People remember specifically where they were the moment they heard John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas in 1963.  Very few of us will remember – since no one knows exactly when it happened – the moment that “white” births in the nation fell below 50 percent, most likely sometime in early 2011.  Yet in comparison, the news that HispanicLatinos, blacks, Asians and those of mixed are giving birth to a new majority is by far more important than what happened in Dallas, although it certainly was not caught on film.

In reading the attendant stories reporting on the Census Bureau announcement, the graphic lines representing white and non-white births cross simply, silently.  But, like the exact moment when a bullet roared through Kennedy’s head, history will record that …history changed, but it was not shattered.  I was a kid in 1963, playing in a schoolyard of a small city in West Texas and after the principal came on the public address system and dismissed us for the day, everyone scurried home.  It was in the next two years that I saw our town start changing.  Upon the mechanization of the cotton fields, Congress then changed the law so that the legal Mexican workers were no longer necessary and had to go elsewhere.  Suddenly, the church on Sundays was not as packed.  Not much later, the local air force base closed, and the population changed again.  But no one knew at the time that by the mid-1970′s  the number of children born of white parents had begun to drop dramatically across the nation – below replacement rates – and has not stopped since and in fact has accelerated so that 2011 will go down in history as the epic year when America changed and became something else – but what?

After Kennedy was killed, pundits like to write, the country changed.  But after 2011 what will the pundits write?  That 2011 meant nothing, or everything?  That it was in the following year in 2012 that America finally got it and rallied itself to understand the relationship between demographic growth, education and economic growth?  Or that it was the year when the Supreme Court at the behest of racist crazies accelerated the choking of the nation’s lifeline by affirming anti-HispanicLatino laws such as Arizona’s and Alabama’s and Georgia’s and Texas’?  Will historians look back and be astonished at a Congress that – locked in partisan warfare fueled by the very angst generated by the new demography – let the nation sink further into fiscal abyss and complicated its future further by not spending more on education?

Will historians write that 2012 was when HispanicLatinos finally understood that they were responsible for the nation’s future – and started to act like it?

Nothing matters in a nation’s life more than demography.  No assassination, no presidential impeachment, no Columbine, no first black President, no Steve Jobs.  And without education all is lost.  At one time, Arab scholars were the intellectual masters of the universe.  What happened?  And there was a time when America was thought to be exceptional but will now China and the rest of the world make of the United States but another England?

Running home from school that November day in Dallas, I was scared as everyone else.  Today is scarier – by far.

Feel free to forward these blogs adapted from previous writings, with additional thoughts published invariably in between.

HispanicLatino.com

In its storied history, America has had to rely on specific generations to make enormous personal sacrifices for the country’s sake.  One generation fought to create the country; another generation struggled to keep it whole and not let it disappear into disunion; another generation beat back fascism; others outlasted communism; and another now fights international terrorism.   HispanicLatinos are no different.  They are a new generation of Americans being asked to save and to hold their country for a far greater purpose than the vast majority of HispanicLatinos might have ever considered – except that many of them start behind the social, economic and political curve.  And the dimensions of the responsibility they bear are daunting.  How to help save a country that seems in decline internally is no small task.

HispanicLatinos have many fronts to cover, but how behind the curve are many of them, really, when they have every freedom and opportunity before them, Arizona not withstanding?  And how far behind are those HispanicLatinos who survived decades of mistreatment, ignorance and inequality to maximize innate talents and abilities?  Indeed, in today’s world all can change in a flash, and technology can be a tool for breath-taking progress.  Many HispanicLatinos might be behind the curve today – but can recover and overtake it tomorrow.

Any process that seeks to achieve significant change at the group level requires a level of self-awareness, including self-criticism, at the individual level, for individual HispanicLatinos, with their hopes, dreams, struggles, personal or otherwise, form the HispanicLatino population.  Without self-examination, many HispanicLatinos will continue to limit themselves and not grow their personal capacities.  This is not an exercise in self-hate.

Pressing themselves in a way no one has asked them to before, they face more difficult times still if they do not embrace their critical participation in the country’s future – and they might not succeed unless they define themselves in a way that they alone can decide.  HispanicLatinos will have to converse with themselves so that they can use their history proactively to fill in any gaps in their identity.

