We are all Americans. Lest we forget, use of the term, “American,” is not exclusive to citizens of the United States of America. And yet, somehow we do forget that. How we think of borders, and language, circumscribes our view of nationality.  

The U.S. Census projects that very soon (2050) the population of the United States will be “majority-minority.” What will cause this shift is the increase in a demographic group called “Latinos” or “Hispanics,” when it is combined with our African-American, Asian-American and Native-American populations.  

As a child who grew up on Gerber baby and food and remembers the little white kid on those jars, I had to smile at this ABC news item a few days ago.  

Even Gerber has recognized that no longer is that child an appropriate symbol for our nation’s babies.

Twenty years ago, there was the “Gerber Baby” and it was a white child.
Today’s Gerber commercials, on the other hand, feature not one baby, but dozens of faces from all different races…. For the first time ever, non-white Americans, Latino, African-American, and Asian American outnumber white children. “The idea where we had a white, middle-class population that we talked about in the 1950s and 1960s, that’s disappearing,” said William Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institute.

The new generation is still in the cradle, but as the infants grow up America will start to look very different. Already, the trend lines are becoming clearer: Older Americans are whiter. Younger Americans are more non-white. Most of the change is being driven by a surging Latino population with a much higher birth rate than any other ethnic group. It is further bolstered by legal immigration.

A closer look at the numbers is revealing.

Latino demographics

As of 2010, Hispanics accounted for 16.3% of the national population, or around 50.5 million people. The Hispanic growth rate over the April 1, 2000 to July 1, 2007 period was 28.7% — about four times the rate of the nation’s total population (at 7.2%). The growth rate from July 1, 2005 to July 1, 2006 alone was 3.4% — about three and a half times the rate of the nation’s total population (at 1.0%). The projected Hispanic population of the United States for July 1, 2050 is 132.8 million people, or 30.2% of the nation’s total projected population on that date.

Beyond looking at the numbers, and the nice neat packages that demographers and other social scientists use to predict trends, a more qualitative approach is called for when discussing this “Latino” or “Hispanic” population in more depth, because we err if we begin to accept those big boxes as monolithic, or mono-cultural.  

It is too easy to slip into a mind-set of assuming that we are talking about one group, and then making political decisions based on a faulty framework. Right now, the focus of the right wing—and much of the left—has been solely on immigration and subsets of that debate, like the Dream-Act.  An underlying (and often overt) current in the plaints of the right is a nativism that is racist. There is a rejection of the “Americanness” of a huge segment of our populace, and a desire to push back against a tide of “brown” that will change the face of “Our America.” For example, I am not included as part of that  ”our” even though some of my ancestors have been here since the 1600’s, and others way before then.  

Headlines about Latinos blare “immigration reform,” “border disputes and crossings.” The words, “illegal” and “alien,” get thrown into the nativist mix, with “Mexican” as the all-inclusive subtext, presenting a skewed portrait of one of the most diverse populations in the US melting, or un-melted, pot.

Contrary to this stereotype, many people who may or may not speak Spanish as a home language or who may have genealogical roots in countries originally colonized by Spain, folks with Hispanic surnames didn’t always come here recently. And of those who recent arrivals, many have roots in the Caribbean, Central or South America—not just Mexico.  

The language debate gets thrown into the nativist mix as well. “They need to learn English…”—as if Spanish has no deep roots in U.S. soil. The geography of the U.S. and its history belies a solely British source for either language or place names here in “The New World.”  That history too often is ignored.

The oldest city of European founding in the U.S. is not Jamestown but Saint Augustine, Florida.  Founded in 1565 by Spanish explorer and admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, it is the oldest continuously occupied European-established city and port in the continental United States.

Menéndez landed with Spaniards and 500 black slaves. Missionaries and soldiers initiated alliances or battles with local indigenous groups, intermarriage occurred quite early and Spanish was the language of the resulting “criollo” population.

