Organic Hispanics

(Art by Stacey Torres, Etsy.com) Well, here we are, and it's Hipanic Heritage Month again. Time for ethnic dance troupes to put on their garish costumes and go hopping around in public, while spectators snicker under their breath. Time for Professional Hispanics, non-profit types who profit from government funding as self- proclaimed community leaders, to come out and promote themselves on local news shows. Time to be reminded of Hispanic role models who raise the bar so impossibly high for the rest of us, they might as well not exist. (Sonia Sotomayor? Really?). To me, Hispanic Heritage Month is about underscoring US Latinos' status as Other. People who whites are comfortable with as long as they can laugh at us, our accent or our appearance. As long as they can remind us that we are different. And they will, often. You can be light-skinned, educated and accentless, and some white

person will always greet you with a hearty "HO-LA, A-MI-GA"! Being categorized as "other" means you're not really equal, that you're not allowed to compete on an even footing with people whose gifts you may exceed. It reduces the arena to work related to your ethnicity, so you end up trying to out-Hispanic each other for crumbs off the mainstream table. And then there's capitalism, the drive to turn Latinos into commodities that form a huge consumer market within the US. So there are powerful forces at work keeping US Latinos as "other". Worse,too many Latinos buy into the stereotype. I've found that in New York, if you're not short, dark and manifestly ignorant, other Hispanics look at you askance -- never mind that you can curse in Spanish and shake your ass with the best/worst of them (while also knowing about your literature and history and speaking and writing the language correctly because you didn't learn it second-hand in some ghetto). It's a reverse discrimination of sorts. But we're not all bookies and churro ladies, so deal with it. Somewhere between Carmen Miranda and Cameron Diaz,there are millions of people like me: educated, integrated Hispanics who grew up in the US., who retain their ethnic identity but feel no neeed to flaunt it. They are a "market", too, why won't anyone here see it? While there are plenty of black and brown pundits on English language news TV, I notice a dearth of Latino spokesmen. That's because Latino viewers are supposed to be watching Univision and Telemundo, right? WRONG! Many of us find it boring, embarrassing and, yes, primitive--largely produced in countries that are foreign to us.

That's why I was overjoyed to see Jose Diaz-Balart get his own show on MSNBC this month. Jose, a second generation Cuban exile, is exactly what I'm talking about. He speaks with a trace of an accent. He wears his ethnicity lightly, like a second skin. He comes off as refined, professional. Unlike Black pundits, who take every chance to trumpet their Blackness to guests and viewers, as if it were not obvious, Jose is never heavy-handed in his projection. He treats his Latino guests with understated familiarity,like they're all members of the same, exquisite, secret society. Every now and then, he'll drop in a quick Spanish phrase to underscore this. His presence gives me hope that finally,someone is bothering to go beyond stereotypes in order to appeal to a segment of the public that's been ignored for way too long. Felicidades, Jose.