"I am Latino, I am also White": ancestry

Thomas Lopez (LAist.com, 12/4/20); Crystal Quintero, CC Liu (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

At a Rose Parade float display, Thomas Lopez compares his profile with first U.S. president.

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"I am Latino, I am also White": Why a Latino of mixed ancestry struggles

La Raza ["The Race"] in LA (Letty Set Go)

"Mr. Lopez, we need you to turn in the form declaring your son's race," said the administrator from my son's school.

In second grade we transferred him to the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) from his parochial school and filed the necessary stack of paperwork, save one form. That was the statement of racial identity.

It wasn't intentional, just an honest mistake. But it wasn't one the school would easily overlook. They called my wife and me individually to obtain the form.

Completing this form was not easy. My son is multiracial -- Black, White, and Native American. I, too, am multi-racial White and Latino. My wife and I are Mexican-American.

From a biological standpoint the answer for our son's identity would be different from ours because he is not ours biologically. But then again, that doesn't really matter because race is a social construct. So from an ethnic standpoint, he's being raised with some of the cultural norms of a Southern California Mexican-American family.

The first question the LAUSD form asked is if our son is Latino or non-Latino.

The next question we encountered asked for his "primary" and "secondary" race.

No explanation was given for the meaning or significance of these terms. Probably the strangest of all instructions was that if Latino is selected in the prior question, only a "secondary" race may be selected in the latter.

Thomas Lopez and his wife and children (courtesy of Thomas Lopez).

 

In other words Latino is essentially treated as a race in a question of its very own, and it carries primacy over all other identities. This makes me wonder. In multiracial Los Angeles Latinos number nearly three-quarters or 75% of the LAUSD student population. But what would that number be if mixed Latinos were counted?

Over the next year KPCC FM (scpr.org) is hoping to hear stories about how race and ethnicity shape life and hope to publish as many of these stories as it can so that the conversation keeps going. This effort is being called "Race in LA." More

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