The Daily Signal - Why Hispanic Heritage Month Shouldn’t Be a Thing

Episode Date: October 5, 2021

We’re in the middle of Hispanic Heritage Month, yet another 30 days of identity-focused celebration, following on the heels of Black History Month in February or Gay Pride Month in June. But while the ubiquity of the terms "Hispanic” and "Latino” might make it seem that they've always been there, Heritage Foundation senior fellow Mike Gonzalez contends that those terms were invented by Marxist activists attempting to persuade so-called Hispanics that they were oppressed. "I'm very proud of [my heritage], but this amalgamation, this artificial label that is created, the officiality of it is what I'm opposed to, because I know that it is done on purpose and with malice and forethought towards the country of the United States," Gonzalez says. He joins "The Daily Signal Podcast" to discuss the Marxist history of terms like "Hispanic” and "Latino,” and to detail the radical left's plans to use identity politics to seize power. We also cover these stories: President Joe Biden announces his frustration with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., over the ongoing fight to raise the debt ceiling. McConnell tells Biden he should ask Democrats, not Republicans, to vote to raise the debt limit. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., issues a statement criticizing left-wing activists who followed her into a restroom at Arizona State University and yelled at her to support Biden’s $3.5 trillion Build Back Better spending bill. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Tuesday, October 5th. I'm Kate Trinco. And I'm Doug Blair. It's currently Hispanic Heritage Month, which means yet another 30 days of identity-focused celebration following on the heels of Black History Month or Gay Pride Month. But while the ubiquity of the terms Hispanic and Latino might make it seem like they've always been there, Heritage Foundation's senior fellow Mike Gonzalez, argues that these terms were invented by Marxist activists attempting to convince so-called Hispanics that

they were oppressed. Gonzalez joins the Daily Signal podcast to discuss the history of terms like Hispanic and Latino and detail the radical left's plans to use identity politics to seize power. Don't forget, if you enjoy this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts, and please encourage others to subscribe. And now on to today's top news. During a press conference Monday, President Biden announced his frustration with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell over the ongoing fight to raise the debt ceiling. In his comments, the president blamed congressional Republicans for blocking Democrat attempts to raise the debt ceiling

and avoid a default and accused them of playing Russian roulette with the U.S. economy. Here's some of Biden's comments via NBC. But let's be clear. Not only are Republicans refusing to do their job, but threatening to use the power, their power, to prevent us from doing our job, saving the economy from a catastrophic event.

I think quite frankly it's hypocritical, dangerous and disgraceful. Biden's statements come on the heels of Democrat failures to move a bill raising the debt limit from the House to the Senate, as well as a failure to send a debt limit suspension bill from the Senate to the House. If no measure is passed to raise the debt ceiling, it is possible that the U.S. will default on its national debt on October 18th, something that has never before happened in American history. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told President. President Biden in a letter Monday that he should ask Democrats, not Republicans, to vote to raise the debt limit. McConnell wrote to Biden, all year, your party has chosen to pursue staggering

transformational spending through unprecedented use of the party line reconciliation process. Democrats inherited bipartisan trends from COVID relief to appropriations, but have chosen to govern alone. Even now, with Americans already facing painful, inflation, Democrats are repairing another staggering taxing and spending spree without any Republican input or support. Bipartisanship is not a light switch that Speaker Pelosi and Leader Schumer may flip on to borrow money and flip off to spend it. Republicans' position is simple. We have no list of demands. For two and a half months, we have simply warned that since your party wishes to govern alone, it must handle the debt limit alone is.

well. McConnell's office also noted that in 2003 and 2006, both then Senator Biden and Senator Schumer had voted against raising the debt ceiling. They weren't alone. All Senate Democrats voted against hiking the debt ceiling in 2006 and all but three Democrat senators voted against it in 2003. Senator Kristen Cinema, Democrat from Arizona, released a statement Monday criticizing activists who followed her into a bathroom at Arizona State University and yelled at her to pass President Biden's build-back-better legislation. On Sunday, a video of an encounter between immigration activists and cinema was released online. The video showed an activist standing outside the bathroom stall cinema was using, berating her for not supporting the Democrats' massive spending bill.

