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Carnegie Corporation of New York Vol. 3/No. 4 Spring 2006 |
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http://www.carnegie.org/reporter/12/identity/index.html
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by Roberto Suro
Immigrant civic integration is an integral part of the Corporation’s focus on strengthening U.S. democracy. In this essay, Roberto Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center, addresses how Hispanics—both those newly arrived in the U.S. and those who have been citizens for generations—are both impacting and being influenced by American society.
The U.S. Census Bureau tells us that in 2004 there were 40,459,196 people in the United States who identified themselves as “Hispanic or Latino.” Which is it, then, “Hispanic” or “Latino,” or both? The Los Angeles Times sticks to “Latino.” The U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the arbiter of such things for the federal government, debated the matter and decided not to pick one or the other so as not to offend anyone. The confusion, and occasional controversy, over the name is just symbolic of a much larger question to which there is no simple answer: who are these people? Indeed, you have to ask: are they, in fact, a single people with a common identity, a common bond or common goals? This is important to know because that population number reported by the U.S. Census Bureau is big already, and growing fast. Forty million folks is enough that if they started pulling in the same direction all at once, they could probably change the nation’s course—socially, culturally, perhaps even politically one day.
What direction would that be? It is certainly not linguistic. Hispanics are not going to make the United States into a Spanish-speaking country because nearly a quarter of this population speaks little or no Spanish at all, according to the Census, and more than a third say they speak English very well. So, it’s not language. Moreover, Hispanics do not share a common race, ethnicity or ancestry, which are the usual ways to identify a population group. They can be black or white, of indigenous origins or not, and their cultural heritages are quite diverse.
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The official definition from the OMB relies on national origins, saying the term “Hispanic or Latino” refers to people who trace their descent from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Central and South America and other Spanish cultures. That’s a pretty broad description because it encompasses immigrants who have just arrived in the United States from those regions as well as those who trace their ancestry in America back many generations. More significantly, the idea of a Hispanic or Latino people comprising many nationalities is not a very strong concept in those regions; not as strong, certainly, as individual national identities. The notion that people from all these places are bound together by an overarching group identity exists more powerfully now in the United States than in Latin America. So, whether the label is Hispanic or Latino, the “label on the label” says Made in the USA. In other words, we are dealing with a uniquely American phenomenon: even if it is based on national origins rooted elsewhere, the group identity for many Hispanics is created in the United States. To understand where this population change may be taking us as a nation, we have to look close to home, not abroad.
`Whatever the meaning of “Hispanic” or “Latino”—and I am going to use these terms interchangeably in this essay—it is not one that is artificial or imposed. If you ask people a question like, “Are you of Hispanic or Latino origin?” a good many respond affirmatively. That is how the U.S. Census gets a population count. You can ask the question in several different ways with many different kinds of surveys, and the size of the group and its basic characteristics turn out to be more or less the same. At the most basic level, then, the Latino/Hispanic “yes” is a matter of self-identification. And if more than 40 million people self-identify as Latino or Hispanic, then this sense of group membership is something large and significant on the nation’s landscape.
I could argue on the basis of sound evidence that the growth of the Hispanic population is as important a demographic development today as the inception of the Baby Boom was sixty years ago. But if you press me on what makes someone a Hispanic or a Latino, my responses start getting fuzzy after self-identification, and I am not being coy in saying that. I have been watching and writing about Hispanics for thirty years, and I answer “yes” for myself when asked, but the more I learn, the less I know for certain about identity. What are the boundaries of this group? What binds us together? What are we saying to each other and to everyone else when we assert this self-identification?
Models of Identity
The search for answers, as best I can tell, has to start with two admissions: first, when it comes to Hispanics, let’s acknowledge that we are watching a work in progress. Second, let’s accept that we need new ways of talking about group identity because the old ones don’t work very well with this population.
