Actually, it's Hispanic that was pushed by the government: http://soaw.org/article.php?id=830
but it's controversial among activists. Studies show that registered voters call themselves Hispanic but this is dismissed by activists as the expression of assimilated 2nd and 3rd generationers: http://latinostories.com/Brown_Latino_Literature_Project/Essays/Hispanic_Versus_Latino.htm
This provides an interest compare/contrast chart of reasons why to embrace or reject the terms. One argument is that Latino is preferred by activists because it's a rejection of the government applied Hispanic. The chart also cynically notes that politicians use Latino to signal a "grassroots" attitude.
http://www.lasculturas.com/aa/aa070501a.htm
Linda Alcoff has some great stuff on ethnicity and identity politics, particularly in the binary of threat and promise -- where Latinos are both a threat and a promise to the u.s. -- which Good Buddy tells us isn't advanced by advocates of identity politics cuz they aren't really smart enough to have observed the phenom on their own. http://www.alcoff.com/content/beyondbinary.html
This is partly a response to brad. have been too busy to read his post and respond. Alcoff writes:
>In the essay "Comparative Race, Comparative Racisms" I advance this
>argument for identity proliferation based on a description of real world
>organizing in complex worksites where races, ethnicities, linguistic
>communities, nationalities, and ethnoraces, criss-cross one another in
>their political allegiances and solidarities.25 Union organizers and
>leaders use the phrase "community of solidarity" to describe the alliances
>they find in work sites in which bonds of trust, communication, and
>support are shared. Solidarity is sometimes based on color, sometimes
>based on language, and sometimes based on nationality. Employers often try
>to exploit and exacerbate conflicts among workers, such as encouraging
>African Americans to support English-only policies or drawing on the
>antiblack racism among Filipinas. But communities of solidarity in
>workplaces also emerge organically from real and not only imagined shared
>experience and shared interests. That is, communities of solidarity are
>not merely based on "artificial origins" stories, or mistaken metaphysical
>views, but on the shared need to have bilingualism accepted as a right, to
>have antiblack racism seen and named as such when it affects hiring and
>promotion, and to have the contract committee take up the demand for long
>vacations which immigrants need so they can return to home countries where
>their families (even partners and children) live. The task of the union or
>community organizer is not to convince everyone that neither race nor
>ethnicity are real, but to understand with precision and accuracy what the
>differences are so that productive collaborations can be developed and
>trust across groups slowly cultivated. Only in this way can organizers
>show that, precisely because of their very identities and the ways these
>are used and exploited by bosses, workers have in some cases common
>enemies and common problems that trump their differences, or their
>differences can be negotiated for mutual benefit in mutual shows of
>support. The route to this expanded solidarity is neither transcendence or
>false commonality, but accurate renditions of differences of experience.
>In some cases this does mean that some groups will have to acknowledge
>their privileges, i.e. the fact that their light skin tone can enhance
>their capacity to be given a promotion. But even privileged workers cannot
>get their workplace rights secured without the collaborative power of a union.
http://www.alcoff.com/content/beyondbinary.html
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)