So the year ends and so does this blog on a regular three-times-per-week basis.  In the year that begins tomorrow, change and events will continue to rock our world.  Sadly, television too soon will break into our lives with news of another mass shooting.  The possibility that Israel will launch its already-planned attack on Iran’s nuclear installations becomes probability as each day passes.  By the end of the spring, the fragile economy might have been harassed back into recession by obdurate House Republicans whose political near-sightedness obscures the electoral razor atop their noses.  Still, despite the immediacy of these events, the most transcendental if not outright existential story for the country remains how HispanicLatinos develop socially, economically and politically.  And so from time to time a thought or two on the subject will appear in this same space.

The beginnings of the HispanicLatino storyline appear old already.  The drumbeat of demographic change has become monotony.  Yet the story is just beginning.  The objective of this blog, which began in the late summer of 2011, intended to advance foundational thought and reflection beyond the routine talking point of a Hispanic/Latino population remaking the country.  HispanicLatinos, after all, will prove more important than the next mass shooting or the combined competitive evolution in the near future of the Brazilian, Chinese, Indian and Mexican economies.  HispanicLatinos must succeed for America to survive.

The HispanicLatino phenomenon, though, is not easily captured.  It seems an apparition in slow-motion, though it is not.  Millions of HispanicLatinos are making millions of individual decisions in their lives daily – from diet to debt – that in the long run will be more important than whether the European Union survives.  The composite meaning of those decisions escapes the attention it deserves for many reasons, not the least of which is the slow, drawn-out understanding by HispanicLatinos of their importance to the country.  The failure of the majority of HispanicLatinos to not understand the historic proportion of their existence relative to the rest of the population threatens the country.  It is, in fact, a matter of national security.

Though the HispanicLatino electorate finally attained some political significance in the recent presidential election year and corporate America more and more understands their commercial significance, HispanicLatinos remain invisible relative to the size of their population.  Remarkably, the best thing that happened to HispanicLatinos was the harsh, destructive rhetoric and anti-immigrant laws authored by racists in Arizona and Alabama that were abetted nationally by the Republican party.  Those events however hurtful to so many began to give form to a perspective that must still be organized then deepened.  HispanicLatinos knew enough to vote almost uniformly Democratic but now ahead of them is finding their voice and determining where they fit in the world.  Without an organic sense of what they are about, HispanicLatinos will remain incomplete and so will be viewed as they are now, as a disparate population on which no one can get a handle.

The political epiphany of the news media of late notwithstanding, the HispanicLatino population is not heard as thoroughly as it should be.  HispanicLatinos do not compel their fellow Americans to an idea that they can quickly understand in shorthand or sound bite.  Unlike African Americans, whose guiding political compass was to correct a grievous wrong and to reorient history to fulfill the promise of the Constitution, HispanicLatinos lack a sense of national purpose, that is to say, a national political identity.  My sense is that the most complete HispanicLatinos are those who have served in the military or those whose knowledge of Spanish gives them a different and deeper understanding of self and, ultimately, of community.  From them must come a new leadership to develop the new ideas of themselves without which HispanicLatinos give the often clueless media – mainstream and new – nothing to grasp onto, so that passé images and exasperating stereotypes remain the currency of muddled ideas that compounds the challenges that HispanicLatinos face in finding themselves and their place in the sun.

The media in turn – paradoxically, given their omnipresence – exacerbates the potential misunderstanding by the whole country of this pivotal moment in the history of the Americas.  Previous generations of Americans evolved without the constant presence of a ubiquitous media.  Not so with HispanicLatinos – except that the impact an unknowing media is having on HispanicLatinos is itself not known.  This is a very dangerous moment, for in the end the individual, personal decisions HispanicLatinos make for themselves is the biggest story of all.

And so from time to time a comment that perhaps achieves insight on the events ahead in our lives might appear in this space.

Jesse Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.