2010 Census: Ethnicity becomes an essay question

No, it's not all banjos around here. Last weekend I finally caught the Chicano art exhibit at the De Young Museum in San Francisco (closing on Oct. 22, FYI Bay Area homies). The exhibit is nothing if not vibrant and interactive: first you're presented with Cheech Marin's (yes, that Cheech Marin) collection of Chicano painting, which is almost ridiculously colorful, and mainly evokes life and struggle in the LA-area Hispanic communities. That's a vast generalization, but I'm no art historian.

Next up are video collages, mini low riders (complete with mini hydroulics so you can make 'em bounce), political posters, snippets of music -- an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink of contemporary Latino culture that, for my money, tries to incorporate too much and winds up glossing over everything equally.

What I found most interesting about the exhibit were interviews in which people discussed the varying terminology in use today to refer to people of Hispanic decent and how it these labels interact with their own identity. In language classes at Berkeley, we've been taught to refer to second- third- etc.- generation Spanish speakers as "Heritage speakers," which denotes their one foot in/one foot out situation. In the interviews, I learned the term pocho or pocha, which is generally used -- pejoratively, it seems -- inside the Mexican American community to describe people percieved as poor speakers of Spanish, who have rejected their heritage to some degree, and end up mixing Spanish and English into Spanglish. Other people interviewed described Chicano as a term that denotes political involvement on behalf of the Hispanic American community; Latino as a descriptor that's too vastly geographic (referring to Latin America) to have any real cultural significance; Hispanic as negating the indigenous heritage and concentrating only on the Spanish-conqueror heritage of these populations.

So, the bottom line is that there's no bottom line: it seems like personal preference rules the identifiers that describe Latinos, Chicanos, Hispanic Americans, Heritage Speakers, Pochos, etc. etc. This is a more complicated situation than can be discussed in a blog, raising questions from the viability and adecuacy of so-called pure language to the morphing ways that immigrant communities and populations identify themselves as their contact with a country of origin becomes diluted over the course of several generations.

But things to think about while you're makin' that low rider spark, m'ijo.