“The most serious challenge to America’s traditional identity comes from the immense and continuing immigration from Latin America, especially from Mexico,” writes Huntington in an excerpt from the forthcoming book published in Foreign Policy magazine. “As their numbers increase, Mexican Americans feel increasingly comfortable with their own culture and often contemptuous of American culture.” Never one to shrink from controversy, the 76-year-old academic asks pointedly: “Will the United States remain a country with a single national language and a core Anglo-Protestant culture? By ignoring this question, Americans acquiesce to their eventual transformation into two peoples with two cultures (Anglo and Hispanic) and two languages (English and Spanish).”
The backlash has not been long in coming–from both sides of the Rio Grande. The Mexican author Carlos Fuentes labeled Huntington a “racist” in the influential Mexico City newspaper Reforma last week and deplored the professor’s “stigmatizing of the Spanish language as a practically subversive factor of division.” The self-described conservative U.S. columnist David Brooks took issue with Huntington’s Kulturkampf scenario in The New York Times. “The mentality that binds us is not well described by the words ‘Anglo’ or ‘Protestant,’ wrote Brooks. “There are no significant differences between Mexican-American lifestyles and other American lifestyles.”
At a time when white U.S. politicians are tripping over each other in hot pursuit of the Latino voter, Huntington’s Hispanophobia has reopened some unresolved questions about identity and integration. Are Hispanics rejecting the powerful forces of American cultural assimilation, which swallowed up the successive waves of European immigrants who preceded them? Are their swelling ranks and enduring loyalty to Latin American culture and the Spanish language carving out Hispanic-dominated enclaves like Miami where, as Huntington puts it, native Anglos and African-Americans become “outside minorities that [can] often be ignored”? Or are Hispanics simply redefining the meaning of mainstream in an ever more diverse, multicultural United States of America?
Statistics amply document the rise of the Hispanic American. Native and foreign-born U.S. residents of Latin American ancestry overtook blacks as the largest American minority three years ago and are fast approaching the 40 million mark. Between 8 million and 10 million of these Hispanics are thought to be illegal immigrants, and nearly 70 percent are Mexicans. If current birthrates and rising levels of immigration continue, Hispanics could attain majority status in California by 2018, and may account for fully one quarter of all Americans by the middle of this century.
It is the roughly 22 million Mexicans in America who most trouble Huntington. He contrasts the success story of Miami’s Cuban-Americans–who transformed that city into the economic capital of Latin America–with the Mexican immigrants of the American Southwest, the overwhelming percentage of whom are described as “poor, unskilled and poorly educated.” The children of this Mexican underclass, concludes Huntington, “are likely to face similar conditions.”
Mexican-Americans and other Hispanics are not quite the insular tail of American society that Huntington contends. They are moving up the socioeconomic ladder–albeit more slowly than the white ethnic groups who preceded them. Historically speaking, it’s important to remember that this wave of immigration is still relatively young. In the case of Mexican immigration, it soared after 1965: 2.2 million Mexicans legally moved to the United States in the 1990s, up sharply from the 640,000 who lawfully immigrated to El Norte in the 1970s, and these figures don’t encompass the possibly larger numbers who entered the country illegally.
More Latinos are going to college–the rate has risen from 16 percent in 1980 to 22 percent in 2000–and they’re making more money: their median household income rose by 4.3 percent between 1988 and 1999. The Washington-based Pew Hispanic Center reports that teenage and young-adult Latinos work and earn more than anyone else in their age group, whites included. Admittedly, one reason is that many do not go to college, and the center found high unemployment rates among second-generation Hispanic youths. But beyond the age of 25, second-generation Latinos with college degrees earn more on average than white workers with comparable educational backgrounds.
Rocky Chavez spent many childhood summers picking grapes in California’s San Joaquin Valley alongside his Mexican-American aunts and uncles. The Los Angeles native recalls telling his U.S.-born father, one of 18 children, how much he disliked the backbreaking menial labor. “Then get an education,” his father responded. Rocky did, earning a college degree. Today the 52-year-old retired Marine colonel speaks little Spanish; he is the principal of a new charter high school in the town of Oceanside, California, and wants to run for mayor as a Republican. “When my father moved us to Torrance he pulled us away from the Latino community,” says Chavez, the proud father of three college-educated children. “I assimilated, and I tell my kids, ‘You know, we went from a migrant family to a family with a son who just graduated from the best medical school in the nation’.”
Hispanics have become accepted in one important respect–as consumers. Their –enormous buying power has opened the eyes of big business, especially in an era when Latino celebrities like J. Lo and Ricky Martin vie for top billing with Britney Spears and Brad Pitt. Anna Brockway, the brand-marketing director at jeans maker Levi Strauss, says she doesn’t think in terms of Hispanic culture versus mainstream U.S. culture anymore. An English-language ad for Levi’s that aired during the January 2002 Super Bowl featured a young Latino model strutting along the grimy streets of Mexico City. Some of Brockman’s colleagues asked her why the company picked a “Hispanic ad” for the broadcast. “Hispanic culture is American culture at this point,” she explained.
That’s especially true among young people. Latinos account for the highest percentage of youths under the age of 18 in seven of the 10 largest U.S. cities. Their numbers will continue to swell for the foreseeable future: the Latino teen population is projected to grow by 36 percent over the next 16 years, while their white peers will decline by 3 percent, according to California-based Hispanic marketing expert Isabel Valdes.
There is disagreement about the degree to which these youngsters and their parents are learning and speaking English. A recent study by the U.S. Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies (AHAA) found that 68 percent of Latinos between the ages of 18 and 34 are either bilingual or identify Spanish as their language of choice. But other research has turned up very different results pointing in the direction of assimilation. A nationwide 2002 survey by the Pew Hispanic Center and the Kaiser Family Foundation found that among adult Latinos whose parents were immigrants, only 7 percent relied on Spanish as their primary language. Nearly half had no Spanish skills at all, and the rest were bilingual. The corresponding figures were even lower for the U.S.-born children of those second-generation Hispanic adults: less than a quarter were bilingual, and the number of those Latinos who spoke only Spanish was not statistically significant. “The transition from Spanish to English is virtually complete in one generation,” says Pew Hispanic Center director Roberto Suro. “Hispanics are undergoing a powerful process of change no less than anyone else who has come to these shores.”
Lest he be accused of being a xenophobic bigot, Huntington concedes that biculturalism is not in itself a bad thing. But he is troubled by the concept of bilingual education and by the idea that Americans may need to learn Spanish to communicate with their fellow citizens. In fact, the United States already is a profoundly bilingual society throughout the Southwest and Texas, in most of California, and in cities from Chicago and New York to Miami. The days when one country meant one language, one culture and apparently one Protestant faith are long gone–if they ever existed in the first place. Millions of Hispanics are assimilating, but they are also putting their own distinctive stamp on what assimilation will signify for future generations. And that is not the result of some apocalyptic showdown between two antithetical civilizations.
