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.
Category Archives: Culture
HispanicLatino: More Human Drama than New Market
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.
Reworking the Networks at Last: Breaking the News
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.
Dream Act Leaders Now Have Tough Decisions to Make
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.
‘Diversity’ Doesn’t Cut It Anymore for HispanicLatinos
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.
Court Set to Empower Ethnic Cleansing of HispanicLatinos
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.
News About HispanicLatinos? Proper Context, Please.
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.
1070: Any Court Affirmation Will Sink America
The Supreme Court hearing today on Arizona’s retrogressive 1070 law serves to remind us that every HispanicLatino is in the same boat. It is called America, and when states like Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, Indiana and Texas begin to subvert the very foundations of democratic governance, we have to hope the Court does not provide additional momentum to a state of affairs that might turn ugly. It has been a little more than a decade since the Court in 2000 greatly damaged the country’s faith in itself by overturning the results of an election that was never fully consummated, thus giving the country a historically disastrous Presidency from which the nation is still trying to recover. And it has been but two years since the Court further eroded the principles of every vote counting equally with its pernicious decision in Citizens United that unleashed the power of corporate greed that distorts the value of an individual vote.
These are not good days for the republic, and they are potentially worse for HispanicLatinos. Still, however the court rules on 1070, possibly in June, America will need as never before new leadership anchored by a new vision that must incorporate the convergence of HispanicLatinos from many places into one, unified population to focus on the immediate future. To help create the new leadership their country needs, HispanicLatinos must forge a new sense of common purpose that incorporates their individual experiences and places of origins to create a new identity – and lay down the foundation to oppose whatever laws stem from a faulty Court decision.
Religion: Critical but Dangerous to HispanicLatinos (Just Ask the Nuns)
Followers of this blog know it focuses on the need to build a new intellectual framework for the development of a new HispanicLatino identity that is critical to the country’s future. A HispanicLatino community – fortified with a new sense of self – might be able to accelerate its current economic, social and political standing to help the country remain fiscally and demographically viable. How a new HispanicLatino identity forms that incorporates their new nation-saving mission depends on HispanicLatinos themselves. But in undertaking a reformulation of their personal selves that can lead to new self-development and self-determination, HispanicLatinos must be on guard to not fall prey to religions – especially hierarchical ones – that threaten the creative potential of the individual. Dogma wrecks self-expression and stunts personal growth. Corroding the status of the individual is but a small step from jeopardizing the democratic concepts of self-government.
The Vatican made the danger of institutionalized religion come alive startlingly last week when it landed on the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an organization that represents the vast majority of Catholic nuns, who in the modern age have evolved – unlike the current set of bishops and so many priests.
If Only a Label Were the Answer
After all the huffing and puffing, the ongoing discussion about the Hispanic and/or Latino labels sort of misses the point. Yes, Hispanic is a confected term, and, yes, Latino, is not far behind but Latino is personally more acceptable to many of us who are Americans but cannot go around town calling ourselves Paraguayans, Colombians, Dominicans, Cubans or Mexicans first but who yet feel differently about our selves, meaning our identity. Thus the discussion – wholesome, necessary and inevitable – is not about a label but about identity, a term that is as much about who we are as it is about purpose in life.