"It's Your Turn in the Sun"

In Washington, B.C., leaders of 120 Spanish-speaking organizations call for a White House conference on Hispanic Americans. Among the demands they want aired: greater emphasis on bilingual education; bigger immigration quotas; more federal civil service jobs.

In Sacramento, California's Governor Jerry Brown drops in on a Mexican-American convention. "You're the leading minority in the Southwest," Brown tells the crowd. "It's your turn in the sun and I want to be part of it."

In Miami, Carlos Arboleya, president of the area's Barnett Banks (assets: $315 million), surveys the local Cuban-American community and confidently declares: "History will write Miami's future in Spanish and English."

That extraordinary vessel, the American melting pot, is bubbling once again. The source of ferment: American residents of Spanish origin, whose official numbers have increased by 14.3% in the past five years alone. Now the country's fastest growing minority, they are bidding to become an increasingly influential one.

Hispanic Americans are learning how to organize and how to win a hearing. Jimmy Carter has taken note of these stirrings; he proclaimed one week last month to be National Hispanic Heritage Week and sent tape-recorded greetings in his unpolished Spanish to Hispanic communities across the land. First Lady Rosalynn Carter underlined those saludos by appearing at a Washington fund raiser for Congress's five-member Hispanic Caucus.

The Hispanic presence has been a palpable one in U.S. life for centuries. But broad awareness of its scope and potential did not really dawn until the 1960s, with the unionizing struggles of Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers and the spread of Hispanic populations. Today, migratory bands of Hispanics are picking apples in Washington and Oregon, helping with the harvest in the Midwest, tending vegetable and fruit crops in California's fertile valleys. Hispanics are also flooding virtually every important U.S. city in search of better jobs, creating latino enclaves from the crowded barrios of East Los Angeles and Spanish Harlem to the manicured suburbs of Bade County, Fla.

The Hispanics' very numbers guarantee that they will play an increasingly important role in shaping the nation's politics and policies. Just as black power was a reality of the 1960s, so the quest for latino power may well become a political watchword of the decade ahead. Predicts Raul Yzaguirre, director of the National Council of La Raza (The Race), an umbrella group of Hispanic-American organizations: "The 1980s will be the decade of the Hispanics."

Statistics back up Yzaguirre's contention. According to 1978 census estimates, there are 12 million Hispanic Americans in the U.S. Hispanic leaders, however, claim that their constituency was seriously undercounted in the 1970 census and all subsequent projections. The spokesmen may have a point. Until 1960, census takers counted as Hispanic only people born in Spain, Mexico, Central and South America, the West Indies, Puerto Rico and Cuba, plus any U.S. residents with Spanish surnames. In the 1970 census, the definition was broadened to include the racial origin of respondents no matter the accident of birthplace, resulting in a dramatic increase in the numbers of Hispanics (see chart). Census officials have promised to take special pains to get a more accurate count during the 1980 census, in effect acknowledging that their methods have been inadequate.

Even the most reliable census figures, however, fail to take into account the enormous numbers of Hispanics who are living and working in the U.S. illegally. At a conservative estimate, some 7.4 million "undocumented"& Hispanic aliens raise the actual total to more than 19 million, and the Hispanic proportion of U.S. population to around 9%, vs. 12% for blacks. Because the rate of natural increase (births over deaths) among Hispanics is 1.8%, .6% higher than that for blacks, and because Hispanic immigration (legal and illegal) is running at the staggering rate of an estimated 1 million people a year, Hispanics may outnumber American blacks within the next decade. Already the two groups are competing fiercely for jobs and Government aid.

As blacks are united by race, Hispanic Americans are united by two powerful forces: their language and their strong adherence to Roman Catholicism. But many more factors divide them. They may be Castilian Spanish, or Caribbean island black, or Spanish-Indian mestizo. Among them are Cubans who fled to the U.S. with money and middle-class skills; impoverished Puerto Ricans or Mexican Americans looking for a job -- any job; aristocratic Spaniards, whose families settled in the Southwest before the Mayflower hove into Plymouth Harbor.

Of the officially recognized Hispanics, the largest single group is the chicanos,* comprising some 7.2 million people of Mexican origin concentrated largely in the U.S. Southwest. An estimated 1.8 million Puerto Ricans live chiefly in the northern-central states, particularly the Northeast. Some 700,000 Cubans, mostly refugees from Fidel Castro's regime, are now in the U.S., mainly concentrated in Florida. But there are also Dominicans, Ecuadorians, Colombians and natives of other Latin American countries or of Spain itself scattered all over the U.S.., totaling an additional 2.4 million Hispanics.

The groups may mix, but so far they have failed to blend. Upwardly mobile Floridian Cubans have felt little in common with lowly Mexican-American migrant citrus pickers. Even in impoverished New York ghettos, newly arrived Dominicans look down on native American Puerto Ricans who, some of the latecomers feel, have not exerted themselves to move up the economic ladder.

In their diversity, the Hispanics have brought some distinctive flavors to the American banquet: the thumping Tex-Mex music of the Southwest borderlands; the salsa dancers of urban discos; the splashy colors of wall murals in Latin communities across the U.S. Equally distinctive are a number of attitudes that many, if not most, latinos share.

Generally they have a strong regard for the family and maintain close kinship ties across the generations at a time when the weakening of traditional U.S. family bonds is a focus of concern. Many come from strongly patriarchal societies and find themselves in conflict with expanding social opportunities for American women. Most intangibly, latinos offer the U.S. an amalgam of buoyancy, sensuousness and flair that many northern peoples find tantalizing or mysterious--and sometimes irritating or threatening.

