There was a mistake in the syllabus.
The article by Portes on the New Latin nation is the last article of the semester.
I have always found this article insightful, even more so now, more than when Huntington was alive. With the recent elections in the US and Trump spreading fear, the so called “Hispanic Challenge” has made it to the White House.
This article, unlike many, give a short, but I would say well thought out introduction into Latin American migrations to the US. This is not the main goal of the article, but we get some context into the nature of immigrants, and now second and third generations (citizens).
I think the article made some interesting comments on ethnicity, education, the rise of transnational communities, and also on downward assimilation.
The line from a bureaucratic box to conceptualizing Hispanic as a ‘race’ is very disturbing, although not new since all “races” are social products. Yet, it is very interesting how things such as these evolve through time, and just as interesting, how they are adopted by the target population, which had nothing to do with coining the term (other names such as ‘Indian’ and ‘African-American’ come to mind).
As far as divisions into how second generations grow-up, much has to do with legal status as much as it does with a parent’s education. As the author notes, second and third generation Cuban-Americans have the highest success rate of the Latino populations in the US. This has to do with how much their parents excelled both in education and the workforce, but just as much, I would say it is the fact that Cubans can become permanent residents, and later citizens much easier than other migrant groups. Mexican migrants on the other hand, have the most difficulty in accessing a legal status that would make opportunities such as access to different educational avenues and/or employment opportunities available.
The most important thing that I took from this article however, was a fact-based analysis that demonstrates that pigeonholing populations based on prejudice does not hold-up to reality. Whether it is Huntington, or now Trump, Latino/a populations for the most part positively contribute to a society, which at many times acts as if it did not need them.
What do you think?