Making Hispanics News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

The effort to coin a term to describe a wildly diverse group of Americans has long stirred controversy.

A sort of collective amnesia sets in as organizations begin to refer to the new category’s long history and develop narratives about the rich cultural basis of the classification. By then, the category is completely institutionalized, and the new classification is, like other classifications, assumed to have existed. —Cristina Mora, Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Constructed a New American

ET is celebrating the many contributions the Hispanic community has made to U.S. culture.

Author Cristina Mora tells Latino USA how the Census Bureau, activists and Univision created the "Hispanics".

America’s surging politics of victimhood and identitarian division did not emerge organically or inevitably, as many believe. Nor are these practices the result of irrepressible demands by minorities for recognition, or for redress of past wrongs, as we are constantly told. Those explanations are myths, spread by the activists, intellectuals, and philanthropists who set out deliberately, beginning at mid-century, to redefine our country. Their goal was mass mobilization for political ends, and one of their earliest targets was the Mexican-American community.