Look at our state’s names—clearly much of the West and parts of the East are derived from Spanish.

Origin of State names
California: From a book, Las Sergas de Esplandián, by Garcia Ordóñez de Montalvo, c. 1500
Colorado: From the Spanish, “ruddy” or “red”
Florida: From the Spanish, Pascua Florida, meaning “feast of flowers” (Easter)
Montana : From the Spanish, “mountain”
Nevada: From the Spanish, “snowcapped”
New Mexico: From Mexico, “place of Mexitli,” an Aztec god or leader

Add Puerto Rico (Spanish for rich port) as the birthplace, or ethnicity of over 8.3 million U.S. citizens.  

The 2010 U.S. Census counted 3.7 million people living in Puerto Rico. This was down from 3.8 million in 2000. By contrast, in the 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, the population of Hispanics of Puerto Rican origin increased from 3.4 million in 2000 to 4.6 million in 2010, surpassing Puerto Rico’s Hispanic population.

Many of our citizens for whom Spanish is a first or second language never crossed borders—the borders crossed them, as the smaller United States expanded its territory westward and acquired colonies.

In order to address our political future, we must first have a better understanding of what and who we are talking about when we use these frames, because to make blanket decisions based on an incomplete and faulty analysis will severely compromise our ability to organize and to form coalitions to make progressive change possible.

So in the weeks and months ahead, I’ll be writing a series of articles on the varied cultures that make up this patchwork quilt called “Latinos,” in the hope that it will inform not only our understanding, but will provide a more nuanced approach to the discussion of  issues and policies concerning these groups.

One of the more flagrant missteps in the press centered on our most prominent Latino political figure, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

Two years ago, when Ms. Sotomayor was nominated for SCOTUS, an article was published, Sotomayor Cartoon In The Oklahoman Comes Under Fire about an editorial cartoon by Chip Bok, published in The Oklahoman and other papers.

Titled “Fiesta Time at the Confirmation Hearing,” it depicted Sotomayor strung up as a piñata and President Obama wearing a sombrero surrounded by a herd of angry bat- or gun-wielding elephants. The article cites an outcry from feminists, about Sotomayor being portrayed as a punching bag. But this critique, though valid, missed the most problematic symbolic references.

The debate made its way here to Daily Kos in a diary, and the wrongness of the imagery resonated on any number of levels. I commented about it at the time: Why a sombrero on President Obama? Why a piñata strung up as in a lynching?  

We tend to associate lynching primarily with the ugly history of terrorizing African Americans, but it is also closely historically related to Mexican-Americans (see incidents like The Porvenir Massacre, 1918).

The lynching of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the Southwest has long been overlooked in American history. This may be because most historical records categorized Mexican, Chinese, and Native American lynching victims as white. Statistics of reported lynching in the United States indicate that, between 1882 and 1951, 4,730 persons were lynched, of whom 1,293 were white and 3,437 were black. The actual known amount of Mexicans lynched is unknown. It is estimated that at least 597 Mexicans were lynched between 1848 and 1928 (this is a conservative estimate due to lack of records in many reported lynchings ). Mexicans were lynched at a rate of 27.4 per 100,000 of population between 1880 and 1930. This statistic is second only to that of the African American community during that period, which suffered an average of 37.1 per 100,000 population. Between 1848 to 1879, Mexicans were lynched at an unprecedented rate of 473 per 100,000 of population. These lynchings cannot be excused as merely “frontier justice”—of the 597 total victims, only 64 were lynched in areas which lacked a formal judicial system.

It’s improbable the cartoonist had that history in mind when he penned his work. Most likely, it was simply a case of all Hispanics being the same—who cares if Puerto Ricans are American citizens, with ancestry from a Caribbean culture, culturally and historically different from Mexican-Americans? “Those people” (insert racist epithet of choice) are all the same. And foreign. Read “not us” as “not U.S.”

