An Invitation to Europeans to Join the Hyphen Club
Ricardo Chavira     [Photo]

Living on the hyphen, a term first floated by author Gustavo Pérez in his book about life as a Cuban-American, neatly encapsulates the joys and challenges of being something other than a plain American.

The myth, of course, is that all of us born here or naturalized are Americans plain and simple.

In truth, those of us who are of non-Northern European ancestry get a hyphen along with our American identity. It designates us as OTA's, Other Than Americans.

The hyphen officially designates us as having roots in the third world or southern European. Canadians and immigrants from Down Under, however, also get a pass. I can't recall anyone being called a Canadian-American or Australian-American.

Some find being tagged with a hyphen discriminatory. But I greatly enjoy being a bilingual, bicultural Mexican-American, so much so that about a year ago I concluded that Americans whose roots are in the United Kingdom, Germany or Scandinavia were being shortchanged.

Where was their hyphen, their ancestral designator? Officialdom long ago had mislabeled them as Anglos — a word that leaves out millions of whites of Germanic or Irish stock, for example. But we all know that there are millions of white Latin Americans, and white is a color, not a nationality.

Thus began my one-man campaign to give my compatriots of European descent the richness of their ancestry. I started referring to so-called white Americans as European-Americans.

The reaction of European-Americans ranged from hostility and confusion to outright denial. When I casually slipped the term into conversations with pale compatriots, the response typically went something like this: "What the hell is that, European-American?"

It was an anthropologically correct description of ethnicity, I said.

"I'm just a regular American," came the often-heated reply.

Then I would inquire where the person's forefathers came from.

England or Scotland or some such was the answer.

"So you are no different than African-Americans, who also trace their roots to the other side of the Atlantic.'' True, Africans were kidnapped and enslaved, but the migratory pattern was identical.

More often than not, my European-American interlocutors sputtered that their family had been here three or four generations, making them regular Americans, period.

I pressed on, pointing out that only Native Americans could accurately claim such a thing.

"Well, my great grandmother was Cherokee."

This always makes me laugh. So many European-Americans claim Cherokee — a tribe noted for its fair skin — ancestry that there must have been 20 million or so in the tribe.

Even conceding the Cherokee great granny, that still left a preponderance of European blood. Sadly, I sensed that these Americans resented being placed in the category of dusky hordes from places like Bolivia or India.

In the spirit of inclusiveness, I will continue to champion the cause of European-Americans. We live in the ultimate multicultural society in which everyone from Armenians to Zambians carry around with them a bit of the old country. It's well past time that our European countrymen and women embrace the hyphen and reclaim their lost ancestry.

(Ricardo Chavira is a journalism professor at California State University, Fullerton, and the University of California, Irvine. He can be reached via e-mail at ricardo_parra1@yahoo.com)

© 2005, Hispanic Link News Service
09/11/05
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