Last week's march for Latino unity in Washington D.C. was an effort to fit a politically unwieldy population into a single narrow ethnic interest group. Yet more and more Latinos are coming to appreciate the vast diversity of the culture -- its Hispanicity -- as a strength rather than as a weakness. PNS associate editor Gregory Rodriguez is a research fellow at the Pepperdine Institute for Public Policy and author of a new report on southern California's emerging Latino middle class.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Is Hispanicity catching on? Last weekend, some 25,000 demonstrators from a variety of Latin American national origins held a Columbus Day march to demand respect for Latino-Americans -- a group to which all claimed allegiance.

Puerto Ricans from the island marched side-by-side with Mexican-American activists from the Southwest. Dominicans from Washington Heights in Manhattan joined ranks with Salvadorans from the Adams Morgan district of Washington, D.C.

The idea of a collective Hispanic identity is not new. In Spanish-speaking countries from Spain to Argentina, October 12 -- Columbus Day -- has long been referred to as Dia de la Hispanidad. In those countries, it is generally understood that a common history has created a shared if ill-defined cultural bond. But in the United States, which has the greatest diversity of Latinos of any country in the world, such an easy notion of a shared history and language has long since given way to a multitude of generational and national distinctions. A fourth-generation Mexican-American in Texas who speaks only English may find it hard to make common cause with a Spanish-speaking Cuban refugee in Miami.

The contemporary U.S. term "Latino" gained currency years before a pan-Latino ethos actually came into being. Ironically, corporations trying to capture the largest share of the nation's Spanish-speaking market may have been the most aggressive propagators of the notion. Marketers deftly fashioned ads and styles they hoped would attract Chicanos in L.A. as much as it would Colombians in Manhattan. But this practice of lumping everyone together has always rubbed -- and continues to rub -- some the wrong way.

In an interview last year, Puerto Rican actress Rosie Perez said she didn't much like Los Angeles because there were "too many Mexicans there." Some Mexican-American movie-goers are protesting the movie industry's selection of Jennifer Lopez, a Puerto Rican actress, to play the murdered Tejana star Selena in the upcoming movie.

The organizers of the Latino march aren't overly concerned with either the deeper cultural bonds among Americans of Hispanic origin or the nuances that separate the variety of cultural icons. They are primarily interested in evincing a united political front to promote an agenda they say will improve the lives of poor and working people and protect the rights of immigrants. They are evoking the sense of a wider Latino identity that transcends nationality, not to broaden the public's perspective of Hispanics but rather to fit a wildly heterogeneous and politically unwieldy population into the narrow parameters of an interest group.

"If we would only all unite, we could change the system" has been a Latino mantra -- and lament -- for decades. Ed Roybal, California's first Latino congressman, spoke of the Latino electorate as the "Sleeping Giant" more than 40 years ago. Latino communities have been seen as untapped political forces whose less than enthusiastic participation in electoral politics or tendency to divide their vote invariably winds up, election after election, disappointing the politicians and activists poised to lead them. One of the consequences of their disappointment is that Latino heterogeneity has come to be identified as a weakness.

But even as organizers were planning the first mass Latino civil rights march on Washington to promote the politics of Latino unity, Latinos from California to Florida have been wondering whether the myth of Latino unity was exactly that. The emergence of a sense of Hispanicity has been mirrored by a growing appreciation of Latino diversity. While politicians bemoan our heterogeneity of national origin, class, race, language and political bent, more and more Latinos have begun to recognize it as a cultural strength.

The lesson of the march may well be this: Trying to fit a population increasingly aware of its multi-dimensionality into a civil rights era model in which an ethnic group is tantamount to an interest group may be like shoving the genie back into the bottle.