Think Tanks, Researchers No Longer Ignore Latinos

By ARMANDO ACUNA

Nov. 12, 1999 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Refugio Rochin, the director of the new Smithsonian Center for Latino Initiatives in Washington, D.C., remembers the early 1970s, when research about Latinos, then a fledgling endeavor, was frowned on by the academic hierarchy.

“My area of interest was migrant farm workers and Chicano economics, but looking at poverty wasn’t considered valued research and was discouraged,” Rochin recalled of his days as a UC Davis professor. “I was told it would be better for my career if I focused on something else.”

Today, Rochin notes with dry understatement, things have turned around. The nation’s fastest growing minority group is being examined as never before.

From think-tank academics studying immigration patterns and educational attainment to profit-seeking companies tracking buying habits, Latinos’ attitudes and tastes are under the corporate and government microscope.

That’s what comes with rising purchasing power estimated at $383 billion this year and expanding political muscle that solicitous Democrats and Republicans feel can sway elections.

“The reason is simple demographics,” Rochin said.

“As a growing number of Latinos climb the career ladder and gain more power and responsibility in their jobs, they become interested in bigger global issues . . . and that makes us mainstream players,” he said. “Yes, we’re interested in seasonal farm workers, but in other things too. There is growing recognition of that.”

The number of think tanks devoted exclusively to researching the nation’s 31.5 million Latinos remains small, though leaders say they are busier than ever. But there is a growing network of new and revitalized Latino research centers largely connected to colleges and universities throughout the United States. Many of them are in California.

In addition, independent research organizations are devoting more resources to evaluating the impact of the state’s 10 million Latinos on a wide range of cultural, political, educational and economic issues. They include the Public Policy Institute of California, a San Francisco-based nonprofit think tank founded in 1994 to study the forces shaping the state’s future.

“We’re here to provide policymakers with high quality research,” said Abby Cook, the institute’s spokeswoman. “You can’t track the phenomenal change at the state level and the effects of that . . . without solid analysis of Latinos.”

The new information is being used by government leaders to make public policy in areas such as education and economic development, and by politicians vying to capture votes. It also plays a role in litigation on immigration and political redistricting and in exploring border issues between the United States and Mexico.

The data are also being employed to dispel stereotypes and to highlight ethnic differences often overlooked under the rubric “Latino.” Businesses are using research to launch new products or to document marketplace trends.

Aided by marketing research, the Gateway computer company is launching a major program targeting Spanish-speaking Latinos, which it sees as a rapidly expanding pool of potential customers.

The program, which started Oct. 1, is the first of its kind by a major personal computer manufacturer. In addition to having ads on Spanish-language TV and radio, the company is providing Spanish-speaking customer service and technical support, along with Spanish software and keyboards featuring Spanish characters.

A spokesman for the San Diego-based company said the research shows that the Latino computer market is where the general market was two years ago, but is growing twice as fast.

Also capitalizing on Latino marketing research is Fernando Diaz, co-founder of OYE magazine, whose research showed there was a market for a magazine targeting second-generation, upwardly mobile, college-educated Latino men ages 21 to 39. The quarterly publication is set to go bimonthly next year.

In the area of public policy, the William C. Velasquez Institute in San Antonio has a long record of providing information that has been used to win more than 80 voting rights lawsuits and gained Latinos increased political access in California, Texas and New Mexico.

The Internet plays a large role in the Latino research emergence. The virtual universe has dozens of sites on Latinos ranging from research on health care to chat rooms exploring what it means to be Chicano.

“There is a more recognized need at all levels for this information, the kind that isn’t readily available” without the Internet, said Richard Chabran, who runs the Chicano/Latino Net on the Web and is director of the Center for Virtual Research at UC Riverside.

Chabran pointed to a research paper about Latinos and AIDS presented at a UCLA conference that in the past would have been ignored by mainstream publications. “We took the bilingual proceedings and put them on the Web,” he said. “This is information that wouldn’t normally go out or be widely disseminated.”

In just the past few years, several policy centers have been created or planned across the United States.

They range from the National Latino Research Center at Cal State San Marcos to a fledgling center at the University of Indiana in Bloomington.

