Mexican-American Ethnic Minorities

Words: 1491
Pages: 6

During Donald Trump’s infamous presidential candidacy announcement, he asserted that Mexico sends America “people that have lots of problems,” and maintained that Mexican immigrants are drug dealers, criminals, and rapists. Following this irrational remark, he has drawn the eyes of the world upon the Mexican-American population, among all other Latinos.1 Though, the Latino population in America is accustomed to constantly being under the eye of the prejudiced public. Both in the media and on the street, people are watching Latinos, or at least they think they are.
Race and ethnicity are ubiquitous to life in the United States; they are essential and unavoidable characteristics, especially in a nation where skin color defines much of the individual’s life and perspective. In the United States, there are six distinct racial/ethnic categories that are acknowledged. Yet, Latino is the only one of these classifications that is strictly an ethnicity and not a race. According to the U.S. Census Bureau:
People who identify with the terms “Hispanic” or “Latino” are those who classify themselves in one of the specific Hispanic or Latino [origins]… Origin can be viewed as the heritage, nationality group, lineage, or country of birth of the person or the
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While each race is associated with a set of stereotypical features and is assigned a generalized racial color, Latino ethnicity is not. The Latino population is racially diverse; they do not have a racial color of their own. Latinos can be of any race, solely identifying themselves as Latino through a shared culture or origin. Latinos and non-Latinos can even both be seen as part of the same race. Nonetheless, Latinos can be “at one or the other end of the color spectrum” (Rodríguez