La Raza does not, and has never, meant “the people.”

The National Council of La Raza and similar anti-white organizations have played a shell game with the term ever since Sonya Sotormayor came under fire for being a member.

The Wikipedia page states that the definition for “La Raza” means “the people” and “the community” with a side note that it only literally means “the race.” But “the race” is not a mere literal translation, it is the only translation. The National Council of La Raza (now UnidosUS, though I use both to refer to the organization) and other organizations using the phrase only began insisting La Raza meant people or community after scandal and negative public perception regarding the organizations’ views towards race. As I intend to show, this new definition came about when La Raza’s racialist and racist rhetoric became somewhat undeniable. For nearly the first forty years of the organization’s existence, no one ever understood the phrase to mean something other than “the race.”

Those using the term, for example the National Council of La Raza, tried to retreat using the familiar motte-and-bailey linguistics to claim that for some reason it could not be translated or understood in any ordinary sense, and we are supposed to (with no real knowledge bridging the gap as to why) accept the fact that, in all other instances and history of the phrase “la raza,” its definition is not a racial one.

This is not speculation, but actual fact. One of the ways this term was “defined” to mean “the people” was actually concluded one day after Sonia Sotermayor underwent immense heat for having belonged to the organization, when former Colorado Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo referred to La Raza as “nothing more than a Latino KKK without the hoods or nooses… the logo of La Raza is ‘All for the race. Nothing for the rest.’ What does that tell you?” As a side note: Tancredo accurately translated the slogan for the organization. The original Spanish is: “Por La Raza todo, Fuera de La Raza nada.” A more accurate translation of the second half might read: “outside the race, nothing.” It was actually one day after this exchange with Tom Tancredo became widespread in the media that organizations using the phrase and news organizations began reporting that the phrase meant “the community” or “the people.” I will discuss this in further detail later.

            I want to return to Wikipedia briefly, since they are party to the purposeful spreading of misconceptions around the phrase. The term “La Raza” as it is listed on Wikipedia only has two citations backing up the claims that the organization’s name “La Raza” meaning “the Race” is a mistranslation. The first source, from Colorado Public Radio, reads:

The term la raza —meaning “the people” — has roots in post-revolution Mexico and in the U.S. Chicano Movement of the 1970s which helped elect some of the nation’s first Latinos to public office. Often mistaken for its literal meaning in English, “the race,” la raza has been used to describe people whose families have migrated from Latin American countries.

            The article traces the history of the term, but every single instance mentioned in the article after this opening paragraph connects La Raza’s name as an organization and more generally the Spanish word “la raza” to exclusively racial contexts, never once bridging the gap between “people” outside of a racialized context that the author attempts, finally ending on a note about “conservative backlash” condemning a racialization and racist usage of the term. One would think that, if the author had not, in the first paragraph, told us it was a mistranslation, the article would be bolstering the claim that the term was racialized.

            The second source, from the Atlantic, insists something along similar lines:

Many people incorrectly translate our name, “La Raza,” as “the race.” While it is true that one meaning of “raza” in Spanish is indeed “race,” in Spanish, as in English and any other language, words can and do have multiple meanings. As noted in several online dictionaries, “La Raza” means “the people” or “the community.” Translating our name as “the race” is not only inaccurate, it is factually incorrect. “Hispanic” is an ethnicity, not a race. As anyone who has ever met a Dominican American, Mexican American, or Spanish American can attest, Hispanics can be and are members of any and all races.

            It’s worth noting that Pace Tancredo of the National Council of La Raza actually wrote this definition and the Atlantic merely reposted it; the original is, however, lost, as the organization underwent a name change in 2017. Still, again, it’s used by Wikipedia to fortify the claim that La Raza means “the people.”

As noted earlier, there isn’t widespread usage of “la raza” as “the people” in most Spanish dictionaries, though the article claims the contrary. Secondly, race is conflated with ethnicity and this creates an innate problem with “the people of Latin America,” “La Raza Cosmica,” and “Hispanic people.” It also makes no sense in the context of their slogan “Por La Raza todo, Fuera de La Raza nada.” “Outside the people, nothing?” “Outside the community, nothing?” We might follow this up with a second question: to what people or what community is this referring to?

The second half reads of the article reads:

The term “La Raza” has its origins in early 20th century Latin American literature and translates into English most closely as “the people” or, according to some scholars, as “the Hispanic people of the New World.” The term was coined by Mexican scholar José Vasconcelos to reflect the fact that the people of Latin America are a mixture of many of the world’s races, cultures, and religions. Mistranslating “La Raza” to mean “the race” implies that it is a term meant to exclude others. In fact, the full term coined by Vasconcelos, “La Raza Cósmica,” meaning the “cosmic people,” was developed to reflect not purity but the mixture inherent in the Hispanic people. This is an inclusive concept, meaning that Hispanics share with all other peoples of the world a common heritage and destiny.

