“Cubans didn’t want to have anything to do with Mexican programming… and the Mexicans would raise hell if we substituted their soap operas with anything else,” recalls one former media executive. Thus, in 1971, Puerto Rican and Mexican-American civil rights activists held a “unity” summit in Washington that disintegrated amid “floor fights” and “shouting matches.” In addition, media executives who tried to bridge cultural divides by, for example, providing Mexican programming to Cuban-American audiences - and vice versa - regularly received complaints and even threats. Early attempts to build organized political or cultural bridges between these communities were infrequent and unsuccessful because these groups resisted the notion of panethnicity. The disparateness of the period, however, was not simply happenstance. There, exiles built close-knit ethnic enclaves that remained intensely focused on the developments of Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolution, and Cuban households tuned in to media stations that broadcasted news of Havana.

Lastly, Cubans and their organizations in the 1960s were primarily based in Florida. And activists there focused on two main issues: Puerto Rican sovereignty and urban poverty in “Boricua” neighborhoods. Television and radio stations from New York through Philadelphia aired Spanish-language soap operas, variety shows and news programming imported from San Juan. Puerto Rican civic organizations, by contrast, were clustered in the Northeast. During that period, all the major Mexican-American civic organizations were based in the Southwest, where Spanish-language media outlets imported programming from Mexico, and student activists developed a “Chicano” youth movement. Indeed, if we were to examine America in the late 1960s, we would find that this community was, for the most part, geographically, culturally and politically disparate. Although terms like the Hispanic/Latino community, the Latino vote and Hispanic culture are common today, panethnicity has not always been a major form of group representation.

Hispanic outlook identity