What's in a name when it's 'La Raza'?

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HOUSTON -- National Council of La Raza president Janet Murguia sat down with The San Diego Union-Tribune's editorial board right before her organization's national convention, which concluded July 12. In 40 years, the council has grown into the nation's largest Hispanic-American civil rights organization.Recently the group has stood up to media and organized groups that perpetuate hate speech aimed at immigrants. While others namby-pamby around, acting as if violent words and deeds are the same as a college dorm debate, Murguia and her group took on the bad guys.They used words of instruction and clarification. They held meetings with media executives in New York and educated the public through a Web site (www.wecanstopthehate.org).Yet, Ruben Navarrette, a columnist on the San Diego newspaper's editorial board, got distracted by a side issue, which is interesting, but with little bearing on the main concern -- advocacy for the right things.It seems he gave credence to how some people get worked up because of the organization's name, the National Council of La Raza.Sometimes critics claim "la raza" means "the race." To this mindset, the Latino group sounds like a race-supremacist movement. Simple advocacy is turned on its head this way and characterized as possibly having some other agenda.Do you see the misconception? The deception?The term "la raza" has been a matter of longstanding concern, Murguia acknowledges: "We take a lot of heat for our name." Whatever name this important group goes by, however, is not a misnomer, even though it may cause problems for the misinformed.To start with, "raza" in Spanish does not simply mean "the race." How is it possible to mean "the race" if Hispanics are of all races?Scientists and knowledgeable people may substitute phenotype, cline and similar terms to refer to genetic differences. In our society, which doesn't like talking about class and status differences and inequalities as interlinked, we use the word "race" to imply all kinds of differences. Our past national history is an encyclopedia about this.But the Spanish term "raza" means more than its biased translators insist. It is not a clone term for the English word "race." To understand the Spanish word's meaning requires a bit of sophisticated understanding.Any Spanish dictionary shows "raza" to mean "breed," "people," "race," and "strain." It is not a single conflated term implying social values. Mostly it is a metaphorical term, not a technical one.Think about it in the same way the Navajo, who call themselves Dine, use their group term to mean "people."We should not be at a loss because one language does not necessarily have an exact clone or jerry-rigged equivalent word in another language.This issue came up back in the 15th century when the early Bible translators found English did not possess all the concepts they needed for the King James Version. So they borrowed words from Latin and Greek to bring biblical concepts into English.In the same way, the assumption in the newspaper editorial boardroom was that "raza" was a concept to get away from.In fact, it might be a concept to get closer as a way to encourage nearness to increasingly socially diverse, interchanging, inter-communicating, class flexibility and globalizing communities.What's disconcerting about the editorial board episode is that a good chance to explain and educate was missed. Sometimes, a symptom of social Alzheimers is detectible from the inability to adapt and change.For our own health, we need to come up with a term that means, "how to avoid hard-headedness when it's to our own disadvantage."(Jose de la Isla writes a weekly commentary for Hispanic Link News Service. He is author of "The Rise of Hispanic Political Power." E-mail joseisla3(at)yahoo.com. For more stories visit scrippsnews.com)