In her statement, Senator Sinema said, Yesterday's behavior was not legitimate protest. It is unacceptable for activist organizations to instruct their members to jeopardize themselves by engaging in unlawful activities, such as gaining entry to closed university buildings, disrupting learning environments, and filming students in a restroom. Cinema, along with Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat from West Virginia, are two holdouts on a massive spending package currently being debated in Congress. On Thursday evening, a group of kayakers confronted Manchin on his boat and demanded that he support the legislation. When asked by reporters to respond,

to activists confronting cinema and mansion, President Biden said it was all part of the process. Here's Biden via Fox News. President, you're talking about how you have 48 Democratic votes right now. The other two have been pressured over the weekend by activists. Joe Manchin had people on kayaks show up to his boat. T.L. Adam. Senator Sinema last night was chased into a restroom. Do you think that those tactics are crossing a line?

I don't think they're appropriate tactics, but it happens to everybody from the only people that doesn't happen to people who have secret service standing around them. So it's part of the process. Now stay tuned for my conversation with Heritage Senior Fellow Mike Gonzalez as we discuss the Marxist origins of Hispanic Heritage Month. Do you have an interest in public policy? Do you want to hear lectures from some of the biggest names in American politics? The Heritage Foundation hosts webinars called Heritage Events Live. These events are free and open to the public. To find the latest heritage events and to register, visit heritage.org slash events.

Our guest today is Mike Gonzalez, a Heritage Foundation senior fellow for foreign policy and Angeles T.R. A. Dando E. Pluribus Unum Fellow. He's also the author of the new book, BLM, the Making of a New Marxist Revolution, highlighting the Marxist underpinnings of the Black Lives Matter movement. Mike, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. I wanted to have you on the show today to discuss Hispanic Heritage Month. You've done a lot of really fascinating research on terms like Hispanic and Latino and where they come from.

So to start off with, could you explain to our listeners a brief history of the invention of these terms? So if by Hispanic Heritage Month, we were celebrating what unites, actually all the quote-unquote Hispanics in the United States, that is the founding by the Iberian kingdoms of Portugal and Spain of their lands, I probably wouldn't have any problem with it. I think that we should learn more about Columbus's exploration, his brave. courageous trek across the ocean to join all of humanity finally together. Leif Erickson, a Viking, said to have done it, but Leif Erickson was not interested in uniting humanity in forging new and permanent links, as Columbus did. If we mean that, and by all means, if we mean the wondrous actions of Frey Junipero Serra in the West to bring the promise of salvation and Christ, Christ,

to the natives of that land, if we mean by no means all good, but still very brave exploration of Cuba, Mexico, Peru, et cetera, by Velasquez and Cortez and Pizarro and looking at all aspects of it, looking at how the good things they did and the bad things they did. then, yeah, I would be for that kind of Hispanic Heritage Month. What I'm not for is for the creation of a Hispanic category by leftists. Well, the instigation of the creation because the leftist activists in the 70s were the ones who really went all out and prodded the bureaucracy, a very reluctant bureaucracy. see, I must add, did not want to do it, starting in the late 60s and culminating in 1977, when OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, finally created the Hispanic category.

And the combination, I guess, would have been when it's placed on the 1980 census for the first time, in this very large and growing group of Americans are hyped off and counted away from the other races that are recognized by anthropologists, not by leftist activists acting on the pay of the Ford Foundation. So that is what I'm against. And the reason I'm against, we can go into that later on depending on what questions you ask, because it is very clear from the beginning that it is done in order to instill grievances in the members of this category in order to transform the country. So what it sounds like you're saying is that these terms like Hispanic and Latino were not

naturally occurring. They weren't invented by the communities that they were invented to describe. It sounds like these were pushed by leftist academics. So with that being said, do you consider yourself Hispanic? So opposition came not only from the bureaucrats, but also came from the grassroots. The grassroots wanted no part of this. The activists were the only people that were interested in doing this, and they were very adamant that Hispanic be created. We can go into, you know, they always say the activists, they hate colonization, but Hispanic and in Latin America, both words that are used by colonizers. I consider myself an American, to be honest. I consider myself a father, first of all, a husband, a Catholic. That's a, that's a, that's a

an affiliation. It's very important to me, an American. I consider myself a Cuban American also, although that is less important than the other things I mentioned. First, I'm very proud of the contributions of Cuban Americans to this country. I love, love, love, Desi Arnaz. I thought he was a pioneer who was considered a God in the 50s and 60s who creates the first sitcom, really. and he was the first to film it. And I am very, very proud of that. My family was torn asunder in 1975 during the World Series because both the Reds and the Red Sox had a Cuban in them.

