Hispanics Aren't Just in the Mainstream,
They're
Shaping America
WASHINGTON (By Guy Garcia, Time)
August 18, 2007 In the blockbuster comedy
Anchorman, a local TV news team led by
Will Farrell has a West Side Story-style showdown with a rival news crew in an
empty parking lot. Suddenly maracas and mariachi horns announce the arrival of
yet another posse. As the Spanish language news team storms in waving machetes
and whips, somebody remarks, "Well, it looks like we got ourselves a bi-lingual
bloodfest."
The scene is played strictly for laughs, but the social awareness it draws
upon is no joke. In Anchorman, as in
real life, Spanish language TV is a force to be reckoned with, and its inclusion
in a mainstream comedy film is a clear signal of its arrival as a player in
American media. It is also a subtle reminder that the United States is in the
midst of a socio-cultural shift that goes far beyond the fact that Univision,
Telemundo, and other foreign language networks like them, have entered the
national consciousness.
Only a decade ago it seemed that Hispanics in the United States would be
doomed to perpetual marginalization. Latinos lagged behind whites, African
Americans and Asians in income, buying power, education and health. Their image
in the mediaif it appeared at allwas generally relegated to gardeners, maids
and barrio gangsters. When sales of salsa overtook ketchup in the early 1990s
only Heinz seemed to care. Then came Ricky Martin and his bilingual anthem to
"Living La Vida Loca." The song redefined urban pop and Latinos, almost
overnight, became cool.
But it was the economic and demographic bombshell ticking under the pop
culture surface that would bring the deepest change. When the 2000 U.S. census
made it clear that Hispanics were poised to become the nation's largest
minority, Latinos were thrust into the zeitgeist-visible, indelible, inevitable.
The news that the buying power of Hispanics is overtaking that of African
Americans and is growing faster than non-Hispanics has sparked a scramble by
corporations to understand this huge lucrative market in its midst. The new
color of money is brown, black, red, yellow and white. The U.S. consumer
economy, in other words, is multicultural-and Latinos, for the first time, are
leading the way.
Latinos have not just joined the mainstream; they are helping to define it.
The prospect of a Latino U.S. President before the end of the century no longer
seems farfetched. In fact, in a survey of Latinos for TIME, 54% of respondents
said they believed "a Latino or Hispanic will be nominated for president or
vice-president in 2012."
Which is not to say that Latinos no longer face prejudice and enormous social
and economic hurdles. Nearly a quarter of all Latinos live in poverty; the high
school drop out rate for Latino youths between the ages of 16 and 19 is 21%more
than triple that of non-Hispanic whites. Neo-nativists like Pat Buchannan and
Samuel Huntington still argue that the "tsunami" of non-English speakers from
Latin America will destroy everything that America stands for. Never mind that
most Hispanics are religious, family-centric, enterprising and patriotic. In the
TIME poll, 72% said they considered moral issues such as abortion and issues of
faith important or very important. This year the government announced that
undocumented workers were pouring billions into Social Security and Medicare for
benefits that they would never be allowed to claim. Of the 27,000 troops serving
in the US armed forces who are not US citizens, a large percentage are from
Mexico and the rest of Latin America.
But the greatest argument against inflammatory xenophobes may come from
economic trends that will shape the future of Mexico-U.S. relations. Experts
point out that Mexico's population growth rate has plunged by more than 50 %
during the last five decades, which will probably lead to rising incomes and
demand for workers inside of Mexico. Already the percentage of first-generation
immigrants in the total US Hispanic population is expected to drop from 40 % in
2000 to closer to a third by 2020, a decline of nearly 20 %. In other words, the
forces that have driven emigration from Mexico-and the social pressures they
have spawned in the US-may be on the verge of reversing themselves.
Latinos are comprised of many races and nationalities, speak several
languages and span the socio-economic spectrum. They can be undocumented
immigrants or descendents of families that were on American soil before founding
of the republic. Their diversity binds them to each other and to all other
Americans. The dreams of the old and new immigrants overlap and mirror each
other, offering up myriad reflections of a mutually imagined America. When
Christopher Columbus set foot on the shores of the New World, he described the
natives as "young...well made with fine shapes and faces...Some paint themselves
with black...others with white, others with red, and others with such colors as
they can find." Columbus could have hardly foreseen that more than five hundred
years later his description of Americans as a multicolored tribe inventing their
identity from a dazzling palette of countless hues would ring uncannily true.
Guy Garcia is the author of "Skin Deep and The New Mainstream: How the
Multicultural Consumer is Transforming American Business".
