The United States has received numerous immigrants from Hispanic America for the past two decades. They have joined millions with a similar ancestry who either arrived earlier or resided in the territories taken from Spain and Mexico in the nineteenth century. The recent immigration’s particular impact on U.S. society, however, has led bureaucrats and sociologists to call these immigrants Latinos, especially for statistical and analytical purposes. This definition groups both natives and immigrants almost solely by their use of Spanish as their primary language, omitting their cultural diversity and creating expectations and misunderstandings of their social performance.
The demographic and economic importance of this minority is seen in the 1990 census, which finds that more than 22 million Americans fit this definition. They have a buying power of more than 140 billion dollars annually, and they account for 30 percent of the nation’s population growth. Most Latinos can trace their origins to Mexico (64 percent), Puerto Rico (10 percent), or Cuba (5 percent); but 21 percent call home any of the other 16 Spanish-speaking American nations. Yet the encompassing term Latino leads to a perception that they are a single, “strong” minority group searching for empowerment and the American dream, and to comparison with Afro-Americans, Poles, Irish, or Jews. Latinos, however, are a creation of the United States, and are still in the process of formation and organization. Racial, national, linguistic, and class discrepancies—medullar to their cultural baggage—divide them.
These are fundamental barriers to their economic and political empowerment that are not explicitly discussed in the two volumes under review here. These works draw attention to Latinos’ urban economic experience of the last two decades and to their struggles in U.S. industrial society; better-paying jobs attracted most Latino immigrants to the nation’s large industrial metropolises. The two texts differ, however, in their methodology and subject matter.
Rebecca Morales and Frank Bonilla have collected ten essays of varying complexity and quality, mostly by Latino scholars, that analyze how the barriers erected by international and national forces are changing the U.S. economic scene and thereby affecting Latinos in their struggle for political and economic empowerment in the urban setting. After presenting a national and chronological view in the first two essays, the book approaches a regional perspective through five case studies of industrial problems affecting Latinos in New York, Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, and San Antonio. The first three of these are excellent. The five studies as a whole reveal the widening gap between Latinos (male and female) and their Afro-American and “Anglo-white” counterparts. It is interesting that the subjects studied can be considered proletarians; that is, workers at the bottom of the economic scale, living under difficult conditions. The last three case studies present theoretical analyses of Latino employment and the environmental paradox of metropolitan areas. The text might be useful for social scientists and all those interested in the Latino phenomenon of U.S. cities, but it is not a book for general readership.
The book by Beatrice Rodríguez Owsley is the result of oral interviews with Hispanic American immigrants who have had successful careers in the New Orleans business community. It opens with an interesting brief introduction on Latinos’ historical role in the formation and early growth of this Southern city, and continues with 17 short autobiographies, along with photos, of the current subjects, both men and women. These Latinos and those in the Morales-Bonilla text differ in several ways. Most of those interviewed in New Orleans are Cubans or Central Anericans, seemingly the largest national Latino groups in the city. Also, most are members of well-to-do Hispanic families, with an above-average education and a good knowledge of English, advantages that have allowed them to adapt rapidly to their new cultural environment. In the words of one, blond and blue-eyed, he had arrived to change his culture, and “I now think of myself as 100 percent American, not Ecuadoran” (p. 52).
This study is not representative of the typical Latino immigrant and does not fit the images discussed above. Nevertheless, it incorporates interesting views on adaptation, entrepreneurship, and cultural preservation. It can be useful for describing Latinos who have techniques to solve some of the problems of their communities, and it presents another method for analyzing the Latino subculture in progress. Both these books make good contributions to our understanding of Latinos in the United States and provide analytical tools to examine their particular presence in urban America.
