Latino Boom: Everything You Need to Know to Grow Your Business in the U.S. Hispanic Market Paperback - 2007

Excerpt

EVERY DOG HAS HIS DAY

Before we talk about the business opportunity behind the growing Hispanic market, I think some historical context is necessary. Throughout this book you will hear me talk about the strong bond Latinos have with the Spanish language and Hispanic “culture.” People often say that to know a language is to know the culture of the people who speak it. But to fully understand the Hispanic culture of Latinos living in the United States, one must also realize that this “culture” is also shaped by the historical and political relationship of Spain with its Latin American brethren. So, allow me first to take you through a quick review of the history of Spain in Latin America, and how the politics and beliefs of the Spanish empire have come to influence many aspects of today’s Hispanic culture, including some very deep-rooted issues of race and class. Once we have briefly explored the historical baggage all Latinos carry from Spain, I’ll bring the focus back to the unique and more modern history of Latinos in the United States.

POLITICS AND ISSUES OF RACE AND CLASS

Talking about Latinos and politics is unavoidable these days. Not only was the Latino vote a “must-win” in the past presidential election, in several key battleground states how Latinos voted actually decided who ultimately won the 2004 presidential election. Democrats are still reeling from the results, but the fault does not lie entirely with John Kerry’s campaign. It is clearly part of the larger problem the Democratic Party has to face, which is that the party has lost touch with its power base. Latinos have traditionally been at the heart of the Democratic Party’s power base. That is why historically the majority of Latinos have been affiliated with and voted for the candidates of the Democratic Party. But as you will see in the following chapters, Hispanics also tend to be more socially conservative in their views on politics and religion, especially if they are foreign-born and Catholic. Realizing that they could appeal both to the conservative side of older and foreign-born Latinos, the Republican Party has been impressively effective in gaining political ground with the Latino community. It has also been able to appeal to the younger generation of Hispanics that are born in the United States and are quickly climbing the economic ladder.

Which party does a better job of attracting the Latino vote will continue to be very important because of the tremendous rate at which this population is growing. According to political researchers, about 750,000 Hispanics will become eligible to vote each year over the next twenty years, so the political impact of the Latino community in the United States is undeniable. Now, to better understand the perspective U.S. Hispanics have on politics and issues of race and class, one must go back to the history of Spain and its colonization of the New World. For those of you who are Latinophiles, in my opinion the best book to read on this subject is The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World, which was written in 1992 by the renowned Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes to commemorate the quincentennial of

the discovery of the Americas. In it Fuentes brilliantly uncovers the historical-political connections between Spain, Latin America, and the United States in “search of a cultural continuity that can inform and transcend the economic and political disunity and fragmentation of the Hispanic world.” According to Fuentes, in spite of all the political and economic crises that have rocked Latin America throughout the centuries, the one thing that all Spanish-speaking people share is their cultural heritage.

What most people do not realize is that the same year that Christopher Columbus “discovered” the Americas in the name of the Spanish empire, Spain itself was undergoing its most significant political and religious transformation. After eight centuries of Muslim occupation, in 1492 the kingdoms of Aragón and Castile were united through the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella. Together their armies were finally able to defeat the Moors in Granada, the last bastion of Muslim military resistance in southern Spain. With the expulsion of the Moors, the Spanish crown began an era of ethnic and religious cleansing that would shape the culture of the Spanish empire for centuries to come. Soon after the defeat of the Moors, attention was focused on the expulsion of the other entrenched culture of Spain: the Jews. That’s right. For eight centuries, the Jews, Muslims, and Catholics coexisted in Spain, a country that is approximately the size of Texas. (Perhaps historians should examine that period more closely to see if they can find answers to the problems we are facing in the Arab and Jewish world today.) But as the new Catholic kings desperately tried to consolidate power in their fractured country, they decided that their “unity” would be based on achieving both religious and racial purity. As a result, the Jews were also forced to leave the country or convert to Catholicism. Many historians agree today that the expulsion of the Jews was one of the biggest mistakes the Spanish kings made, since the Jews were the only ones in the Spanish kingdom that had the necessary experience and knowledge in commerce and finance to keep the Spanish empire thriving.

So in one crucial year, 1492, the Spanish went from being politically divided to being united under one kingdom, from having different languages and laws for each kingdom to having Castilian be the official language of all of Spain, and to bringing back the old Roman law. And finally, after 800 years of coexistence, the expulsion of the Muslims and the Jews may have achieved the religious purity the king desired, but it also drained the intellectual, scientific, and business classes of Spain at the worst possible time: the emergence of Spain as a world power. This was the political backdrop of the discovery of the Americas. Why is this important? Because this political and religious transformation of Spain would forever mark, or should I say scar, the colonization of the New World and therefore influence the “Hispanic culture” inherited by Latinos in the United States today.

