Mexican-American Birth Rate Is Not News To Mexican-Americans
There’s a lot of navel-gazing going on about the birth rate among Mexican-Americans.
Ever since the Pew Hispanic Center released it’s study that says that, for the first time ever and over the past 10 years, there were more Mexican-American births than there were Mexican immigrants in the U.S. there’s been something akin to a mini frenzy of speculation and introspection.
It’s a very dynamic situation.
There’s been less immigration from Mexico over the past decade and a large chunk of the Mexican-American community is at a ripe child bearing age. Add to that the fact that white women have an average of 1.8 kids while Latinas have 2.4 and the numbers begin to make logical sense.
Marketers, as you’d expect, are leading the wave of expectation; the $1.2 trillion spending group just got more predictable. The question they ask themselves is whether to sell to these specific consumers in English or Spanish. It’s a big deal to them.
It’s also a big deal to politicians. These are native born kids we’re talking about and they’ll soon be of voting age. Suddenly their concerns and point of view are valuable because they can be turned into votes, and votes assure staying power.
Educators may be the least affected, not because they don’t care, but because the increase in native-born Latinos changes very little. We already know that Latino students lag an average of 2 years behind their white classmates – that lag doesn’t see native or immigrant, it just reflects the state of Latinos in schools. Immigrant kids have specific language needs but overall the needs of all Latino school kids are a major concern for the nation’s future.
It all comes down to the things we’ve been talking about at News Taco. Latinos represent the biggest slice of the future U.S. workforce – they’ll be doing the work that sustains the economy, making the salaries that buy the goods, paying taxes and contributing to Social Security. But they’ll be changing America in other ways as well.
Latinos are quickly changing the way America thinks of itself; the way it sounds, the food it eats, the languages it speaks and words it adds to American English. Mexican-Americans will be the leading force of those Latino-induced changes, not so much immigrant Latinos, or at least not as much as we once thought.
What I find refreshingly peculiar is that there’s little speculation or navel-gazing coming from Latinos or Mexican-Americans themselves. And it’s not because of a lack of caring, it’s just that we seem to be too busy having and raising babies. Think about it; it’s not our petri dish, it’s not an experiment that we should observe. It’s what comes naturally – the the being born, the living, the working, the getting old.
So if marketers and social scientists and demographers and politicians want to speculate, I say have at it. While they’re busy trying to figure it out Mexican-Americans will be busy making it happen.
Follow Victor Landa on Twitter: @vlanda
[Photo by Herkie]
