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By Roger Hernandez |
New Jersey, Feb 8, 2005: The neighborhoods where I grew up in Union City and West New York, in New Jersey, were more than half Hispanic, mostly Cuban. The town where I live today is only 2 percent Hispanic. There were exactly seven people of Cuban ancestry as of the 2000 Census, before my family moved in.
Yet I don't feel ill at ease, most of the time. And when I want my fix, Union City and all that Cuban food are only a half-hour away.
I assimilate my cake and eat it, too.
A lot of other Hispanics are doing the same thing, suggests a new study by the Pew Hispanic Center.
Using data from the 2000 Census, it found that 57 percent of Hispanics live in neighborhoods where they constitute less than half the population. These neighborhoods averaged a Hispanic population of only 7 percent.
Most of us do not live in the "barrio," as the popular imagination suggests, speaking only Spanish far from the American mainstream. We live right next door to regular 'Merkins.
But the old barrios are still there, too, thank God. Forty-three percent of Hispanics live in Latino-majority neighborhoods. What is more, that percentage increased from 39 percent in 1990, the study says. The faster growth is a direct result of the new waves of immigrants in the past few years. Pew's researchers say that 48 percent of the Hispanic residents in majority-Latino neighborhoods were foreign-born (many of the native-born in those communities are children still living with their immigrant parents), while in minority-Latino neighborhoods 61 percent were U.S.-born.
No surprise there: Immigrants today like to live in ethnic neighborhoods, as they have since the 1800s. But eventually their children grow up and move to suburbia - just like in previous generations.
No surprise either - unfortunately so, in this case - that like the descendants of immigrants who a couple of generations ago spoke Italian, Polish or Yiddish, those suburban Hispanics are beginning to lose their original language. Three-quarters of Hispanics who speak only English live in minority-Latino neighborhoods. What might be surprising to some is that in majority-Latino neighborhoods, only 28 percent of residents speak just Spanish. Fifty-eight percent are bilingual, and 14 percent speak English only.
The point? Last year in "Who Are We: The Challenges to America's National Identity," Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington argued that "the persistent inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages. Unlike past immigrant groups, Mexicans and other Latinos have not assimilated into mainstream U.S. culture."
Huntington feared that Hispanics were living in "their own political and linguistic enclaves." Oddly enough, it also alarmed him that Hispanics were "establishing beachheads elsewhere." So, wrong if you live in a Hispanic neighborhood, wrong if you don't.
No matter. The Pew report helps us see the absurdity of his proposition. It is simply not true that those "enclaves" are a never-before-seen phenomenon in American history, and it is simply not true that Hispanics are stuck in those enclaves, unable or unwilling to join the mainstream.
What is true is that Hispanics are managing to assimilate - despite the fact that not all are white enough to blend in as easily as Greeks or Italians, and despite the millions of immigrants who arrived since the 1990s and have not yet been in America long enough to assimilate.
Out in suburbia, we are as likely as any other American to drive the SUV to the mall, grab a burger at Applebee's and fly the U.S. flag from our front porches to support our Marines and soldiers in Iraq.
That's another non-Latino neighborhood where you'll find lots of Hispanics, too.
Roger Hernandez is a syndicated columnist and writer-in-residence at New Jersey Institute of Technology. Reach him at rogereh@optonline.ne