THE GIANT WAKES UP
June 6, 2005

            San Antonio, Texas. For many decades, the Hispanic population of the United States has been viewed as a sleeping giant: the potential for political power, economic growth and media influence are all there, but few Latinos manage to rise above the crowd or occupy important posts. This has now changed.  The giant has awakened and his footsteps are changing the shape of the United States.

            Antonio Villaraigosa’s successful campaign for Mayor of Los Angeles, the second largest city in the country, is the best example of the Latinos’ emerging political clout. It is not just a matter of making history—Antonio is the first Latino to hold this office in 133 years—but also shows that the number of Hispanic leaders is growing all the time.

            You could see the Latino wave coming.  Last November saw the election of two Hispanic Senators:  Ken Salazar from Colorado and Mel Martinez from Florida.  And later came the icing on the cake: President George Bush appointed his attorney, Alberto Gonzalez, as the first ever Hispanic Attorney General.

            The interesting thing is that these four men share very humble origins and hard-working pasts:  Antonio, whose parents were divorced, started working as a shoe-shine boy in Los Angeles at the age of 7; Ken told me how he, along with his seven brothers, had lived on a ranch in Colorado with no electricity until 1981; Mel made the trip from Cuba to Florida alone as part of “Operation Peter Pan;” and Al’s father was an immigrant in Texas who worked as a construction worker six days a week.

Antonio, Ken, Mel and Al’s stories—like that of former President Bill Clinton—show how in the United States even the poorest and most defenseless can reach the pinnacle of power. What other country has that kind of social mobility?  Very few. That is why Latino immigrants keep coming to the United States.  Not because they think the streets are paved with dollars, but because they know that, with a lot of hard work, they can make a better life for themselves and their children. The United States is a country where there is a direct relationship between effort and results. If you work hard, you get ahead. On the other hand, in Latin America I know people who have worked hard all their lives and still die in abject poverty. That’s why they go north.

Each hear almost a million and a half Latinos join the 45 million who already live here.  Half of these new Latinos are immigrants, both legal and undocumented, and the other half are babies born here and given names like Jose, Alejandra, Miguel and Erika. This—immigration and high birth rate among Hispanics, has already made Hispanics  the majority in cities like Miami and Los Angeles. Hispanics will be a majority in Texas and California within three decades, and by 2125 there will be more Hispanics than whites in the United States.

We will not live to see it, but this demographic transformation appears to be unstoppable and will have enormous consequences.  For example, the United States is already the country with the second largest number of Spanish speakers (after Mexico.)  More people speak Spanish (or Spanglish) here than in Spain, Argentina or Colombia.

It therefore comes as no surprise that some of the Spanish-language radio and television programs in cities such as Houston, Dallas, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York (just to name a few) have a larger audience share than the English-language programming. Who would have thought this could be possible 50 years ago, when on June 9, 1955, Channel 41, the first Spanish-language television station in the United States was founded here in San Antonio?  Twenty-five years before CNN went on the air, it was a tiny television station in south Texas that started the real media revolution in this country.

Against this backdrop of constant expansion and growing (and visible) Latino power, it no longer seems so farfetched to envision the election of the first Hispanic president, or that the United States will become, city by city, a bilingual nation.

The giant has jumped out of bed and is touching everything he sees.