Posted on Thursday evening for Friday, Sept. 7, 2012.
I wrote late last year that I sensed that the HispanicLatino finally was turning the corner to become part of the national consciousness. The geographic concentration of the vast majority – about 75 percent – of the HispanicLatino population in eight states historically worked against its inclusion in the normal affairs of the nation. For that and other reasons, HispanicLatinos for decades have been absent from national commercials, television news sets and the decision-making processes of government, organizations large and small and corporations of any size and their boardrooms. And from opportunity itself. It is as if a group of individuals in the millions whose forefathers arrived in all of the Americas more than a century before Jamestown did not exist for much of the nation. The misplaced notion that most HispanicLatinos conducted their daily lives in Spanish abetted their lack of consideration in the normal, day-to-day thinking of managers, bureaucrats, business owners and corporate planners.