On the first point, the population statistics leave no doubt: the number of Hispanics doubled between 1970 and 1990 and has nearly doubled again since 1990. No population can grow that fast without changing, particularly when immigration is driving much of the growth. About four-of-every-ten Hispanics are foreign born, and among those newcomers, well more than half have arrived in the U.S. since 1990. Those numbers represent a lot of people who are still very much in the process of adjusting to new lives in a new place. And the transition will last beyond their lifetimes. High fertility rates among immigrants is the other propellant of population growth. Another three-in-ten Hispanics are the native-born children of foreign-born parents. This is the second generation, and these young people—whose median age is less than thirteen—are adapting what they inherit from their parents and what they learn outside their homes to fit their own needs. Altogether, then, about 70 percent of the Hispanic population is involved in a process of fundamental cultural transition at some stage or another. Some trajectories are becoming evident, but the final results are still very much in doubt. Hispanics are a people in motion, so we must accept the uncertainty they bring with them and be patient. Understanding their impact on American society could take a while. It could take decades.
The next step—the second admission I am suggesting—involves our historical models of group identity. There are two—minority group and ethnic group—and neither works very well with Hispanics. The first is based on the African American experience: the majority—the mainstream of society—identifies a minority group on the basis of race or by other markers that have served as grounds for unjust exclusion. The excluded group, in turn, asserts collective bonds as it seeks redress of grievances. And in the case of African Americans, even after fifty years of political and economic gains, the group is still often defined, and often defines itself, as being outsiders whose status in American society is still uncertain. The ethnic group model is based on the experience of the Irish, the Italians and other European immigrants. They began as outsiders, even outcasts, with a distinct identity based on national origins. Over time, however, through a process of assimilation and absorption, they gained acceptance to the mainstream and their group identities faded. In effect, they became white.
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Even if you believe that history likes repetition, there is no good reason to assume that Latinos will march down either of these roads. Hispanics do not share an obvious common marker like skin color that sets them apart, and they have not begun their journey through American society from a common and tragic starting point, such as slavery. Perhaps this helps to explain why society has not imposed an identity on Latinos as rigidly or as pejoratively as it did on blacks, and why Latino identity does not derive from a collective experience such as resistance to persecution. Indeed, many Latinos are immigrants who have come to this country seeing it as a land of opportunity and have succeeded in realizing their aspirations. On the other hand, Latinos are also not entirely an immigrant population that has been invited into the mainstream. Important segments of the Hispanic population have lived aspects of the minority-group experience. These Latinos have a history as victims of discrimination, and they have created institutions as well as a political identity that developed out of a civil rights struggle. Moreover, about half of the Latino foreign-born population is in the United States without legal authorization and most have no avenue for becoming fully incorporated into the country’s national life no matter how much they assimilate. So the Hispanic experience intertwines enough aspects of both the minority and ethnic group models that neither model alone suffices.
The Latino experience in the U.S. is not going to be exactly like that of blacks or Italians or other minorities: it is going to be something else. Whatever Hispanic identity ends up being, to understand it, we’re going to have to open up our thinking about race and ethnicity and about the ways that group identities take shape. We are seeing something new unfolding before our eyes, but the phenomenon is far enough along that we can look back and see where it started and how certain trajectories have begun to take shape.
Many Different Perceptions
Over the course of several years I have worked on a variety of public opinion surveys of the Hispanic population, and this research tells us that Latino identities are fairly fluid and that their view of the United States is expansive. This means, for example, that most Hispanics see no conflict between learning English and continuing to speak Spanish, between learning American ways and retaining a Latin culture. They see the United States as desirable, and admirable in many ways in comparison to their countries of origin except on one point: they believe that moral values and family ties are stronger in Latin America than here. But most importantly, they see the United States as a nation that embraces many cultures and not as a place that tries to impose a single national type.
