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"Tim" Cisneros grew up in an intensely Mexican American family in San
Antonio. His brother, Henry, grew up to become the city's first Latino mayor in
recent history. Now an architect in Houston, Tim is married to a woman who is
also Mexican American. For most of his life he's viewed himself, and his
experience as an American, through the prism of his ethnic identity. He's
Latino, and proud of it. But Cisneros doesn't expect that his three children
will be nearly "as Latino" as he and his wife. In their old tree-lined
neighborhood close by Houston's high-rise towers, his kids live and go to school
amid a diversity of races -- Anglos, Asians and African Americans as well as
Hispanics -- and within a culture that's rapidly transcending old racial
barriers and redefining familiar racial themes.
"My daughter listens to hip-hop,
belongs to the Asian engineering society and has a crush on a black guy,"
Cisneros says with bemusement in his office in central Houston. "There's no
identification with any group or race."
Welcome to post-ethnic America. You may
not have heard much about it yet, since it hasn't fully seeped into the
intellectual and political realms that define the national discourse on racial
issues. But it's in full bloom on American streets and in the marketplace,
changing long-standing notions of ethnicity and race and reshaping interpersonal
relationships in a manner that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. On
its cutting edge are kids like Cisneros's and their counterparts across the
country. No longer content to hew to a single cultural or racial identity, they
are beginning to erase the often unbreachable divide that has marked, and
marred, race relations in this country from the earliest European settlements.
The emerging post-ethnic sensibilities
challenge many fondly held assumptions of the political class, the media and,
perhaps most of all, certain academic elites, as they contradict the notion that
American ethnic and racial divisions are rarely transcended or, conversely, that
assimilation -- the old idea of the melting pot -- turns ethnic populations into
proto-Episcopalians who eat white bread with cheese spread. As such, they're
sure to be unwelcome news to those with a vested interest in perpetuating ethnic
divides, as well as to those who champion diversity, or multiculturalism, as a
means of assuring a continued ethos of ethnic separation. But cultures will
blend in spite of the ambitions of social engineers, and the future belongs to
those who embrace it. This is especially true in the new reality of a
post-ethnic America, which is about nothing so much as opportunity -- for
American citizens, American culture and American business.
Post-ethnicity reflects not only a
growing willingness -- and ability -- to cross cultures, but also the evolution
of a nation in which personal identity is shaped more by cultural preferences
than by skin color or ethnic heritage. To put it in youth terms, you're less
likely to be a Latina, an African American or an Asian American, for instance,
than a hip-hopper, a roquero (rocker), or a pop-culture fan of any color
or ethnic background.
Today's young Americans represent the
most multiracial group in modern American history. According to Census 2000, 40
percent of people under the age of 25 -- "echo boomers" and younger --
belong to some race or ethnic category other than "non-Hispanic
white." Overall, during the 1990s, immigrants and their children were
responsible for a remarkable 70 percent of total U.S. population growth. The
kind of culture these new Americans are shaping is most evident in those places
-- cities such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami and Houston --
where immigrants, and, more importantly, their offspring, are molding
street-side realities. The food, the music, even the look of these cities
reflect not a single cultural influence, but a plethora of them, and their young
citizens dabble freely in the variety.
Second- and third-generation Latinos
are the vanguard of these cultural shifts. They constitute the largest and
fastest-growing segments of young non-whites in the country, and in many
communities across Texas, California and New York, they are the absolute
majority of high school students and the overall workforce. If nativists, such
as Pat Buchanan, or the cultural nationalists who infest most Chicano studies
departments at universities were right, these descendants of Latin American
immigrants -- who constitute three-fifths of all Latinos residing in the United
States -- would be forthright cultural nationalists themselves, exclusively
embracing the Spanish language, music and identity.
But they're not. According to the Pew
Hispanic Center/Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation 2002 National Survey of
Latinos, most second-generation Latinos are either bilingual (47 percent) or
English-dominant (46 percent). Only 7 percent consider themselves
Spanish-dominant. The results tilt even more toward English among the third
generation, with 22 percent indicating that they are bilingual, and the
remaining 78 percent English-dominant. The same patterns hold for media and
music. According to the market research firm Cultural Access Group, young
Latinos consume English-language television and radio by better than 2 to 1 over
Spanish affiliates. Only a tiny minority -- 13 percent in Los Angeles and half
that in New York and Miami -- listen primarily to Spanish language music.
So how do these young Latinos identify
themselves? In a way not too different from other young Americans. Roughly half,
according to the 2000 Census, consider themselves white and, on many critical
issues, such as abortion and the war in Iraq, their views are often similar to,
or more conservative, than those of their white counterparts. Viewed in this
light, Latinos do not fit the mold of a permanently aggrieved minority on
America's left. Similarly, their linguistic preferences would seem to challenge
the continued viability of programs such as bilingual education, with their
emphasis on preserving a distinct culture or "easing" Spanish-speaking
youngsters into an English-language mainstream they appear to be diving into
headfirst.
