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The words we use to identify ourselves define our behavior and values

Francisco Miraval

It seems that those words we use to identify ourselves and the group we belong to reveal the cultural values we accept and, as a consequence, those words also define our behavior. That’s what Dr. Carlos Hipolito-Delgado, of the University of Colorado in Denver, says in a recent study.

Dr. Hipolito-Delgado’s study, titled Decoding the Ethnic Labels Used by Undergraduates of Latin American Descent, was published in the July 2014 issue of the Journal of Humanistic Counseling, that is, the publication of the American Counseling Association.

For his research, Dr. Hipolito-Delgado interviewed 500 undergraduate college students from all over the country, all of them descendants of Latin Americans. The students were asked to select the “ethnic label” they use to identify themselves. Dr. Hipolito-Delgado found that those “labels” are associated with cultural values and sociopolitical circumstances and, for that reason, with the “ethnic identity” and with the behavior of the students who were interviewed.

In other words, once you know which “label” a person uses to identify himself/herself and his/her group, then you will also know with high degree of certainty which language that person will prefer (if English or Spanish, in this case), what that person thinks about racism and other social problems, and how much he or she accepts and adopts American values.

The two most commonly used “labels” by the students interviewed by Dr. Hipolito-Delgado were “Latino” and “Hispanic” (almost 19 percent of the total in each case), followed by the nationality of the student (“Guatemalan,” for example), by a hyphenated label (“Cuban-American”), by “Chicano, “ and by simply “American.”

Using different interpretative tools to analyze the data thus obtained, Dr. Hipolito-Delgado found that different “labels” correspond to different “key psychological constructs” and also different “definitions of what makes sense” to a person.

That means, according to Dr. Hipolito-Delgado, that “Latino,” “Hispanic,” “Chicano,” and the other “labels” are not interchangeable, as commonly assumed. For example, if a person identifies himself/herself as “Hispanic,” that person will show a low level of identification with a given ethnic group and a high level of acceptance of American values.

However, those who identify themselves as “Chicanos” will show a high level of ethnic identification and a low level of acceptance of American culture and values. In the case of “Latinos,” they keep their ethnic identity and they may or may not agree with mainstream American values. And those who prefer to be called “Americans” will accept those values, but they don’t keep their cultural identity.

(The paper here referenced is a 19-page document that cannot be properly summarized in this column. The reader interested in more details should consult the journal mentioned above. )

So, deciding which “ethnic label” to use is an act of defining one’s identity and the culture and the behavior one will follow.

For that reason, it is very important -especially for those with frequent interactions with persons of Latin American descent- to know and understand the connections between the “labels” listed above and the surrounding culture.

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