As has happened with almost every ethnic group in America, the Hispanics are learning that growing numbers and assertiveness often produce growing hostility. As far back as 1943, hundreds were injured in a Los Angeles race riot, an event dramatized in the current West Coast hit play, Zoot Suit, by Luis Valdez. But now the antipathy is becoming more intense and pervasive as the Hispanics become not only more visible but also more insistent on their rights.

As America's latest great wave of immigrants, Hispanics are learning another hard lesson: latecomers start at the bottom. Nearly 27% of Hispanic families in the U.S. earn under $7,000 a year; only 16.6% of non-Hispanic families fare as badly. For the second quarter of 1978 the Hispanic unemployment rate was 8.9%, while the national average was 5.8%. As a group, Hispanics are the most undereducated of Americans--despite their own deep belief in the maxim, Saber es poder (Knowledge is power). Only 40% have completed high school, vs. 46% of U.S. blacks and 67% of the whites. In urban ghetto areas, the school dropout rate among Hispanics frequently reaches 85%. Language is an obvious handicap, but the vocal Hispanic demand for bilingual education raises particular problems.

In a society more aware of minority rights than ever, that demand is hard to brush aside. Many Hispanic spokesmen speak of "linguistic liberation" and argue that failure to provide bilingual education amounts to "cultural colonization" by the majority angles. Others say that failure to provide bilingual instruction guarantees that most Hispanic children will fall hopelessly behind in classwork.

Critics attack bilingual programs on several grounds: that they are inadequate or inefficient; that extra efforts should not be made for Spanish-speaking children unless they are also made for French-speaking or Hebrew-speaking or Vietnamese-speaking children; and, perhaps most cogently, that Hispanic students who speak mostly Spanish at school and whose parents speak mostly Spanish at home will never really learn to compete in American society as a whole. Cultural pride notwithstanding, this could prove a-fatal handicap in a specialized, highly technological nation where language skills are more important than at any other time in history. What is more, the perpetuation of a large subculture with little or no skill in English could lead to something the U.S. has so far managed to avoid: the rise of a nation-within-a-nation, the growth of the sort of linguistic or "communal" factionalism that has long haunted countries such as India, Sri Lanka, Belgium and most recently Canada.

The slow growth of Hispanic affluence and educational attainment is mirrored in politics and in Government bureaucracies. There are five Hispanics in the House of Representatives, compared with 16 blacks and 22 Jews. The Hispanics are Edward Roybal, 62, of California; Manuel Lujan, 54, of New Mexico; Robert Garcia, 45, of New York; Henry Gonzalez, 62, and Kika de la Garza, 51, of Texas. Since the defeat of the late Joseph Montoya of New Mexico in 1976, there have been no Hispanic members of the Senate. There is only one Hispanic Governor: New Mexico's Jerry Apodaca, and he cannot succeed himself when his term expires in January. Mexican-American ballots nailed down Texas' 26 electoral votes for Jimmy Carter in 1976, and he reciprocated by appointing more Hispanics to federal positions than any of his predecessors. But, while they hold 112 of 1,201 presidentially assigned posts, none are at the Cabinet level. Hispanics hold only 3.4% of jobs in the federal bureaucracy, while blacks hold 16%, and the Hispanic proportion of federal jobholders has inched up only .7% in the past ten years. The same pattern holds true at state and local levels.

There are a number of reasons for the underrepresentation: the Hispanics' relatively late arrival as a major immigrant group; their reservations about politics, often the result of once having lived under corrupt, autocratic regimes; their traditional preoccupation with family and community affairs rather than broad political issues; outright racial and social discrimination. But the most immediate --and most easily remedied--reason is their failure to register in sufficient numbers. Of 7 million Hispanics eligible to vote, only 37.8% are registered, vs. 66.7% of the population as a whole.

That is where many Hispanic leaders want to concentrate their efforts. Says Richard Hernandez, 31, one of Carter's White House counsellors: "You can't work outside or around the power system. You've got to get inside. And where it counts is with votes."

Political activism is gradually--very gradually--beginning to bring Hispanics together. In Los Angeles, Latin neighborhood associations have forced city authorities to provide better services, and pressured the state government to investigate auto insurers on charges of setting unreasonable rates. In Texas, Hispanics have organized civil rights marches reminiscent of the '60s, often to protest police brutality.

More mundane than those demonstrations, but ultimately more fruitful, may be the timeconsuming, door-to-door work of men like Willie Velasquez. A former activist with La Raza Unida (The United Race), a chicano social and political movement founded in the late '60s, Velasquez, 34, now heads the San Antonio-based Southwest Voter Registration Education Project. Says he: "Every immigrant group that's come to this country has gotten involved in the political process as a major part of their advancement. We keep giving the same message: political participation is indispensable to any minority group." Last year the project registered 160,000 Hispanic voters in 68 cities across the country.

More and more Hispanic Americans are settling in places like Chicago, Boston and even Greenwich, Conn, (some 10,000 in a town of 63,000). The problems, and promise, of the Hispanic-American experience in the U.S. may be best illustrated, however, by what is happening in three other cities: metropolitan Miami, whose Cuban population (430,000) is exceeded only by Havana's; metropolitan Los Angeles, whose 1.6 million Hispanic population, which is overwhelmingly chicano, makes it the world's second largest Mexican agglomeration after Mexico City; and New York, which surpasses San Juan in Puerto Rican population (1.3 million). There is a fourth community that also demands study: that furtive, elusive subculture-within-a-subculture, the illegal aliens.

-The word is a colloquial, shortened form of Mexicano. It became fashionable among younger Mexican Americans during the '60s; some members of the older generation prefer not to use it.

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