It should be fairly evident by now that HispanicLatino population growth can create new markets for smart business owners who are on top of and can interpret demographic change. HispanicLatino population growth also creates new ways for corporations and businesses – HispanicLatino and non-HispanicLatino alike – to reach those new markets.
Category Archives: Language
Slow Down the Slowing Down
Decision-makers, especially those in business, should take a considered view of recent reporting on the slowdown of the growth of the HispanicLatino population. Changes in population by their very nature alter the composition of the marketplace, but the formation of new markets and a work force that is more HispanicLatino remains fairly on course.
Much is being made of the slowdown in the HispanicLatino birthrate since 2007. As the Great Recession took hold, it dampened the disposition of HispanicLatinos to add to their families. Coupled with the dramatic increases in deportation of individuals in the country illegally and increased border security to prevent their return, the lower birth rate is causing some observers to move quickly to ratchet down estimates of the size of the HispanicLatino population going forward.
Seeing Growth in Ourselves
In the midst of the economic recession and the failure of the super committee to begin fixing the federal budget, it is not surprising that households and businesses across the nation harbor doubt and perhaps a defeatist attitude about the future.
But HispanicLatino households of all sizes – and business owners in particular – might do well to consider a contrarian approach, a strategy that nets returns by going against the current grain. Contrarian thinking requires perceiving the future differently.
The Thankful Tortilla
So tomorrow the ubiquitous flour tortilla is all but ignored. For an entire year, day in and day out, it carries within its fragile walls our lowly bean, our stout potatoes, our lofty hopes. The tortilla tomorrow gives way for one day at least to dark and rich wheat rolls, buttery biscuits and melting loaves of white bread. Not a bad trade for a day of true thanksgiving.
But come Friday morning, the tortilla will again take on its burden and enfold our very sustenance within its hold. Yet it seems unfair, after so much toil and labor month after month, week after week, day after day, that it is relegated on the eve of our national thanksgiving to second chair on the operatic stage of family get-togethers.
Prelude to the Past: In Defense of Anglo Rights
What happens, asked then-Justice Sandra Day O’Connor when she served on the Supreme Court, to laws designed to defend minority rights when minorities become majorities? At issue was the Court’s Grutter v. Bollinger decision in 2003 on using some racial preferences in college admissions – a tool that would be unnecessary if we lived in a truly equal society.
Turning Back History
The long arc of the immigration story has gotten us here, literally. Yet on one hand, the demographic and economic forces which are structural in nature and in place have led to the assertion of immigration as a population change agent. Immigration, as it has always, is adding to the population of the country and changing it in the process.
On the other hand, the countervailing sentiment is also asserting itself, so that states like Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, Indiana and Texas are leading the equally natural anti-immigrant reaction.
Not Armageddon Yet
The Wall Street Journal hid the woman’s face. Not the usual journalistic fare you see on a Greyhound bus between Austin and Dallas. The WSJ is more likely found zipping above us on American Airlines on a 35-minute flight. She sat to my left, within the peripheral range of my one good eye.
Every other week or so when I board the bus to go 220 miles in four and a half hours instead of three by road I resolve to fly the next time or to break down and get a car. If I get the smallest car on the market, I can minimize my carbon footprint. But I then think, regardless of the size of the car, about the number of people who would be at risk. Oh, I can drive. Recently in a rented car with a package of insurance that could have bailed out the Greek economy, I managed to navigate more than 300 miles safely. But I still shudder when I think about the old lady I almost ran over with my truck on my way to Christmas Eve Mass at Saint Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington years ago. The police rightfully would have concluded it was her fault but had I better vision I would have been able to react more quickly.
Behind the WSJ woman, a young man sat fidgeting, his face turned brackish, or perhaps crackish, and dark by either a hard life or drugs or both. A diamond ring in the ear of an NFL linebacker strutting his masculinity on television on Sundays no longer comes off as improbable. On a somewhat youngish man who should weigh another 10 or 15 pounds, his stoned ear suggests the rest of him might be too.
Seriously?