Sotomayor is a native of the U.S., born in the Bronx. Yes, her parents are U.S. citizens too, born in Puerto Rico. Puerto Ricans don’t wear Mexican sombreros (the traditional hat of the Puerto Rican agricultural worker or “jibaro” is a “pava” made of dried palm leaves). Pinatas are part of Mexican culture as well, even though nowadays  at kiddie parties all Americans use them.

In the media, and in many minds, symbols, images and stereotypes are mixed and matched with total disregard for anthropology or history.

And the question arises: Who cares what hat was used?

I do.

Who wants to deny that stereotyping and bigotry in images shape and form our view of the Latinos among us?

I don’t and won’t.

We persist in using lazy demographic sociology-speak, lumping any and all persons who fit the socially constructed ethnic category of Hispanic/Latino into one data set. After we stuff all Latinos into one box, we then have the omnipresent box of “race” to consider. “Ethnicity” and “race” are a quandary, and the U.S. Census Bureau cannot be depended upon to accurately tabulate these data due to shifting categories and collection methodologies over time. Many persons of Mexican ancestry in some of our earlier census records were simply dropped into the “mulatto” category.  

Socially-constructed “race” in the U.S. varies from “race” in the Caribbean or South and Central America. We wobble back and forth between thinking of “Hispanics” as a race, labeled as “white” or as a default as “brown.” Rarely is the border crossed into “black,” even though when talking about genealogical descent or culture, when dealing with certain populations who are part of the Latino category, African ancestry in both phenotype and culture can be discerned. A look at this is proffered in the recent series produced by Professor Henry Louis Gates for PBS, Black in Latin America.  

Self-definition is called into question too. The box one fits one’s self into may depend on racial power relationships and hierarchies here, or in the home country. Very few (about 2%) of “Hispanics” checked the “black or Negro” box in the 2010 census, nor did many select “Native American.” America encompasses the entire hemisphere, and though U.S. citizens refer to themselves as “American” as if they have a patent on it, everyone in “the Americas” can lay claim to its usage. The category of Hispanic masks indigenous ancestry and even language assumptions. When U.S. southern borders were locked into their current configurations, how many people on one side became “Mexicans” while those north of the line remained “Indians?”

I did data analysis for a research study of migrant workers on Long Island in New York, where intervention materials were developed for women attending pre-natal clinics. All materials were in Spanish.  And many of the women didn’t understand them at all, since they were not fluent in Spanish even though they hailed from Mexico. The project directors had to find bi-and-tri lingual mixteco and náhuatl speakers to assist in conducting qualitative interviews.

If we are going to deal with the shifting populations in the U.S., where the Democratic Party fits into serving the needs of and representing this mélange of constituencies all neatly boxed into a package, we really need to begin to unpack that big box and examine the smaller subsets. We need to be cognizant of more than immigration as an issue and to be aware of how shifting patterns of settlement can tip the balance in certain states where we don’t normally assume that Latino voices either exist or are of importance.

Where does the demographic data lead us?  

The inevitable conclusion is that the population of the United States, as we know it, is going through a major change. No wonder there is push-back and a loud outcry from those who want their idealized, ahistorical country “back.” This outrage is reflected in an uptick in nativist legislation. Those of us on the left need to be just as aware of the pitfalls of adopting any and all rhetoric or assumptions that underlie this last gasp of a mythical “white” America. We need to learn more about the diverse nature of Latino communities (with a decided emphasis on the plural).

Pa’lante Siempre Pa’lante—in other words—we are always moving forward.

Netflix is headed south.

The popular home entertainment subscription company has confirmed that it will launch its online streaming service in 43 countries in South and Central America and the Caribbean later this year. An announcement released Tuesday morning didn’t specify a precise date.

The move will mark a significant expansion for Netflix, which is available only in the United States and Canada. Netflix Chief Executive Reed Hastings has identified international expansion as key to his company’s growth, though he hasn’t identified where the next launch would be. Entertainment industry executives briefed on the matter who weren’t authorized to speak on the record previously told the Times that Netflix was preparing to expand soon to Latin Amerca and Great Britain.

