Should U.S. media use the term “La Raza”?

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The National Council of La Raza (NCLR) is one of the largest Hispanic advocacy organizations in the United States, and frequently referred to in the U.S media as ‘la Raza.’

That has to stop, argues Daniel Hernandez, a former Los Angeles Times staff writer and now a journalist and LA Weekly blogger based in Mexico City.

Hernandez argues on his blog Intersections, which is featured here on La Plaza’s recommended links, that the term ‘la Raza’ is a historical one and that the NCLR includes it in its name purely as a consequence of the era in which it was founded, which was during the 1960s. He faults a number of U.S. publications, including the L.A. Times, for continuing to use the term outside of this very specific historical context.

‘The mainstream press has adopted the semantics tricks of the right-wing propaganda machine to conflate together two very different things: NCLR -- the largest and most middle-of-the-road, big-money-backed, non-partisan Hispanic (their word) advocacy organization in the United States, and the codeword for reconquista hallucinations advocated only by an extremely small, extremely fringe, and extremely irrelevant batch of Chicano nationalists,’ argues Hernandez.

Click here to read the rest of Hernandez’s thoughts on the use of the term ‘la Raza.’

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City