Latin Lessons
Who Are Hispanic Americans, and How Will They Vote?
Article Summary and Author Biography
Discussions of Hispanic Americans in the media and on the campaign trail are warped by ignorance about who they really are and what they really want. A new book seeks to fill the gap with a data-rich portrait of this complex community.
RAY SUAREZ is Senior Correspondent for PBS NewsHour.
Cambridge University Press
2011
448 pp.
1107638739
$99.00
Essay
The United States is far less divided on immigration than the current debate would suggest. An overwhelming majority of Americans want a combination of tougher enforcement and earned citizenship for the 12 million illegal immigrants in the country. Washington's challenge is to translate this consensus into sound legislation that will start to repair the nation's broken immigration system.
Snapshot
Current demographic trends suggest that the percentage of Latinos eligible to vote in the United States will grow in the decades to come, and if Democrats continue to win lopsided margins among them, it will become nearly impossible for Republicans to win enough Electoral College votes to put a candidate in the White House.
Protesting Arizona's controversial immigration law, May 1, 2010 (Reuters / Jonathan Ernst)
In June, as the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Arizona's controversial immigration law and the Obama administration announced a significant change in U.S. deportation policies, the country's roughly 50 million Latino residents were once again transformed from a diverse collection of individuals into an ethnic bloc and then into a political issue in the 2012 campaign season. It was hardly the first time, and it will certainly not be the last, as the U.S. government and American society and political culture struggle to make sense of the country's rapidly shifting demographics.
By now, the main questions have become familiar. How many Latino voters are there? What do they care about? Are they conservative or liberal? Republicans or Democrats? Will Candidate X figure out how to appeal to them? Will they vote in November? If they overperform in the census but underperform at the polls, does it matter that Latino populations seem to be growing quickly in hotly contested swing states?
What has also become familiar is the lack of good answers to these questions, notwithstanding the many commentators, most of them not Latino, who confidently hold forth on the subject on talk radio and cable news, even though they tend to have rather modest firsthand knowledge of the country's Latino communities and, worse yet, rarely offer any hard data to ground their punditry in reality.
Latinos in the New Millennium represents a potential antidote to this vapid discourse and a data-rich corrective to the stereotypes that too often define Hispanics in the United States. Aptly describing the book as an almanac, its authors, a group of academic experts, have collected and synthesized a massive quantity of data on the political and personal sentiments of Latinos across all lines of national origin, citizenship and immigration status, and income and educational levels. Their findings simultaneously clarify and complicate the reductive portrait of Latinos that frames discussions of their social and political relevance.
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