Yet another thing is certain: Young
Latinos aren't afraid to mix it up personally with other American races and
cultural groups. Like Asian Americans, they have shown a strong tendency to
intermarry. Roughly 30 percent of second-generation Latinos and Asians now wed
people from outside their own racial groups. Mixed-race births in California
have grown from 40,000 in 1980 to more than 70,000 annually; one out of every
seven babies born in the Golden State in 1997 had parents of different races.
This unprecedented mixing alone guarantees the development of an increasingly
blended culture, not only for Latinos and Asians in particular but for young
Americans as a whole.
Among today's post-ethnic youth,
cultural diversity is casually presumed as a normal aspect of daily life, and in
the highly fluid youth marketplace, cultural identities are adopted, exchanged
and shed as simply and efficiently as if they were eBay transactions. Take
music, for example. White suburban kids -- following the reverse crossover
example of this generation's most visible iconoclastic rap superstar, Eminem --
make up the majority of the country's so-called "b-boys and b-girls"
who purchase (or download) hip-hop music created predominantly by black artists.
Meanwhile, creators of this popular art form are themselves increasingly
diverse. In Northern California, the underground deejay scene has long been
dominated by Filipino "turntablists" who spin hip-hop beats to
enthusiastic throngs of club goers of every nationality and color. Or consider
the hit films among America's teenagers and twentysomethings. Justin Lin's
critically acclaimed "Better Luck Tomorrow" is an independent film
released by MTV Films that explores suburban teen angst and violence -- through
a cast that's only incidentally all-Asian American. And of course the
blockbuster "The Matrix Reloaded" boasts a rainbow cast of all the
colors and hues of a post-ethnic America.
Leon Wynter, author of "American
Skin: Pop Culture, Big Business, and the End of White America," notes that
these commercial transracial representations sell in the mainstream marketplace.
They signify, he states, "a vision of the American dream in which we are
liberated from the politics of race to openly embrace any style, cultural trope,
or image of beauty that attracts us regardless of its origin."
Of course, we aren't quite there yet.
But the new post-ethnic dynamic can be felt even in regions such as the South,
where larger numbers of Latinos and Asians are now settling. These newcomers,
suggests James Johnson, an African American demographer at the Kenan Institute
in Chapel Hill, N.C., are breaking down the traditional black-white split that
has so characterized previous race relations in the region. "You are seeing
a shift, in the South particularly, into a society that is more the kind of
thing you see in Los Angeles and other places," observes Johnson. In the
process, he believes, the old racial divides will be replaced by a new, more
nuanced view of ethnicity and race.
In many places, this will mean the need
to provide immigrants with better access to education and to familiarize the
local populace with the history, language and customs of the new Americans. It
also will call for a new approach to dealing with "community" issues
as many neighborhoods experience constant flux. In communities such as South
Central Los Angeles (now officially rechristened South L.A.), for instance, what
was once predominantly an African American enclave is now a majority Latino
district. The challenges in addressing the area's problems -- regarding jobs,
education and public safety -- go beyond race and are now often spoken of in
economic and social terms rather than exclusively ethnic ones. Those who promote
exclusively race-based approaches and resist the new ethnic dynamics no longer
offer a working strategy for dealing with the problems of such communities.
The post-ethnic reality is also
expressed in how people of different ethnicities increasingly live and, yes,
shop in America. A generation ago, Americans were warned about becoming a
country bifurcated between inner-city minorities and suburban whites. But this
is no longer a danger. Today, nearly 51 percent of Asians, 43 percent of Latinos
and 32 percent of African Americans live in the suburbs. The immediate suburbs
around Denver, for example, experienced a 50 percent increase in their Latino
populations during the 1990s.
Suburbanization, with its emphasis on
cars, produces a different and more blended kind of "ethnic" economy
than traditionally denser urban settlements such as New York's Chinatown.
Shopping centers in Southern California's San Fernando Valley, the epitome of an
immigrant-oriented suburban area, are likely to be multiethnic, with stores
advertising in Russian, Farsi, Armenian and Spanish, as well as the ubiquitous
English. The sharpest ethnic entrepreneurs are keyed into this post-ethnicity as
a critical part of their business strategy. Andrew Cherng started Panda Express,
the 500-restaurant chain, as a small family-run Chinese restaurant in Pasadena
nearly 30 years ago. Today, it's the largest Chinese restaurant chain in the
country, catering to the broader American public in shopping malls, retail
centers and ballparks across 37 different states. Across California, the Asian
supermarket chain 99 Ranch Market is finding a growing number of Latinos and
whites among its customer base.
To survive and prosper in the future,
ethnic businesses -- as well as mainstream American ones -- will need to adjust
to the new post-ethnic reality. So will the rest of us, because this is a trend
that will only accelerate. In the America of the 21st century, race and
ethnicity are sure to be continuously reinterpreted by succeeding generations,
confounding the fears and prejudices of their befuddled elders.
