Latino Post-Millennials Create America’s Future

The 2016 Republican presidential campaign has been based on an overtly anti–Mexican immigrant nativist message, another round in the universalistic versus nativist conflict over the definition of American. Nationally, Latinos exhibit the strong work ethic, avoidance of welfare, positive health outcomes, and long life expectancy of Latinos in California. In the post-millennial generation in the top eleven Latino market areas, Latino presence ranges from being a large majority to being the largest plurality. Latino post-millennials will be instrumental in creating the twenty-first-century definition of American.

Creating a Regional American Identity

For over 150 years, Latinos have not assimilated and disappeared the way European immigrant groups have, but they have not remained isolated and untouched by Atlantic-American society around them. Instead, Latinos have been quietly creating a regional variant of American society and identity, one that is in the process of becoming as distinctive a way of being American as is the Texan regional identity.

Washington Defines a New Nativism

Latinos were categorized by new nativists as a dysfunctional urban underclass minority group that led a lifestyle sharply at odds with the accepted American values-based lifestyle: unemployed and not seeking work, dependent on welfare, families broken, and suffering from major health problems. However, data from 1940 to 2000 showed that, compared to other racial and ethnic groups, Latinos have consistently had the strongest work ethic, lowest use of welfare, highest rate of business establishment, strongest families, and unexpectedly good health outcomes, such as the longest life expectancy.

Latinos Reject America’s Definition

The Chicano Generation, largely the grandchildren of refugees who fled the Mexican Revolution from 1910 to 1930, came of age in the 1960s and 1970s and rejected the nativist definition of Latinos by consciously embracing their Mexican and Latin American cultural heritage. When they traveled to Mexico, however, they discovered they were considered to be American rather than Mexican, and they often wound up feeling that they did not truly belong to either identity. New immigrants from Mexico and Latin America arrived and settled in without placing much attention on their cultural heritage.

Latinos Define “American”

Non-Hispanic white focus-group participants rejected their parents’ Anglo-Saxon nativist definition of American and used the new nativist definition, one based on work ethic, rejection of welfare, strong families, and patriotism. In the aftermath of the pro-Proposition 187 messaging, they felt that Latinos were poor because they lacked ambition and were unpatriotic because they spoke Spanish—and hence might not be truly American. Both US-born and immigrant Latino focus-group participants felt that they were fully American, but they were aware that many non-Latinos did not think that they were, indeed, fully American.

Latino Post-Millennials

Latinos make up over fifty percent of the post-millennial generation in California. Their formative experience is very different from that of non-Hispanic white post-millennials, who are the highly educated children of the highly educated baby boom and generation X parents. Latino post-millennials may be characterized as being largely the US-born, highly educated, bilingual children of immigrant parents, who have lived all their lives constantly targeted by nativist, anti-Latino rhetoric. These young Latinos are flocking to college campuses, and as they enter the labor force, their productivity will drive the state’s economy.

Times of Crisis

In the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles civil disturbances, nativists blamed “illegal immigrants” for California’s many woes, and they successfully convinced the state’s electorate to approve Proposition 187, a broadly worded initiative that would deny public services, including education, to undocumented immigrants, US-born children of undocumented immigrants, and persons suspected of being undocumented immigrants. The initiative’s passage stung Latinos into action: US-born Latinos registered to vote—and immigrant Latinos naturalized—in unprecedented numbers. By the end of the decade, an enraged Latino electorate had found its voice, and Latino voters increasingly held sway at the ballot box.

Latinos Define Latinos

The rapid growth of Latinos from 1965 to 2000 was driven at first by immigration and then by birthrate. Latinos became the majority population in many towns, cities, and counties of the state. Latino growth as a market captured the attention of many businesses, which advertised openly in Spanish and tailored their goods, products, and services to the tastes of the Latino market. Increasingly, Latinos began to define Latinos, rather than be defined by non-Latinos.

America Defines Latinos

From the Gold Rush to World War II, Latinos have considered themselves to be American by virtue of their belief in and support of the universalistic ideals of equality, freedom, and democracy. During that same period, nativists have refused to consider Latinos as Americans because they were not members of the core national ethnic group: white, English-speaking Anglo-Saxon Protestants. These two competing definitions of American—universalistic versus nativist—have clashed repeatedly in the political arena.