"The browning of America" by Carolina Peña

There’s a phrase I heard for the first time this year and it was sure to produce mixed reactions. However you chose to interpret the phrase, whether you see the so called ‘browning of America’ as a positive or negative transformation, it’s an undeniable reality that is not confined to the usual multi-ethnic hubs found in Florida, New York, California, and Texas (although some would argue that Texas was always brown and the border really crossed them!). The fact is that this is happening all over- Atlanta, New Orleans, Reno, Oklahoma City, Boise, and Kansas City, to name a few places.

Yet, as this growth that is evident on the surface, it unfortunately overshadows other areas of growth in our community that are less appealing to the media. I will discuss more of these ahead, but for now I will argue that ‘the browning of America’ is a sweeping statement that assumes a narrow-minded change in demographics.

This change is well beyond color. We are talking about an ethnicity that is among the most diverse in its combination of African, European, Meztizo, Asian, and Native American. It includes first, second and third generation Hispanic Americans of various levels of cultural assimilation, income and education. And they are top priority audiences for politicians and businesses. Ever since the 2000 Census revealed important data on the growth of the Latino population, the attention seems to seldom shift to the depth of this growth.

Now, given that I work for the Hispanic Heritage Foundation and was awarded the 2005 Philadelphia Regional Hispanic Heritage Youth Award in Journalism, I’d like to provide more observations based on my experiences and career focus.


For the past three and a half years I’ve had the amazing opportunity to work with the HHF’s Youth Awards and LOFT (Latinos On Fast Track) while doing side projects in print and broadcast media while completing my degree in Public Communication and Marketing at Montgomery College and now at American University. These experiences have opened a window into the real ‘the browning of America’ that is beyond the ‘colored statistics’.

Through the Youth Awards we see tens of thousands of students from across the country taking the time-consuming effort to apply for scholarships. They represent only a small piece of the pie that includes an increasingly diverse group of students in age and economic status. This will be the fastest growing segment of the population in the next 15 years, where second-generation Latinos will represent 36% of all Hispanics based on me2, the first major Latino youth-only national study. And with our growing buying power and influence, here are a few things to consider in our evolving identity:

Will we identify ourselves as Latino/Hispanic or American?
Will we speak our parent’s language or loose Spanish all-together?
Will our values be driven by our culture or our parent’s culture and religion?
Will we consume English-only or a bilingual mix of media?
How will we find a way to reconnect with our culture?

And a policy question that also came to mind… Will affirmative action have any relevance?
In matters of identity, as the meaning of ‘being Latino’ evolves, perhaps these results from the me2 survey conducted in 2006 will provide some clues:

Being Latino means more than just speaking and looking Spanish; to YLA it means being family oriented (84%), proud (83%), hard working (81%), passionate (80%), tied to tradition (77%), religious (71%), and believing in higher education (60%) and giving back to their community (53%)