Latinos and El Super Bowl

The big “Latino” news of this week is probably the announcements by a bipartisan group of eight senators and the subsequent one by President Obama that outlines a set of principles for immigration reform. Some have cautioned that this is entirely a cynical political move that will end in a stalemate (and the draw goes to the incumbent, Obama), I hold a bit of optimism that the law will take some steps forward toward a more common sense and humane immigration system.

One of the big remaining concerns, often a subtext of the immigration debate, is that it is not merely a legal issue or even an economic one, but a symbol of the cultural war. For many Americans immigrant is synonymous with Hispanic, and the big threat of immigration is really the xenophobic threat of a large cultural group coming and changing the culture in which we currently live. Harvard historian Sam Huntington was bold enough to be completely honest about this view when he proclaimed the “Hispanic Challenge” against the American way of life.

So, assuming that my optimistic views are confirmed and millions of Latino immigrants gain the legal right to live and work in the United States, what will happen next? While I don’t believe that a cultural war will take place, there is no doubt in my mind that Huntington was right, that Hispanics will remake America-they already have, and they have done so with most Americans’, and especially entrepreneurial capitalists, enthusiastic support.  Already, businesspeople not only want to court Latinos, they realize they need to. Too, bad so many of them just don’t know how to do it well.

In a few days millions of Americans will be glued to their televisions to watch the real war we all care about, Super Bowl XLVII. With a Civil War-like story line of brother versus brother, North versus South, it should once again break television-viewing records. Of course for many, the real main event is the half-time show, with the potential hope of wardrobe malfunctions, and the commercials. One might assume that Latinos would rather be watching fútbol than football and thus make an extra effort to reach out to them via the between-play marketing. That would be the wrong assumption to make considering a 2009 Nielsen poll showed that football is Latinos’ favorite sport to watch on television. Perhaps therein lies the reason why we can probably expect another lackluster year of commercials with a Latin twist during the big game-the U.S. business world knows we are important, but they still don’t get us.

One mistake marketers make is that getting the attention of Latinos is all about language. They think that if you simply translate the English copy into Spanish and have an aging Latin American actor do the voiceover, then Latinos will rush out to buy the product. That mentality ignores the fact that most Latinos are U.S.-born, English-speaking, and young.

The NBA made a slightly savvier attempt by airing a Spanish-speaking commercial during an English broadcast of one of their basketball games. It breaks away from some tired stereotypes by using a modern, Middle American, backdrop. But, they still wrongheadedly reference telenovelas, the Spanish soap operas that we American Latinos are familiar with, even though we are more likely to be watching The X-factor, or Modern Family.

One ad that has been touted in advance of its Superbowl airing is downright insulting. It already starts off bad because it is an ad for the cheap Mexican knock-off, Taco Bell. It gets worse with the ironic, punk inflected, Spanish with an American accent, signing in the background. Some probably believe that this gets the younger sensibilities of Latinos right, but by going for mockery, both in terms of the product and the ad, and they might as well just dig The Frito Bandito up from the archives.

Personally, I am a fan of a Latina marketing strategist’s idea of “the wink”, which demonstrates the knowledge that Latinos are really American in many ways, but that there is a subtle Latin American sensibility to a lot of what we do. Last year a Super Bowl commercial featuring Carlos Mencía really hit the mark. Carlos, representing what we typically think of as a Latino, with his tan skin and dark features, also portrayed who many Latinos really are with his flawless English and American style. In the commercial he teaches a diverse class of foreigners some key phrases that they will need to learn to survive in the United States. It is great because he is their cultural guide to being American, and like many successful Latinos, he has mastered the art of being a chameleon. He knows the nuances of both cultures, but is decidedly American. He drinks Bud Light, after all.

So when you sit down with your Corona, or more likely, a Bud Light, this weekend, and you find yourself eating chili con carne, and dipping some chips into salsa and guacamole for a traditional American Super Bowl, take note of whether advertisers really get what (Latino) Americans like or not.