Fortifying their identity and solidifying their sense of purpose are necessary to create a stronger foundation for the HispanicLatino – and American – community.  They must not let history weigh down their progress but they can remedy the past and prepare for the near future by completing themselves as individuals and making each other whole.

The importance of the moment boils down to nothing less than this: Right now, HispanicLatinos as a group are not going to be enough for their community and their country to succeed.  Something new has to emerge – something that focuses, directs and motivates understanding of – and engagement in – the world around them: A new HispanicLatino identity.

What does a new HispanicLatino identity look like, and how do HispanicLatinos go about forming it?  The very process of self-assessment and self-determination will formulate it.  A core step is understanding the evident truth that surrounds them and that they hardly can fail to understand:  How Hispanic and Latino the world around them has become.  In doing so, they can come to realize that something around them has changed and that they, too, must change – an essential ingredient to the new beginning HispanicLatinos can and must make.

After all, they have a historic, generational responsibility to fulfill.

Feel free to forward these blogs adapted from previous writings, with additional thoughts published invariably in between.

HispanicLatino.com

Many years ago one of the most influential books ever written shaped my own political identity and my view of the world. Ostensibly about the presidential campaign of 1960, Theodore White’s Pultizer Prize-winning The Making of the President told the story of how John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson survived one of the narrowest presidential victories in the nation’s history.  But more than simply converting a political story into a highly interesting narrative, White wrote revealingly about how political markets are hardly more than consumer markets.  In his eyes, fifty states and the District of Columbia – each one different from the other – comprised 51 political markets with many more submarkets of voters, hundreds in fact.  They still do, if not more so.

White’s book gave birth, in many ways, to the evolution of modern political campaigning as surely as did the great issues of the time, for it foreshadowed the increasingly balkanized, partisan politics that now paralyze the country at one of its most critical passages in its history.  Civil rights, abortion, same-sex marriage all resonate differently within these submarkets – and with different intensity within each one.  This political reality drives campaign strategists to try to weave a national political narrative atop a structure of groups and subgroups and concoct strategies to increase voter turnout within those same subgroups.  Successful campaigns that succeed in doing both almost always will win. (The same applies to corporations and large organizations as they try to figure out the HispanicLatino community.)

Thus in the days after President Obama endorsed same-sex marriage, the news media are full of speculation and analysis about how it will affect his re-election efforts, especially in already marginal states with, of course, inherent subgroups of voters.  As is often the case, however, sometimes the larger issue at stake is clouded by another story that probably resonates more so and that the polls never pick up because some questions are hard to plumb.  Thus The Washington Post’s story on what Mitt Romney did in high school – attacking a student who was probably thought to be gay and cutting off his hair – could be resonating with many more people than same-sex marriage.

It sort of stands to reason: Same-sex marriage is one of those stories that in reality affects so few people but hazing is something that many more people have either felt directly or indirectly.  In fact, I would submit that most HispanicLatinos feel that they are being hazed right now by laws that Mitt Romney supports in Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Texas and other states .  And localities after the Supreme Court rules in favor of Arizona’s patently offensive and racist laws will only increase the feeling that HispanicLatinos are having more than their hair cut off.

In the aftermath of Obama’s announcement, a reporter from a national television networks set off to find HispanicLatinos in opposition.  Of course, he found a fundamentalist preacher in Orange County in southern California and his assistant opposed to it.  I guess if I wanted to find a Wisconsin dairy farmer’s opinion on cheese heading north of Madison would be a safe bet.  In the world of segmented politics, are HispanicLatinos so opposed to same-sex marriage that they will vote against a President whose opponent is a Republican whose party is enabling the most anti-HispanicLatino rhetoric this country has heard in generations?

The reporter might have inquired if, pushed to the wall, these two HispanicLations – who seemed to be rather recent arrivals to the country and are therefore more vulnerable to real anti-HispanicLatino rhetoric – might not end up voting for Obama.  How could the possibility of direct assault on their families compare to two men or two women getting married 50 miles up the Hollywood Freeway?

Were HispanicLatinos nationally to vote in a significant way for the Republican candidate over the Democratic nominee based on same-sex marriage would surely have been interesting to Teddy White.  It would be to me, too, but, more important, it would have longer-term ramifications for all HispanicLatinos, not just the ones fixated on so irrelevant a topic.

Feel free to forward these blogs adapted from previous writings, with additional thoughts published invariably in between.