An Associated Press story last week quoted Alabama’s Gov. Republican Robert Bentley, who signed legislation that targets any HispanicLatino who might appear to be in the state illegally. The law would have kicked every brown kid out of school had a federal court not intervened. Bentley, not intending to draw guffaws, wondered why his state is being laughed at across the nation.
“Why are we getting all the publicity? I think it has to do with Alabama’s past and the perception that people have of Alabama over the years…and really don’t recognize the amount of progress we’ve made in Alabama over the last 50 to 60 years,” Bentley said.
If you did not know he was serious, it would indeed be a laughing matter. Continue reading
And That’s the Way It Is
I tried to call the fellows at the Politico.com website in northern Virginia earlier this week. No, not about Herman Cain. I wanted to make sure that its Friday tip sheet for the Sunday morning news programs includes Fareed Zakaria’s GPS. The tip sheet gives a heads-up on whom the producers of the main networks have invited as guests, and Zakaria’s Global Public Square by far overshadows anything on the other networks.
This is no small matter, especially for HispanicLatinos who are a globalized population in a globalized world. Continue reading
Crockett Keller, Meet Joshua
Years ago as a teenager in the mid-1960s at the height of the civil rights movement, I would take the bus down from the dusty and dry plains of West Texas in August to go to high school in San Antonio in South Texas, returning home for Christmas and then for the summer.
I loved the trips. The trip south was the more exciting. Back then buses were clean and safe, and the bus driver through his mirror looked at me to make sure I was secure and he and his bus would carry me to a completely different world. Listening to my little transistor radio – that age’s version of the iPod – I would stare out the window and watch the land begin to fall and the flat and empty terrain change. The further south the bus sank the greater the number of trees and the greener the grass got – and some of the rivers actually had water in them.
The Hill Country was always beautiful. It is like no other part of Texas, especially in December. The bus would roll by ranch homes, with singular rows of red and green lights outlining their roofs, snuggled in between the hills. Thin trails of blue smoke would drift from their chimneys. I was a blessed soul seeing Christmas cards come to life. I especially liked arriving at little Mason, Texas, whose courthouse seemed enchanted. It appeared to me like a little Hapsburgian castle. Ringed by a small stone fence, it seemed to have dropped from an Austrian sky. I half-expected the Archduke Ferdinand to step out of it and get gunned down by Serbian nationalists.
The reason my thoughts would turn from idyllic and romantic meanderings so abruptly to thoughts of violence was only moments away. Just as U.S. Highway 87 bends away from the courthouse a huge billboard in black letters on a white backdrop proclaimed “Martin Luther King is a Communist” with the word communist underscored.
Memories of those times came back to me this week when a news story popped out about a man named Crockett Keller, who owns a gun shop in Mason. Keller refuses to make his services available to Muslims and to people who voted for President Obama. Well, that would include Catholic me and most HispanicLatinos. How sad. It was a far different experience for me when the bus stopped for a few moments in Mason by the side of a store. I would run in to buy a candy bar and Coke. The German lady recognized me after my first trip and would always smile. In between the haters and the angered, other people make the world better.
I wish I could remember when the sign changed. King was assassinated in 1968 precisely so that no one in the country would be discriminated against as Mr. Keller seems to think he has the right to do.
After the jarring sign, the bus would continue to flow south, and I would get excited. Within yards of the road just north of San Antonio, a spring would gurgle from the ground. A real spring. For someone from the driest part of Texas, water springing from the ground is a near miracle. Memory unreliably brings back the name of the spring as Joshua, the prophet who led the Hebrews to the new land of Canaan. In one of the battles the Hebrews had to fight, God is said to have hurled hailstones from the heavens to help them.
My first thought for Mr. Keller was a ton of hailstones, except that after all these years, I remember Dr. King, and I realize there always will be people like the gun shop owner. He was preceded by the people who put up the long-gone billboard. They were there in 1965, they exist in 2011 in the likes of Govs. Jan Brewer in Arizona and Robert Bentley in Alabama and the Loudon County Republicans in Virginia who circulated a picture of President Obama shot through the head – and they will persist even until 2065.
But there always will be people like the bus driver and the German lady at the little store. And there are other many good people in Mason and even in Alabama and Arizona and Loudon County.
And there will be always springs of hope.
Blogs published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays or invariably in between.