The Spanish conquistadores who came to the Americas were often the sons of noblemen who were not going to inherit titles, lands, or fortune in Spain, so they ventured to the New World in search of new riches and titles. They were not alone, of course. With them came religious missionaries, military personnel, and seamen whose only desire was to get rich in their New World adventures. But the base of political power always remained in Spain. For more than 300 years all the decisions on how to settle, govern, and exploit the New World came directly from the Spanish court in Madrid, subjugating both the colonizers and the colonized to a higher power: that of the king of Spain and through him, of course, God. So, from the very beginning, class issues permeated the colonization of the Americas. Unfortunately, these class issues still remain today, with 90 percent of the political and economic power still concentrated in the hands of 10 percent of the population, who more often than not are the direct descendants of light-skinned Spaniards or other European colonizers.

In terms of race, Latinos have a colorful and seemingly contradictory history. Although Spaniards participated in the slave trade, it was a Spanish slave owner turned missionary who, as early as 1524, became the strongest advocate for the rights of Indians. Bartolomé de las Casas successfully convinced the Spanish crown to recognize that African slaves and American indigenous peoples had a “soul” and therefore demanded that the Holy Roman Catholic empire of Spain grant them human rights. As a result, the Spanish government recognized the rights of Indians for the first time in 1542, when the Law of the Indies was enacted. The mixing of races that ensued created the many beautiful shades of brown that now exist in Latin America. This mixture of races was once lauded as “the cosmic race” by the great Mexican writer and intellectual Jose Vasconcelos. Nevertheless, as Fuentes says in The Buried Mirror, the Spanish obsession with racial purity was also demonstrated by the often insulting terms used to “classify” the mixing of racial groups that went on in the New World. At the top of the list are, of course, the criollos or Creoles, the descendants of Europeans who were born in the New World. Although criollos were usually not racially mixed, they were deemed as “less than” by Spaniards since they would never have the power of the peninsular Spaniards and other Caucasian Europeans, and therefore needed to be classified differently. “The mestizo was the child of a white and an Indian,” says Fuentes. “The mulato (the offensive name was derived from the Spanish word for mule) was the child of a black and a white. The zambo was the offspring of an Indian and a black.” The terms go on and on, getting more offensive at each turn. However, although these terms were created to keep track of the racial purity of Latin Americans, in Hispanic culture “discrimination” is more pervasive than racism. Five hundred years of intermarriage and racial mixture in Latin America have created a “brown” skin tone that for many Hispanics no longer has any kind of racial implication. It’s simply part of what makes Latinos beautiful. However, when Hispanics come to the United States, they are confronted with America’s racist baggage. The obsession with race in this country turns even the simplest acts of life—getting a driver’s license or registering your kids in school—into a black versus white paradigm that is difficult for Hispanics to understand. That is why—as you will see in chapter 5—Hispanics defy the “racial” categorizations that the U.S. government tries to impose on them, opting to embrace their “ethnic” or Hispanic identity instead.

REACHING CRITICAL MASS

Fast-forward now to the year 2000 when the press touted the crossover success of Ricky Martin, Jennifer Lopez, and Marc Anthony as a “Latin Explosion,” as if Latinos had never been “visible” to the majority of Americans before. The truth is that we’ve been around for a while. In 1985, when I was fresh out of college, everyone was calling the eighties the “decade of the Hispanic,” but nothing ever came of it, mainly because the Hispanic population hadn’t reached “critical mass.” Well, now, after more than 150 years of being part of the rich cultural landscape of the United States, Latinos have finally become part of the so-called “mainstream.” Although Latinos are not necessarily assimilating into the big American melting pot as past immigrant groups have, they are certainly affecting and shaping the mainstream in ways that nobody could have ever imagined only a few years ago.

Already today in America national sales of Mexican salsa and corn or flour tortillas outpace that of ketchup and white bread. Clearly the influence of Latinos on mainstream America can no longer be denied. But before we get into what that really means, let’s take a short trip back in modern history to better understand how current perceptions and stereotypes of the Latino community have been formed over the years.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF LATINOS IN THE UNITED STATES

Several years ago, Gregory Rodriguez, a senior fellow at the New American Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy institute, wrote an essay for The New York Times in which he discussed the reasons behind the lack of integration of Latinos in the United States. “While Latinos have been an integral part of the American cultural landscape since the mid-nineteenth century, only now are they beginning to gain the broad social acceptance that other groups experienced within a few generations of arriving in America. Having reached critical mass, Latinos are asserting their ethnicity more confidently than ever before. On one hand, large numbers, air travel, and the reach of global media have made the Spanish language and Latin American styles and norms far more visible on this side of the border. On the other, their growing demographic presence is propelling American-born Latino political and cultural figures into the English-speaking mainstream.

