For Hispanic Being a "race" on the census: I was merely going on something (a usually reliable) college lecture told me, so don't trust your teachers, kids. It involved a discussion around censuses (there needs to be a better plural - censae?)
Seen in that light, it makes sense to call it a "race". They're constructions too after all.
Precisely.
Think of it this way, Gully: over in Ireland, your religion matters. A lot. Or, at least, it did back in the day. But when Irish immigrants came to here, they tended to form one united, "Irish-American" bloc. The religious divisions that were salient over in Ireland suddenly lost their meaning in the United States, because now there was a whole huge "non-Irish" bloc that would have made "Protestant-Irish-American" and "Catholic-Irish-American" completely untenable on their own. In order to maintain
some independent identity, the members of each group had to shed some of their own. (note: I'm not saying this happened in some sort of creepy monolithic sociological way. this was the consequence of thousands of individuals'
independent decisions)
You can see this in my family tree. My mom's maiden name is Walsh, but her mom's maiden name is Hall, and on both sides there's quite a few Scottish names. Her mom was Presbyterian before she got married. Based on this evidence, I'm fairly sure a significant chunk of my family is originally of Scottish descent, perhaps descendants of some of the families shipped from Scotland to try to Protestantify Ireland. Yet my grandmother has fond memories of relatives with Irish accents, and my mom proudly identifies herself as 100% Irish. In fact, I'm sure during the time period my ancestors were moving over here, the thought of a Catholic Walsh (my mom's dad) and a Presbyterian Hall (my mom's mom) would have been unthinkable... but, over here, as both their families considered themselves members of the "Irish-American population", there was no significant barrier to the marriage (okay, my grandma had to convert, but... blame it on the Catholic traditions
).
A thousand pardons if I pretended to understand the social structure of pre-1900 Irish society and completely misjudged
Because, in the U.S., completely separate identities for
every single Spanish-speaking country would be almost entirely untenable, except in certain, special cases (cubanos in Miami, puertorriqueños in New York City, though I suspect that last one is starting to wane), we see the same things we've seen throughout all history. Perhaps immigrants try their best to maintain individual culture (I know sure as heck we did not celebrate Día de los Muertos in all my Spanish classes, because of the individual teachers' predilections), but their kids sure as heck don't.
Poll
