I Don’t Speak For All Latinos; No One Does

So I was asked last night, “How do Latinos feel about Obama?”

Where it happened or who was asking doesn’t add or detract from the story, I get that question more than I care to report. I was polite, tried to look like I was seriously pondering an answer, waited long enough for the question to gain a little mass and fall from where it floated above the table and said: that’s a good question.

What I was thinking was: I haven’t had time to ask all Latinos how they feel about Obama, so I don’t know. I didn’t say that, though. I held my tongue, and I think it has to do with my catholic school upbringing – it’s the same reason that, to this day, I push my chair in after I leave the dinner table.

Latinos don’t speak with one voice, about anything. But some non-Latinos have an expectation that we do. I blame that expectation on the prankster who invented the whole “Hispanic” thing. I like to think that the Hispanic thing was a last resort, that someone was trying to explain the community and the people in it to someone else who had no working knowledge of who we were, and in frustration at not being able to explain us properly said, “we’re like this big group, we have several things in common, but not all things…just call us Hispanic.”

So now, when non-Latinos find out about News Taco and that I write opinion columns on Latino issues, they think I’m a spokesperson.

The easiest, knee-jerk answer to the questions is to refer to the many polls on Latino attitudes and politics.  It provides something to say and makes me sound much smarter than I am: According to the Pew Hispanic Center, and on and on; the latest poll says, blah, blah.

There is a difference: I have an opinion, but I don’t speak for all Latinos (I don’t even speak for the few who’ll listen to me). So I don’t know what Latinos feel about Obama, but my opinion is that many are disenchanted, and they’ll vote for him again anyway. I don’t know why Latinos don’t vote in the numbers that they should, but my opinion is that part of it has to do with feeling marginalized, that they don’t feel part of the political process (I also think that the answer to the low voter turn out  lies within the Latino community, and not on the shoulders of politicians). I don’t know why some people think that some Latinos refuse to learn English, but my opinion is that it’s not true; that English-learning Latinos feel more comfortable speaking in Spanish when they can. I can go on about a whole bunch of stuff, following the same pattern: I don’t know, but I have an opinion.

And I imagine that somewhere down the line, in a non-Latino conversation, the non-Latino I spoke to will use  our talk as a point of legitimate reference: “Well I spoke to a Latino, and he said…(add the issue du jour).” See how that happens?

So I write in News Taco, and I write opinion columns and I get the comments and the nasty mail, but I don’t speak for the Latino community. And that’s a good thing, because I know my people and you all (I carry a Tejano license to use that term) wouldn’t like all of what I have to say. That’s what I tried to explain to my non-Latino conversation partner. It’s complicated.

Here’s my conclusion: Latinos need an elevator speech; we need a boilerplate explanation and talking points to commit to memory so we can have answers at the ready.  We can come up with a few points, circulate them on Twitter or Face Book so that all Latinos are on the same page, and go from there.

They bought the whole “Hispanic” thing; who knows, they may fall for this as well.

 Follow Victor Landa on Twitter: @vlanda