HispanicLatino.com

Markets is a word easily thrown about, especially in the changing landscape of television.  One definition of market is the old trying to catch up to the new – and to the news, perhaps.  In the roiled television industry, ‘market’ could also be defined as networks discovering they stood in the way of history.  Certainly, television has scrambled to catch up with the social media, and it has begun finally to move away from an old demography on which it has been stuck that each day applies less and less to the only definition of markets that ultimately matters – a way to make money.

Television creates as many markets as it discovers.  Television created the modern market as much as the explorers created a ‘new’ world – through voyages of discovery of new geography, new demography, new technology.  Markets often exist for years before they are discovered.  The modern HispanicLatino market is not new by any means but, having materialized to some only recently, it is therefore recently discovered.  In any case, it is testing the ability of television to deliver for consumer and advertiser alike.

For so long, television was just there: Three networks entertaining and informing a market presumed to be unified.  Into this unitary market HispanicLatinos were brought along as any other segment of society.  My very intelligent father, who refused to speak English although he knew it, would not miss an episode of Bewitched.  In shorthand Spanish he would say, Ponle hay, con la brujita, referring to the channel he wanted. Put it there, with the little witch.  Would he – and we – have watched Elizabeth Montgomery if Univision or Telemundo or Telefutura or Azteca or Galavsion or Mundo2 had been around 40 years ago in West Texas?  When the household sat for days in front of the television set during the Cuban Missile Crisis (with my father’s newly cleaned rifle standing in the closet just in case the Russians invaded) or later when John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas – would he have wanted to watch English- or Spanish- language reporting?  What if the network-to-watch-on-breaking-news, CNN, had been around?  How would Univision or Telemundo have covered these events or the Bay of Pigs, for that matter?

These questions create corporate anxiety in a day when even in North Dakota anyone can watch a soccer game live from Buenos Aires or from Santiago Bernabéu in Madrid.  Television management now is trying to chase down the HispanicLatino market after having left it behind at the advent of the modern age that created so many new markets.  Indeed, the non-HispanicLatino population is not what it was only 20 years ago and neither is the HispanicLatino population – not just in numbers but also in self-perception.  As the old demography collapses, the old market can no longer grow along the same pattern – for either English- or Spanish-language networks, mind you.  So out come the new strategies and the casting about for new ways to capture a market that is out there, always has been, always will be – and, just to make things interesting, is finding and remaking itself.

No one disputes that television changes us.  Same-sex marriage anyone?  Had Univision existed in the high plains of Texas, miles removed from the border with Mexico, the HispanicLatino demographic would be different altogether.  On the other hand, people do change television, and the mostly English-speaking HispanicLatino population retains a cultural undertow fed by geography and a changing demography whose rhythms must be calibrated correctly lest they disrupt more of what we think we know.

The new identity HispanicLatinos must develop to succeed in the new world now formed around them will emerge from that market – and the pressures on that market.  The resulting human drama forms the bulk of what – and how – news organizations cover this decisive point in history.  Who HispanicLatinos are and how different they are from the most recent reiteration of what it means to be an American – including socio-economic realities – are the facts that all industries have to address strategically in public.  But these are the realities that HispanicLatinos confront individually and privately each day of their lives, creating new markets in the process.  And this ongoing growth, above all else, is the most important.

Whoever understands how these pieces come together on a daily basis will make of these new markets a success.  Asking the right questions is as important as understanding the answers.

Feel free to forward these blogs adapted from previous writings, with additional thoughts published invariably in between.

HispanicLatino.com

There are many tough executive-level jobs in corporate America today.  The nation’s economy is being buffeted on all sides by foreign competition, skilled workers are at a premium and the nation’s infrastructure each day falls behind the rest of the world — among other issues. Few of those jobs are more challenging than leading a television network today (or a film production or advertising company for that matter).

Whether heading up an English-language or a Spanish-language operation – all are caught in some way by changing demographics; the evident and growing power of social media and new platforms; and an audience comprised of submarkets and subgroups hard to unify into a national market.  It is nothing short of mayhem – and confused mayhem at that – exacerbated by business models that probably need to be revamped or scratched.  Not surprisingly, rumors abound about the future of the current Spanish-language networks, the advent of news ones and the creation of new hybrids for English-dominant HispanicLatinos. ABC and Univision this week affirmed their intention to bring to life next year a new cable news channel that appeals to English-dominant HispanicLatinos.

