Portal:Hispanic and Latino Americans

In the United States, a Black Hispanic or Afro Hispanic (Spanish: Afrohispano, literally, "Afro Hispanic") is an American citizen or resident who is officially classified by the United States Census Bureau, Office of Management and Budget and other U.S. government agencies as a Black American of Hispanic descent."

Hispanicity, which is independent of race, is the only ethnic category, as opposed to racial category, which is officially collated by the U.S. Census Bureau. The distinction made by government agencies for those within the population of any official race category, including "African American", is between those who report Hispanic backgrounds and all others who do not. In the case of Blacks of Latin descent, these two groups are respectively termed "Black Hispanics/Afro American Hispanics" and "non-Hispanic Black Americans/non-Hispanic Black Americans", the former being those who report Black African ethnicity as well as a Hispanic ancestral background (Spain and Hispanic Latin America), and the latter consisting of an ethnically diverse collection of all others who are classified as Black or African Americans that do not report Hispanic ethnic backgrounds. (more...)

• ... that Tomás Rivera, a Chicano author, poet, and educator, was the first Mexican American chancellor of the University of California system?
• ... that after the first demonstration by members of Católicos por La Raza at St. Basil's Cathedral, in downtown Los Angeles, the archbishop resigned?
• ... that Chicanismo is a cultural movement by Mexican Americans to recapture their Mexican, Native American culture, which began in the 1930s in the Southwestern United States?
• ... that on Christmas Eve 1969, when California lawyer and noted political activist Ricardo Cruz was a law student at Loyola Law School, he was arrested for leading a march of several hundred demonstrators protesting the newly constructed, $4 million St. Basil's Cathedral?
• ... that the first gang injunction to make headlines was obtained by Los Angeles City Attorney James Hahn against the West Los Angeles-based street gang the Playboy Gangster Crips in 1987?
• ... that Rini Templeton created works of graphic art for the New Mexico Land-Grant movement before moving to Mexico to collaborate with the labor movement there?
• ... that the parents of Chicana fiction writer and Cornell University English professor Helena Maria Viramontes (pictured) met while working in the fields, and that the impact of César Chávez and the United Farm Workers later influenced her fiction?

2005

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Sylvia Mendez (born 1936) is an American civil rights activist of Mexican-Puerto Rican heritage.

At age eight, she played an instrumental role in the Mendez v. Westminster case, the landmark desegregation case of 1946. The case successfully ended de jure segregation in California and paved the way for integration and the American civil rights movement.

Mendez grew up during a time when most southern and southwestern schools were segregated. In the case of California, Hispanics were not allowed to attend schools that were designated for "Whites" only and were sent to the so-called "Mexican schools." Mendez was denied enrollment to a "Whites" only school, an event which prompted her parents to take action and together organized various sectors of the Hispanic community who filed a lawsuit in the local federal court. The success of their action, of which Sylvia was the principal catalyst, would eventually bring to an end the era of segregated education. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian honor, on February 15, 2011. (more...)

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