National Hispanic Heritage Month
September 24th, 2009 by Sarah Laleman Ward
National Hispanic Heritage Month runs from September 15- October 15 this year. What is Hispanic Heritage Month, you ask? It is a month-long “…tribute to the generations of Hispanic Americans who have positively influenced and enriched our nation and society.” Visit their website for more information, resources, links, and fun stuff.
Here at Hunter, you can also investigate Hispanic Heritage by utilizing our print and electronic resources. Professor Julio Hernandez-Delgado has put together this subject guide of resources for Latin-American Studies, which includes both subscription (for Hunter users only) and free (for everyone) Web resources.
Additionally, Hunter College is home to the Centro de Estudios Puertorriquenos which is currently located on the 3rd floor of the Hunter Main Library. Centro’s has a two-part mission:
One is to collect, preserve and provide access to archival and library resources documenting the history and culture of Puerto Ricans. The other is to produce, facilitate, and disseminate interdisciplinary research about the diasporic experiences of Puerto Ricans and to link this scholarly inquiry to social action and policy debates.
Visit Centro’s website for more information.
Also try searching CUNY+, the library catalog, for a variety of books on this multi-faceted subject.
On a personal note, something that I found interesting while writing this post was my own ignorance of the terminology. Upon seeing the phrase “Hispanic Heritage Month” I recalled hearing that the label “Hispanic” is sometimes considered inaccurate, and the preferred term is Latina/o. So, being a librarian, I started doing a little research. Here is what I found:
The first definition of the term, from the Oxford English Dictionary, is relatively benign
Hispanic, adj. 1. Pertaining to Spain or its people; esp. pertaining to ancient Spain.
I was looking for something a little more illuminating though, so I turned to a different source. I used the database Gale Virtual Reference Library, which allows users to search across a number of encyclopedias and dictionaries all at once. This entry, from Key Words in Multicultural Interventions: A Dictionary, states:
Hispanic/Latino
Hispanic is an ethnic label given in 1978 by the Office of Management and Budget to describe a person of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American, or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race (Marin & Van Oss Marin, 1991). The term Hispanic identifies those individuals who trace their ancestral backgrounds to one of those countries in the Americas.
The label Latino is perceived by some individuals as accurately reflecting the political, geographical, and historical links present among Latin American nations. The term Latino preserves the national origin of the referents (regardless of languages spoken) as a significant characteristic, it is also culturally and racially neutral. The Hispanic/Latino population will use either term as an ethnic descriptor. A more precise self-descriptor is the country of origin with which the individual identifies.
This is what I was looking for. I see now why Latina/o is the preferred, although still inaccurate, term. So when conducting research, one should remember that there are multiple ways to approach a topic and sometimes terms are used interchangeably. So if I were searching for more information related to Hispanic Heritage Month, I might use search terms such as “Hispanic Americans” or “Latinos” or “Latinas” or even more geographically specific terms like Mexican, Puerto Rican, etc. Isn’t research fun?
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