The great difference between what HispanicLatinos want to see as entertainment and what they want to consume as news are two different issues and must be solved by a number of new approaches.  Many HispanicLatinos are giving up on mainstream networks whose news programs do not even try to address their communities and whose entertainment programs leave so many HispanicLatinos feeling hollow – not exactly what a population that is still about the business of finding itself needs. That might explain why HispanicLatinos outrank other groups per capita in the use of social media.  Likewise, tired of trying to shoehorn the HispanicLatino population into their current products, corporations are being forced to try new business lines after disasters orchestrated by that old nemesis, conventional thinking.

Some corporations in other industry sectors do not get it yet, but some do, and in the world of news, change is real.  HispanicLatinos who are attuned to the future most likely get more from watching the likes of Fareed Zakaria on CNN along with Jorge Ramos on Univision than elsewhere.  They present a wider understanding of this millennium’s version of the new world through a combination of domestic news with a highly-informed international perspective – which is what individuals in a globalized economy require.  Zakaria and Ramos are to the new America what the old McNeil-Lehrer Newshour was for an earlier version of a country rediscovering itself as it began to undergo four decades of change but that left an exploding HispanicLatino population by the wayside.  And José Díaz-Balart, God bless him, on Telemundo is certainly trying to catch up.

Interestingly, the inability of Telemundo once it was bought by NBC to gain significant share of the HispanicLatino market should be a case study for business schools throughout the country and for corporations considering new HispanicLatino ventures – followed closely by an examination of Univision’s own inability to understand its market fully over the years.  As its natural market changed, Univision did not adapt to it so that now it is caught in the same problem as the other networks.  In many ways Univision, then, is the process – like the rest of the HispanicLatino population – of expanding and redefining itself.  But so is ABC, perhaps intelligently so.

The challenge always is about content and presentation.  The leaders of news operations initially have to make sure that getting a slew of HispanicLatinos on air that hardly understands the demographics and experience of the HispanicLatino population nationwide is not the answer. On the entertainment side, another sitcom about another Mexican/Mexican-American family in LA would not just be a cliché, it would be an embarrassing cliché.  The answer lies in inclusive balance.

Despite dropping immigration and reduced birth rates and increased deportations, the HispanicLatino population will still outpace the growth of the rest of the national population in the years to come – the result of everyone else’s birth rates dropping more so.  Thus corporations are creating new channels and perhaps organizing entirely new networks, offering new kinds of websites and recasting knock-offs of popular talent shows.

One of the more interesting stories might be that of Fox, which has real, recent experience in launching a national enterprise.  It, too, is organizing something new for the HispanicLatino market.  If it does not create another version of its right-wing, English-language hate machine, Fox could be best positioned to take advantage of a reshaped market increasingly anchored by dual cultural realities.  Fox’s sports offerings on Fox Deportes in fútbol and Fox Sports in football already serve a key, highly defined HispanicLatino demographic – something hard for other networks to claim.

Fox might or might not have the right people to do what needs to be done.  But it does have the opportunity to do what ABC-Univision is doing – starting a new venture that should start from scratch and that has every reason to succeed if its input-decisions on content are not skewed and its news presentation is based on an authentic and honest knowledge of the market.

>>> Additional reading of possible interest:

http://www.hispaniclatino.com/2011/10/17/pssst-the-passat/

Feel free to forward these blogs adapted from previous writings, with additional thoughts published invariably in between.

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Criticized by supporters for passing a weak civil rights bill in 1957, even though it was the first civil rights legislation in almost a century, the powerful Democratic Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson responded by saying that it was but a first step to larger gains ahead.  Eight years later, a far more comprehensive civil rights package indeed became law.  The story of those years — retold in part in Robert Caro’s new book on Johnson, The Passage of Power – holds implications for those contemplating a watered-down version of the Dream Act.  The courageous leaders of the Dream Act movement, perhaps unknowingly, hold in their hands much of how HispanicLatinos are redefining themselves.  The other part of that redefinition is being accomplished through the courtesy of states like Arizona, Alabama and Georgia and, soon enough, most likely, the Supreme Court.

