Harsh Realities Abrade Family Values : * County’s Latino Community Exemplifies Qualities That Politicians Tend to Overlook

Inflated rhetoric about “family values” has wrapped this political year in distraction. To see more clearly, we need to consider what modern families actually are dealing with in their daily lives.

We must consider their problems, their aspirations, and the limitations imposed by poverty. One need not look beyond Orange County to find the kinds of gray areas where cherished values run up against harsh realities.

As the conventions were wrapping up, Republicans and Democrats were engaged in point and counter-point about what it means to be pro-family. At that very time, an important conference took place in the real world of Santa Ana.

The county’s Health Care Agency sponsored a session for community leaders that shed light on the difficult economic hardships facing many aspirants to entry level in the middle-class and to all of its cherished values.

The speaker was David E. Hayes-Bautista, director of UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center. He was invited by the county’s health and disease prevention manager because he had conducted a three-year study of Latino cultural attitudes. The idea was to give county officials some new ways of thinking about delivering health care to those locked in poverty.

His message? “Latinos are poor, but they are also hard-working and have strong family values.”

These findings should hardly be revolutionary. But Hayes-Bautista suggests that Latinos no longer fit the so-called “poverty-stricken urban underclass” mold.

That’s an academic way of saying that many poor Latinos are not “them,” from a middle-class perspective. They are very much like those who already have managed to make their way out of poverty. In some of the convention-season rhetoric, the specter was raised of an ethnic conspiracy at work to undermine family values.

Hayes-Bautista has found otherwise--that many Latinos have genuine middle-class aspirations and attitudes, but find themselves struggling with poverty-level incomes. And this really has been a very familiar dilemma in American life for scores of other immigrant groups.

Finally, diversity should be looked on as an asset, not as a problem. A crucial point made by Hayes-Bautista was this: “Rather than being a disadvantaged population presenting social problems, Latinos should be looked upon as a potential source of strength for the society and the economy of the state.”