The same fluidity is apparent in the ways that Latinos see themselves. In a 2002 survey, the Pew Hispanic Center asked a large national sample of Hispanics about the terms they use to identify themselves so we could determine which terms they favored most. We gave them three choices: American, Hispanic or Latino, or their country of origin and asked which term they used first or if there was only one term they preferred. The responses varied sharply between immigrants and those born in the United States. More than two-thirds of the immigrants favored their country of origin, saying they were most likely to identify themselves with terms like, “Mexican,” “Cuban” or “Dominican.” That is not surprising; after all, they were referring to the countries where they were born and raised. Only a small share of the immigrants (6 percent) called themselves “American.” Meanwhile, about half of native-born Latinos preferred “American,” while a substantial number (29 percent) also primarily identified themselves by their country of origin.
The most curious finding involved the terms “Hispanic” and “Latino” because they were not very popular. The group label was preferred by no more than one-quarter of either the immigrants or the native born. It’s not that they are hostile to the idea of an overarching Latino identity encompassing the whole of the Hispanic population, but that identity is not at the forefront of their thoughts. “Hispanic” and “Latino” are not the first terms they reach for when they want to tell you who they are, at least when they have other choices that reflect national identities.
This sense of fragmentation along national lines was evident elsewhere in the same poll, the 2002 National Survey of Latinos, which my organization conducted in partnership with the Kaiser Family Foundation. An overwhelming 85 percent of respondents said that Latinos from different countries have separate and distinct cultures rather than sharing one Hispanic or Latino culture. In a similar vein, respondents were about evenly divided over whether or not Hispanics from different countries were working together to achieve common political aims. But it would be a mistake to dismiss all tendencies toward group identity just because that notion seems to lose out in competition with individual national identities.
When Hispanics are asked about how others perceive them, you find a different story. In that 2002 survey and others, Latinos by large majorities—as high as eight-out-of-ten—say Hispanics as a whole are the victims of discrimination. Near majorities—four-out-of-ten—say that discrimination is a major problem preventing Latinos from succeeding in this country. Three-out-of-ten say that they, personally, have experienced discrimination or that someone close to them has been discriminated against in the last five years. From within the group, the Hispanic/Latino identity may seem weak, but members of the group clearly feel that the rest of society sees that identity forcefully. Ethnic or racial identities can often arise from two sources: what members of a group feel that they share in common and the roles imposed on them or projected on them by the majority. Given the nature of American society today and the characteristics of the Latino population, this is a particularly fluid mix.
Then again, the Latino population is itself a complex intermingling of people whose families have been here for generations, who have come here from Latin America and who are the children of immigrants. As I noted before, about 70 percent of this population is made up of immigrants and their children—the people who to some degree are involved in a process of assimilation. This reality is reflected in Latinos’ views on many different matters, not just the nature of group identity. Perhaps the best way to track this process of assimilation is to look at the languages that Hispanics speak: English, Spanish and the mix of both. Many different kinds of public opinion surveys on different subjects have shown broad and consistent differences between Latinos who speak only Spanish, most often recently arrived immigrants, and those who speak only English, most typically those with long family histories in the United States. And there is often a range of views among bilinguals. In surveys conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center, this pattern has emerged on subjects ranging from the acceptability of divorce, to the chances of success in the Iraq war, to the quality of education in U.S. public schools.
Take the issue of abortion, for example, which we have asked about in several surveys. Large numbers of Latinos who speak and read only Spanish find abortion unacceptable—nearly 90 percent in some polls. Bilingual Hispanics are also disapproving but less overwhelmingly, by about 75 percent. Among those who speak and read only English, a bit more than half find abortion morally unacceptable, which is close to the split you find in the non-Hispanic population. Consider something that is less of a hot-button issue, and you get the same result: in the 2002 survey, for instance, we asked whether it is better for children to live in their parents’ home until they get married. Among the Spanish dominant, 95 percent agreed. Among the bilinguals, 75 percent said yes. And with the English speakers, 52 percent agreed, which was just a bit higher than what we found with non-Latinos.