As in Canada, where Netflix debuted in September, Latin American users will only have access to Netflix’s online streaming service. DVDs by mail, the company’s original offering when it launched in 1998, continues to be available only in the United States.

In Europe, Netflix would face competition from the similar service Lovefilm, which was acquired in January by Amazon.com. But in Latin America, Netflix will have the opportunity to be as dominant as it is in the U.S. and Canada. As of March 31 it had 23.6 million subscribers, 800,000 of whom were from Canada.

The company said its new service in Latin America will be available in English, Spanish and Portuguese (the latter language is spoken in regional powerhouse Brazil) and will include a mix of American, global and local films and television shows for a single monthly price that has yet to be announced. The company didn’t say how much content will be available. Digital rights are typically separated by nation or region, meaning Netflix would have to make separate deals to offer the same movies and television shows in Latin America that users in the U.S. and Canada can currently access.

In the U.S., access to Netflix’s online streaming offerings costs as little as $7.99 per month.

– Ben Fritz

This has been a very intense week for social media marketing. First, Google announces its second attempt in social media by launching Google+ in a direct effort to take on Facebook. Then, MySpace is sold and will be relaunched with Justin Timberlake as creative consultant. It’s clear that everyone wants a piece of the pie of this fast-growing social networking market.

With a Little Help From My Friends

In their attempts to compete versus Facebook, both Google+ and MySpace could also use some help. And Latina moms can be very helpful.

Consider the following facts:

• Hispanic moms are one of the fastest growing demographics online.
• Eighty-two percent of mid- and high-acculturated Latino moms are online.
• Virtually 100 percent of Hispanic moms online are engaged in social networking.
• Eighty-four percent of Hispanic moms are on Facebook.
• Their presence in MySpace is 40 percent higher than white moms (29 percent reach).

These moms rely on family and peer advice, and social networks let them extend their circle of trust. Sixty-eight percent trust word-of-mouth conversations related to brands and marketing activities.

And that’s exactly one of the key components that Google can leverage to benefit from this specific segment. Google+ offers Circles, which helps compartmentalize all the people in your life. Google argues that putting everyone under the “friends” label can hurt the ability to share (it can be sloppy and insensitive, according to the search giant).

Latinas On-the-Go

It’s not surprising, given the success of Android, that Google+ includes a strong mobile component. From adding location to every post to Instant Upload to add camera phone snaps to a private album in the cloud.

Busy Latina moms are taking advantage of mobile connectivity. And they are also heavy users of social media on-the-go (40 percent more than total women in the U.S.).

Sixty percent of them access Internet from their phones and for one out of four, their smartphone is their primary online connectivity device. Back to Google, in recently acquired smartphones among Latinos, Android is far surpassing other platforms.

Latina moms over-index in accessing social networking sites almost every day versus white women. Not surprisingly then, they access Facebook more frequently than their general market counterparts. Latinas also heavily over-index in other social media tools such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Foursquare, as you can see in the comScore Hispanic Online Report graphic below.

Source: comScore March 2011 Hispanic Online Report

The Latina Power

Latino households’ buying power will be $1.4 trillion by 2013, and Hispanic moms are the key decision-makers and influencers of 80 percent of all purchases made in their households. There’s no doubt of how attractive this segment can be for many marketers. But Latina moms’ influence doesn’t stay within the limits of their home. Social media is a way of influencing and being influenced in terms of their purchase decisions:

• Ninety-plus percent of Hispanic moms consider the recommendation of a family member or a friend as a primary influence in their purchasing decisions.
• Sixty-plus percent versus the total public qualify as word-of-mouth influencers based on their recommending behavior and size of social network.

