Defining the "Hispanic Work Ethic”

We Hispanics are used to being insulted and denigrated. After all, there are a wide variety of colorful slurs and cultural putdowns out there from which the bigot can choose.

However, “lazy” is one insult that's never seemed to stick. When people apply the term to Hispanics, there doesn't seem much conviction behind the epithet. After all, how can Latinos be lazy if they’re working hard to invade America and then steal everybody’s job? That sounds like quite a strenuous chore to me.

The stereotype of the shiftless Latino peaked back in the days when welfare cheats were the biggest bogeyman that white America had to face. Even then, though, it was scarier to paint African-Americans as lazy — a stereotype still resonates with many today. The bottom line is that Hispanics never had a Stepin Fetchit to serve as cultural shorthand.

In recent years, the claim that Hispanics are lazy has been further diminished. Instead, we're seeing the rise of a new cliche: one of the sweaty Latino knocking himself out to install your roof or finish your garden or clean your hotel room.

How much of this imagery is true? Sure, it's impossible to quantify or express an abstraction like “work ethic.” But I’m writing the post here, so this is my opinion: Hispanics value hard work, sometimes to the point of personal detriment.

Such a culture is deeply rooted in the origins of Hispanic culture. While Europe was in the Dark Ages, Latinos were building vast pyramids and mighty empires. That set the precedent for the value of sweating a lot.

But when those empires collapsed, as they tend to do, Hispanics didn’t take a cue from Europe, which was building cities and universities. Instead, we returned to the soil, where backbreaking toil became a prized endeavor (Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel has something to say about this). And then, of course, there was the fact that in later centuries, Europeans weren’t about to give up their economic advantages, so they colonized the New World and convinced the populace to keep slaving away — quite literally.

Next, throw in the Catholic Church, which has a huge presence in Latin America and continues to present the (questionable) theological argument that unending work and suffering in this world will be rewarded with paradise in the next.

Finally, leapfrog to the present day, when poor immigrants are grateful to work at menial tasks because it means remittances for home.

The result is a cultural strength, but one that's failed to adapt to the modern world. The concept of “work” for many Latinos (particularly older ones) consists of straining and pushing, pulling and lifting. Many of these same Hispanics will ridicule or deride the argument that building a website, filing a legal brief or writing a thesis counts as “work.”

It’s strange, perhaps, that a Hispanic culture that's so strongly Catholic often rivals Protestants for their work ethic. But I’ve seen it in action.

If you don’t believe me, ask columnist Ruben Navarrette, who writes, “My grandfather was a farm worker who would make it a point to show up to a job early and start working a half hour before he clocked in, as his way of showing appreciation to his employer for hiring him.”

Navarrette uses the example of his grandfather to make a larger point, which is that native-born Americans — be they Latino, white, or black — tend not to have the work ethic of immigrant Hispanics. Navarrette bemoans this phenomenon.

But at the risk of denigrating the man’s grandfather, is it really so great to let an employer know that you’re willing to work for free? Isn’t this one notch above a slave mentality, and doesn’t it just tell the employer that you can be pushed around and are not worthy of respect?

Americans seem to know that Latinos will knock themselves out working. (At the very least, we Hispanics seem to have trouble knowing when to knock off with the work.) Rather than respecting this attribute, though, it’s often exploited.

To illustrate this point, let me close with a brief anecdote from my childhood. When I was in the Boy Scouts (the subject of a future post), my troop went on a camping trip. For reasons I don’t recall, our scoutmaster asked me to dig a hole. I set to the task at once.

They forgot to tell me to stop, however, and I kept going until I had created the Marinas Trench of Boy Scout campgrounds. It didn’t cross my mind to take a break.

Finally, one of the white scouts walked by, saw me, and shouted, “Hey, this kid is still digging.” The scoutmasters apologized for their mistake, then praised me for my hard work. When I thought about it, I realized that my tenacity wasn’t admirable — it was stupid. I had absorbed the idea that it was important to mindlessly labor, no matter how ludicrous the task — never questioning why I was working so hard, and all in the belief that drudgery was its own reward. As I recall, the hole that I dug went unused and soon filled up with muddy rainwater.

I have since wised up, at least a little.

Photo Credit: Bill Jacobus