On a great variety of matters, therefore, it seems that immigrant Spanish-speaking Latinos hold distinctive views, while the native-born English speakers hold views that are roughly similar to the American population as a whole. And this result is reflected in attitudes about more than just social issues. In that same 2002 survey, we asked about fatalism—a sense very common among the poor in Latin America that they are not in control of their own destinies. Among Latinos who speak only Spanish, 59 percent agreed with the statement, “It doesn’t do any good to plan for the future because you don’t have any control over it.” Among Latinos who speak only English, a scant 24 percent agreed with that statement. Bilingual Hispanics were in-between, at 31 percent. Only 17 percent of non-Latinos agreed that they have no control over their futures. On this very simple but very basic measure of how individuals see their fates, as on a great many other issues, the shift to English produces a remarkably clear shift in attitudes.
What I’ve concluded from looking at a variety of surveys is that exposure to American ways through the acquisition of English produces absorption of those ways. Certainly, not every aspect of the American experience gets adopted, but enough does to show that a significant process of assimilation is taking place: people change when they come to the United States and the change accelerates when a great big doorway into their hearts and minds is opened by language.
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An Ongoing Process of Change
Language is something we know a lot about because it is a very tangible, testable marker and because there is a great deal of data on it from the Census, from big government household surveys that are carried out regularly, as well as the kinds of public opinion polls that we conduct at the Pew Hispanic Center. The data from all these sources is very consistent. For example, about three-quarters of foreign-born Latinos, the first generation, speaks only Spanish and the rest of the immigrants are bilingual to some extent. The second generation—the children of immigrants—are about evenly divided between English speakers and bilinguals, with almost none reaching adulthood speaking only Spanish. And, among Hispanics of longer tenure in the U.S.—those born here, of American-born parents—more than three-quarters speak only English and the rest are bilingual to some extent, though often their Spanish is weak. So we know for certain that a transition to English is taking place across generations with a lot of bilingualism along the way.
In addition to linguistic adaptations, the survey data I referenced before indicates that a process of change is underway in the Latino population as immigrants and their offspring adopt a variety of values typical of the American public at large. The language data tell us that this process moves along gradually, but steadily. The demographic data show that Latino population growth is constantly being fed by people coming in at the beginning of the process—recent immigrants and their children. Thus, even though a great deal of assimilation is taking place, it can seem that nothing is happening, that Latinos are not changing or even that they are resistant to change, because the Spanish-speaking population is constantly being refreshed by new arrivals. Indeed, for the past decade or so, immigrants early in the assimilation process have accounted for a majority of Hispanic adults, and so it will be for the foreseeable future. In my view, then, these realities reinforce the notion that Latinos are a people in transition, a people in the process of becoming something new.
Suppose then, that by some act of magic—because that’s what it would take—not one more Latino immigrant entered the United States. How would the American Hispanic population evolve as a segment of U.S. society if no more newcomers arrived?
One possibility is that differences would wash away and Latinos would become fluent in English, improve their economic status and simply become a lot like everyone else in a couple of generations. In this regard, some commentators have already heralded the glorious return of the melting pot. Give it time, they advise, and Latinos will simply be melded into the white mainstream just as the European immigrants were a century ago. Embracing this view wholeheartedly, however, requires believing two things: that today’s newcomers are basically the same as those of the past and that the United States has not changed in a hundred years. Both are debatable propositions. I would argue, as I indicated earlier, that the contemporary context offers much better clues as to the direction of Hispanic trajectories than the historical models.
Think back again to the 1970s, the time when the current wave of Latino immigration and population growth got underway. In retrospect, it is evident that the United States was then in the middle of an era of profound change. The old industrial manufacturing base of the American economy was withering away, to be replaced by the new service sector. A fundamental element of the nation’s social structure was being transformed as women gained new status in the home, at work and in the public arena. Finally, the growth of the Hispanic population also coincided with the maturing of the civil rights era.
All of these changes had their start before the Latino population began to grow, and Latinos were, at most, minor players in the initial phases of these transformations. They certainly did not play causal roles. But now, as we move through the first decades of the 21st century, the effects of those transformations are still being absorbed by the nation even as Hispanics become much more numerous. Latinos, then, are like the character who appears peripheral in the first act of a play and then takes center stage midway through the second. By virtue of their population size, however, the Latino population will be a protagonist with a major role to play in the third act, now unfolding.
