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I am Latino

Editorial Latino demographics sliced, diced, and spiced.

Are you feeling probed, measured, counted, surveyed and quantified lately?

You should be.

It seems that interest has never been higher in who Latinos are, how many there are, their ages, what type of businesses they own or work for, and
what they do, buy, eat, drink, play, marry, matriculate, like and dislike.

Funny, used to be that nobody cared about all that. The images of Latinos mirrored in U.S. society I most remember were of Mexican and other
Latino caricatures taking siestas under cactuses or palm trees.

That was before the 2000 U.S. Census count of Latinos woke up everybody - from marketers to businesses to media - that a sleeping gigante, in
terms of population and buying power, was awaking.

These realizations came to me this week as I waded through the growing slush pile on my desk of studies, survey results, polls and media reports about
Latinos.

These info bites slice, dice and spice the demographics of Latinos, local and national. They come from the pages and statistics of Scarborough
Research; the SRP Hispanic Business Study; DATOS 2005 (a collaboration between the Arizona Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and the Salt River
Project); Yankelovich MONITOR Multicultural Marketing Study 2005; Phoenix-based Behavior Research CenterÕs Rocky Mountain Poll; and others. 

 I have taken these bits and cast them in the literary style that is a tribute to the Chicano poetry opus/manifesto I am Joaquin, by the activist Rodolfo
"Corky" Gonzales, who died on April 12 of this year. And my brother Corky knows I would never disrespect him.

I am Latino.
Rescued from a past of confusion and lost identity,
revered, caught up in a flattering whirl of capitalism, marketers and media.
Where I see brown they see green.
I am acculturated, assimilated, segmented, inter-culturated and targeted.
In a new dawn I rise to turn the tide
of economic battle and the struggle
of cultural survival.

I am the  New Lifer,
a proud foreign-born Spanish-speaker
here eight years.
My hijos y hijas are the Second Generation,
transplants slowly
forgetting the mother tongue
and in whose hearts beat a new corazon.
But who remain the blood, the image of myself.

I am the Pioneer, with a mean age of 65
and an annual household income
of $50,000. I toil, live and die
in the great urban pueblos. You too would
attain a mean age had you worked as hard
as I all your life, with not much to show for it.

I am the Settled In.  Mostly U.S. born,
age 43, with a household income of $68,000
that may  rise to $100,000.
I prefer English, the language of acculturation.

I am the Young American, born here,
average age of 26,
raking in a household income of $60,000.
I ride the waves of the Internet, a consumer
growing in strength.
These music CDs, movies, TV shows belong to me.
To buy them is my birthright.

I am Latina.
I am bilingual and make the buying
decisions for my family.
My grandmothers were the black-shawled women, faithful, strong-willed, who paved
the path of my liberation
to enter the workforce in swelling numbers.
I am soccer mom by day and Salma Hayek by night.
I spent $6.6 billion on retail apparel last year.
I am the goddess Tonatzin, the Virgen de Guadalupe, Cristina, and Martha Stewart reincarnated
with a credit card.

I am Latino.
Praise and flattery are my new burdens.
I must kill new stereotypes to live.
I must dispel misconceptions that I
speak only Spanish and am forever a campesino.

I must dare to face the tyranny of political coyotes
that  profit from me
by hypocrisy and manipulated statistics
that tell the truth of their motivations,
yet say not one truth about my reality.

I am Latino, who bleeds in ways not measurable.
Now the trumpet sounds the Revolution,
and my people stir like a hidden jaguar 
slowly rearing its head.