...? In short, when will we have a Latin American pivot? The cliché is often stated: by 2050, half of Americans will speak Spanish. I myself come from one of two states that the 2010 Census found had a population over 40 percent Hispanic. The interests of the United States and the interests of greater Latin America are increasingly aligned because their peoples are increasingly the same. Generally speaking, Latin America and the US have revolutionar...
...a wide margin. However, Calderón’s party has responded by selecting Josefina Vázquez Mota, a 51-year old mother of three, as their candidate. She is the first female presidential candidate of a major Mexican political party. Hispanic Vote Fails to Show Up Yet Again This is a big year for us too: The American presidential election will be contested later this fall. As might be expected, coverage of the race is widely broadcast throughout Latin Am...
Illustration by Maria Insalaco Borges, Cervantes, Neruda, García Márquez—these were the canonical legends of Hispanic literature whom I expected to encounter in my Introduction to Hispanic Cultures course last fall. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the expected books were almost entirely absent from our syllabus. In lieu of these Spanish and Latin American authors, the class focused on works by the likes of Raymond Williams, Stuart Ha...
...that no amnesty should be given to illegal immigrants but rather that they should so thoroughly be denied opportunity here that they decide to return to their home nation (aka, self-deportation). Considering the growth of the Hispanic electorate, such a hard-line stance doomed Romney with Hispanic voters (we will see exactly to what extent as the national vote is broken down in the coming weeks), and while it is certainly true that Hispanics care...
...ld be a greater injustice to allow the debate about education to move away from how to support and fix the schools and districts that serve (or underserve) the 16 million children living in poverty – many of whom are black or Hispanic. We cannot allow the language of the achievement gap to distract from what it is intended to highlight: that certain students – the vast majority of whom are poor and many of whom are racial minorities –...
...ICE). Other ordinances establish English as the official language. Interestingly, research by Karthick Ramakrishnan and Tom Wong shows that these sorts of policies are driven more by partisan politics than by the size of the Hispanic or recent immigrant populations. Not all policy efforts are exclusionary. State-level DREAM Acts are an example of inclusive efforts by states to broaden the economic and social community. These laws, which have bee...
...conomically segregated. A New York Times report found that “650 of the nearly 1,700 schools in the system have populations that are 70 percent a single race; more than half the city’s schools are at least 90 percent black and Hispanic.” Despite efforts over the years, schools are even more segregated than they were in the 1960s, according to Gary Orfield, an education professor at UCLA. According to Arne Duncan, increasing universal access to qua...
...ptional performance to regain it—an advantage that can by no means be taken for granted. Obama’s greatest sources of support in Colorado are its increasing liberal population, the 21 percent of its population that identify as Hispanic, and the youth voters with whom he always polls well. He may get an additional advantage in the state when Colorado’s unemployment numbers are released—the national unemployment rate, announced today, fell to 7.8 pe...
...migrants are not deported also suggests an underlying political motive. He abused his presidential powers by bypassing Congress and effectively throwing checks and balances out the window in order to muster support within the Hispanic and Latino communities. Karen Hughes, a Republican strategist, put it best: “Even those who disagree with the president’s decision to run roughshod over the system of checks and balances…have to admire the audacity...
...nities. Fairly recently, though, notions of race in America have expanded beyond black and white to a new framework, what some call the “ethno-racial pentagon”: five categories that mark Americans as (1) white, (2) black, (3) Hispanic, (4) Asian, or (5) Native American. While for many the choice is easy, the notion that everyone should fit neatly into only one category is illogical. It is especially so in the context of the five-sided framework’s...
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