Do Latinos Navel-Gaze? Is the Pope Latino?

Is the Pope Latino?

Remember the good ol’ days of Karol Wojtya, when the Pope was Polish and no one questioned it? When it was such a given that it became a punch line affirmative: Is the Pope Polish?

Suddenly the Pope is from Argentina and we ponder the question.

We Latinos in the U. S. make a sport of identity navel gazing. And now that we’ve got the internet to play with, our navel gazing reverberates – we think we’re merely thinking out loud, but we’re doing it in the middle of a world-wide town square. So our incessant identity jabbering becomes a curiosity.

“I’m such a mess because I’m  light skinned.”  “My parents didn’t teach me Spanish.” “What do you mean I don’t sound Latino?” …it goes on and on over the internets.  Of course we would navel gaze at the Pope’s Latino-ness! He’s the Pope! Bendito!

So the jabbering about it began as soon as he appeared for the first time on that balcony in St. Peter’s Square. Mixed with the elation, and the calls for prayer came the inevitable snark and cynicism. “His parents are Italian immigrants.” “Yeah but he’s Latino nonetheless…”  “He cozied up to the Dictator.” etc…

It wasn’t surprising to see, a few weeks after the fact, an Associated Press Article about the question itself. Call it a curiosity piece, non-Latinos peering into Latino navel gazing as if taking a ride on a glass-bottom boat. They caught a snippet of a piece of an ongoing conversation that bubbled up when a Latino became Pope and they magnified it. “Look Marge they’re kinda like us.”

It doesn’t help. If that AP story is all some folks get to consider about Latinos and the new Pope, they’re getting a very incomplete picture. But then again, the complete picture is so vast and so complicated.

I heard a rumor that Pope Francis’ first trip will be to Latin America. It may be one of those well intended rumors, but nonetheless, imagine his stop in Mexico. You know that apart from the obligatory pilgrimage to the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe (if that doesn’t cement his Latino cred, nothing will), somewhere along the way someone will hand him a sombrero charro, and he’ll probably put it on for a moment, and the picture will spread across the internet. Somewhere, someone will criticize the picture, and someone else will put the sombrero in a glass case in some basilica in Mexico City. That’s just the way we are: nuance, wrapped in idiosyncracy, bundled in irony, shelved in paradox.

Did we question the Pope’s ethnicity? Did we question the questioning? Did we lash out at those who took the nickle tour of our navel-gazing?

Is the Pope Latino?