Looking at it from an eagle’s perspective our nation’s calendar is an exercise in memory. Days, weekends, and even entire months are turned into occasions for all sorts of diverse eulogies, including those to religious figures (Christmas), love and family (Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day), defining political events (Independence Day, Thanksgiving, Presidents’ Day, Holocaust Day), and even civic duties (Voting Day). In the last several decades, ethnicity has also become a feature (St. Patrick’s Day, the Puerto Rican Day Parade, Black History Month). And so, unfailing in its punctuality, Hispanic Heritage Month is upon us again.

          Needless to say, the festivities—at least at the national level—are fairly new. Not because Latinos have suddenly arrived in the country, even though the perception that Hispanics are fairly new arrivals to the American Mosaic is repeated ad nauseam by the media and conservative political pundits. Truth is, our history in these lands is older that the nation itself, dating back to the Spanish Empire, if not even earlier. What has changed, however, is the perception of who Hispanics are. From a series of disparate groups each defined by national background (Mexicans, Salvadorans, Cubans, Colombians, Dominicans, etc.), we have grown, though not fully matured, into a full-fledged community, one exemplified perfectly by the motto e pluribus unum.

          Interestingly, whereas African Americans stress history in their Black History Month, ours is about heritage. That is to say, it isn’t the past itself that is at center stage but the heterogeneity of our collective present. The ongoing debate regarding nomenclature—should it be dubbed Latino Heritage Month or instead be referred to as Hispanic—doesn’t obscure the implicit issue at hand: the constant ambivalence between these rubrics is proof of the unfinished business of controlling how others perceive us. And since our heritage is at stake, building the month around October 12 is an opportunity—albeit an explosive one—to define ourselves as bastard children of a misadventure between Europe and the Americas that took place in 1492.

          The date is celebrated in the United States as Columbus Day but in Latin America it acquires different connotations. In some places it is known as Día de la Raza, a day to reflect on issues of race, while in others it is featured as Día de la Comunidad, a day of collectivity. (I discuss the topic in full in a forthcoming book, What is la hispanidad?, forthcoming from the University of Texas Press.) In any case, mid October is the center of gravity of Hispanic Heritage Month, which invariably ends up as a hodgepodge of possibilities—indigenous and anti-imperialist voices lament colonialism, Caribbeans proudly parade blackness, Mexicans and Central Americans talk about mestizaje, and radio and TV networks everywhere emphasize the idea of family.

To me it feels like a fiesta and a day of reckoning intertwined. Curiously, individuality ends up becoming the ultimate message. The portraits hanging in libraries and school classrooms offer a sampling of possibilities: César Chávez, Sandra Cisneros, George López, Jorge Ramos. . . .  But what does influential mean? A successful career? A life of sacrifice? A commitment to change? How does Hispanic Heritage Month combine the heterogeneity of Latino society as a pozole, or a multiethnic soup, with a measure of individual personality? 

There are no easy answers to this question. In fact, let me open the question to our readers: What do we celebrate when we celebrate these role models? In what sense does that individual personify Hispanic Heritage Month? Who is indeed the most influential Latino in the United States? Answers will be posted on this blog. The author of the most insightful one will receive a prize by mail from the Latino American Experience.

The swearing-in of Sonia Sotomayor, on August 8, 2009, as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, the first Puerto Rican to reach such a prestigious institution, ought to be a moment of jubilation.

For centuries Hispanics have felt alienated in, from, and by the legal system. Too many of us are on the wrong side of the law—in jail and not on the bench. But Sotomayor replaces David H. Souter, who is returning to life as a private citizen in New Hampshire. Although during the nomination process she wore her heart on her sleeve, her left-leaning views aren’t expected to change the political chessboard of the court.

Whether or not they acknowledge it, every judge is defined by their environment and the individual choices they’ve made along the way. From her childhood in the Bronx, to her education in Ivy League schools, and her journey as an assistant district attorney and a federal district judge in New York, Sotomayor’s trajectory seems identifiable to millions of Latinos.

          In the years to come, her gender and ethnicity won’t stay at the door. However, her  most important test—and in that her Latina identity might play a crucial role—will be whether she is able to stand up to the conservative block on the Supreme Court, comprised of Antonin Scalia, John G. Roberts, Jr., Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas. Will Sotomayor feel intimidated by the white male establishment as she did upon arriving as a student to Princeton, where she  graduated summa cum laude? Does she have the knowledge and acumen not only to protect her independence but also to make the debate more compassionate?

For while Sotomayor is indeed a “first”—surely as a woman, if not necessarily as a Hispanic, as I’ve argued elsewhere (http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/10358/who-is-first-hispanic-justice), depending on how one defines the term Hispanic, Louis Brandeis, who was Jewish of Sephardic descent and was nominated by Woodrow Wilson, serving from 1916 to 1939, might have been the first in that regard—the new glass ceiling is symbolized by the connection between intelligence, femininity, and Latinidad; a triptych that unfortunately doesn’t receive enough attention in our public sphere.