Talking about influence power, Latina “mami” bloggers are also exploding, becoming one of the fastest-growing blogging demographics (five times increase in 2010 versus 2009).

What Facebook Should Worry About

The social nature of Latinas finds a true space in social media, where sense of belonging and sharing everyday issues and ideas come to life.

Online Latinas’ growing influence goes beyond the U.S.: their networks include friends and family members both in North America and in Latin America. And it also goes beyond friends and family members: 20 percent of them are blogging.

Will Google and MySpace consider the critical role that Latina moms could play in their future success? Will they be able to convince Hispanic moms to abandon Facebook? Time will tell.

In the meantime, considering the latest news in social media, should Facebook be worried?

According to this interesting article, there are five things about Google+ Facebook should worry about. I would like to add one more thing: the growing influence of the Latina mom.

Protestors outside AT&T Park join in the “National Day of Action Against SB1070″ by picketing the Arizona Diamondbacks vs. San Francisco Giants baseball game Saturday, May 29, 2010, in San Francisco. The protest was held in support of the Boycott Arizona campaign.(AP)

With Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game less than two weeks away, Hispanic groups outraged over Arizona’s attempt to crack down on illegal immigrants are pressing players and fans to sit this one out.

Even though the state’s controversial immigration law has been put on hold by the federal courts, opponents say a boycott is still a good idea.

“We just encourage everyone who opposes racism and discrimination, think about children separated from families, to come out and stand in solidarity with all the children,” boycott organizer Anayanse Garza told MyFox Phoenix.

Arizona’s crackdown, which would allow police officers to check the immigration status of those they suspect are in the country illegally, drew national attention when it was first signed into law in April 2010. Critics said it would lead to unconstitutional racial profiling while supporters argued the state is helping federal authorities who aren’t doing their job in enforcing immigration law at the border.

But in July 2010, a U.S. district judge granted the Obama administration’s request to block the most controversial parts of the law. Other parts took effect, such as a ban on obstructing traffic while seeking or offering day-labor services on streets. And the law has served as a model for similar efforts in other states.

The Supreme Court is expected to weigh in on the law at some point.

Hispanic groups began protesting the All-Star Game last year, pressing baseball commissioner Bud Selig to move the event from Phoenix. But after that failed, protestors are now focusing on a boycott.

Even though the Arizona law is in limbo, boycott organizers believes their protest will still resonate with players and fans alike.

“A lot of them will feel in their heart they are doing the right thing by not coming to Arizona and breaking the boycott,” boycott organizer Luis Osorio told MyFox Phoenix.

The Diamondbacks don’t believe fans will stay away from the game because of the protest.

“The timing of this law being on hold right now is good of the game and us,” said Diamondbacks President and CEO Derrick Hall. “Obviously there’s a lot of noise around that and there should have been, but in our opinion you really should not mix sports baseball teams and politics.”

Rosa Gerra and her brother started UHA over 40 years ago to address injustices.

 

After acting as the executive director of the United Hispanic-Americans for 16 years, Rosa Gerra has retired.

Gerra and her family helped found the organization more than 40 years ago.

According to the website, the UHA’s purpose is “to improve the quality of life for Hispanics in Northeastern Indiana by providing advocacy, social and cultural services and promoting an understanding of Hispanic cultures, challenges and opportunities.”

Programs include the Adult Tobacco Free Program and De Mujer a Mujer, which teaches women how to prevent HIV/AIDS and STDs.

Gerra and her brother, Tony Cuellar, started the organization to address social injustices against Hispanics. “The discrimination was blatant then,” she said in a 2007 interview.

“Under Rosa’s leadership, UHA has taken a leadership role in addressing the needs of the ever-growing Hispanic/Latino population in northeast Indiana,” says the new board president, Larry Graham, who added that a strategic planning process is under way to determine the UHA’s future focus.

Former board president G. Herb Hernandez was appointed acting executive director of the organization, 2424 Fairfield Ave., at the UHA’s last board meeting.