Category Archives: Immigration

News About HispanicLatinos? Proper Context, Please.

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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.

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1070: Any Court Affirmation Will Sink America

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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.

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On HispanicLatino and not ‘Hispanic’ nor ‘Latino’

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Standing in a conference room atop a bank building in Miami last week, I had been looking out at the spectacular vista.  From the city’s mammoth airport to the west, my gaze spanned eastward, marveling at the jewel-islands linked by the necklace of causeways that connects all to the island of Miami Beach, itself ensconced by the emerald beauty of the Atlantic.  I forced myself to return my head to business and stepped into the hallway to snatch a cup of coffee.  Upon my return, a man who had spoken earlier to the meeting I was attending introduced himself.

The usual banter ensued, and soon enough the inevitable question that has plagued humanity since it invented small talk came my way from the Anglo marketing consultant: What do you do for a living?

I write a blog on HispanicLatinos at HispanicLatino.com.

Oh. He paused.  You are combining the terms.  He paused again, then: Thank you!  Before I could smile in return, he continued in spurts of sentences.  We never know what to say…at my company…which term to use…we go back and forth…in reports and stuff…we do not want to offend anybody….

My response was a bit more organized:

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Tejano Monument: Much More — So Much More — than a Statue

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It is more powerful than first imagined.  Where its creators placed it is impressive.  The idea it projects excites the mind, for it is the beginning point of a new future.  It is the new Tejano Monument on the grounds of the state capitol in Austin that will be dedicated tomorrow.  So poignant a commemoration of the past denotes the beginning of a new day.

Standing in front of the monument, one can hear a soft wind that evokes the past but simultaneously whispers the inauguration of a new time formed centuries ago but interrupted by the vagaries of demography that can make and unmake nations.  Though motionless, the statue of a Spanish explorer oversees the future: A Tejano rancher — the original, authentic cowboy — surrounded by a longhorn and another steer and other animals alongside a family that predestines much of the modern HispanicLatino population.

Upon a swath of granite that masterfully captures the sweeping expanse of Texas at its very beginning, its Tejano past is cast in bronze and the future emblazoned on a tableau of larger expectation.

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Needed: A New People with a New Plan — Now

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Regarding their common – and to many, worrisome – future, neither the country nor HispanicLatinos have a plan.  The much ballyhooed “bridge to the 21st Century” that Bill Clinton talked about in his re-election campaign is no more than a plank walk at the moment.

America – until now – never needed a plan.  In its earliest years, the nation fought great political battles over a national banking system and government involvement in the development of a young country’s infrastructure that included canals, national roads and bridges.  Once settled, these initial disputes opened up a continent to the economic energy thrown off by the Industrial Revolution that ultimately hurled America into the forefront of nations in the 20th century.

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The New America: A New Creation

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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.

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The Nation-saving Purpose of the HispanicLatino Population

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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.

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Anti-HispanicLatino Rhetoric – a Small Silver Lining

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So it is true that anti-HispanicLatino rhetoric continues unchecked, driven by the prolonged Republican presidential primary campaign, fed by the fights in places like Alabama, Arizona, Georgia and South Carolina over mostly unconstitutional state laws on immigration and festooned by the antics of the hate-filled Joe Arpaio.  And the tone of the attacks that like shrapnel explode in every part of the HispanicLatino community might get shriller still.  However, a sliver lining adorns every cloud.

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National Decline: A Burden for HispanicLatinos

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The phrase national decline finally has entered the lexicon of American political thought – and not soon enough.  How much time America has to address its national decline is an interesting question given that the nation’s government has entered a period of stagnation and ideological paralysis.  The institutions of government, paralyzed by the nation’s increasingly polarized and monetized politics, show no signs of being able to put forth strategies to sustain the nation’s future.

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Without Solutions, Things Could Get More Complicated Still

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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.

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