Latino Graduation: The Good, the Bad, and the Possible

There was much ado last week over the announcement that the graduation rate among public high school students in the United States reached a 40-year high.  The National Council for Educational Statistics (NCES) estimates that up to 78 percent of students graduated high school within four years of starting their education, a rate not seen since 1974.  While welcomed news generally, the improvements among Hispanic and Latino students in particular caught many people’s attention.  Slightly more than 71 percent of these students graduated high school within four years of starting; representing a 10-point improvement over the past four years.  Researchers and others offered several reasons why Latino and Hispanic students’ graduation rates improved. Perhaps the most straightforward of these, and one that few even noted, is that there simply are more Hispanic and Latino students in school than at any previous point in time.

AP Photo/Reed Saxon from nationaljournal.com

The Pew Hispanic Center had reported the growth in these populations back in August 2012.  Pew’s report noted that as many as one in four public elementary school children were of Hispanic descent, while up to 24 percent of all pre-kindergarten-through-twelfth-grade students were of Hispanic descent.  The growth of the Hispanic and Latino populations in schools should not come as a surprise, of course, when one considers that these populations now represent the largest minority group in the U.S.

These upward trends are encouraging.  Unfortunately, they appear unsustainable when considering Hispanics and Latinos in higher education.  As described in Pew’s August 2012 report, Hispanic and Latino populations are the largest minority group on U.S. college campuses; representing the largest minority group at four-year colleges, and up to one-fourth of the students at two-year colleges.  While these enrollment figures parallel those for elementary and secondary schools, the graduation rates do not.  According to NCES data (summarized below), approximately 28 percent of Hispanic students graduate college within four years of starting.  The percent of students completing a traditional four-year education increases the longer students take to finish, jumping to 44 percent for students finishing in five years and to over fifty percent for those finishing in six years.

Table 1: Graduation rates for the 2004 starting cohort for select institution types

2004 Cohort	All 4-year institutions	Public Institutions	Non-profit Institutions
4-year completion rates	27.90	21.50	46.10
5-year completion rates	44.00	40.20	57.70
6-year completion rates	50.10	50.10	60.50

Source: National Council for Educational Statistic, Digest of Educational Statistics, Table 345. Available at http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_345.asp

While improved graduation rates are a good thing, there are negative effects associated with Hispanic and Latino students taking longer to finish their schooling – increased personal debt and a delayed start to a career, to name just two examples.  The next set of challenges in the realm of Hispanic and Latino education include maintaining the improved high school graduation rates and addressing the higher education graduation rates.  This will not be an easy task, but I like to think it is not an impossible one.

The 30-Year-Old Solution

Of all of the suggestions of gun control and school safety to emerge from last month’s tragic shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT, none struck me as more ridiculous than the National Rifle Association's (NRA) call for armed guards in all schools in the United States.  This is a terrible idea.  I have written before about the psychological and social tolls increased militarism in schools takes on schoolchildren.  What is more, however, is that the idea of arming more people to curb gun violence was a laughable notion some thirty years ago, too laughable then to be taken seriously now.

Norman Lear, the renowned creative force of some of the most influential situation comedies of the 1970s, recently recalled on The Huffington Post a piece from his show All in the Family.  In this particular bit, the narrow-minded, right-leaning lead character, Archie Bunker (played by the late Carroll O’Connor), provides a counterpoint to a recent editorial broadcast on his local news station in true Archie fashion.  His cures for society’s ill must be seen to be believed, and you can watch the video below.  I am just old enough to remember when this All in the Family episode first aired; recognizing that Archie’s character was a parody, one intended to show the faults and foibles of the very positions he advocates.  And while I appreciate Lear's sharing of this worthwhile bit, his commentary about it misses two key points about today's gun control debates.

First, Lear worked in an era of television when sit-coms could address social issues, especially when Lear was their creative force (see not only All in the Family, for example, but also his Maude, One Day at a Time, and Good Times).  Second, Lear produced such pieces like this during the era of the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Fairness Doctrine, when federal regulations required all broadcasters - the nationals and their local affiliates - to give equal time to two sides of an issue.  Archie’s appearance on his local newscast in this piece is in response to an early editorial of that news station.

Surely, this is a lost element of television’s democratizing power.  Given today’s 24/7 news cycle of too many channels and nothing on, views and opinion become fragmented.  (So much so that some people even feel compelled to start their own blog!)  Nevertheless, we cannot allow that to happen when it comes to something as important as curbing gun violence.  My hope is for a reasoned, rational, and well-informed discussion, which after was what Archie seemed to have been striving for.