The Census, English, Spanish And The New U.S. Latino

What’s the U.S. going to look like when young Latinos who are primarily English-speaking but also speak Spanish to their abuelitas and work hard to preserve their latinidad are running the country? I was thinking about the repercussions the Census would have for my generation and the generations of Latinos younger than myself recently. More than ever, the future of the United States rests in the hands of pochos — or Latinos and Latinas who feel like they belong to two cultures, both the U.S. and a Latino nation — and I believe that means our country will be a more culturally rich nation.

Young Latinos like myself are so Americanized that the changes will not be so large as to take us in an entirely new direction. Rather, in the face of a growing and changing global society, I believe the cultural changes as Latinos begin to step into leadership roles in the U.S. will enhance our society with different perspective so as to make us more competitive in the global marketplace.

New Latinos don’t necessarily speak Spanish well, which isn’t to say they don’t like having Spanish around in their everyday lives, but they operate primarily in an English world. Marketing and cultural expectations for Latinos are going to have to change. Those ads you see that advertise towards “Hispanic markets” that are in Spanish are going to run out of an audience soon because most of this $1 trillion market is either bilingual or English dominant.

So it ends up being the same thing I wrote about before: as Latinos become more tightly wound into the fabric of U.S. culture, they become more Americanized, yet “American culture” becomes Latinized. Young Latinos like myself are the future of this country, and if you take a look at us, it’s not that scary.

I speak English 90% of the time, most of the music I listen to is in English, the books and movies I watch are mostly in English (and American, for that matter), I am more apt to celebrate the Fourth of July than 16 de septiembre (albeit I’m not much of an independence celebrator either way), just to name a few examples. Yet, I’m more likely to have tacos for breakfast than cereal, I prefer chile over ketchup any day, I pronounce my name in Spanish, I speak Spanish to relatives and close friends, I cover my home with La Virgen de Guadalupe and when asked the ever-irrelevant “What are you?” question, I always respond by saying I’m Latina (or some variation of that, for example: My family is from Mexico.)

There it is. For my generation the Census is a roadmap to what the future will look like by the time we start careers, go on to higher education, purchase homes, have children and start businesses. I, for one, am excited to see what I believe will be a vibrant and hopeful American generation take the reins from a generation so different from themselves. So if you really think about it, the Census is telling us that the future of the U.S. is going to be pretty much the same as it is now, except perhaps with a few more accent marks.

Follow Sara Inés Calderón on Twitter @SaraChicaD