Reformers in any arena always have to confront the concept of incremental change as a tactical possibility.  Supporters of the Dream Act are no different, yet their movement is more than a way to extend citizenship to college-age students whose parents brought them into the country as non-citizens and who have spent most of their lives here.  The fight over proposed law represents part of how the HispanicLatino population is evolving.  It has as its broader topic the existence of 11-12 million HispanicLatinos who are in the country without proper authorization, and it speaks to the greater need of how all HispanicLatinos, legal or otherwise, advance economically, politically and socially.

The problem is that the politics of today are not the politics of 1957, when the legendary Johnson and his fellow Texan, House Speaker Sam Rayburn, were able to use their enormous political skill and power to achieve what despite the criticism was a historic accomplishment made better in the future.  Today, there is no such leadership on Capitol Hill or in the White House to push the Dream Act forward – or much of any legislation of importance to the rest of the HispanicLatino population and, indeed, the whole country, for that matter.

Even more problematic is the difference in substance of the two pieces of legislation.  The 1957 law sought to strengthen the dignity of every American by protecting the right to vote.  The reduced version of the Dream Act being batted around does not advance the dignity of HispanicLatinos.  Indeed, Marco Rubio’s proposal, what we know of it, would convert HispanicLatinos into second-class inhabitants of the country – not even citizens – in an attempt to create political chattel for himself.

That it took eight years – eight years! – to achieve meaningful civil rights legislation is a historical fact that Dream Act supporters and HispanicLatinos in general cannot dismiss.  The Voting Rights Act of 1965 came to be only after Johnson as President seized the emotional momentum generated by President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas in late 1963 to fashion a great Democratic landslide in the presidential election of 1964 that increased his political power exponentially.  Today hardly resembles that period in American history.

The Dreamers will have to gauge whether any compromise now matters more than standing firm for the whole package or a larger package of immigration reform.  Demanding a larger package implies figuring out how to increase the power of the HispanicLatino vote immediately, the only dynamic factor that can change the current environment as the HispanicLatinos continue to redefine and find themselves.

The HispanicLatino vote could be the new Lyndon Johnson – except that no one has converted it into the kind of political power that he embodied and brandished. But that is what real leaders do: Grow their power to affect more change.

Feel free to forward these blogs adapted from previous writings, with additional thoughts published invariably in between.

HispanicLatino.com

Diversity is no longer an operative word for knowledgeable and informed HispanicLatinos conversing and thinking seriously about the future.  Unity is by far more suitable for the times.  It speaks to the strategic importance of a population that has gained critical geographic and demographic mass.  A microcosm of the kind of collaboration that geography and demography will extract naturally from HispanicLatinos is the daily operations of the country’s Spanish-language television networks.  Every day of the year, HispanicLatino professionals from all corners of the HispanicLatino world produce programming developed and managed by staffs whose primary language of interest might be Spanish derived from different countries of origin but whose language in the control room is likely English.

Aided by a new demography and a resilient geography while Spanish-language television and radio networks expand in more markets while English media distribute both positive and negative messages that bolster its identity, a HispanicLatino population that is allegedly a loose conglomeration of groups competing against each other is unlikely to succumb to expansive division over the long term.

While only an example, the English-Spanish paradigm evident in television production will continue to extend to many more sectors of the economy, calling, of course, on HispanicLatinos to maintain, improve or acquire both Spanish and English to an effective level.

Nothing explains the current economic standing of the HispanicLatino community more than their misuse or abuse of the Spanish language or their lack of knowledge of English beyond the need to minimally exist.  Real and unimagined personal insecurity gnaws within an English-dominant or Spanish-dominant HispanicLatino when he or she is placed in social situations that require effective communication in the opposite language.  These moments of insecurity feed other feelings of inadequacy that douse the creative spirit and stunt the growth and potential of good and talented human beings.

The challenge of language is a bar more HispanicLatinos need to clear.  Individuals who might not be able to express themselves in both languages effectively will fall short of their productive potential.  It is painful indeed when a HispanicLatino cannot communicate in either language – as it is when younger Anglos can speak Spanish more effectively than their HispanicLatino counterparts.  I speak from personal experience.

