Scholar Challenges Latino Stereotypes

On a recent Monday, Prof. David Hayes-Bautista addressed the Mexican American Opportunities Foundation’s staff, offering expert advice on Latino socioeconomics for application to that organization’s child-care program.

The next day, the UCLA professor made a presentation on Latino health for U.S. Surgeon General Antonia Novello and her aides at the Century Plaza Hotel.

Two days later, he was addressing the group Hispanics in Philanthropy at the James Irvine Foundation. The next day, he made a presentation at a conference on Reducing Poverty in America at UCLA.

And, oh, yes. He also taught his usual slate of classes in the UCLA School of Medicine and prepared for presentations in Washington and Mexico.

It was all in a week’s work for Hayes-Bautista, one of the most sought-after experts on Latino demographics in California, where an estimated 9 million Latinos reside.

“On average, I make about four or five outside presentations per week,” said Hayes-Bautista.

In addition to his classroom duties, Hayes-Bautista heads the UCLA Center for Latino Health, a self-supporting research unit that serves as his launching pad for the study of Latino health, culture, socioeconomics and general demographics.

The most recent of his works, “No Longer a Minority,” was published last summer. It challenges the common belief that Latinos in California form part of an “urban underclass,” a sociological model that portrays some people as having little interest in working, a high welfare dependency, disintegrated families and alienation from society, said Hayes-Bautista.

According to the study, which covers 1940 to 1990, California Latinos “have historically had high rates of labor force participation and family formation while showing low rates of welfare dependency . . . along with sound health indicators (good life expectancy),” all of which contradict the underclass model, he said.

“Rather than being a disadvantaged population presenting endless social problems, Latinos should be looked upon as a potential source of strength for the society and economy of the state,” he said.

The view that Latinos provide a “stabilizing force” was repeated last month in a report that Hayes-Bautista prepared for the Latino Coalition for a New Los Angeles.

Dionicio Morales, president of the Mexican American Opportunities Foundation, said Hayes-Bautista’s work “gives us the facts and figures . . . weapons to reinforce the things we fight for. In the past, we usually fought for our causes on the basis of emotion . . . on the basis of pain.”

Alan Heslop, director of Claremont McKenna College’s Rose Institute, gives a similar assessment.

“To date, research on Latinos has lacked careful empirical analysis,” Heslop said. “It has usually suffered from one of two excesses--sentimental myth-making on the one hand and harsh ideological posturing on the other.” The latter, he explains, includes the depiction of Latinos as “victims of the capitalist conspiracy.”

Hayes-Bautista’s work “rises above both levels in a clear-headed way,” Heslop added.

Hayes-Bautista, son of an Anglo father and a Mexican-American mother, was born in San Pedro, lived in City Terrace and El Monte, and at age 7 moved to Yuba City in Northern California, where he lived until his college years. While in his teens, he contributed to the family by working in area farms and became familiar with farm workers from Mexico and with his Latino roots.

He began his formal study of Latinos when he left Yuba City for college, first to UC Davis and then to UC Berkeley, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology.

Next, he helped establish and became the first director of La Clinica de la Raza, a community-based health care organization for indigent Latinos in San Francisco. Simultaneously, he undertook graduate studies at San Francisco’s University of California Medical Center in medical sociology, earning a doctorate in 1974.

“These two interests--my clinic directorship and graduate studies in medical sociology--coincided, and I learned a lot about the health field,” he said.

He later joined the School of Public Health faculty at UC Berkeley, where he taught health policy and administration for 13 years before leaving for UCLA in 1987.

In addition to being on the faculty of the School of Medicine, he was named director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, a position he held until last year, when he established the Center for Latino Health as part of the UCLA School of Medicine.

He has co-authored several works on Latinos with other faculty members and research professionals, bringing other disciplines to bear.

“We look at issues of history, politics, economics, culture, values, spirituality,” said the 47-year-old professor, who teaches a course for fourth-year medical students on Latino health and related matters to help them decide on their future specialty.

Looking at 1970 Census data and vital statistics in the mid-1970s, Hayes-Bautista said he “noticed then that the Anglo ‘baby boom’ had transformed into a ‘baby bust’ while the Latino population, then a small minority, was growing.”

This led to the publication of his first work, “The Burden of Support,” which he later updated with a study of the 1980 census.

The update led to projections of dramatic Latino population growth in the state, which he said led to some Anglo concern that a larger Latino population would mean “more social pathology for the state: poverty, crime, drugs, unemployment. The assumption was that when people are poor, their behavior is poor. I didn’t know how to respond to these concerns because I had not really looked at those issues.”

When he received funding to study those issues, he said, “I really didn’t know what I would find.” He uncovered information about California’s Latinos that contravened the urban underclass model--longer life expectancy than Anglos and lower infant mortality. Yet, he said, Latinos showed high rates of poverty, low education and poor access to health care.

This situation is paradoxical, he said, because California Latinos rank high in the public health characteristics of a strong and stable population, yet low in earning power and other economic factors. Usually, he says, the two are directly--not inversely--related.

This led to studies of sociological factors for California Latinos, such as labor force participation, labor force desertion and family formation, none of which, he found, “fit the urban underclass model either.” Part of the reason for the low-income figures for Latinos is the abysmally low wages paid to illegal immigrant workers, Hayes-Bautista noted.

The UCLA professor hopes that his studies provide guidance to the state’s policy-makers, particularly in the areas of education and access to health care.

Hayes-Bautista plans further research along this line and is now working on “The Latinization of California,” which will project his broad demographic findings into the first quarter of the next century.

The Numbers

Following are key statistical findings by Prof. David Hayes-Bautista, as presented in the work entitled “No Longer a Minority.” * Labor Force Participation, 1990, for males aged 16 and above.

Latinos 80.2%

Anglos 73.9%

Asians 69.1%

Blacks 64.2%

* Life Expectancy at Birth, L.A. County, 1986

Asians 81.5 years

Latinos 79.4 years

Anglos 75.1 years

Blacks 68.7 years

* Infant Mortality Rate, L.A. County, 1986 (per 1,000 live births)

Latinos 5.7

Anglos 11.3

Blacks 17.7

* Years of School Completed, adults 25 years of age and older, California, 1990.

Anglos 13.4

Blacks 12.6

Asians 12.6

Latinos 9.1

Sources: California State Employment Development Department, Los Angeles County Department of Health Services and the California State Department of Finance