“I’m Not Hispanic; I’m Puerto Rican”: Heterogeneity and Political Engagement in a Sunbelt Diaspora

• In Event: Latino Political Alliances in the US: Comparative Historical Views

Abstract

This paper looks through the case of the 2011 political redistricting in Orange County, Florida, where Orlando is located, to examine Puerto Rican and Latino heterogeneity and political engagement in a new immigrant-destination space, where recent arrivals meet long-time diaspora Latinos in a place that is new to both. The case spotlights the dialectical tensions between national and pan-ethnic identifications as well as fluid racial identifications. The quotation in the title was uttered by a Puerto Rican activist in protest against Anglo strategies of containment, which he saw in force in the appointment of carefully selected (and non-Puerto Rican) “Hispanics” as representative of the (Puerto Rican–dominated) Latino community on the Redistricting Advisory Committee (RAC). I analyze the makeup of the RAC as a strategy for using state power to re-inscribe racial hierarchy in the service of private, corporate interests using the tenets of neoliberal multiculturalism. Although denied a place on the Advisory Committee, Puerto Ricans were the most outspoken of Latinos at the public hearings. In reverse impact of the view that cultural citizenship enables claims to political and legal citizenship, I argue that Puerto Rican birthright political citizenship was a subtext to the proceedings, providing members of the larger Latino population, no matter the individual status, with legitimacy in their claims to cultural citizenship.

Author

• Patricia L Silver, National Coalition of Independent Scholars