HispanicLatinos can remake America through the remaking of their identity, and, ironically, it will fall on the more assimilated or acculturated HispanicLatinos to communicate how important their community’s development will be to the country’s survival. Above all, more integrated HispanicLatinos must understand clearly the core characteristic of the population they will be forced to lead: It is still a people in the making.
America itself is a country always in the making and reinventing itself. Constant change grew it into a world power. If the country is always being remade, so, too, must the HispanicLatino community experience ongoing change.
At the core of any human being succeeding in life and maximizing his or her potential is a sense of confidence that emanates from a complete self usually derived from a secure home, environment and family. Knowing who one is, growing to understand one’s purpose in life and feeling comfortable within one’s own skin is critical to individual achievement.
Individuals not born into a minority population or into less-than-optimal financial circumstances might not understand the reality that permeates the lives of millions of HispanicLatinos. Beyond the normal insecurities that all individuals experience in their early childhood, through their teenage years and as young adults, individuals in minority and economically disadvantaged environments confront additional challenges. Many HispanicLatinos grow up in culturally ambivalent households, in which ambiguities can and do cloud the formation of the self and the generation of a secure identity.
Viewed through the traditional prism that proscribes that at least two generations pass before an individual is Americanized, a vast majority of HispanicLatinos are still in the process of becoming. About 70 percent of HispanicLatinos are of the first and second generations of their population or are foreign-born – an extraordinarily high proportion for a group that has existed before the founding of the American Republic. Many HispanicLatinos by definition are still becoming accustomed to a country many of whose citizens are less than jubilant about the changes in America’s demography.
The circumstances in which many of these first- and second-generation HispanicLatinos find themselves provokes varying degrees of social dissonance and leads to outright conflicts in personal identity in some that affect their individual well-being. Thus, despite being engaged actively in the process of becoming Americanized, many HispanicLatinos are no strangers to self-doubt, and it does not take much for HispanicLatinos of any generation to have their identity shaken by fresh and consistent attacks on their community – which have increased in the past decade and intensified in the last two years.
Many HispanicLatinos experience the resulting insecurity in highly personal ways and might fret about them and suppress them in private. But publicly, as a group, many manifest their lack of confidence in low test scores, low self-esteem, high drop-out rates, marginal economic achievement and, often, in anti-social behavior that ranges from mayhem and violence in their personal lives to lower participation and engagement rates in the political and public sphere.
Measured against almost every norm, HispanicLatinos as a group do not rise to standard levels of educational, economic and social attainment in American society despite the accomplishments of many individual HispanicLatinos. That most are English-dominant has not made much of a difference.
Never before in the history of America has a group growing daily as a share of the national population and in real numbers remained in such as state of flux, with many of its members feeling incomplete and many others operating outside the mainstream.
This unprecedented development is of supreme importance. In many cities and towns, HispanicLatinos are literally supplanting the Anglo population, becoming the largest minority population of the nation and on the cusp of forming majorities in the key states that generate most of the nation’s wealth. As the Anglo population recedes, the size of the group of HispanicLatinos who are first and second generation will grow and the overall impact of its behavior and internal dynamics – whatever form they take – will be greater over time. The melting pot long has been turned off, and now the heat under the economy will be turned down to a lower flame, introducing greater uncertainty.
On the remaining 30 percent of HispanicLatinos who are beyond the second generation and are, generally speaking, more culturally integrated thus falls the responsibility to lead in the development of a new HispanicLatino identity and to help forge HispanicLatinos into a force that they can recognize as their own – not as a symptom of increasing ethno-nationalism but as a way to give form to a people that must solidify and grow its economic standing for its own benefit and the country at large.
Feel free to forward these blogs adapted from previous writings, with additional thoughts published invariably in between.