There are two issues with this interpretation. “Race” is only “excluding others” in the same sense that any standard definition would of any group of people. The author insisting upon this has nothing to do with whether or not “la raza” means “the race.” Second, and this is similar to Colorado Public Radio source, we’re not really given a clear indication as to how “la raza” ever came to be the supposedly preferred Spanish way of express “the people.” The book La raza cósmica (The Cosmic Race) by 1929 Mexican Presidential candidate by José Vasconcelos uses the term to discuss racialist ideologies concerning the people of Latin America. It has been translated into English multiple times, and not once in the entire history of the work has any publisher ever opted for the title “The Cosmic People” or “The Cosmic Community.” Nobody has ever contested the translation of this title, either.

Similarly, “the people” is never interchanged in a political context with “la raza” in Latin American politics, as these tend to opt more often for some variation of “el pueblo”—which is immediately identified with “the people” politically in Spanish dictionaries. Again, historically this is proven as well, such as Puerto Rico’s Partido del Pueblo or Alianza Bravo Pueblo in Venezuela. If you feel like the Atlantic article muddled any definitions, understanding, or the history of the term, you are not wrong. That was by design.

            There is a historical presidence for when the National Council of La Raza began insisting that “la raza” didn’t mean “the race.” The definition from La Raza’s website and published by the Atlantic was posted on May 29, 2009. This was exactly one day after Tom Tancredo had attacked Sonya Sotomeyer for her involvement in the organization. “La raza” only became misunderstood when the organization needed to save face and was under fire for accusations of racism, which it was indeed engaging in. Again, Tom Tancredo pointed to the slogan as his evidence that the organization was racialist and racist. Even Janet Maguira, the current president of UnidosUS/ National Council of La Raza doesn’t challenge the translation of the phrase used by Tom Tancredo.

            Again, “raza” or “la raza,” though referring to “race,” can have and maintain a benign meaning in many contexts, but the need for organizations using the phrase to cover their tracks itself (among other more blatant reasons) points to an insidious purpose.

            It could, admittedly, be used to refer to “the Latin American people” in the same way that “white people” is interchangeable with “the white race,” but only in the sense that the word refers to a racialized people, which again is interchangeable itself with “race” but not “people.” For example, a politician that says he represents “white people” is not talking about the same group as a politician claiming he is talking about “the people.”

            Finally, one could argue that La Raza may mean “The Race” in every single other context and quite literally in the title of La Raza, but that “race” here is meant generally refer to “the people” and not a race. In other words, the person could concede the word in every other context refers to race, but the name of the organization alone does not use it in this way and instead uses it to refer to “the people.” But this would be absurd, as La Raza’s operations have a racial basis beneath all of their activity. For example, La Raza Centro Legal’s “About” page reads:

La Raza Centro Legal (LRCL) is a multicultural community social justice center based in the Mission District of San Francisco. Born out of the civil rights and Chicano movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s, Centro Legal was founded in 1973 by Latino law students to fill a gap in the availability of economically and culturally accessible legal services for the Bay Area’s Latino population.

As the website states itself, it is “multicultural” but specifically was born out of an ethnic movement (the Chicano movement, which is a dubious identifier) and widened into a racial one. The leader of the San Francisco chapter describes in her profile that her “dedication for the Hispanic community started when she immigrated to the United States...  and acquired in depth knowledge of the Hispanic immigrant population.” While Hispanic does not point to a race necessarily, “Latino” and “Hispanic” in conjunction does. None of this is to throw particular shade on these organizations, but merely to state that any claim that the phrase “La Raza” has nothing to do with race is an open deception. Giving La Raza the most charitable interpretation possible, it is at its core a racial advocacy group.

But we shouldn’t view the organization of the National Council of La Raza/ UnidosUS in the most charitable way possible. As we can see in this article, the organization has gone through great pains to hide its racialist agenda from the American public. The good news is, the American public has never really bought it.

Even the Latino community was privy to this. The civil rights activist Cezar Chavez said in a 1969 interview with the New Yorker:

"I hear more and more Mexicans talking about la raza—to build up their pride, you know," Chavez told me. "Some people don't look at it as racism, but when you say 'la raza,' you are saying an anti-gringo thing, and it won't stop there. Today it's anti-gringo, tomorrow it will be anti-Negro, and the day after it will be anti-Filipino, anti-Puerto Rican. And then it will be anti-poor-Mexican, and anti-darker-skinned Mexican. ... La raza is a very dangerous concept. I speak very strongly against it among the chicanos."

He not only agrees with the literal definition being the real definition, but with the sentiment behind it as well. La raza does not, and never has, meant “the people.”