Historically speaking, the first sizable group of Latinos to become “Americans” did so through the conquest and annexation of the American Southwest in 1848. “So the first image of Latino Americans was one of defeated foreigners,” says Rodriguez. “Then mass Anglo-American migration to the West turned the native Spanish-speaking population into a marginalized minority whose ‘Americanness’ would be challenged well into the next century.”

All immigrants to the United States have had to face prejudice after their arrival but, according to Rodriguez, Latino Americans have had to endure wave after wave of anti-Latino sentiment. “Because Mexican labor has been recruited into the United States during boom times and expelled during busts, native-born Mexican Americans have suffered the fallout from campaigns ostensibly aimed at their foreign-born cousins. In the 1930s, the fear that Mexicans were taking jobs from ‘real’ Americans led to the deportation of more than one million people,” he adds. Some scholars now believe that up to 60 percent of those “Mexicans” forced to leave were actually American citizens.

As a result of these strong and continuous waves of anti-Latino sentiment, Rodriguez says that many Latino immigrants, especially Mexicans, were forced to conceal their cultural heritage in order to get ahead. For decades, it was not uncommon for Latinos to claim to be of Italian or Spanish descent in order to avoid hostility while living in the United States.

DON’T CRY FOR ME, PUERTO RICO

Not many people realize that the island of Puerto Rico had been a military possession of the United States since 1898, when Spain ceded its colony to the American government at the conclusion of the Spanish-American War. However, Puerto Ricans were not given American citizenship until 1917, in part because the U.S. government was desperate to find workers who could help with the construction of the Panama Canal. From the Great Depression through World War II, Puerto Ricans came to the United States in droves, all of them in search of a better life as new citizens of this great country. After World War II, and encouraged by the U.S. government’s “Operation Bootstrap,” more than 1 million Puerto Ricans came to New York, quickly becoming the backbone of the city’s manufacturing workforce.

In the late forties a strong movement toward independence from the United States was growing on the island of Puerto Rico. The U.S. government did not pay too much attention to this movement until 1950, when two men who claimed to be Puerto Rican “independentistas” assaulted the White House in a vain attempt to assassinate President Truman. What ensued was a political debate that tried to appease both sides and ended up creating a unique political status for the island: the commonwealth, which is neither a state of the union nor a military possession.


From the Hardcover edition.

Media reviews

Advance praise for Latino Boom!

“A must read for those looking to seriously understand the dynamics of the U.S. Hispanic market. Cartagena provides an excellent foundation for grasping the opportunities inherent in this important consumer segment.”
–Sonia Maria Green, director, diversity marketing and sales, General Motors

“Chiqui Cartagena serves as the ideal guide, peppering hard facts with personal anecdotes that truly bring the U.S. Hispanic market to life. Her unbiased, media-agnostic approach to the Latino Boom fully reflects the mosaic of Hispanic identities that make up this market. Bravo, Chiqui!”
–Peter E. Blacker, vice president, multicultural & international, AOL Media Networks

“A book that every marketer in the United States should read. Every multicultural ad agency should give this book as a gift to its clients, and have their own account and media executives in training read it.”
–Manuel E. Machado, CEO/co-chairman, Machado/Garcia-Serra-Publicidad; chairman, Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies, 2004-05

“I have a very short list of must reads, and Latino Boom! is now the newest and best ‘bible’ on Hispanic marketing. I will gladly recommend the book to all senior management at MTV Networks!”
–Lucia Ballas-Traynor, senior vice president, General Manager, MTV Español & VHUno

“The U.S. Hispanic market has evolved over the last twenty years into the backbone of the mainstream market in the U.S.A. Understanding how the market has grown, its importance, the nuance, and how to effectively reach Hispanic consumers is the foundation for Chiqui Cartagena’s book. Bravo! for helping those interested in the Latino Boom.”
–Eugenio (Gene) Bryan, CEO, HispanicAd.com

“Cartagena has blended data and real-life experience in a very readable, enjoyable manner. The ‘10 mistakes to avoid’ are a great ‘cheat sheet’ and could serve as a quick executive presentation on how to start a Hispanic marketing campaign. What a great tool for organizing my strategy and developing my execution plan.”
–Ed Miller, director, Verizon Communications


From the Hardcover edition.