Monday, June 6, 2011 The Michigan Daily - michigandaily.com 5 h ati*s t s * 9 JEFF ZUSCHLAG GAlrighGt, gu.s, nwt Schwarzenegger and st E-MAIL JEFF AT JEFFDZ@UMICH.EDU ,, arr nt Wt no~rinr mintn i he recent 1, 1 As a Spanish major and a Mexi- can-American, I am interested in understanding Latin American culture. Cer- tain classes through the Spanish * department - like His- tory 348: Latin America: The National Peri- NICK od and Span- BRINGARDNER ish 430: Race and Nation in Latin America - have exposed me to the breadth and richness of Latin America. From taking these classes, I, like many other historians, soci- ologists and poets, realized how illogical it is to brand people in the United States as Latino. Latino is not a race. Latino is an American con- struct and a blanket term covering over 400 million people spanning beyond three continents. Using one simple term like Latino doesn't begin to capture the complexity of the people it includes, or the scope of its use. To me, race implies color, but Latinos cover the entire spec- trum. They range from the whitest of Spaniards (yes, even redheads) to the piel morena (the U.S. standard "Mexican or something" medium brown skin tone) to the black of Caribbean Spanish-speakers from the African Diaspora who ended up in every country from the Domini- can Republic and Cuba to Argentina and Venezuela. That's right; Latinos can be black, white, red and yellow. For some reason, the skewed Amer- ican perception imposes its ideas of racial identity onto people of this obscure category. It puts Domini- cans or Cubans (or any othernation- ality with dark skin) in an odd spot. How can they tell the census that they're Hispanic/Latino and Black at the same time? Bi-racial doesn't exactly cover it either - the same way mestizo didn't really cover their collective history. Collective culture also exists between the many different eth- nicities covered by Latino, but that doesn't make any of them inter- changeable. Similar to the way an American may get offended by being called Canadian by an igno- rant foreigner, Cubans don't like being mistaken for Peruvian or Puerto Rican. Each country car- ries an individual identity, but our perception of Latino is limited to the countries we are exposed to and blends the rest together, making Latino only Mexican or only Puer- to Rican when it should be more inclusive than that. Unfortunately, its vibrant and diverse culture has limited exposure in the U.S. and the popular Latin perception has been manufactured to mean something different from what it is, and often carries negative connotations of reggaeton, gang violence and drug trafficking. Since it applies to so many cul- tures and ethnicities, asserting an individual Latino identity is dif- ficult. In twenty-two years of iden- tifying as a Latino, I have struggled with things as arbitrary as a last Using race as an identifier is problematic. name - my last name is German and not Mexican. So I thought learning Spanish and understand- ing the culture would bridge the perceived gap. During academic breaks I would search for Spanish novels to read and maintain fluency. I remember two summers ago when I really felt like I was Latino. My entire reading list was comprised of "Latino" novels: "Cronica de una muerte anunciada" (Chronicle of A Death Foretold), "The Mambo Kings Play Songs Of Love", "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" and "The Savage Detectives." But then I had to catch myself during a few moments because I, still with a bit of lingering prejudice, wondered why authors with names like Daniel Alarc6n and Junot Diaz were writ- ing in English. I realized I would have been remiss if I did not accept that moving to the United States and having children who speak English is part of Latino history. Latino means so many things. So using race as a means of identifica- tion is problematic. We know that already - we are college students. We have probably beaten this "race" horse to death both inside and out- side the classroom. But that doesn't mean everyone else is enlightened. It takes close study and questioning of a subject to fully understand it. Acceptance of the broad concept of Latino is easy, but striving to under- stand the depth of the various cul- tures within Latino is a better way to approach the subject. Nick Bringardner can be reached at njbring@gmail.com. bCurreelntas IIEvents With .nelecto.crnngup there's a lot of important issues to discuss and-- Son of a eygusA aata. Representative just twseeted a picture at his crotch! uTent uient Events Events Club Club Some days I just can't win. I went to a party last weekend. It was one of those nights that my friends had persuaded me to go out, and I succumbed like the social weakling I am to heavy- weight peer pressure - a VANESSA mistake, I RYCHLINSKI would find out later. It was an unusually dead Friday ,and to top it off, it was raining. Once we finally got to our destination - a huge mansion-type house on South Division - I was wet and completely unenthused. Sitting on the couch in the large living room, I sulked, glowered even, as I sipped on a very full-flavored beer someone had given me. After being angrily bored for some time I decided to make the most of my situation. I turned to my buddy keeping me company on the couch and said those fateful words, "Hey, you wanna dance? Let's dance!" After about five minutes, I was actually enjoying myself. There were other people getting down. My best friend had finally made her way to the dance floor from wherever she was in this mon- strous house to join me. The DJ was decent, and there were no unwelcome undergrads trying any nonsense. Sigh. Almost perfect. Right on schedule, the fun- sucking University Police chose this moment to show up and issue a noise violation. Most of the par- ty-goers scattered by instinct, and my friends and I decided to take our leave. I walked over to the couch, picked up my purse, which had been knocked to the floor and my phone was gone. I searched everywhere, under tables and the piano standing nearby. I even Party foMf ripped apart the couch, the scene of my prior melancholy moodi- ness. Oh the humanity - my phone was gone. Needless to say, I was angry. A person that tends to see red more often than not anyway, I was completely incensed that my phone had been filched from the very room I had been standing in, when I had left it unattended for about fifteen minutes total, after sitting on my derriere for the entire night. The story of the Awful Friday Night is not over yet, however. I walked home using a shortcut to get through my parking lot behind my apartment - the typi- cal Ann Arbor hole-in-the-fence. This hole has been mended sev- eral times, though I once heard a girl living below me yelling at someone in the process of kick- ing it, and it is quite handy, I will admit. Upon squeezing through the fence, I saw that the passen- ger side mirror of my car, which I habitually parked in the same spot had been ripped off the side of the vehicle. After spending several days phoneless, I looked at the call information from the night the phone was taken and the perpe- trator had made a whole host of text messages. I called one num- ber after another. The story was the same with every call - these were people from my own phone book, not the thief's like I had thought originally. Whoever it was had contacted around ten people with offers of graphic sex- ual favors. From looking at the phone records, some of the con- versations were quite extensive. Good thing I have no shame, I tell you. The list included ex-boy- friends, an awful one-time hook- up, girlfriends, gay friends - the whole gamut. When I turned an old phone on that day, I received several texts from people appar- ently attempting to follow up on the dizzying array of promiscu- ous fun I had suggested. I found this night, besides an exercise in anger management, quite interesting. What is it about students here at this school that makes them think that they can do whatever they want? True, no lasting harm was caused. Both of the situations can be fixed. I ordered a new phone, I duct-taped my mirror and I contacted every person to explain what had hap- pened (the ones who had errone- ously thought that the sexting was genuine lamely tried to tell me that they knew it was all a joke). The night was an exercise in anger management. But none of that is the point. It costs money to go to this school, and it's the truth that most stu- dents take classes and live here, on the parental dime. I'm not an exception to this, quite honestly. But there is something seriously wrong with a campus where stu- dents think it is acceptable to make a joke out of someone else's property. At the end of the day, it's not really about the damages. It's about the fact that now I don't park my car in a certain spot in my own enclosed parking lot. It's about the fact that someone I don't know sitting near me at a party could be a thief with an imbecilic sense of humor. It's about the fact that some people who live here are apparently entitled assholes. And that's just too bad. Vanessa Rychlinski can be reached at vanrych@umich.edu.