Rethinking Latino Identity

At a meeting of the Stanford Latino Alumni Assn. two years ago, a Mexican American professor publicly scoffed at the idea of Latino socioeconomic progress. Sardonically, he asked his audience of young Latino professionals if “anything had really changed for Latinos since the 1960s?” The crowd reflexively nodded “no.” The irony of the scene was lost on everyone.

Somewhere along the line, Latinos stopped being considered another in a long string of immigrant groups who arrive poor in the United States but, through hard work and strong families, rise up the socioeconomic ladder in a generation or two. Instead, they are widely seen “underprivileged minorities” who, because of external barriers or internal pathologies, are permanently condemned to the lowest rungs of U.S. society.

The insidious nature of the political-spoils system has turned this glib assessment of Latino social mobility into a virtual mantra. In vying for government dollars, Latino and other non-white activists and politicians have been known to compete for the dubious title of most economically and socially dysfunctional ethnic group. They are armed with statis- tics they say indisputably proves that the barriers many Latinos still face are insurmountable.

Some Latino intellectuals and writers have even defined the essence of Mexican American identity as working or lower class. Those who have made it to the middle class or who have moved out of the barrios are sometimes called “sell-outs.” To avoid this epithet, many U.S.-born middle-class Latinos have affected barrio accents or feign streetwise mannerisms. Unfortunately, a strong Latino middle-class identity has yet to take hold.

Still, it may be too much to expect of a dispersed Latino middle class that it have a uniform, well-defined voice. About one-third of them marry non-Latinos. Almost two-thirds live in non-Latino-majority neighborhoods. For that reason alone, most Latino spokespersons and elected officials don’t factor the middle class into the so-called Latino political agenda. Some even fear that an acknowledgment of the growing Latino middle class is tantamount to deserting the many Latinos, particularly immigrants, who have not yet made it to the middle class.

Yet, it is crucial that Latinos re-examine what are essentially 30-year-old notions of their social mobility. Given the 400% increase in Southern California’s Latino population in the last 25 years, such a reassessment is long overdue. Of course, the continuing influx of new immigrants greatly complicates the task of gauging Latino social mobility. High poverty rates for these immigrants have the effect of pushing down overall Latino statistics--eclipsing the progress of long-established immigrants and U.S.-born Latinos.

If U.S.- and foreign-born Latinos are analyzed separately, however, and the immigrant’s year of entry is taken into account, U.S. census data reveals that there is considerable social mobility for both immigrants and the native-born. Foreign-born Latinos make steady advances out of poverty and into homeownership and the middle class the longer they reside in the United States. And, critically, the U.S.-born children and grandchildren of Latino immigrants fare considerably better than the immigrant generation.

As of 1990, there were nearly four times more U.S.-born Latino households in the middle class than in poverty. Nearly one-third of foreign-born Latino households were owner-occupied. During the 1980s, U.S.-born Latinos were becoming middle-class homeowners at a significantly faster rate than the overall population. During the same period, the growth in the number of foreign-born Latino owning their homes was nearly commensurate to the rate of growth in new immigrant households, which tend to have high rates of poverty. In short, nearly as many previously poor pre-’80 immigrants moved up the socioeconomic ladder as recent arrivals took their place. This upwardly mobile trend continues to the present. An estimated 220,239 Latinos bought homes in virtually every corner of the region from 1990 to 1995.

All this should underscore the absurdity of pretending that there really is some monolithic “Latino community,” or that all Latinos snugly fit into one cultural, economic or political mold. Quite the contrary. Latinos make up what can best be described as a vast, dispersed, heterogeneous, multilingual and multiclass population.

Not unlike other immigrant groups--most notably the Italians--the Latino path to the middle class is marked more by a steady intergenerational ascent than rapid individual progress in education, which better characterizes the Asian and Jewish immigrant experience. Rather than a question of Balkanization, the long-term prospectus points to a full-scale integration of Latinos--racially, socially and economically--into the broader regional society. The nature of this assimilation is the major distinction between the Latino and other past immigrant experiences.

Given the huge numbers and the region’s proximity to the Mexican border, what was considered an inevitable, linear descent into Anglo American culture has been replaced by a much more complex and dynamic process of cultural continuity and acculturation. Clearly, Latino American culture, however it may evolve in the coming generations, will be a significant part, if not the center, of Southern California’s cultural milieu. Indeed, a predominately Latino regional society and, eventually, a predominately Latino middle class, will redefine our very notions of what it means to be American.

On the other hand, without a sizable and growing Latino middle class, the region’s economic, political and social life will not be viable. But, if immigrants follow the heretofore unrecognized progress of their U.S.-born counterparts, Southern California may be facing a brighter 21st century than many believe. One thing is clear, however: The fate of Latinos increasingly mirrors that of the entire region.

According to a Field poll released last month, California’s Latinos are more optimistic about the future than the larger statewide population. That shouldn’t be surprising. More than eight in 10 of the state’s Latinos took part in this century’s two major Latin American migrations or are children of those who did. While the U.S.-born Anglo middle class has been experiencing a sense of its own decline in recent years, most middle-class Latinos are relatively new to this social plateau and are feeling of their ascendancy.

Far from mirroring the static, stuck image of a permanently disadvantaged minority, Latinos are, by and large, struggling upward and following the momentum of the great waves of European immigrants who came before them.