¿Anglos? Grrrr....

I hate this term Anglo.  I don´t like reading it or using it.  And, I would never refer to myself or any of my friends as Anglo, even if they really have Anglo-Saxon origin.  So what would I use?  If someone were to ask me if I was Anglo, they would probably get more than they bargained for because I would get into a discussion of identity labels before I gave them a label for myself.  On forms where I am asked what my ethnicity is, if they give the option I check I prefer not to disclose.  Being Anglo where I am from means that you have to fight Affirmative Action and go through your genealogy to find any bit of Native American or Latino or Black (Black is the preferred term where I am from) heritage so that you have a better chance of getting the scholarship or the job or whatever it is.  When I am forced to pick a label, there is only one offered to me: White.  Anglo is never on these forms (and rightly so because Anglo-Saxon was a small part of Europe overall), which is part of the reason I am surprised to see it pop up so often in these academic papers.  I don´t want to be German-American, Czech-American, Irish-American, Hungarian-American, English-American, or Norweign-American.  Those are my ´heritages´ but I know nothing of their cultures from my family.  I am ´mixed´ too (I won´t use the term mestizo because of how it makes other people feel), but at the end of the day I am left with American, which says more about me than anything else to out-group members (aka people from other countries), but it says nothing about me to other americanos of whatever race or ethnicity.

I think this is the biggest issue with Whites (and probably many Blacks too) understanding the nature of the identity issues for latinos/hispanos.  We (may) have a hard time understanding identity because we feel so removed from this close-knit communnityness (not as true for all obviously, especially Blacks).  Personally, I don´t even feel connected to my hometown or home state.  Being from Michigan, which is referred to as the Mid-West even though it´s in Eastern Standard Time, people from outside the region will often lump us into the Minnesota/Wisconsin Fargo-type-dialect, which is offensive to us.  So, I dunno, I guess what I am trying to say is that I am trying to understand these identity struggles in the Southwest while dealing with my own dearth of identity, and realizing that identity is clear-cut for very few people in the world.  We are all just a big mess.

Note: Throw gender, personal history, age, and lifestyle into the equation and it gets even harder.