invaders were Berber, only the top dogs were from Syria and Yemen.
Reconquista pushed the invaders and turncoats to the South, and in the end, to Africa. They faked converting to Christianity, but still kept plotting with Ottoman agents how to get Spain back to Muslim domination. Also they lit beacons for Muslim raiders to get ashore and enslave Spaniards during decades until at last, the king heard the plea of some noblemen about routing all them out, regardless of their formal status as Catholics. It’s very easy today in North Africa to spot a Morisco descendant; most likely he would look like something closer to the average Spaniard than to the average Moroccan or Algerian.
About the Jews, it seems that most of them were Spanish natives converts, they proselitized a lot for many centuries, a process which Visigoths kings stopped on its tracks straight-out banning it some decades before the Muslim rule.
A final word about Gypsies. Something was tried during the XVIII century, the Great Round-Up, but it failed mostly by pressure of the Church. We have almost 3/4 of a million Gypsies in Spain, which sucks a lot.
My first message was my first intervention here in CC, after many years of being a silent reader both of the site and the books. It’s been a pleasure to have exchanged some words with you.
Regards and all the best from Europe.
On Wikipedia I find between 5 and 10 percent on average North African admixture among Spaniards and Portuguese, but there is also the problem of Jewish admixture
There is also minor Turkic admixture in Russians, Anatolian in Balkan peoples, North African/Middle Eastern in Italians, Khoisan in Boers
Where do we draw the line between Europe and Africa, between the White and non-white worlds? Of course, it is primarily a genetic issue, but we can hardly bisect Iberia with its devout Catholicism and Romance languages over the difference of a few percentage points. The pessimistic anthropologist, himself the product of the admixture of Aryans and Paleo-Europeans, will find unfortunate genetic specimens in every country
I recall that Richard Lynn argued in his book ‘Race Differences in Intelligence‘ that the reason the Portuguese have somewhat lower average IQs than other Europeans according to his data is that they were apparently the only European state to import significant numbers of black slaves.
Interestingly, there is a much greater level of representation of mitochondrial haplogroup L – found mostly in sub-Saharan Africa – in some parts of Iberia than anywhere else in Europe.
Also, given that the Gibraltar Strait is only a few miles across at the narrowest point, and the Mediterranean Sea, far from a barrier, was long a hub of trade, raiding, conquest, migration, and hence gene-flow, there are obviously great genetic commonalities between North Africa and Southern Spain.
According to Carol Baker, not only is Hispanic a made up term that she sneers at, it defines a category of people she does love: people who are eager to take every vaccine she and her industry want them to take.
And of course she also defines the antithesis of these needle recepticles errr I mean, “Hispanics”; Whites In this video she seems to be on team Hispanic to get the gringos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyXuPwsLGWI&pp=ygUdY2Fyb2wgYmFrZXIgZ2V0IHJpZCBvZiB3aGl0ZXM%3D
Well, at least we know why the ruling class of, “Whites”, love non-Whites – albeit with the most cuddly emotion they are capable of – contempt.
Wow, what a psychopathic bitch! She doesn’t appear to be a Triber™ but she sure thinks like one. It kind of reminds me of Ernst Zundel’s 1996 interview with an Israeli journalist where Zundel says that, “Jews are a race of the mind.” Zundel attributes that quote to Hitler but I think he was mistaken or he was just trying to eff with the jew’s mind like they do with us on a daily basis.
I agree with many of Jim’s points. The terms Hispanic and Asian are both used too broadly.
When you hear the word Asian, the first picture in your head is some little Chinese guy on a motor scooter delivering your food — But it also applies to Hmong, Indians (from India) Cambodians, and all other very primitive Asians, not just East Asians.
When you hear the word Hispanic, the first picture in your head is likely a 5’3” Mestizo in California selling sliced fruit in a street corner that he stole from a supermarket somewhere — But it also applies to very light-skinned Columbians like Shakira, actual Spaniards like Antônio Banderes, and black-passing Hispanics like Roberto Clemente and most Dominicans.
As you can see, things can get complicated. However, I’m more or less ok with using the term Hispanic as a racial classification, because virtually all Hispanics aren’t purely White. Even most Cubans (who are often touted as White) that I encounter here in the northeast have lips like a black person, and actors like John Leguizamo are increasingly loud about hating White people — even though he likely would have been classified as White 50+ years ago, despite his Columbian roots
I think, at least for the time being, it would be too risky to try and classify Spaniards, Cubans, and White-passing South Americans like Columbians as White, and limiting the Hispanic headcount to only Mestizos and Mulattos who are proven to not be White — even though that would likely reduce the 17 or 18% Hispanic thats currently counted down to about 10-13% instead, and Whites would probably be closer to 70% of the USA.
