Workforce Language Services

One of my pet peeves is hearing people (even Spanish-speakers themselves) refer to the Latino community as Spanish.  As in “Only Spanish people work there,” or “That store sells Spanish food.”  I’m not sure if this phenomenon is unique to the Northeast, whose cities are populated with recent Mexican-immigrants, second generation Dominicans, Puerto Ricans who move between their island and this part of the country, and dozens more nationalities.  But lumping all Spanish-speakers together under the false umbrella of “Spanish” negates the true diversity of people from very different cultures united by a common language.

Poynter Online, an online publication providing information for journalists about their profession, delves into this issue through a discussion about whether to use the term Hispanic or Latino.

Roberto Suro, a professor at the University of Southern California and former director of the Pew Hispanic Center, suggests that we look at the Latino population as diverse, dispersed, and growing and changing all the time. 

The article ends with this thought:

It’s often our habit to lump “Hispanics” in one group when reporting about health, politics, or any other subject. Our sources often do the same thing. Suro’s data forces us to think twice and ask a few more questions. As he emphasized last week, “it’s dangerous to generalize.”

This advice would also serve us well when talking about workplace diversity and should warn us against assuming that all Spanish-speakers act and respond in similar ways.  A company’s sound cultural competency policy will take into account that Latinos will not have a uniform set of perspectives and way of working just because this group shares a common language. 

To read more, click here.  Especially of interest are the statistics that suggest a multiplicty of perspectives delineated by generation.