Due to unusual circumstances that I won’t even get into, I found myself at a ritzy event, surrounded by wealthy individuals. I happened to be standing near the door, and I saw members of the one percent walk in.
For the most part, they were polite and just like you and me. However, the exceptions were numerous enough to notice.
Perhaps you didn’t notice when a national political leader said that America was entering the “Decade of the Hispanic.”
You can be forgiven, because the speaker was Henry Cisneros, and he wasn’t talking about our current decade. He was talking about the 1980s.
In America, you can be anything you want to be, and everybody has unlimited potential…
Well, if that were really true, the entire population would be nothing but rock stars, senators, Oscar-winning actresses, and NFL quarterbacks.
You’ve heard of the luck of the Irish. So what is the luck of the Hispanic?
Personally, I think the Latino propensity for serendipity is symbolized by Hugo Reyes, also known as Hurley, from the show Lost.
Despite being a fun-loving, friendly Latino, Hurley kept seeing everybody around him get killed in some random or grisly manner. He constantly bemoaned the fact that he was cursed.
Certainly, many Americans relate to Hurley. For the last decade or so, we’ve all felt jinxed. It’s been a nonstop joyride of economic turmoil, endless war, terrorist threats, and political chaos.
As we all know, Hispanic culture has contributed much to the United States. A quick glance at the artistic, political, and social makeup of the nation confirms that Latinos are prime instigators when it comes to plotting the direction of the country.
Many of our new values have their roots in Latin America. However, there is one concept from the old world that should not be welcome here. Ironically, it is U.S. powerbrokers — people unlikely to be Latino — who are most clamoring for it to gain a foothold in this country.
I’m talking about the encomienda system, which hasn’t formally existed for hundreds of years, but which has never really gone away. Briefly, the encomienda system was set up by the Spanish Conquistadors, who divided Latin America among themselves. An encomienda was a land grant that gave a Spaniard property rights over Indian labor. Basically, the conquistador got a hacienda and indentured servants to make him rich.
I once took a freelance gig editing a book about conspiracy theories. It was an encyclopedia of crazy shit like Mkultra and the Bavarian Illuminati and Area 51.
The book was a highly entertaining read, but it didn’t exactly keep me up at night. I just don’t believe humans are competent enough to pull off fake moon landings and shadow governments and the like. So I’m not prone to yelling, “Conspiracy!” and attributing sinister motives to shadowy figures.
But it’s not a conspiracy to say that Hispanics and African Americans have long been played off one another. And the reason for this is clear: It maintains the status quo.
After all, if America’s two largest ethnic minorities are busy fighting each other, they have little energy to combat the power structures that hinder their mutual growth.
My wife has warned me, for my own sanity, to stop torturing myself. But I can’t help it.
Whenever I read a news article about immigration or the dismal economy or some other political topic, I scroll down to the Comments section to see what the theoretical average American thinks about the situation.
This is always a mistake. The ratio of insightful comment to shrill diatribe is about one in ten.
Previously, I’ve written about the ironclad grasp of family in Latino culture. Once again, I’m not arguing that Scandinavians and Belgians and Koreans don’t love their families. I’m just asserting that Hispanics often prioritize family to a level that majority-culture America may find extreme.
After all, the whole idea of sending grandma to the old folks’ home when she gets to be inconvenient is not a Latino tradition. Similarly, it wasn’t Hispanic politicians who hijacked the term “family values” to justify why they hated certain groups of people (although many Latinos were only too happy to adopt that definition after the fact; but that’s another post).
With hope, this is the last post I will write about the Great Recession. Like every American, I cannot say goodbye and good riddance quickly enough to this horrific period of economic malaise.
By the way, is the word “malaise” ever used in any context other than economic? But I digress.
The past few years have been, to use sophisticated analytical terms, a total financial clusterfuck. And yes, Latinos were hit harder than most.
I’ve written before about the sky-high unemployment rate among Hispanics and plummeting rates of remittances to Latin America and general economic depression in the Hispanic community. To put a capstone on these stats, the National Hispana Leadership Institute released a study showing how sucky it is to be Latino right now, particularly if you’re older. The study was undertaken with AARP, so it looked at Latinos age forty-five or older.
What they found was that Hispanics in this age group were twice as likely to lose their jobs as the general population was. Latinos were also more likely to suffer a decrease in earnings. In addition, almost half of Hispanics had trouble paying for the bare essentials, and over one-third cut back on basic medications. Finally, about twenty percent lost their health insurance (I’m sure the rates are much lower among Tea Baggers).
With stats like that, it would be understandable if we Hispanics curled up in a corner, sucking our thumbs and trying vainly to think happy thoughts. But we’re talking about people who routinely ditch old lives for a shot at a better future.
So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Latinos have shown resiliency during this nightmarish time. The report points out that Hispanics were more likely than the general population to look for new jobs, to seek advanced training, and to work toward keeping their skills up to date.
Most interestingly, Hispanics were twice as likely as the general population to start their own businesses. Yes, even in a disastrous era, Latinos were among the first to take a chance on making things better.
I can’t say that happy endings are in store for all those Hispanics who got through this mess. But again, I hope that I never have to return to the topic of how terrible things once were.
I once lived near a street lined with multimillion-dollar houses. I myself was crammed into a tiny apartment a few blocks away. What can I say — it was a socioeconomically schizophrenic neighborhood.
In any case, I was in a store near one of these mansions when I overheard the shop’s owner trying to calm down a woman on the phone. After hanging up, the store owner mentioned that the caller lived in one of the upscale houses. The caller was upset that so many people were parking near her mansion.