Attracting the most attention is the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies, which opened this fall. The institute aims to provide academic support for Latino-focused faculty as well as national community service and original research, said its associate director, Allert Brown-Gort.

Notre Dame also has taken over as headquarters for the Inter-University Program for Latino Research.

Begun in the early 1980s, the program has grown from a consortium of four research centers to 16 spread throughout the country. It serves as an information clearinghouse for research on Latinos, and brings scholars together.

When it comes to old-line Latino think tanks, few rival the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute, which is affiliated with Claremont Graduate University and the University of Texas at Austin.

Founded in 1985, the center--which is funded by more than 50 corporations and foundations--primarily focused on education and public policy. But it broadened its scope in 1997.

The center also now looks at the impact of information technology on Latinos, the role of Latinos in U.S.-Latin American relations and how Latinos fare in the entertainment industry.

Harry Pachon, Tomas Rivera’s president, said the institute receives queries for information nearly every other day, as well as requests to initiate research.

“Latinos just emerged in the last 30 years [in the nation’s consciousness] . . . and there’s complete ignorance and a clamoring for information,” Pachon said. Though one of 10 people in the United States is Latino and, in California, 20% of the growing Latino middle class earns at least $50,000 a year, there are still significant “misconceptions and myths out there,” he said.

Some of them, he said, include the perceptions that Latinos can be reached only through Spanish, that Latinos have no allegiance to the United States and are here temporarily, and that poverty in the Latino community mainly consists of single women with young children. All these, the research shows, are false.

Pachon cautions that despite the increased breadth of new Latino research, some studies are of poor quality, due to small sample sizes and advocacy masquerading as objectivity. Some say there also is an element of political correctness at play in the new attention.

“Yes, there is additional research on Latinos, but are we getting reliable and credible findings?” asked Fernando Soriano, director of the National Latino Research Center, which mainly looks at health and drug abuse issues. “There is tremendous variability among Latinos, and we have to be careful what we say.”

Extensive data collection on Latinos is relatively new. It wasn’t until 1980 that the U.S. Census Bureau created a separate category for Latinos to identify themselves. The lack of comprehensive information is well-known to commercial interests.

Rick Leibert, president of San Pedro-based Events Marketing Inc., publishes Hispanic Confidential, a monthly newsletter for corporate clients that is a smorgasbord of Latino demographic factoids intended to persuade retailers and manufacturers to invest in Leibert’s projects.

“At first, it was tough to find stuff, but now more and more information is out there,” Leibert said. “We can read the [population] numbers like everyone else.”

The numbers are familiar to Jeff Vitucci, researcher and economist for Santa Barbara-based Hispanic Business Magazine, which tracks Latino entrepreneurs and business owners. “The appetite for information is insatiable. We get calls all the time from ad agencies and finance institutions,” Vitucci said. “They are asking us things like, ‘What’s the credit card debt of Hispanics aged 25 to 30 in the U.S.?’

“Over the next 50 years, half of the net population increase will be of Hispanic origin,” Vitucci said. “If you missed jumping on the bandwagon with baby boomers, don’t blink, because another bandwagon is coming.”

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Latino Resources Online

Research about Latinos is becoming more common as their population grows nationwide, particularly in California. Listed below are several Internet Web sites that either specialize in or include Latino research issues:

Chicano/Latino Net: https://clnet.ucr.edu

Tomas Rivera Policy Institute: https://www.trpi.org

Inter-University Program for Latino Research: https://clnet.ucr.edu/iup.html

The Azteca Web Page: https://www.azteca.net/aztec

Andanzas al web Latino: https://lib.nmsu.edu/subject/bord/latino.html

Julian Samora Research Institute: https://www.jsri.msu.edu/whatis/

Latino/a Research & Policy Center: https://ita.cudenver.edu/lrpc

Policy.com: https://www.policy.com/icp/about.html

University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States: https://www.ucr.edu/ucmexus/mexushom.html

Public Policy Institute of California: https://www.ppic.org

California Policy Research Center: https://www.ucop.edu/cprc

UC Committee on Latino Research: https://www.ucop.edu/research/ucclr.html