Hispanics?

“I don’t like Mexicans,” said one angry New Yorker. “They think they can live in the neighborhood and not obey the laws.”

“I don’t like Puerto Ricans,” said another. “They forgot where they came from after they started living in New York.”

The first angry New Yorker, as quoted in an article in today’s New York Times, is George Ortiz, 52, who was born in Puerto Rico. The second is Javier Morales, 31, who recently moved to the Big Apple from Mexico. As the NYT wryly observed:

They call East Harlem El Barrio — the neighborhood — but it is not so neighborly these days. In the last 10 years, Mexican immigrants have been arriving in a huge influx to the crowded streets of what has long been a Puerto Rican enclave. While the two groups share a language, a common tongue does not ensure a common bond.

An obvious question, of course, leaps off the streets of East Harlem: if Mexicans and Puerto Ricans don’t have “a common bond,” what sense does it make for employers, admissions officers, etc. to give them (leave aside for the moment Cubans, Argentinians, Brazilians, Costa Ricans, et. al.) preferences as “Hispanics”?

But a less obvious question may be more important: if a university — let’s say Columbia, since it’s close to East Harlem — awarded a highly unrepresentative preponderance of its Hispanic preferences to Mexicans/Mexican Americans, would Puerto Ricans (by which I mean those of Puerto Rican background, wherever they were born) have grounds for complaint?

If Columbia, accepting the distinction between “Hispanic” and “Latino” that I recently discussed here, excluded from its “Hispanic” pool all descendants of early or recent immigrants from Spain, would members of this group have a discrimination complaint? Or rather, a valid discrimination complaint, since I assume they would complain in any event.

Columbia surely has the same academic freedom to discriminate to produce its preferred diversity as Michigan, doesn’t it?

Wouldn’t any claim of discrimination in circumstances such as my hypothetical have to be based on the principle that people have a right not to be discriminated against because of their race or national origin? If so, that leaves preferentialists in something of a pickle, for they’ve made it abundantly clear that they no longer believe in that right.

While you’re thinking about that, note that the Spanish ambassador to the United States, Javier Ruperez, presumably miffed that “Latinos” reject and resent the influence of Spain, has jumped into this debate. In a long letter to the Washington Post today, he claims that Hispanics are not only not a racial group; they are not even an ethnic group.

It is not only artificial to oppose the “Hispanic” to the “Latino” but dangerous as well. There are no confronting historical and cultural origins in our community. The Meso-American indigenous person is as Hispanic as the citizen from Buenos Aires or the Afro-Caribbean person. Ethnic features are not the base for “Hispanic.” Our nation is our language.

Hispanics are defined by their mixture of races — and that may be their greatest feature. The Hispanic universe is extremely diverse and includes races, religions and various cultural heritages. Cervantes, Velazquez and Picasso are as much a part of me as Botero, Neruda, Chichen Iza or Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Well that’s one diverse universe, all right. But do any and all parts of it deserve preference over members of other universes?

But wait a minute. Hold on. If the Hispanic/Latino “nation” is its language, maybe Jessie should be getting some preference in her upcoming grad school applications. Her mother, after all, speaks fluent Spanish.