Were population groups merely fungible, the current challenges facing America and HispanicLatinos might be less compelling. If HispanicLatino households reflected the socioeconomic characteristics of the Anglo household, their growing numbers would be what the nation needs to help balance its budget and invest in its future. But though HispanicLatinos constitute an important strategic asset in the fiscal future of the country, they are in dire straits. HispanicLatinos earn little more than as 40 years ago. In a land that aspires to political and societal equality, the economic inequality among its individual components has taken on ominous implications.
Category Archives: Identity
A post-racial society? In our lifetimes? LOL
I have to strain to refrain from laughing when I hear someone say or write that we live in a post-racial society. No doubt, the country’s non-Anglo population has reached a critical mass. But it has not reached critical acceptance of the HispanicLatinos, blacks, Asians and the many others who are transforming the nation – and most likely never will. Last week, in San Antonio, the kids from Edison High School, an overwhelmingly HispanicLatino campus, were subjected to shouts of “USA! USA!” after their basketball team lost a playoff game to a school from across town in predominantly non-HispanicLatino Alamo Heights.
The New America: A New Creation
To an already over-populated world undoubtedly harming its environment and contributing to climate change, the thought of adding more people to a global population of seven billion is not a subject easily dismissed nor left blithely unconsidered. Yet, the arms race of the previous century has been displaced by an undeclared demographic war among nations, and America cannot but continue to grow its own population.
The Nation-saving Purpose of the HispanicLatino Population
Readers who have heard me speak know that it was as a teenager more than 40 years ago that I watched the impact that sudden changes in demography and in the economy can unleash. The winding down of the bracero program and the nearly simultaneous closing of the local air force base devastated the town in West Texas where my family once lived. From that experience it was only a matter of time before I realized what was coming to the country as a whole. As a young reporter in Corpus Christi in the late 1970’s, I saw the makeup of its schools’ HispanicLatino population prefigure the slow unfolding of the drama we are witnessing today. It was then that I first learned the power of 2.1.
Culture Change
At the core of the way forward for HispanicLatinos and the country is implementing change. Change is the universal, common condition of humankind, flowing from its evolutionary nature, and most change throughout history has been for the good. Yet, for a nation that knows it faces tremendous challenges, the forces of inevitable change cannot be left to chance and to the vagaries of the trillions upon trillions of decisions that individuals make on a daily basis that in the end result in the society that surrounds us.
To the potentially decisive moment in history to which HispanicLatinos are called – which is nothing less than sustaining an America that can continue to influence events on a widening global stage – how to change what is must be a constant component of our thinking.
On Stage Last Night: The Old America
If you believe that the country is undergoing a historic demographic transformation and that a new America has emerged with a majority of the country realizing it needs a new way forward, then you need to look no farther than last night’s Republican presidential forum in Arizona. The debate was for and about the old America, that is to say, that part of the country that is willing to hear candidates for the Presidency who would spend 25 minutes…on birth control. The discussion last night was of interest to voters who care about the issues that hardly matter to the rest of America: The bailout of the auto industry that worked; immigration that helps prop up a declining national population and, of course, birth control. And that was the first hour.
Without Solutions, Things Could Get More Complicated Still
HispanicLatinos are more important to America than simply holding up a national population that otherwise would be in serious decline. Yet they are a complicated blessing, given their complicated history. Significant-enough discrimination, legally-mandated exclusion, ample geographic isolation and individual self-neglect in many HispanicLatinos sheltered their culture from full-fledged assimilation in American society.
Thus hindered and restrained, HispanicLatinos began to fall behind early and have lagged through the years. But change can happen quicker today than in any time in history. HispanicLatinos now can develop a new way to manage their immediate future, and they can look to the just-immediate past to see how the prospects of a whole country can change in the span of only a few years.
HispanicLatinos: A Different Deal at an Important Moment for the Country
Through the years most Americans have believed that their country is exceptional and assume it is eternal. Indeed, its ability to provide opportunity and freedom and to convert human potential into spectacular scientific and technological progress eclipses other nations, and America remains a shining example of the promise of humankind. Despite its faults and shortcomings and because it is not a perfect union, it could have become a slave-holding, colonial-imperialist power for longer than it was tempted. Enough of its people, however, chose differently.
Americans have spent hundreds of thousands of lives and invested trillions of dollars to make the world a safe and better place for humankind. Most Americans – including the vast majority of HispanicLatinos for whom loyalty is almost part of their DNA – take immense pride in their country, and rightfully so. Yet history is not destiny; demography is.
Accenting the Positive
So yesterday’s blog that Mitt Romney perhaps should consider spelling his name Romñey given his Mexican heritage got me thinking about the use of accents in names and words when presented visually on English-language television. More and more, television stations and newspapers are using accents and punctuation marks to spell properly the names of individuals, places and things. Little by little, the media is reflecting the new demography of the country. Continue reading
A People More Worthy than a Monument
An insistent wind under a pewter sky inconvenienced the crowd of about 150 that last week had come to break ground for a new Tejano monument on the grounds of the Texas state capitol. The statue commemorating the role of one of the original populations of Texas is just about complete and will be laid and dedicated on March 29.
Around me huddled in the cold were faces and names I had not seen nor heard of in a long time. Some of the activists of the past had joined the leadership of more establishmentarian types to make the monument a reality – a reality that will end hundreds of years of exclusion of HispanicLatinos from any presence on the grounds of the capitol of a state in which they are 40 percent of the population. As unbelievable as it sounds, in all of the commemorative statues, plaques and other monuments at the Capitol, not one – not one – pays respect to the population that settled and organized the land as Tejas that later became Texas.
It was impossible to look around me and not think of an era ending so much as a new era blowing into being in which a new history far different from the one of the past takes hold. Continue reading