The Cincinnati Reds had, of course, Tony Perez, and they wouldn't have won the World Series without him. And the Red Sox had Louis Tehant, a fantastic pitcher, and they wouldn't have gotten to the World Series without Louis Teant, as we know. So we were sitting there in the basement, Happy and Queens. This is before the creation of Hispanic, by the way. This is before we knew the wonderful term and label that was going to be applied to all of us. We sat there in our basement in Jackson Heights, then known as Jackson Heights, you know, torn up about which site to root for.

I'm very proud of that, very proud of my family. I love my family. I love the history of my family. What it accomplished both in Cuba and in Spain. before because I have very recent ancestors, grandparents who are Spaniards. And when I say it accomplished, I'm not looking at only at the ancestors, my Cuban ancestors who were members of the establishment. I'm looking at really sometimes even more of the immigrants, my immigrant grandfather,

my immigrant, you know, five great-grandparents, all of whom poor, who came from northern in Spain and made it in Cuba. So I'm very proud of all that. But this amalgamation, this false, this artificial label that is created. The officiality of it is what I'm opposed to because I know that it is done on purpose and with malice aforethought, there was the country of the United States. So with that history in mind and with the way you view yourself in mind, I mean, I'm curious, what are the views of the communities that these terms were invented to describe South and Central Mexican nationals on terms like Latino and Hispanic? Are these terms popular with them?

And then further on, how have these terms been embraced by the wider American population? Is this something that they accept as well? So what Pew, I don't know, all 58 million of them personally, it's funny every time somebody says to me, Hey, do you know this Cuban-s-like, no, we're like almost two million Cuban Americans. We don't really know each other, all of them. Look, we can only look at the opinion polls. Pew Research, every poll that I've looked at, Pew is very good, by the way. It's center-left, and the analysis is center-left.

But if you look at the numbers that Pew puts out, I swear by them. And what they find is that between 20 and 25 percent uses Hispanic Orleans, Latino, the rest uses Dominican or Mexican or Puerto Rican or American. So Hispanic and Latino, I'd love to get into Latino, by the way, because that story is not known at all. And of course, Latinx, that term only known to NPR and Joe Biden. I can tell you that nobody in Miami is having a cafito thinking he's Latin X, and nobody walks into a bodega in Manhattan thinking she's Latin X. My goodness. My goodness.

Well, I'm really glad that you actually brought that up because as radical leftists kind of continue their war on language and as they decide that these terms are not far enough, Latino and Latinics, you know, are now these think jacconics, I've heard a couple of times. I mean, how does this evolution of identity-based language, like Latinx, chicanics, and all these other crazy ones, how does this play into the sort of Marxist underpinnings of the phrases themselves? By the way, I often tweet that I did the ancestry test, and I came back 55% Hispanics, 20% Portuguese, Portuguese, 20% Irix, and less than 1% Indiaks. So what they do is they create these categories. And then the next step, I'm very open about this, by the way, if you listen to Maria Teresa Kumar, who is wonderful in her competitory,

in her ability to just speak the truth sometimes when she's on Chuck Todd or doing a show with Nicole Hannah-Jones. She will say, look, it's really, really hard. She's the head of Voto Latino. It's really really hard to instill grievances into the members of these categories because they're not aware that they're being oppressed. This is, of course, pure and classic critical theory and critical legal theory and critical race theory. They believe from the beginning that what happens is that the members of the population

are not aware of their oppression, that you can, you know, Horkeimer, one of the godfathers of critical theory writes in the 1930s that one could not rely on the proletariat to overthrow the system because the proletariat will not understand that he's suppressed. He has no idea that he suppressed. His assistant, Herbert Marcusa, then writes in the 1960s that liberation can only start with the consciousness of servitude. And so it is with these activists and the heads of these groups who grab an immigrant from Uruguay or his progeny and say, you might be happy here. You know, you may have fought really hard to leave Guerrero, Mexico, and immigrate to this country. And you may think this is the land of opportunity in milk and honey, but you're wrong.