The arrest for disorderly conduct of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., at his Cambridge home, on July 16, 2009, has left a sour aftertaste. Responding to a 911 caller who described two men breaking into the Cambridge house, Sgt. James M. Crowley was greeted by Professor Gates, who quickly became annoyed that a police officer was asking him to identify himself. Professor Gates was just back from a long trip to China to shoot a PBS documentary and it’s possible that, exhausted as he was, he was not easily tickled by an unwelcome visitor. Instead of offering Sgt. Crowley his driver’s license, at the policeman’s request, Gates first produced only his Harvard ID, which, like any other university card, doesn’t contain an address. Only later did he show his license. In the next minutes the incident quickly got out of hand. Since Sgt. Crowley wasn’t responding to the radio calls from the Cambridge Police Department, the central command sent more officers to the scene, a fact that made Professor Gates even angrier. By then, he was complaining that the treatment he was receiving was because he was a black man in America.

        Over the last three decades, Professor Gates has done invaluable work in the study of race and culture among African Americans. He is known for his affable demeanor and inexhaustible energy, although after a hip operation his physical mobility has been somewhat curtailed. Unfortunately, this incident brought out the worst in him. I don’t believe Sgt. Crowley was engaged in racial profiling. On the contrary, it was Professor Gates who, indirectly, had profiled the white police officer as an automatic racist without having had the chance to understand his motives. To this date, Professor Gates believes he is owed an apology. Shouldn’t he be the one to apologize instead? Years ago, when he arrived at Harvard as a star academic, among one of his first errors was to introduce himself at the Cambridge police station: “I’m the black guy with the Mercedes,” he is said to have announced. He clearly wants to avoid being confused with the black guy without one.

        Even more troubling was President Barack Obama’s impulsive reaction to the incident. Upon hearing about it, he described the police arrest as “stupid,” a comment for which he was made to apologize. Then, he invited Professor Gates and Sgt. Crowley for a beer at the White House so that the guys would be able to sort things out in a friendly fashion. Why doesn’t the president invite a poor black man who is, indeed, racially profiled by the police in Cambridge—or anywhere else in this land of opportunity—for a beer, as well? Why is it that our first black president is eager to jump to a conclusion about the sorrowful scene in Cambridge but says nothing when the “little guy” undergoes a far less deferential treatment? Is it because our leader, who has been careful enough not to make too much of his blackness, sides with the powerful and not with the powerless?

        My impression of the whole affair is that the dialogue about race we’ve been having in this country is still couched in a black-and-white paradigm while the majority of the population has been living in technicolor for quite some time. Would the nation have responded in similar fashion to the arrest of a Puerto Rican professor? I doubt it. Would Professor Gates had responded similarly if the police officer had been Asian? I don’t believe it, either. Is beer at the White House a solution to racial profiling? And would anyone be talking about the affair had President Obama kept his attention on healthcare reform? The lowest point came when both Professor Gates and President Obama suggested that the July 16 tete-a-tete was a fitting “teaching moment.” A teaching moment for what? To show how Professor Gates is as much defined by class as he is by race? My overall impression is that, like Michael Jackson, he became white a while back. And President Obama did also. It is the poor black man who is still black, and so are millions of Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans, and others whose skin color and the lack of a Mercedes identifies them as dangerous in the eyes of the law.

The nomination by President Barack Obama of Judge Sonia Sotomayor as a Supreme Court Justice for the seat left vacant by Judge David Souter is reason to celebrate. A full-fledged confirmation is in store in which not only the Senate but the American people need to find out her views on a number of decisive issues, abortion among them. There have been rumors about a sometimes abrasive working style and the distance between the justice and political activism that also require examination. But Judge Sotomayor, about whom I’ve been reading for years, is a superb candidate.

     In the last eight years, the Supreme Court—at least since the debacle between presidential candidates George W. Bush and Al Gore—has slowly moved to the right. This move has been all the more troublesome because in those same years the country has become increasingly heterogenous in its ethnic constituency. Also, women have moved upward to important positions of power. The court, however, looks like the same ol’ boys club it has been for decades. With the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O’ Connor the number of women members has decreased. And minority voices, physically as well as metaphorically, have been silenced. The lineage of Justice Thurgood Marshall became opaque with the confirmation of Justice Clarence Thomas, arguably the least inspiring justice ever seated on the court.

     If approved, Judge Sotomayor will bring some sabor to the institution. Her credentials are impeccable: an undergraduate degree from Princeton, where she graduated summa cum laude; a stellar performance at Yale Law School, where she became editor of the school’s law journal; and distinguished stints as Assistant District Attorney in New York for five years and on the U.S. District Court of the Southern District. She has taught at New York University and Columbia. However, the hearings promise to be full of pyrotechnics. The far-right wing of the Republican Party, after its embarassing defeat in the last presidential elections, has begun using Sotomayor as a picture girl of “lefty activism” from the bench. From Newt Gingrich to Rush Limbaugh, the argument is put forward that she’s unfit to be a Supreme Court Justice because she uses her life story—and prides herself on it—to make her decisions. But could it be otherwise? No judge is a robot. To make a decision, one needs to apply one’s knowledge of the world to the findings. As for her activism, Justices Roberts, Alito, and Thomas are far more partisan than anyone currently seated on the court, interpreting the Constitution according to their views and against the views of the majority of the nation’s population.

