The Inanity of Ethnicity

My wife was born in Uruguay, a Spanish-speaking constitutional republic with one of the most historically stable governments in South America. Uruguayans live in an European culture; all of the native populations were long ago eradicated from the Eastern banks of the Rio de la Plata.

My wife can trace her own family's lineage back to Spain, France, and other areas in Western Europe.

After a childhood in the capital of Montevideo, she spent significant portions of her youth in Italy and England, studying at Cambridge before coming to the United States.

In some ways, her time in Europe has distanced her from others who were born in Uruguay. Her accent is unaccountable - a truly global amalgam cobbled together of grade-school English lessons by Spanish-speaking teachers, training in the formal British style, and extended exposure to American idiom.

In other ways, though, she retains the vestigial traditions of her youth. When Uruguay's players became the only non-European team to advance to the semi-finals at the World Cup in 2010, she was as glued to the games as any fan at the Plaza Independencia. (Soccer is huge in Uruguay - they hosted and won the first-ever World Cup in 1930.)

At Branch Brook Park in Newark, NJ during the annual cherry blossom festival.
Photograph by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

I am, on the other hand, more of a mutt. Although the bulk of my ancestors come from a virtual continental tour of northern and Western Europe, my father's side of the family also contains a dab of Native American. By any genealogical standard, my wife is the "dominant" European-American, and I am the ethnic minority.

Yet that is not how our society perceives us. I have pale skin, light brown hair, and a southern New England lilt. She has (slightly) darker skin, black-brown hair, and that inexplicable-but-unmistakable accent.

In this country, she receives the designation of "Hispanic," and I get labeled as the Caucasian. Never mind that neither of those terms has any logical meaning - we have to put something on the Census form.

When people meet us they immediately tailor their questions to their presumptions about our backgrounds. This occurs whether we're speaking with other "Hispanics" or "Caucasians."

Does that make us part of the growing trend of "interracial" marriage in the United States? As it is, first-generation Hispanic immigrants tend to view themselves as "white" at a higher rate than their own children do, making the question that much more intractable.

That these arbitrary (and often inaccurate) characterizations are still so entrenched into and codified by our institutions bothered me long before I got married, but they’ve grown more irksome to me since then. I didn’t fall in love with a Latina – I fell in love with a specific human being, unlike any other.

It is vital that we retain a historical memory of our past traditions, of course. It is helpful to know where you come from in order to understand the circumstances into which you are born.

But I also believe that each of us should be free to chart our own course from there. Ethnic identifications assure you of nothing about a person. I was born in Connecticut, yet I drink yerba mate, a caffeinated drink that's as popular in Uruguay as coffee is here. My wife, however, prefers uncaffeinated chamomile tea. Q.E.D.