You're enslaved. You're oppressed. The satisfaction of your material needs through capitalism, even though. though you're happy with your Wi-Fi and you split a level home, this is a very oppressive superstructure. This is what they believe, why they created the category, and they created this category as a vehicle to attain that goal of liberation that Horkheimer and Marcusea and Antonio Gramsci, although he was not really a member of the Frankfurt School, think of, this is pure, the creation of these categories and the instilling of the grievances, the curating of the grievances,

they say you must not forget, you must write these things down. In fact, in order to apply for the incentives to do this as you get maybe a preference for a city contract. But in order to get a preference for a city contract, you must write down how you would discriminate it against 30 years ago, you must never forget. And my goodness, you must never forgive. So this is all a very well thought out. And it works if we let it work. And what I set out to do in my books,

but my latest BLM, the making of a new Marxist revolution, but also last year it's about to change America, is to make all this clear to shine the spotlight on it. We've discussed some of the implications and some of the biases and things that the radical left does with this terminology like Hispanic and Latino. But one of the things that I'm always curious about is in an article you wrote for The Daily Signal called The Invention of Hispanics, you write, what all of these radicals sought

and were quite successful at eventually achieving was to analogize the experience of black Americans to that of Latinos, the term la Rasa, literally the race, by itself epitomize this process of racialization. the question now being why. What is the motivation here? Is it to bring a new Marxist world order? What is the end goal here? Of course it is.

It is exactly that. It's liberation. And they say that, you know, by the way, notice how Marxists never really promised liberty or freedom because they know they're not promising liberty or freedom. What they're promising is liberation because they believe in the oppressed oppressor narrative. And so they're saying, we're going to be liberate. It's liberation from oppression that we're after. And yes, very much so.

And this is just one individual, but a very influential individual. You know, Marcusa had been very influenced by the riots and revolutions that he saw in his native Germany in during the First World War, especially in 1919. And he thought that was going to come to fruition with the German Soviet, just like you had a Russian Soviet. And that didn't happen. And then he moves to the United States. and again, then 40 years later, he sees the riots of the 60s, and he has, you know, the penny drops for Herbert,

and he writes that it is in the ghetto population, his words, that you will have the revolutionary agents. They must continue to be guided by a communist, a Marxist intellectual class, but that because they need to have revolutionary consciousness, which he doesn't believe they have, but they have revolutionary potential. And he sees that they can be brought into violence. And he's behind demonstrations, by the way, when he begins to teach in San Diego at the university,

he's behind some demonstrations there. He's behind some Mexican militant Chicano demonstrations. So he sees it. He thinks that these groups must be created. And you're quite right that the United States. unique and exceptional suffering of black Americans, that suffering must be analogized to these new groups, which is wrong. It's false. And it's in many ways just ugly. Because obviously, I or my family, my name is Gonzalez famously. And nothing like what happened to African Americans happened to my family, you know, or to anybody named Gonzales. That's not to say that people named Gonzalez do not experience discrimination, especially, you know, in Texas and parts of the Southwest earlier on in the last century. That was very real and there's evidence, very substantial evidence of it.

And we know from the experience that they relate that that happened with nothing ever approximates what blacks suffered in this country. So we've seen some of the consequences of this kind of hyper focalization or hyper intense scrutiny of race and identity on American politics and American social cohesion. What do you think are some of the most severe consequences of the left's push to push everything through this lens of race, including Hispanic and black? We see it today. I mean, all the polls tell us that Americans majority, a substantial majority, not. not just a plurality, but a substantial majority of Americans today believe that race relations are the worst they've ever been. We've had riots. 2020, we've had a spike in the murder rate of 30%.

30% as an extra 5,000 people dead. In 2020, I believe mostly because of the riots and the instability, which took place mostly because the instigation of the organization of the Black Last Matters organizations, Obviously, with an assist from Antifa, although Antifa does not have the organizing muscle or the cachet or the money that Black Lives Matter has. So, and we've seen the invasion of critical race theory into all aspects of our lives, how kids are being divided according to race, how white kids are being told that they're racist and that they're oppressors and they have privilege. and black kids are being told of what Derek Bell said, that they will never gain equality with whites, which is false and disgusting to say that to a black child. That's a form of child abuse.

It's also child abuse to tell a black child or a kid named Rodriguez that the numeracy or literacy or punctuality or linear thinking or the use of reason are not things for them. that sitting in their desk and being quiet and following what the teacher says and paying attention and doing homework or white things. My goodness, this is things that would have made the Grand Dragon of the KKK blush 20 years ago and now is being repeated in our classrooms. And it's being repeated and we're paying for it as taxpayers. And we're being trained in that places of work. and under penalty of not advanced or even being fired.