Consider, for example, the changes wrought by the civil rights era. The main expansion of the Latino population occurred after the United States, in the middle of the 20th century, fundamentally reassessed the way it perceives people who are not part of the white majority and how it manages relations between those groups and the majority. That upheaval, and the new social structures it created, now condition the way in which newly arrived Latino immigrants and their children see themselves and are seen by others. In this regard, their experience is fundamentally different than that of the European immigrants who arrived in the U.S. and underwent an assimilation process prior to the civil rights era.
A key to understanding this difference is recalling that there was, in fact, a Hispanic population in the U.S. when the civil rights era began and that it took part in the upheaval. Led primarily by native-born Mexican Americans, Latino organizations fought against discrimination that had been imposed on them both by law and custom, especially in Texas. An entire generation of Latino leaders and institutions used the tools developed by African Americans and benefited from the same types of legislation and court decisions in seeking redress of grievances. Those leaders and institutions were well established in Hispanic communities when the population began to grow through immigration in the 1970s. And, perhaps more significantly, Hispanics had been recognized in both judicial decisions and legal statutes as members of what many would describe as part of the newly recognized post-1960s social structure: the minority group.
So, everyone added to the Hispanic population automatically becomes part of a group that is formally defined as a people apart, a people with a shared identity, a people who had suffered inferior status and still might need protection from prejudice. Regardless of whether they are rich or poor, regardless of whether they come from a Caribbean capital or an Andean village, all of these people are categorized together under the label “Hispanic or Latino.” This inevitably means that the process of assimilation for today’s immigrants and their offspring will be very different than it was during the late 19th and early 20th century era of trans-Atlantic migration.
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Prejudice in many forms certainly existed a hundred years ago, and many immigrants certainly suffered from it. One important response to this experience was to organize socially, politically and religiously, as national groups; that is as Italians, Irish, or Jews for example. Out of necessity, many of the European immigrant groups actually strengthened their ethnic bonds and identities in the first stages of the assimilation process because organizing as national groups was often the most effective way of getting established in this country.
The United States is, arguably, a more tolerant place today than it was a hundred years ago, and the mechanisms for asserting group identities are different, as well. Immigrants from Latin America still often organize themselves as national groups, but the host society offers them an alternative in the form of an Hispanic identity, which overarches national differences. Indeed, U.S. institutions and legal regulations formally recognize and favor group identity far more than national origins. For example, there are about 700,000 people of Guatemalan origin living in the U.S., according to the Census. That is a pretty small group, and one that does not enjoy any particular recognition. As a Hispanic or Latino, however, each of those individuals becomes part of a formally recognized minority group—and the nation’s largest minority group, at that. Assertion of this identity, which does not exist in Guatemala, actually brings with it some stature and protection. The family of a recently arrived immigrant from Guatemala will have no connection to the experience of a Mexican-American who lived in South Texas in the 1950s, but their process of assimilation to this country will be highly conditioned by the great social changes put in place because of those Latinos who played a small part in the civil rights era. As a result, the trajectory from Guatemala to America now leads through this peculiar condition that we, as a society, label as Hispanic or Latino. Assimilation has never been simple or direct, but today, the avenues by which old identities fade and new ones are developed seem particularly complex, fluid and varied.
It may be tempting at times to expect, or hope, that Latinos at the beginning of the 21st century will follow the same pathways as European immigrants did at the beginning of the 20th. But the circumstances surrounding the two groups are hugely different and, as time goes on, those differences are only likely to grow.