A HispanicLatino deficient in either language in the age of the new demography is incomplete for times that call for workers with greater, not fewer, personal and professional abilities and tools.  Perhaps Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s appointment to the Supreme Court is a case in point.  It is hard to imagine any HispanicLatino in the country – whatever their personal backgrounds and however different the intensity of their cultural histories – not being elated at the news of the selection of an exemplary Puerto Rican jurist as the first HispanicLatino appointment to the highest court that interprets the Constitution for the whole country.   And, indeed, the new associate justice is adamantly bilingual – and a complete professional.

HispanicLatinos can and should view such important developments through their own cultural prisms that do not require them to forget their native lands in order to be full Americans.  Active memories of the past nourish the beginnings of another, different kind of life in the present.  If HispanicLatinos do forget who they are, they shortchange themselves.  Denial of self dilutes personal growth.  A new philosophy of community and self-acknowledgement of unity through language can guide HispanicLatinos to create a new age.

HispanicLatinos are a gift to America as much as they are gifts to each other.  But they cannot be so diverse as to make their lives adverse.

Feel free to forward these blogs adapted from previous writings, with additional thoughts published invariably in between.

HispanicLatino.com

There was something unusual about President Obama last night when he spoke from Bagram military base in Afghanistan.  His tone of voice seemed to capture the nation’s weariness of war without his own voice sounding listless.  There was no bluster, no nonsense.  Matter-of-fact, he sounded presidential.  He did not rush to useless rhetorical heights.  All of this should have resonated well within the HispanicLatino community, whose contributions to the Bush wars are well documented.

Obama embodied part of the common sentiment expressed to me by a family member a year ago.  “We need to get out.  We have done all we can.  It will not work in the end, but no one has given it a better shot.”  Indeed, the casualties within the country and within the HispanicLatino community will last for decades and entire lifetimes.  It really is time to come home.  It is hard to believe that we have spent more than $3 trillion in those wars and will spend trillions more to take care of the wounded and the families of the dead.

The message Obama delivered was a powerful as the one that went unstated:  Get out, close that checkbook, open up another course at home.  The hope is that the discredited neoconservatives, the ones who sat back while others fought and the habitual warriors who plunged America into these meaningless wars, get the message for all time.

Somewhere in his voice lay the possible reaction of a country were it ever attacked – God forbid – again as in September of 2011.  Only the most ridiculous people would argue for some sort of land invasion – of what?  More probably, we would step up what we are doing now: Keeping the pressure up and waiting for generational change to come in the Islamist world.  Nations can change within a generation.  Some can climb; others decline.  Perhaps that is the reason for a longer commitment than most Americans want now.

HispanicLatino.com

Last week a Department of Justice led by Attorney General Eric Holder mounted an attack so lame in front of the Supreme Court against Arizona’s anti-immigrant, anti-HispanicLatino law known as S.B.1070 that even first-time observers realized how thoroughly DOJ had been routed.  Obama’s lawyers cratered in a case of existential importance to HispanicLatinos, who should be thankful that Obama’s lawyers later this year will not handle the challenge before the same Court to the minority-friendly college admissions policies of the University of Texas – meaning those of all of the nation’s colleges and universities.

HispanicLatinos should not be happy about last week’s unmitigated disaster if the Court affirms any part of 1070 in June. Any HispanicLatino citizens who think they are exempt from its ramifications have a surprise waiting for them. As surprised might be President Obama in November.

Most legal experts presume that last week’s faux attempt at lawyering by DOJ will cause the Court to endorse at least part of the Arizona law that targets individuals based on color, race, ethnicity and sound of speech on the mere supposition that they might be in the country illegally.  My fear – and I so hope I am wrong – is that local governments will rush to propose and enact ordinances against defenseless local immigrant and HispanicLatino populations.  Imagine the likes of hundreds of “Americans” like Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Arizona running wild in every state.

Imagine cities and counties across the nation that have been chomping at the bit to let loose their police departments on anyone who looks HispanicLatino.  The Court in June is set to unleash nothing less than a legalized form of ethnic cleansing.  That was Arizona’s intention from the very beginning and if the Court supports 1070 in any form then local governments will take whatever aspect of the law to the maximum.  Racists like Joe Arpaio already must be salivating like the racists of old when the Couert affirmed the nation’s Jim Crow laws.  And it will not be as simple to overcome these local measures as the Jim Crow laws of the past that were swept away by federal civil rights legislation.  Individual states now would have to pass laws to override them – a near impossibility in almost every state given the easy legislative obstacles that obtrusive lawmakers can put in the way.  Arizona is here to stay if the Court does not get ahold of itself between now and the time it writes its decision.

