On Gay Marriage, HispanicLatinos Move Beyond Their History

The Supreme Court’s decision to rule on gay marriage after sidestepping the issue for so long constitutes another pivotal moment in the development of the new Hispanic/Latino social and political identity.  Like every group that evolves into the consciousness of being an American, HispanicLatinos become in various forms the products of efforts to attain the American ideal — which changes over time.  The American of today is not the American of the 1960’s and certainly not the American of a half century later.  Neither are HispanicLatinos.

How exactly HispanicLations evolve — bombarded as they have been by the sweeping forces that have transformed society during five decades of halycon change — is not yet fully evident. In many ways Hispanics or/and Latinos are still discovering themselves.  Many are sinewously insecure.  A population that goes by two different names cannot be anything but a collection of individuals still figuring things out — advancing the idea that HispanicLatinos are not like everyone else.  Indeed, they are not alike in many ways to each other.  But regarding gay marriage, it would appear that HispanicLatinos in toto have moved past their former thinking — and, thus, their former selves.

The more interesting question is why HispanicLatinos are not following the script they were once expected to read from and, more so, how does one address them in the third millennium of modern time and the third century of the American Republic?

 

 

It is not as if HispanicLatinos do not understand the issue.  Gay marriage is not burdened by the intricacies of the fiscal cliff or the complexities of the challenges to peace in the Middle East.  No, the question — like the image of two women or two men getting married — is quite simple and clear, and HispanicLatinos have moved to the right side of history.  Yet while HispanicLatinos remain socially conservative, they evidently are not a conglomeration caught in stasis.  They have grown in numbers and they have matured in their understanding of the world around them.  Perhaps they have been forced to by religions and political parties that are their own worst enemies and that thrived on exploiting insecurity. 

It is more difficult every day for HispanicLatinos to respect churches that align themselves with a political party whose official line is bellowing forth anti-immigrant language that conflates into discriminatory and hateful rhetoric against HispanicLatinos of all kinds and shapes regardless of citizenship staus.  It must have been just as difficult for Catholic bishops and their Republican allies on election night to accept that 71 percent of HispanicLatinos nationally rejected a right-wing philosophy that is not appropriate for modern times.  In some states the figure zoomed past 85 percent.  In any market, 71 percent is whole-scale rejection of a product.

In this environment in which HispanicLatinos have unleashed themselves from old thinking, they have the opportunity to develop a higher sense of globality, that is, to reexamine the world around them and rethink what caused them to be who and what they are.  Leaders, corporations, institutions and organizations — and molders of public opinion — who understand the journey of self-discovery that HispanicLatinos are pursuing will have a better chance to influence their behavior and, more important, their formation.  Thus it is that progressives have an opportune moment to reshape the political foundations of the country for years to come by helping to move a people shaped by inherently anti-democratic institutions into democracy’s corner.

HispanicLatinos are looking for an original experience.  They are about the business of finding themselves, starting from a new original point.  The previous point of their origin cast them as followers of decisions made by others.  Today, they do not depend on the past so much as on desire to take control of their own future.  Of their own selves.

While HispanicLatinos historically by and large are not necessarily programmed to look under the hood, they are forced to do so by high-profile public issues like gay marriage, made more possible by the tragedy of AIDS that brought all sides of the political spectrum out of their own closets.  The mindless anti-gay “humor” on Spanish-language radio — a daily, nauseating reminder of the failure of so many Latin American societies to pro-gress — is an antiquated aberration.  That kind of archaic thinking, while less relevant in today’s world, still cannot be gratuitously dismissed.  It hopefully represents no more than the momentary inability to advance onto a higher intellectual plane.

The very idea of relations between members of the same sex remains a source of discomfort for some HispanicLatinos.  But not as discomfiting to the new and large HispanicLatino population moving ever more confidently into the future.

Jesse Trevino is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.