During most of the last great era of immigration, the United States operated something very close to an open-door policy for those who came across the Atlantic. Asians were systematically excluded on racial grounds, but the only Europeans denied entry were those judged to be carrying disease or likely to become public charges. Although many thousands were quarantined and sent home from Ellis Island, those allowed to land were, in time—though sometimes after much turmoil—enfolded into the nation’s civic life. All had the right to seek citizenship, eventually. Today, the United States, however unintentionally, operates a two-tier immigration system. Some are allowed into the country legally, with a well-defined set of rights and obligations and most are granted the right to remain permanently and become citizens after a number of years. Many others, however, enter the country illegally. Despite laws and enforcement efforts to the contrary, their presence is tolerated, at least tacitly. Evidence of this fact is that best estimates suggest the population of unauthorized immigrants has grown to more than 11 million people, and that once beyond the border region, they face little risk of apprehension. By law, the undocumented are prohibited from working, from receiving most public services and from ever seeking citizenship, yet they readily find employment, albeit in the lower reaches of the labor force, and are essentially free to live here as long as they like.
By any measure, this is a sizeable population and arguably, the only one that is now systematically excluded from full participation in society. There are now more illegal migrants living in the United States than there were blacks living under Jim Crow in the states of the old Confederacy at the time of the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954—and this cohort represents a sizeable portion of the Hispanic population. About one-out-of-every-five Latinos is undocumented, including about one-half of all foreign-born Hispanics. Nearly one-out-of-every-three Latinos lives in a family with at least one undocumented relative. And, for the past several years, the number of unauthorized immigrants has exceeded the legal flow. Thus, illegality has become one of the defining characteristics of the Latino population.
Though drastically different than the kind of discrimination suffered by African Americans or Mexican Americans prior to the civil rights era, because it is a status that is chosen rather than imposed, being undocumented is a marker of exclusion and marginalization. It is the basis for an identity as a people apart. No matter to what extent an illegal immigrant learns English and adopts American ways, he or she faces an insuperable barrier to full inclusion and participation in American society. And then again—though it may seem an unlikely prospect—a single act of Congress could simply erase that barrier.
The New Dividing Lines
Immigration status is a new boundary line, one that confronts Latinos like no other group and that is likely, over time, to condition the ways that newcomers are incorporated into American society, or not. But at the same time, the “old” boundary lines of race and ethnicity are also undergoing change because the United States is a fundamentally different place than when either African Americans or the immigrants of the trans-Atlantic era were forming group identities. In both those cases, there was a dividing line drawn sharply through American society. On one side sat a white majority that set societal, political and cultural norms, and those norms were overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon, Christian and male. Now, women, blacks, Jews and all kinds of other folks are involved in defining American norms, there are several different kinds of dividing lines and they are blurry in places and sometimes even zigzag. Immigrants today, like immigrants before, are busy absorbing American ways; the difference is that nowadays there are many more ways to be an American, many more accepted flavors and variations. The Latino immigrant influx arrived as the United States was in the process of establishing a more diverse vision of itself. The process seems irreversible but is not finished, nor is it fully codified or digested. Latino immigrants and their offspring are adapting to a United States that is already immersed in a process of transformation that may be further impacted by the Latino immigrants themselves. This is a demographic coincidence that may well be of profound historical impact.
For example, in the 1970s, as the Baby Boomers became adults, they put off having children; many never did and many had just one or two. In the same decade, as noted earlier, the influx of immigrants from Latin America, especially Mexico, began to grow. These two trends, entirely unrelated in their origins, gathered momentum across decades and produced effects that continue to reverberate throughout American society: the first created a dearth of people while the second resulted in an abundance. Without this confluence—meaning, absent Hispanic immigration and high fertility rates—the United States might well begin to resemble nations such as Italy or Japan, which have quickly aging populations that are also shrinking in size. When the Boomers retire, Hispanics will be there to fill out the workforce. Thus, the significance of Latino population growth has to be measured not just by the sheer size of their numbers but against what is happening with the rest of the population.
While Latinos make up 14 percent of the total population, they account for 21 percent of all children under the age of 10. Look at another key segment of the population: young adults. Between 2000 and 2005, the number of non-Hispanic whites between the ages of 20 and 35 declined by nearly 800,000. Meanwhile, the number of Latinos in that age range increased by more than 1.7 million. The Latino population is not only growing fast, it is accelerating while the rest of the population is getting older and hardly growing at all. That context enormously leverages the significance of the Hispanic numbers. The fact that Latinos are the only population in the United States that can be cited as fast growing not only defines their size but also helps to highlight their place in American society, bestowing a particular degree of status, as well.
