Updated: 4/1/2004; 11:01:01 AM
3rd House Party
    The 3rd house in astrology is associated with writing, conversation, personal thoughts, day-to-day things, siblings and neighbors.

daily link  Wednesday, March 10, 2004

Hispanic Nation

I’m slipping again in practicing my Spanish. The only thing I do regularly is watch telenovelas, which is a nice lazy way of keeping up. The stories are utterly predictable but I still get sucked in. And now I have a new one, Mariana de la Noche, that looks like it’s going to be good. Doesn’t hurt that Jorge Salinas is in it – a least a couple of my girlfriends will be watching this one solely to see him. It’s great having friends watch so we can speculate together on who will turn out to be so-and-so’s real father or mother, when the protagonist will realize the baby is not his and, in this case, when our heroine will find out she’s not under a curse but that it’s her adoptive father who is secretly killing off all her suitors.

 

Ah, a new word from the telenovela’s web page – the step-sister is a niña berrinchuda – temperamental; berrinche is a tantrum.

 

Monday morning I missed out on my informal Spanish lesson with la loca argentina. I had slept badly and had a backache and felt awful. Maybe next week. I should go back to my Pimsleur Spanish III CDs, which I do sporadically, mainly if I have a long drive. And my Como agua para chocolate book sits waiting with pencil-scribbled English words in only the first two chapters. Sigh.

 

Last week I read an article in Foreign Policy that claims that “The persistent inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages.” Unsurprisingly, critics have been throwing berrinches (look, I used it!), calling the author, Samuel Huntington of Harvard, a xenophobe. The Economist accedes some of Huntington’s points, but says that “Despite new arguments to the contrary, the relentless Latino influx is still good for America.”

 

For a good and I think pretty balanced perspective, see the BusinessWeek online article, “Hispanic Nation”:

What's not yet clear is whether Hispanic social cohesion will be so strong as to actually challenge the idea of the American melting pot. At the extreme, ardent assimilationists worry that the spread of Spanish eventually could prompt Congress to recognize it as an official second language, much as French is in Canada today...

 

Still, many experts think it's more likely that the U.S. will find a new model, more salad bowl than melting pot, that accommodates a Latino subgroup without major upheaval. "America has to learn to live with diversity -- the change in population, in (Spanish-language) media, in immigration," says Andrew Erlich, the founder of Erlich Transcultural Consultants Inc. in North Hollywood, Calif. Hispanics aren't so much assimilating as acculturating -- acquiring a new culture while retaining their original one -- says Felipe Korzenny, a professor of Hispanic marketing at Florida State University…

 

It boils down to this: How much will Hispanics change America, and how much will America change them?

Meanwhile, I’ll be busy watching my new telenovela, adding to Univision’s soaring audience:

As the ranks of Spanish speakers swell, Spanish-language media are transforming from a niche market into a stand-alone industry. Ad revenues on Spanish-language TV should climb by 16% this year, more than other media segments, according to TNS Media Intelligence/CMR. The audience of Univision, the No.1 Spanish-language media conglomerate in the U.S., has soared by 44% since 2001, and by 146% in the 18- to 34-year-old group. Many viewers have come from English-language networks, whose audiences have declined in that period.

 


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