So now what should HispanicLatinos do?  It is certainly causing more of them to think harder about Obama.  Were any third-party candidate viable, Obama probably would lose the election.  Even so, he is more in danger now than he was last week.  Any drop-off in HispanicLatino participation at the polls could prove fatal.  HispanicLatinos not showing up in sufficient numbers – let alone voting against Obama – would cost him Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Iowa, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada and, poetically, Arizona.

Realizing the sudden danger they are in, Senate Democrats announced with great fanfare that they would immediately propose a law to overturn the impact of the Arizona law if the Court rules adversely.  Sorry, guys, HispanicLatinos overall have not yet attained the educational levels of the rest of the country but they ain’t stupid.  How, exactly, will Harry Reid’s farcical attempts at legislative window dressing fix up Joe Arpaio or Farmers Branch in Texas or Hazelton, Pennsylvania, or the whole state of Alabama or the rest of the 50 states?

Last week’s disaster, coupled with Marco Rubio’s attempts to enact some sort of Dream Act, opens the door for the Florida senator to a growing audience of HispanicLatinos now willing to listen to an anti-Obama message anchored by increased deportations and a limping economy.  Rubio’s maneuvering on Dream might be as transparent as Harry Reid’s, for any Senate bill would not see the light of day in a House of Representatives dominated by xenophobic Republicans.  Still, Rubio is angling to be used in a general election strategy.  Curiously, though, his first baby steps on Dream might be his growing appreciation that the HispanicLatino community that extends beyond Miami after Arizona more than likely will become a more politically coherent and powerful force.

Certainly not as feeble as Obama’s attorneys.

Feel free to forward these blogs adapted from previous writings, with additional thoughts published invariably in between.

HispanicLatino.com

At times in journalism it is not the story but the context that matters.  So it is with news reports this week about rapid declines in Mexican immigration that generated front-page news coverage throughout the nation.  Mexicans coming northward form only one component of the changing demographics roiling the country — and it is important that HispanicLatinos do not think that the size of their population is going to diminsh in any way in the years ahead.  Almost 50 years ago – long before the advent of the HispanicLatino population became newsworthy – the power of demography and the economy made a deep impression on me.

The winding down by Congress of the bracero program that allowed for Mexicans to work legally in the country and the nearly simultaneous closing of the local air force base economically devastated the town in West Texas where I grew up, reducing the county’s population from about 40,000 to 30,000.  But at the same time the country already had written a prophetic passage in its history, and its authors were not Mexican immigrants, changes in the economy or laws passed by Congress but the so-called Anglo population.  Sometime in 1972 or 1973, the Anglo population decided it was going to stop having more than two kids per family.  Thus news gives way to context.

When the female members of a nation do not give birth to at least 2.1 children, they set the course of a whole people on a downward trajectory – and that as much as anything else has caused the composition of the population of the United States to change in the last five decades.  The Pew Hispanic Center’s report this week on declining immigration rates from Mexico will never be as important as understanding that Anglo birth rates are continuing – today — to still fall faster than those of Mexican and Mexican-American families and the HispanicLatino population as a whole.  The replacement rate of the Anglo population has collapsed to 1.6 and perhaps as low as 1.4 while that of the HispanicLatino population remains somewhere around 2.4 or higher.  Were it not for the HispanicLatino population the very existence of the country would be in question.

HispanicLatinos and the rest of the nation must be aware of the calamity that low birthrates pose for the country.  As I have written before:  The laws of demography are clear:  A nation of people who stops having children dies.  It is that simple.  No nation can except itself from the arithmetically-ordered dictates of demography.  The Great Economic Recession of 2007 is as much a Great Demographic Recession.  The birthrates of all groups took a hit, but the Anglo population more so.

It is true that the core of the nation’s HispanicLatino population growth curve has been fed mostly by Mexican immigrants and Mexican-American birth rates, and their rates of growth have slowed significantly.  But they are still are giving birth to life around them.

Almost static Mexican migration patterns only slow down the inevitable transformation of the nation’s population – and that is the only news story that in the end will matter.

Feel free to forward these blogs adapted from previous writings, with additional thoughts published invariably in between.

HispanicLatino.com