La Raza

The Spanish expression la Raza ('the people' or 'the community'; literal translation: 'the race') has historically been used to refer to the Hispanophone populations (primarily though not always exclusively in the Western Hemisphere), considered as an ethnic or racial unit historically deriving from the Spanish Empire, and the process of racial intermixing of the Spanish colonizers with the indigenous populations of the Americas (some utilizations of the term include racial mixing with enslaved Africans brought there by the Atlantic slave trade). The term was in wide use in Latin America in the early-to-mid-20th century, but has gradually been replaced by Hispanidad. It remains in active use specifically in the context of Mexican-American identity politics in the United States (). The term la raza latina was in use by 1858 in local California newspapers such as El Clamor Publico by californios writing about America latina and latinoamerica, and identifying as latinos as the abbreviated term for their "membership in la raza latina". The shortened name of Día de la Raza (now often, though not always, with a capitalized R) was used in 1939, when the feast day was celebrated in Zaragoza in combination with a special devotion to the Virgen del Pilar (Our Lady of the Pillar). Chilean foreign vice-secretary Germán Vergara Donoso commented that the "profound significance of the celebration was the intimate inter-penetration of the homage to the Race and the devotion to Our Lady of the Pillar, i.e. the symbol of the ever more extensive union between America and Spain." Francisco Franco wrote a novel under the pen name "Jaime de Andrade" which was turned into the film Raza of 1942. It celebrates idealized "Spanish national qualities", and exemplifies this usage of raza española as referring specifically to Spanish Roman Catholic heritage. In Central America, Mexico, and the United States, la Raza emphasizes an ethno-racial heritage traced to classic and post-classic Mesoamerican societies and cultures, or it may express ChicanX-LatinX identity (la Raza being taken as short for la raza iberoamericana, following Vasconcelos).