A recent story on our local NPR station about Latino and Hispanics included a short interview with me. You can find it here (the story is from the Fronteras Desk, which is a cooperative effort between several NPR stations in the Southwest to provide coverage of issues relevant to the Southwest and border states – their stories are heard on the NPR stations in San Diego, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Alburque, El Paso, and San Antonio).

As the story indicates, their impetus for doing the story was a letter that I wrote to my local NPR station, KJZZ. I wrote the letter in response to a story they did about whether people in the United States with origins in Latin America prefer the term “Hispanic” or “Latino.” You can read that story here. This is the letter I wrote to them:

First, I want to compliment you on the excellent and comprehensive reporting coming from your Fronteras stories. I take issue, however, with your recent story about preferences for the use of the terms “Hispanic” and “Latino” (“Study: ‘Latino’ and ‘Hispanic’ Not The Preferred Labels” by Nadine Arroyo Rodriguez, April 4, 2012).

It is unfortunate that in a story about the labels Latinos and Hispanics apply to themselves, you carelessly used as synonyms two labels that are not interchangeable. Ms. Rodriguez used the terms Hispanic and Latino as equivalent terms referring exclusively to persons of Spanish-speaking origin. While these terms have sometimes been erroneously conflated in US government census documents and by the Pew Hispanic Center, it is not proper general English usage to treat them as synonyms. Moreover, the lead to your story erroneously referred to “people of Latin American descent,” even though the survey at issue in the story ignored the one-third of Latin Americans who speak Portuguese.

Recognized authorities on the English language, such as the American Heritage Dictionary, point out that the terms Hispanic and Latino are not synonymous. The term “Hispanic” refers exclusively to those whose ethnic origins trace back to Spanish-speaking countries. The term “Latino,” however, is not limited only to Spanish speakers, but is also frequently used to refer to persons whose ethnic origins trace back to Latin America. Latin America includes Brazil, which as I’m sure you know, is a Portuguese-speaking country. Indeed, there are more Portuguese speakers in South America than Spanish speakers.

Brazilian-Americans commonly use the term “Latino” to identify themselves. The AP Stylebook makes a distinction between the terms Hispanic and Latino; it recognizes that Latino includes not just those of Spanish-speaking origin but also more generally includes those from Latin America (including Brazilians). There are nearly 400,000 Americans of Brazilian ancestry in the United States (including me) and 200 million people in Brazil. It appears careless to me to use terms that ignore Brazilians’ significant presence in our country and hemisphere.

I realize that your story was based on the results of the Pew survey and was perhaps mirroring Pew’s usage of the terms. But previous KJZZ stories have also made this same error. Additionally, even if Ms. Rodriguez was repeating the terminology used by the Pew Center, repeating such specialized non-standard usages without explanation is confusing to listeners. I suggest that in the future, your usually careful and insightful reporters more clearly delineate the difference between the terms Hispanic and Latino in their reporting. KJZZ would do well to follow the recommendations from the AP Stylebook and use more care and precision when choosing whether to use the term Hispanic or Latino.

Sincerely,
James Rogers

I wrote the letter not expecting much of a response. To my surprise, I received a response indicating that my letter had ignited a debate in their newsroom and asking if they could interview me for a story about terminology and self-identity.

The interview was a new experience for me. We talked for about 15 minutes, but only 10 seconds of our interview ended up in the story. If you listen to the audio for the story, you’ll notice that it is slightly different than the written version. The main difference is that the written version says said I “fancy” myself a Latino – to me, that seemed to carry a mocking tone, as if I’m portraying myself as something I’m not. Well, I really am half-Brazilian. My mom grew up poor in a little town in the middle of nowhere in Brazil (she even lived in a house with dirt floors and no running water for a few years as a kid). Her parents were born and raised in Brazil. And so were her grandparents. And so were her great grandparents. As far as we can tell, all of my Brazilian ancestors go back into the 1600s and 1700s. I wonder if because my last name is Rogers and because I’m pale-faced and blue-eyed, they didn’t think I can really claim Latin American heritage.