It’s a tough one for sure. But keeping the classification intact for now I think is smart.
I just had a conversation with my dim black co-worker that Puerto Rican women are just as bad as black women (the part I didn’t say was they’re just not hideous).
Even though blacks have the “slave owners leftovers” excuse for why they eat awful crap, I thought Puerto Rican food was gross on its own, but that 18-25% seems to be the culprit.
The one-drop rule in the US is harshly criticized and it does have its faults, like it alienated the best and smartest light-skinned, white-acting blacks and pushed them into the enemy’s camp. But it’s great in its simplicity. If you live in a Latin American country you have to waste a lot of your intellectual energy keeping track of an endless classification of different types of mestizos and mulattos, as was shown in a very interesting article on this site a long time ago. It mentioned “castizos” and “dark mestizos,” but that was only the beginning.
Why worry about alienating people who are genuine aliens? Are we stronger with nonwhites in our camp? Is diversity now a strength?
That depends. How non-white does one have to be to not be white enough? If someone is 1/8 black and 7/8 white, should that person be considered white?
How about non-white?
Being considered non-white despite having 87.5% white ancestry seems strange when the average African American is almost 20% white. They are rightfully categorized as black.
I guess there could be some cases where the black phenotype is very visible, but generally speaking these people will look and act white, in addition to being genetically white.
Hispanics are a bit different where many are not majority anything. They’re just a blend of white, Amerindian and black. These people are visibly and genetically not very white.
Why insist on the binary option white or black when mixed people are obviously mixed?
“Because I am congenitally prone to furious bouts of semantic squabbling, I refuse to use the term “Latino” or “Latin America.””
Good.
Best depiction of Puerto Ricans in a movie? The Horsemen, with honorable mention to their leader, Zorro, in the 1961 picture The Young Savages.
I’m pretty sure Hispanics call Americans “Anglos” as a result of their Spanish European ancestry, not despite of it. I remember this was the go-to term Spanish used for the Brits back when they were at each other’s throats in the 17th Cent.
No. They call us Gringos. Even when I visited Brazil I was called gringo. Does anyone know the origin of that term?
Gringo is the Castilian Spanish word for “foreigner.” Similar terms I heard while living in LA were guero and gabacho.
I’ve read that gringo also possibly stems from the Mexican American war when Irish battalions would sing a popular song of the era “Green Grow the Lilacs “. It was misheard by Mexican troops who began referring to the Americans as gringos. Who knows?
Word never used in Spain until it arrived from South America and progressives adopted it in the late 70s because “Anti-Colonialism”
In Spain “gabacho” is a French national. “Güero” is something Mexicans use to address blond people.
Gringo probably comes from griego (greek), from the expression hablar en griego/falar grego, similar meaning as english “its all greek to me!”
In my Catholic high school in Queens, NY, the Puerto Ricans were pretty pale and their fathers were doctors or lawyers or bankers. This was in the 80s. Funny story is the Spanish kid whose parents wouldn’t let him hang out with the Puerto Ricans. They weren’t allowed over his house. He said his parents tolerated us normal Americans because they were in our country after all. But they still knew they were better than us.
“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.”
Interestingly to compare this with both the level of economic development in the different countries – and their racial demographics/genetics.
Argentina and Cuba are mostly white/European; Mexico mostly mixed indigenous-European (Mestizo); Dominicans are mostly of African ancestry. The whiter countries definitely seem to be richer.
Also, Cuban immigrants to the USA were often refugees fleeing communism and hence (like Vietnamese immigrants) presumably disproportionately from elite or middle-class backgrounds.
These are always rich discussions. First, the media and progressives see it as okay for Asians, the Muslim world the the vague LatinX contingents to be identity groups. But any mention of White identity quickly leads to accusations that stormtroopers will be bred.
Then the various other races have their own hierarchies and racism. The Asians have the Japanese and Singaporeans on top, then China, Taiwan, then a conglomeration of south Asians. Among American and African blacks there remains stigma against the darkest blacks, because, umm…
Comments are closed.
If you have a Subscriber access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.
Paywall Access
Lost your password?Edit your comment