While it would be easy to overstate the potential leverage represented by the size of the Latino population, their numbers—and standing as America’s largest minority group—are already too big to ignore. Employers, marketers and politicians increasingly seek out Latinos as workers, consumers and voters. This attention may be self-serving, but it is attention nonetheless, and probably ripe for future spin. Latinos are the rare group whose position in society is defined less by who they have been than by who they will become.
In the public policy arena, the size and projected growth of the Hispanic population has already had a notable impact. The banking industry, for example, was so concerned about keeping immigrant Latinos as a potential source of new consumers that it successfully lobbied the Bush Administration to block Congressional efforts to keep undocumented immigrants from opening bank accounts. Indeed, concerns over the future political clout of the Hispanic population have acted as a brake on a variety of efforts to adopt restrictive immigration policies. And, when the Supreme Court decided in 2004 to preserve affirmative action in university admissions, one of the rationales was the growing size of the minority population in the coming years. This perception of demographic significance is not going to resolve all of the hardships or remove all of the barriers faced by Latinos but it is widespread enough in the majority society that the position of Latinos today is more positive than that of blacks in the 1970s or Italians, for example, in the 1920s. Group identities are powerfully shaped by the majority, and in this case, demography is a critical factor. Moreover, Latinos themselves absorb some of this sentiment, generating a feeling of demographic pride, even demographic triumphalism, at times.
The picture I’ve tried to paint in this essay is not one of a racial minority group cordoned off from the rest of society. Nor is it the picture of an immigrant ethnic group at the gates waiting for admission into a society that will absorb it and wash away its differences. As I noted earlier, this phenomenon is something different than we have seen before. Latino/Hispanics comprise a group with an identity that sets them apart, but not permanently. The boundaries that define the group are shifting and they are permeable, which is characteristic of a society that values homogeneity of purpose but also embraces cultural, religious and ethnic diversity. Still, the societal contradictions faced by Latinos abound: for example, they intermarry with a freedom unimaginable for blacks fifty years ago, one signal of the ongoing assimilation process, and yet, at the same time, a large Latino cohort—the undocumented—live in the shadow of the law. It is unlikely that this range of experiences will narrow any time soon.
So what conclusions can we reach after considering the many factors impacting the lives that Latinos/Hispanics live in the U.S. today? Surely at least one thing is clear: the Latino/Hispanic identity is one that allows for multiple and varied expressions. Latinos have arrived on the scene as American notions of identity continue to evolve and they have brought with them the kind of identities that may be well suited to the moment. The result, the combination of the two—a nation with less rigid boundaries and a people with a more fluid identity—will undoubtedly change both the host society and the newcomers. In the past, the United States has tended to either reinforce group differences or negate them, but now it seems headed into a future where it will do neither. Instead, the prospects are for a society that sometimes embraces, even celebrates, some aspects of group identities while at the same time fuses people of different sorts together in pursuit of common purposes and goals. It is an uncertain and potentially confusing prospect—but promising, as well—and one that has only just begun to unfold.
Now, which is it, “Latino” or “Hispanic?” The answer is that “Hispanic” is the preferred choice of about a third of the group and is most popular in Texas and Florida. “Latino” is preferred by a bit more than a tenth, mostly in California and New York. But the majority has no preference and will use both. How could it be otherwise in 21st century America?
Roberto Suro is director of the Pew Hispanic Center, a Washington, D.C.-based research organization. The Center was founded in July 2001 with support from the Pew Charitable Trusts. A former journalist, Suro has 30 years of experience writing on Hispanic issues and immigration. He is author of Strangers Among Us: Latino Lives in a Changing America, (Vintage) as well as numerous reports, articles and other publications about the growth of the Latino population. During his career in journalism Suro worked for TIME Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post and other publications.