We are on a roll for this season. We are very privileged to have Mark Hugo Lopez, GS ’96 join us to talk about his work at the Pew Research Center. Mark is the director of race and ethnicity research at Pew, where he leads planning of the Center’s research agenda focused on chronicling the diverse, ever-changing racial and ethnic landscape of the United States. In this episode he helps highlight the diversity among Latino communities. A few months ago we chatted with Aida Pacheco about Latino voting. Mark brings a wealth of additional data on various aspects of Latino communities.
The Pew Center is a non-partisan organization which collects and analyzes data. They don’t make recommendations for action but they do provide the data for anyone who wants to understand a particular issue. This episode is airing during Hispanic Heritage Month, which is a nice coincidence for us. It is almost shocking how many studies there are on the PEW site about Latinos. We will highlight a few on our resource page, including some interesting ones on Afro-Latinos. But for the moment, here’s a link to the main PEW page for Hispanics/Latinos. Enjoy the episode Diversity Among Latino Communities.
A word from Nubian Tigers about naming*
*Both Aida and Mark said that the term “Hispanic” was not one created by the communities themselves. But rather, it is a phrase coined by the government to refer to a population that speaks Spanish. Today we see the terms Latino/a, LatinX and Latine. We asked Mark and Aida about the various names. They both said, most folks in the communities primarily identify by where they come from. But, many older folks use Hispanic to refer to themselves. We choose to continue to use Latino/a, LatinX and Latine, because these are the terms younger advocates and grass roots activists chose for themselves.