     And yet, I doubt that in the end the Republican base will be willing to alienate Latinos even more. As of late, this is the party of discord, with Dick Cheney becoming the leading exponent of security at all cost (endorsing even torture) to make America less vulnerable. That nearsightedness backfired during the second Bush years: the United States not only became more insular, it also betrayed the principles of liberty, equality, and justice for all under which it is based. Judge Sotomayor’s story is proof that America is still a land of dreams. Will the Republicans turn those dreams into a nightmare yet again?

     Understandably, the Hispanic community is ecstatic about Judge Sotomayor’s nomination—and so am I. There’s finally an antidote against the stereotypes of Latino women as sheer body matter and turbulent emotions. Intelligence is seldom an ingredient invoked in U.S. popular culture when talking about Hispanics. Thus, she is now a folk hero. Posters of her smiley face are on display everywhere in Spanish-speaking neighborhoods from Spanish Harlem to East Los Angeles. A few days ago I received an MP3 version of the “Sotomayor Mambo,” to which I’ve been dancing ever since. Now I’m just waiting for the little action figure of La Jueza to go on sale, with Sotomayor looking like the Statue of Liberty, robed in the Puerto Rican flag, a crown of thorns on her head, a boom box instead of the torch high on her right hand, and the U.S. Constitution under her left arm.

Judge Sotomayor calls herself a “Nuyorican judge.” What a refreshing statement that is!

Turning the past into history is always fun. The effort isn’t a summation of what occurred at a particular time but what we think happened. In other words, the act of writing history is nothing more than interpretation. Making that interpretation appealing to readers is the dream of any historian. And even when the target audience doesn’t include the young, it goes without saying that it is the next generation that either endorses or rejects a particular interpretation.

It is urgent to make young readers in this country aware of the rich aspects of Latino history. Only in so do we advance the possibility of a more tolerant future. Too often our school textbooks ignore this past, reducing essential episodes to bullet-type captions, giving protagonists a mere nod, and silencing major themes without which it is impossible to appreciate how the United States became the diverse nation it is today. For instance, I recently reread a classic history of the Civil Rights era—one assigned for college courses nationwide. I looked to assess the role Latinos were allowed in the project. To my dismay, it was insignificant. Does this mean Latinos were passive during the period? Not at all. Evidence of their activism is enormous.  It simply means that the interpretation of those historical events is incomplete. Or more accurately, biased.

One of the greatest tasks we face is how to make Latino history a fundamental component of the U.S. historical narrative. The single way to achieve this task is by inviting young readers to understand, reflect, and debate—in one word: to interpret—not only a slice of the collective past but, as my 12-year-old son puts it, the whole enchilada. Once we’re ready to do that, a series of questions become apparent: What is the greatest challenge posed by interesting the young in Latino history and culture, for one cannot exist without the other? What are the most prominent themes in Latino history and culture? And what is the ideal approach to pique interest in the subject? Should it be through a Great Books strategy, by emphasizing historical figures and political leaders, or in a bottom-up way?

Needless to say, such questions don’t have easy answers. I invite LAE users to share with me their divergent responses.

I’m worried about Barack Obama’s Hispanic base—or lack of it.

To explain my worries, let me explain that I’m certainly not the only Latino pleasantly surprised by the support he received from Spanish-speaking people in California, Texas, New Mexico, and even Florida in the concluding stages of the campaign. His astute staff managed to overturn the deeply rooted racism at the heart of the largest minority group in the country. Needless to say, that kind of racism isn’t much of a secret. Watch just a few minutes of a prime-time telenovela on Telemundo and you’ll realize the extent to which Hispanic whites are cool and black and mestizos are not.

And, while on the subject of television images, I doubt I was the only person to notice the absence of folks like me among the millions greeting President Obama at the Washington Mall on Inauguration Day. Yes, I noticed a Brazilian flag. And, I saw J. Lo and Marc Anthony singing (and not bickering) at a late-night ball. But that’s about it. No salsa, no merengue, no bachata—the lineup of performers was visibly un-Latino.

Maybe I’m being facetious now, but I confess that I did not laugh at Rev. Joseph Lowery’s comment that “Brown can stick around. . .” In fact, I found the line offensive. Stay where? The only person packing his suitcase was Bill Richardson, who was forced to return to New Mexico after proving to be a potential casualty in the confirmation hearings. Hispanics come in every shape and form. We become a unit when displaying endless amounts of passion. I’m afraid none of that unifying spirit was on display on Tuesday.

No doubt this a moment to savor: the United States has its first black Jewish president. What I fear we didn’t get is a truly multicultural boss. In fact, listening to political commentators discuss how whites and blacks have come together makes me wonder if, rather than advancing, we haven’t regressed. During the final Bush years it felt as if the nation was growing up—maybe out of resistance to an abusive government—by reaching beyond the false black-white dichotomy. The fact is, we haven’t been a black-and-white country for a long time. The Civil Rights era wasn’t only about the black struggle; it was also about Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Filipinos, and what is known as “others.”

I hope our first non-Latino president ratifies what we already know—that the nation exists in Technicolor.