This is all wrong and very wrong, and that's the reason the American people are rebelling against this. I've been traveling, you know, from coast to coast. Yesterday I was in Oregon. Tomorrow I'll be in Nashville. Next week I'll be in Cincinnati and Kentucky, literally from coast to coast. And everywhere I meet, you know, hundreds, dozens of Americans to have had it with this.

I mean, I think one of the things that struck me the most is what you said is that a lot of the victims of this terrible ideology are the people that they're purporting to help themselves. Minority students who are being told they can't succeed because success is a characteristic of white people. It's a trait that white people sitting in your desk is a white person thing, which seems so backwards to me. I mean, you mentioned that they would make the Grand Dragon of the KKK blush. I think you're absolutely correct. on that note, I'm curious if we want to talk about issues relating to this specific subsect of people, is it a way that we can refer to these groups without using these sort of racialized terms like Hispanic or Latino? Does it make sense to talk about things, for example, like the Hispanic vote?

No, that one makes absolutely no sense. So the largest group in America, the largest nation of origin group are Mexican-Americans. They're like 37. I think they may be 38 million today. And it makes no sense whatsoever to talk about the Mexican-American vote, just like it really makes no sense to talk about the German vote. That's the largest group or the Irish vote anymore. The Irish vote has been split now, I believe, since the 60s,

Mexican-American vote in some parts, like the Rio Grande Valley, and it's going heavily conservative, heavily Republican. In the cities of Texas, especially among the young, It is going the other way. It's going not just for Democrats or liberals, but heavily progressive. You know, it is, so I hesitate to talk about the Mexican-American vote. The Hispanic vote makes zero sense because you have Puerto Ricans voting differently in Florida than they do in Hartford or New York or Philadelphia.

Cubans voting definitely massively one way. in Miami. And then that's not the way they vote in Houston. The Mexican Americans vote in Houston or East L.A. So I, if you are designing an ad or you are, you're in this business at all, a consultant, you would not, you would be foolish to think that's such a thing as a Hispanic vote politically.

It just doesn't exist. Whether you use it to Trump or not, I don't know, I'm not the thought police, you know. people who use it. People want to use Latinx. I mean, that's funny. Let them use Latinx. As long as they don't force me, you know, to use it with a gun to my temple. And I said, you know, affirm or desist, you know, I don't care what people use. This is still a free country. I think it makes more sense to talk about Americans, geographic Americans. I don't mind talking about the Mexican-American vote in the Rio Grande Valley in Edinburgh or, or

or McCallon or to talk about the Puerto Rican vote in Hartford, that is an animal. Sure. The Cuban, there's such an animal as the Cuban vote in Miami. You know, that is part of, you know, reality. And if you were in that business, then you should talk about it and think of it that way. I'm told that there's even such a thing as the Irish vote in Boston. You know, no longer do we have really the Dutch vote in the Hudson River Valley as we did in the days of Jackson, Andrew Jackson. Right. For sure. No, so Mike, I think all of that is really fascinating. And I would love to continue talking to, but unfortunately, we are running a little bit low on time.

So I do have one final question for you. And as we've discussed through this conversation, I think we can all basically agree that the left's hyper focus on race and this idea that everything needs to be underpinned by this Marxist ideology of identity and racialized disharmony is a problem. So my question for you is, do you think this fight against racial fragmentation and the left's kind of campaign to do this is a fight? is a fight that conservatives are winning. And as a secondary follow-up, what are we doing well specifically and where do we need to shore up our defenses? I think conservatives have well begun

by identifying the problem, talking about it, freezing at, I think the left has been caught by surprise. By the way, the left doesn't know what critical race theory is, obviously, or they're just lying. When they say that it is not critical race theory to talk about systemic racism, that is just a lie.

That's just ignorance. So they haven't read, I don't blame them, but the majority is definitely against them, and they're playing with fire. I'm glad to hear that you think that we have some pretty solid chances against fighting back against this. I'm sure our listeners also appreciate your advice

on how we can better push back. So that was Mike Gonzalez, a Heritage Foundation Senior Fellow for Foreign Policy and the Angeles T. Aredondo, E. Pluribus Unum Fellow. He's also the author of the new book, BLM, The Making of a New Marxist Revolution, highlighting the Marxist underpinnings of the Black Lives Matter movement. Likes, thanks again so much for joining us.

Thank you, Doug. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to The Daily Signal Podcast. You can find the Daily Signal podcast on Google Play, Apple Podcast, Spotify, and IHeartRadio. Please be sure to leave us a review and a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts, and please encourage others to subscribe. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you all tomorrow.

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