Who gets to say they're Latino?

On the surface, it is just a Chicago neighborhood election for a seat in the Illinois Senate.

But the candidates wishing to go to Springfield to represent a set of Northwest Side neighborhoods have managed to touch on an issue that impacts Hispanic people across the United States. Namely, who exactly gets to use the label “Latino?”

Illinois state Rep. Rich Bradley, D-Chicago, a 12-year veteran of the Illinois House of Representatives, says he has decided to try to move up politically to a higher-ranking office. He has decided to run for a seat in the Illinois state Senate.

What is really happening here is that the daughter of Chicago Alderman Dick Mell has decided she wants to run for political office, and she has decided to run for the post now held by Bradley. To avert a political brawl with the family of a high-ranking Chicago alderman, Bradley decided it would be easier to knock off the incumbent state senator from his home neighborhood.

That would be state Sen. Iris Martinez, D-Chicago, who understandably has no desire to be dumped from electoral politics just because Bradley is being squeezed out of his incumbent position.

Martinez is appealing to the growing Spanish-speaking population in the neighborhoods represented by the legislative district, hoping to get them to comprehend that some “Anglo” guy is trying to knock one of their own out of a political post.

There’s only problem with this strategy.

It turns out Bradley has just as much right to claim the Hispanic/Latino label as Martinez. His mother’s side of the family comes from Mexico. His grandparents on his mother’s side of the family come from the Mexican state of Guanajuato (which also happens to be the state where my paternal grandfather was born).

If Bradley had been named in the Castilian Spanish tradition, he would be Ricardo Bradley Cerda.

His mother went so far last week as to have her son’s campaign distribute a prepared statement on her behalf demanding an apology from Martinez about her claims that Bradley is just another political white boy.

“As a woman proud of her 100 percent Mexican background, I was shocked and appalled to… read that Iris Martinez’ campaign had called my son the ‘non-Latino’ candidate,” Margaret Cerda said. “This is an insult to our family, who always took pride in their Latino heritage after moving to the United States from Mexico.”

For what it’s worth, Bradley has not kept his ethnic ties a secret. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund – which wants to elect as many Hispanic/Latino lawmakers as possible – made a special effort to ensure that political people who prepared the legislative district boundaries in 2001 were aware of Bradley’s Mexican ethnicity so that he would be given a “safe” district to run for office in.

Now I don’t expect Martinez -- who in 2003 became the first Latina/Hispanic woman elected to serve in the Illinois Senate – to get all concerned about hurting Rich Bradley’s feelings. I don’t expect her to issue an apology anytime soon to Margaret Cerda.

It doesn’t even surprise me to learn that candidates are taking verbal cheap shots against their political opponents. Electoral politics played by “Chicago rules” almost mandates such accusations – particularly in the lower level legislative races where about the only way to gain any attention from potential voters is to stir up some sort of trouble.

But dragging ethnicity issues into this political debate stinks.

I would hate to think that Hispanic/Latino people are going to have to start providing detailed genealogical studies in order to justify their use of the ethnic label. I wonder if, to people like Martinez, I need to start identifying myself as “Gregorio Tejeda Vargas,” just to reiterate that grandparents on both sides of my family came from Mexico.

I’m not comfortable bringing up degrees of ethnicity and trying to set standards about who qualifies and who does not. To my mindset, it reeks too much of the old racial standards by which people in this country were judged based on what percentage of “white” versus “black” blood they allegedly had coursing through their veins.

Bradley actually wouldn’t be the most prominent political victim of Hispanic confusion.

Aides to former Democratic presidential candidate Bill Richardson said their efforts to gain support among Latino/Hispanic voters would have been so much easier had their candidate had a Spanish last name.

Would candidate Guillermo Richardson Lopez (that’s what his name would have been, had his Irish-American father and Mexican mother named him in the Castilian Spanish tradition) be running even with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in this year’s presidential race?

Who’s to say?

With his droll campaign style and lack of decent funding, Richardson might still be on his way back to Santa Fe to fulfill his duties as New Mexico governor. But there wouldn’t be so much confusion about his ethnic roots, even though to me one look at Richardson’s face makes me see his “mestizo” roots and realize that he is a “Mexicano” at heart.

Then, there’s my all-time favorite Hispanic/Latino guy who got stuck going through life with an Anglo name – the late actor Anthony Quinn.

He was born Antonio Quinn Oaxaca in Mexico, and the Irish Quinn portion of his name originated with his paternal grandfather, who married into a Mexican family and went native.

Be honest.

How many of you assumed after watching “Zorba the Greek” and seeing his skin tone, that Hollywood went out and got a real Greek guy to play a Greek part? They didn’t, although Quinn’s appearance there is not as ridiculous as the notion of Natalie Wood playing the female lead role of a Puerto Rican girl in the film version of “West Side Story.”

In Quinn’s case, he got the chance to play Mexican roles when he was more established in his career – particularly in the 1978 film “Children of Sanchez,” based on a 1950s sociological study of life in a Mexico City slum neighborhood, and 1995’s “A Walk in the Clouds.”

Getting back to Bradley, he is just as much as Mexican as an Irish guy. His half-Anglo roots should not be held against him. Nobody’s perfect.

Having the ethnicity issue brought up is just too low a blow, even in a city where a liberal Jewish guy once campaigned for mayor against a black man by urging voters to cast their ballots for him, “before it’s too late.” Besides, there are enough other issues for the two to run on. It’s not like Bradley and Martinez ought to be natural allies.

Bradley is a long-time supporter of Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, whereas Martinez is allied with state Senate President Emil Jones, D-Chicago, and has said publicly she sides with Gov. Rod Blagojevich in his political differences against Madigan.

I have no problem if the two of them want to turn their legislative campaigns into a surrogate brawl between the forces of Madigan and Blagojevich. That’s fair play. As writer Finley Peter Dunne’s ever-quotable Chicago bartender character Mr. Dooley often told us, “politics ain’t beanbag.”

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Originally posted at www.ChicagoArgus.blogspot.com