The Latino daily – Your Wednesday morning brief

Yesterday, Atlanta Braves manager Freddi Gonzalez was fired by the Braves front office. He was the only Latino MLB manager, so now there are no Latino managers in major league baseball. The Braves have a dismal 9-28 record under Gonzalez. The parting, though, was awkward. Gonzalez received an email telling him he had a flight to Atlanta on Tuesday, but his team is playing a series in Pittsburg until Thursday. Ouch.

WEDNESDAY, May 18, 2016

Good morning Taquistas!

I woke up with my head buzzing with statistics. I’ve spent the last few days pouring over a set of Latino consumer numbers, thanks in great part to Latino daily subscriber Ana Valdez. She sent me a study done by Morgan Stanley about the impact of the growth of the U.S. Latino wallet (spending power). It’s pithy. Half of the growth between now and 2020 will be because of Latinos. So it’s no wonder that folks like Morgan Stanley are looking our way, poking around how we spend our money, where, and why. Being Morgan Staley, the numbers are supposed to tell the wisest among us what stocks to buy, given the trends. And that’s all good. I like the numbers because they tell stories.

I’ll be posting what I’ve found in the stacks of statistics on your daily brief in the next few days. I’ll start today with healthcare . . .

►Wednesday’s numbers

37 – The percentage of growth in U.S. Latino healthcare expenditures between 2013 and 2014.

2,631 – The average yearly amount, in dollars, of U.S. Latino expenditures on healthcare.

4,379 – The overall average yearly amount, in dollars, of expenditures on healthcare.

40 – The percentage difference between the U.S. Latino and the overall average yearly expenditures on healthcare.

48.6 – The percentage of U.S. Latinos who prefer using alternative medicine.

39.8 – The percentage of the overall U.S. population who prefer alternative medicine.

66.9 – The percentage of the U.S. Latino population who visited a physician in the last 12 months.

77.9 – The percentage of the overall U.S. population who visited a physician in the last 12 months.

20 – The percentage difference in age between the U.S. Latino (31 years) and the overall average population (38.6 years).

Source: Morgan Stanley
►There were primary elections yesterday . . .

. . . in Kentucky and Oregon.

But before I mention who won or lost, let’s look at how many Latinos there are in each state (according to the Pew Research Center):

Kentucky: 3.3 percent of the population is Latino (about 145,000), that’s about 1.5 percent of the eligible voters. 33.6 percent of Kentucky Latinos can vote.

Oregon: 12.5 percent of Oregonians are Latino (496,000), about 6.4 percent of the eligible voters. 37.7 percent of them are eligible to vote.

So it’s not like Latinos in these states held sway. Right?

Although, in Kentucky, where Hillary Clinton won by a paper-thin margin, Latinos could have made a difference.

Check it out: there are 49,000 eligible Latino voters in Kentucky, and with 99 percent of the votes counted, Hillary won by 1,923 votes.

A friend who recently visited Kentucky tells me that there is part of the city of Lexington that’s called Mexington, because there’re so many Latinos there. I’m just saying . . .

In Oregon, Bernie Sanders won by a large margin – 43,208 votes. And yet, there are 187,000 eligible Latino voters there.

See what I see?
►Still, the candidates have been spending their time courting the obvious Latino voters.

Yesterday Bill Clinton was in Puerto Rico, campaigning for his better half. The reports are a little underwhelming.

Fox News Latino called the visit low-keyed, saying the former president said little that hadn’t been said before.

Bernie Sanders was in Puerto Rico on Monday. Fox drew a comparison:

“The big difference was the depth of the senator’s speeches. Sanders proposed new ideas and discussed the thorniest questions, referring to the ‘colonial’ attitude of the United States toward Puerto Rico, and demanding that Obama release the ‘political prisoner’ Oscar Lopez Rivera.

“Clinton to the contrary limited himself to brief addresses with references to past work his wife has done on behalf of Puerto Rican interests, and more general statements like ‘she believes that the United States has failed to provide truly equal and adequate treatment to the people of Puerto Rico.’”

Quote of the day

“The best way to respond to xenophobic, or racist, or uninformed positions is with information, not with adjectives.”

-Mexican Foreign Minister Claudia Ruiz Massieu, quoted by columnist Andres Oppoenheimer. The Mexican government will launch a U.S. public relations campaign in early June to counter the remarks made by GOP presidential presumptive nominee Donald Trump. Also, a group of Mexican-American businesspeople is preparing to launch a lobbying group named American Mexico Public Affairs Committee, modeled after the pro-Israel AIPAC and other influential Washington lobbying groups.

►“Illegal alien” lost a battle of definition in Congress . . .

. . . by a 25-24 vote in the Appropriations Committee.

The fight started last fall when Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) and others sent a letter to the committee asking that the “illegal Alien” term be removed from official U.S. regulations, laws and documents. In March the Libray of Congress decided it would remove the term from its headings and subjects.

That was too much for GOP Representatives who took the matter to a vote in committee as part of a spending bill. The measure was introduced by Rep. Diane Balack (R-TN) in April.

Castro says the term is outdated “and that the government’s continued use of it puts it behind the American public, which increasingly has abandoned it.”

The GOP sees the fight against the term as a battle for “political correctness.”

But it occurs to me, if “illegal alien” is a codified term, then isn’t it politically correct?

►On to other things.

It’s been 62 years since Brown v Board of Education ended segregation in U.S. public schools (69 years since Mendez v Westminster brought the issue to legal light).

But things aren’t much better than they were in 1947. According to a Huffington Post report:

“The Government Accountability Office released its report on Tuesday, the 62nd anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. The study is the result of a 2014 request from Reps. Robert Scott (D-Va.), John Conyers (D-Mich.) and former Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.). They wanted to learn more about the extent to which racial and economic segregation is impacting the nation’s schools.

“The GAO — a nonpartisan agency designed to provide Congress with oversight — found that schools have become increasingly racially isolated for both black and Latino students. And these institutions also routinely fail to provide students of color with the same resources given to their white counterparts.”

The segregation is new, it’s a backslide form progress made in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s.

The problem is greater for Latinos – “Latino students in these schools sometimes face ‘triple segregation,’ facing barriers not only associated with racial isolation and poverty, but also with learning a new language. And the number of schools facing the worst rates of racial isolation — where 90 to 100 percent of students are black or Latino and low-income — has grown by 143 percent since 2001.”

President Obama has talked about a renewed commitment to school desegregation, but so far there’s been no noticeable action.
►And I’ll end with this . . .

The summer music festival season is upon us. And that’s great if you like summer music festivals. And if you’re a Latino millennial you may like them more than your peers. At least, that’s what Nielsen says, and it’s their business to know things like this.

This is from IQ magazine: “Nielsen found that nearly half (45%) of US festivalgoers are millennials – that is, those born roughly between 1981 and 1997 – and that attendees are 51% more likely to be Hispanic.”

We like live music. And apparently we also like craft beer – “US festivalgoers are 38% more likely to drink craft beer than the average music listener, and also count domestically produced wine, vodka, tequila and rum among their tipples of choice.”

Which festivals are we talking about? Think Lollapalooza, Coachella, Bonnaroo. Haven’t heard of them? That’s OK, 48 percent of people surveyed hadn’t heard of Lollapalooza, 64 percent knew nothing about Coachella, and 79 percent were clueless about Bonnaroo. (For the record, I knew about the first two. What’s a Bonnaroo?)

Craft beer drinking Latino millennials know all about them. So there you go.

Haz el bien sin mirar a quien.

Have a great day!