Hispanic Like Me?: Racial games, racial tags -- the way the Left plays.(identity politics)

'It's not good enough to simply say that because of someone's genetics or surname that they should be considered Hispanic." So came the official pronouncement from Angelo Falcon, representing a group of Hispanic leaders opposed to the nomination of Miguel Estrada to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The group, assembled by Senate minority leader Tom Daschle, included representatives of the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and the Southwest Voter Education Project.

Falcon's statement goes beyond mere opposition to a Republican judicial nominee; it marks a new battleground in identity politics. Groups that have consistently argued that race and ethnicity should be compelling factors in everything from college admissions to judicial appointments now want the right to define just who qualifies for inclusion in their racial and ethnic categories.

Estrada has several strikes against him, according to his opponents. Though he was born in Honduras and came to the United States at 17 speaking mostly Spanish, he is from a middle-class background. More damaging still, in the eyes of the ethnic lobby, Estrada excelled academically, needing no special treatment to gain admission to Columbia and Harvard -- where he earned his undergraduate and law degrees with honors. Worst of all, Estrada apparently holds conservative views on a number of issues, although his critics have had a difficult time coming up with anything he has said or written that might buttress their claim that those views are outside the mainstream of "Hispanic opinion." To left-leaning Hispanic advocacy groups -- which includes nearly all of the most prominent and well-funded Hispanic organizations -- any one of these attributes might be awkward. Taken together, they are disqualifying.

For all their talk of "diversity," the advocacy groups brook no dissent from their own orthodoxy. For questioning the effectiveness of bilingual education and the fairness of affirmative action, I've been called a "traitor," a "racist," and a "heretic," and was even dubbed "the most hated Hispanic in America" in a cover story in Hispanic magazine. In the late 1980s, a Texas chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens passed a resolution officially declaring me a "non-Hispanic" and threatening with expulsion any member who so much as stayed in the same room with me. Similar charges have been leveled at others who ran afoul of the ethnic powerbrokers: author Richard Rodriguez, the late immigration activist and journalist Richard Estrada, and Republican congressmen Henry Bonilla and Lincoln Diaz- Balart, who quit the Hispanic Congressional Caucus because they found it intolerant and intolerable. None of us quite lives up to the Hispanic ideal set forth by Angelo Falcon and his fellow ethnic activists.

The irony is that none of us has ever pretended to be representative of Hispanics as a group. Certainly Miguel Estrada hasn't. Rep. Bob Menendez, who spoke for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus at the Daschle press conference, complained, "Mr. Estrada told us that him being Hispanic he sees having absolutely nothing to do with his experience or his role as a federal court judge." Exactly. Being Hispanic may affect our taste in food, music, literature. It may determine the way we celebrate holidays or even which holidays we celebrate. But for most Hispanics, it doesn't affect the way we think - - no matter how much our putative Hispanic leaders may wish otherwise.

So if Estrada is not "authentically" Hispanic, who is? "As the Latino community becomes larger and larger in the country, as we gain more political influence, as we become more diverse, the issue of what is a Hispanic becomes more problematic," according to Falcon. Actually, defining who is or is not "Hispanic" has been a problem for decades -- the term itself is tricky. Most Hispanics don't define themselves as such, according to several surveys of Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cuban-Americans, and others. The majority of these "Hispanics" would prefer to be identified by ...