This kind of attitude demonstrates great ignorance about Latin America, which is not what you would expect to see from a set of journalists who purport to be experts on Latin America. Latin America has significant populations of just about every racial background–including whites. Just in Brazil there are large populations of people tracing their ancestry to Europe (all parts – north and south, east and west), Africa, the Middle East (there is a large number – 7 to 10 million – of Brazilians descended from Lebanese Christians who came to Brazil in the first half of the 20th century; in fact, one of the biggest fast food chains in Brazil is a place that makes Middle Eastern fast food), and Asia (Brazil has the largest population of ethnic Japanese people outside of Japan). There is even a large community of descendants of Confederate Americans who went to Brazil following the South’s loss in the American Civil War. They are known as the “Confederados” and still have annual get-togethers where they dress up in Confederate uniforms and sing American folk songs (in badly-accented English).

Brazil especially is a real melting pot of racial and ethnic backgrounds. As I’ve mentioned before, my 23andMe results indicate that my direct maternal ancestor is of African origin, probably from Mozambique. The rudimentary analysis available on 23andme estimated that I have about 1 percent African ancestry and 3 percent indigenous ancestry. (2022 update: Online genomics companies have greatly updated their algorithms since I wrote this post in 2011. Updated results show only 1% North African and no eastern European ancestry. Based on their updated ancestry analysis, my ancestral background is about 96% European, 3% Indigenous American / American Indian (eat your heart out, Elizabeth Warren), and 1% Sub-Saharan African. Combining this information about 4% non-European ancestry from what I know from genealogy, a general approximation of my European ancestry would be that my ancestry is about 50% English/British Isles and 46% Portuguese. The latest genomic analysis basically confirms this, showing the following results for my European ancestry: Portugal: 39%, England & Northwestern Europe: 28%, Scotland: 11%, Sweden & Denmark: 6%, Wales: 5%, Ireland: 4%, and Spain: 2%.)

The way they have it in the NPR story, they seem to imply that I am improperly putting myself out as being Latino. This is not true. I almost never identify myself as Latino in day-to-day life or on forms that I fill out.  And this is what I told the reporter–I specifically told her that I almost always mark “White” or “other” on forms, and not Latino.

(For example, I could have marked “Latino” on my law school admission forms, and thus benefited from affirmative action, but chose not to because I wanted to know for myself that, at whatever law school I ended up, I got in there on merit and not because of affirmative action or any special advantage from my ancestral background. I still managed to get into Harvard Law School, but I got in on merit, because I scored a 177 on the LSAT (99.7th percentile) and had a 3.7 GPA.)

The reporter kept on pushing me, though, and asked directly if I would qualify as a Latino. In response to that direct question I said that I believe I would qualify since my mother is Latin American. This is where the quote from the story came from. I now believe she was asking questions to fish for the quote she wanted to use. I believe that she and her colleagues deceptively and dishonestly edited the audio and also did the same in how they quoted me. The main things we talked about were my point that it is ignorant for journalists to assume that all Latin Americans speak Spanish, when one-third of them do not, and also that people of Brazilian descent are ambivalent about the label “Latino” and do not really consider themselves to be of the same ethnicity as Hispanics.

Most of the stories from the “Froteras Desk” give the appearance of advocacy pieces for the interests of Mexicans and Central Americans.  I should have realized that they would not be interested in making their reporting more accurate. What this experience has emphasized to me is that journalists are not very interested in learning about the world and accurately representing it to others or about fairly representing the people about whom they are reporting–most journalists appear to see their principal role as crafting a narrative to push their opinions and beliefs.

My first Rogers ancestor was born in Massachusetts in 1631. Most of my ancestors on my father’s side have been in North America since the 1600s. This is the American identity to which I am assimilated, because my immigrant mother made a conscious choice to NOT teach her children Portuguese (out of me and my three siblings, I am the only one who speaks Portuguese, and only because I learned it at age 19 while in Brazil as a missionary). She wanted us to be fully integrated into American culture and to have an identity as being American (and ONLY American). She made a wise choice, one which I am grateful for.