Alex Lacamoire
Alex Lacamoire – 71st Annual Tony Awards – Media Room – 3 West 51st Street – New York City, NY, USA, 2017 – Photo Credit: Laurence Agron / PRPhotos.com
Birth Name: Alexande Lacamoire
Place of Birth: Los Angeles, California, United States
Date of Birth: May 24, 1975
Ethnicity: Cuban [French, Spanish, possibly other]
Alex Lacamoire is an American composer, arranger, conductor, musical director, music copyist, and orchestrator.
Alex is the son of Cuban parents, Maria Lozano and Alfredo Lacamoire. He is married to Ileana Ferreras. Alex’s parents’ surnames are of French and Spanish origin, respectively.
Alex has said:
My parents are exiles, which means that they had to work a little harder than most folks in order to make it in the US. Cubans know how to persevere-we’re experts in that field.
Source: Marriage record of Alex’s parents – http://www.familysearch.org
I get your point. It’s just that, as a Brazilian with recent immigrant ancestors, this is a hard concept to grasp. Also because we know absolutely nothing about Alex’s ancestry and we’re only presuming his background includes French and Spanish roots because of his parents’ surnames.
@madman
Well, I think Brazilian and Cuban, as both nationalities and ethnicities, would work the same way any other does. An English person who is half Scottish is still English, even though that’s only half their ancestry. If you are of what would be a “Brazilian” ethnicity, it doesn’t make you, or anyone, less Brazilian if you are, let’s say, a quarter Polish. I just think there needs to be a standard, we can’t include everything under the umbrella terms (in that case we could just as well remove it and only let the ethnicities remain without brackets).
Shouldn’t French be separate from Cuban?
Why?
Because that’s the standard that is most often used here: the groups who have been present in the country for a long time are put under the nationality label (Cuban, Mexican, Chilean etc.) while recent immigrants are put outside of it. And Cuba hasn’t been populated by French people to a large extent historically.
I agree. French should be separate from Cuban because the ethnic makeup of Cubans doesn’t usually include French.
So are Cubans only expected to be people from Spain, Africa, or Indigenous?
Yes, with different combinations. Of course there are people with other ethnicities living there, and they are Cubans, but if any ethnicity can be put under an umbrella term, then that term becomes useless. Should, for example, a person born and raised in Cuba by Chinese parents, be labeled “Cuban (Chinese)?
Two examples:
http://ethnicelebs.com/william-levy
http://ethnicelebs.com/rodrigo-santoro