Breaking stereotypes

Latinos don’t fit neatly into simple clichés

By Taryn Luna

The Gresham Outlook, Aug 8, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (3 Reader comments)

Photos by Jim Clark / The Outlook

Wayne Machuca, SGT. Manuel Hernandez, Cipriano Diaz-Delgado, Cece Sattergren and Gerald Guerrero.

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Society often gives into preconceived notions about people, judging based on ethnicity, appearance, denomination, media portrayals or livelihoods.

From repercussions of slavery to Japanese internment camps during World War II, few minority groups in America have been spared the pain of negative stereotypes.

“There’s been quite a history of stereotypes placed on Latinos,” said Shannon Valdivia, an instructor of speech communication at Mt. Hood Community College. She teaches courses in cross-cultural communication.

“It started off that they were lazy and stupid and drunk all the time,” Valdivia said of most common stereotypes. “Then it was that Hispanic men were extremely sexist and treated their wives badly. Then it was they were gang bangers who love to fight, and of course, they were illegals.”

While she admits there are bad apples in every bunch, it’s not true for everyone.

“The Latino experience is so different in real life. It’s extremely diverse,” she said.

Today, more than two thirds of Latinos in America are legal citizens, as are three fifths of the Latinos in Oregon, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and the Pew Hispanic Center.

Based on a study conducted from 2005 to 2007, the Census Bureau estimated there were 18,590 Latinos in Gresham, making up 18.3 percent of the population.

Sgt. Manuel Hernandez of the Gresham’s Police Department, who heads the East Metro Gang Enforcement Team, said there were about 700 documented gang members in Gresham last year. Hispanic gangs used to control most of Rockwood, but his team has seen an influx of African American gangs.

The facts don’t support all of the stereotypes.

THE DANGERS OF STEREOTYPES

In a culture where people have a need to symbolize everything they encounter, they rely on these common stereotypes to define things they haven’t experienced for themselves, said Dr. Naomi Abrahams, chairwoman of the sociology department at Mt. Hood Community College.

“People learn from their own environments, and because our society is still very segregated, we learn from the media and other examples that are given to us,” Abrahams said.

Valdivia and Abrahams agree: The American media provides inaccurate portrayals of Latinos.

“Nine times out of 10, when you see Latinos on television, they are the criminals on ‘Law & Order’ or the suspects on television news programs,” Valdivia pointed out.

When people decide to venture across socioeconomic and cultural lines to work with other ethnicities and types of people on equal playing fields with equal status, they can discover the falsehood of stereotypes they previously believed in, Abrahams said.

But sticking to their own comfortable pocket of society, relying on information from third-party sources, and stereotypes of what they haven’t experienced to paint a portrait of the world around them is easier than crossing cultural barriers to learn for themselves, she said.

The danger of stereotypes is they can become real for those who believe in them and those who are subjected to them.

“If people believe a situation is real, it is real in its consequences,” Abrahams said.

Racial profiling is a prime example.

People with darker skin are stopped by police more than people with lighter skin, although there is no evidence that they are more likely to be breaking the law, she said.

Latino children often are categorized as “slow,” and are then tracked and treated that way in classrooms for the remainder of their education. Some are labeled slow because Spanish is their first language, others are categorized that way, Abrahams said.

This is where self-fulfilling prophecies come into play.

“If you beat a child down enough and tell them they aren’t capable, they are going to believe it,” Valdivia said. When a child has been told by teachers that he’s slow throughout his education, the chances that he’ll attend college severely decrease, she said.

TWO SIDES TO EVERY STORY

As the American economy continues to suffer and immigration issues become the topic of more heated debate, Valdivia hears from both sides of the argument in her classroom.

Some of her students sympathize with illegal immigrants and think Americans are being selfish. Valdivia asks those students how they would feel if someone broke into their home, attempting to explain how some Americans feel about illegal immigrants trespassing in their country.

Other students express frustration toward the 11.9 million “illegals” estimated to be living in the United States, accounting for 4 percent of the nation’s population and 5.4 percent of the work force, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

“I remind these students that illegal immigrants don’t qualify for financial aid and don’t get help to go to college,” she said. “They don’t qualify for most public assistance or social services and most who do have been granted that assistance by the U.S. government. Should they be upset with the immigrants because the government decided to give them assistance?”

A common complaint about Mexican-Americans, who accounted for 37.8 percent of an immigration boom to the U.S. between 1970 to 2000, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, is that they don’t fall in line with the American way or embrace American culture.

“With Mexico being so close, Mexicans are the least likely to assimilate into American culture,” Valdivia said.

Immigrants who have an ocean separating them from their homeland assimilate more naturally, she said. For many Mexicans, the possibility of returning to their home country is higher, especially those who come to the United States for seasonal work and leave in the winter.

THE STRUGGLE

Gloria Wiggins, division manager of El Programa Hispano in Gresham, a Catholic-based charity serving the needs of low-income Latinos, said if people could see through the eyes of a social worker they wouldn’t think of Latino immigrants as people who come to United States and aim to freeload off public assistance.

“They don’t qualify for any assistance,” she said. “And their children can qualify for about $60 a month in food stamps.”

Because they are struggling to survive in their native countries, Latino immigrants often leave their families behind to come here and do jobs that nobody wants, without any insurance, for basically nothing, she said.

The 2005-07 American Community Survey found that 25.9 percent of Oregonian Latinos were living below the poverty line, compared to 12.3 percent of Caucasians. It’s safe to say the sunken economy is hitting Latinos harder than most.

Since Christmas of last year, Wiggins said El Programa in Gresham has seen a 20-percent increase in the amount of people who walk through their doors due to the collapsing economy, boosting the number of people they serve to at least 20,000 annually.

Before Christmas, when Gresham was in a state of emergency due to an unusual snow storm, El Programa gave away 300 turkeys from its office to needy families on a first-come, first-serve basis. After just two hours, all the turkeys were gone.

Despite the hardships Latino immigrants face on American soil, it’s often far better than the life they left behind, she said.