Showing posts with label Mexican-Americans. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mexican-Americans. Show all posts

May 10, 2012

Romney's whiteness crisis re: Tito Puente

Michael Tomasky, the Daily Beast's Left correspondent, schools Mitt Romney in the importance of the surging Mexican-American youth vote  by scorning Romney's presumed lack of familiarity with New York-born Puerto Rican jazz musician Tito Puente (1923-2000), who -- as Bill Murray predicted in Stripes -- is dead. 
It seems clear that the main issue Mitt Romney is going to use to try to reestablish himself as a moderate is immigration. He told a private audience on April 15 that "we have to get Hispanic voters to vote for our party" and warned that current polling "spells doom for us." Then, on Monday, he made himself available to the media for the first time in a month—while standing beside Florida Senator Marco Rubio, a leading veepstakes name. … 
And finally—art. Art is so underestimated in politics. Romney is just sooooo white. Even whiter than the Osmonds. Bush wasn’t that white. He came from a state where these days you can’t help but know some Latinos, and he spoke him a little esspanyole, even. But Romney? He fired some guys working on his lawn because he couldn’t afford the political liability of employing them, as he openly admitted at one of those GOP debates. Aside from that—well, I admit I’m no more up on the latest salsa artists than Mitt is, but do you think that guy has ever listened to one Tito Puente record in his life?
Do you ever get the impression that most national pundits don't know anything about Mexican-Americans, other than there are a lot of them?

Granted, nobody in NYC-DC knows from Puerto Ricans, but don't you think Tomasky (who is younger than I am) could at least have come up with a Latino musician younger than Tito Puente? How about Ritchie Valens of La Bamba fame? Sure, he's been dead for 53 years -- as long as Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper -- but he was still born 18 years after Tito Puente.

April 28, 2012

The Mightiest Mestizo

It's universally assumed that as the Mexican-American population increases, integration and assimilation will ensue. Yet, I keep recalling great Mexican-American athletes of the past, such as Pancho Gonzales, Lee Trevino, and Nancy Lopez, who lack contemporary counterparts. 

Recently, an ESPN article "NFL Draft Lacks Latinos" predicted that few Hispanics would be drafted. Indeed, through the first three rounds or 96 picks, there was only one Spanish surname called, and Kendall Reyes is definitely not Mexican.

And this reminded me of a Mexican-American guy of my age from Ontario, California (Inland Empire) who ranks right at the top of offensive linemen in the history of the NFL, Hall of Famer Anthony Muñoz. I'm not a football expert, but I typed into Google "greatest offensive linemen" and one article from 2010 concluded its top ten list with:
#1 Greatest NFL Offensive Lineman of All Time: Anthony Muñoz 
Anthony Muñoz is the greatest offensive lineman of all time. At left tackle, Muñoz was the total package of size, strength, athleticism, and technique. In the passing game, Muñoz routinely shut down the game's best defensive ends and outside linebackers. In the running game, Muñoz could wall off his man for two counts, throw him onto the ground, and rumble downfield to wreak havoc on pesky linebackers and defensive backs. As a receiver, Muñoz also hauled in four touchdowns on tackle-eligible plays during his 13-year career as a Cincinnati Bengal. Anthony Muñoz mastered, perfected, and dominated his position as well as any man that has ever played any sport. Anthony Muñoz—the Gold Standard franchise left tackle.

A lot of top ten lists on the Internet are content farm produce. There aren't many statistics on offensive linemen, so there's no way to conclude the argument over who was the greatest ever. But Muñoz is definitely in the argument, and might well be the favorite.

This is kind of weird when you stop and think about it. Because of the huge increase in population, there ought to be more famous Mexican-Americans today in more different fields than there were in the past, but it doesn't really look like that, does it?

August 15, 2011

"Devoid of charm"


I wanted to briefly quote from my VDARE.com review of former Mexican foreign minister Jorge G. Castaneda's Manana Foreveri?
He notes that the impoverished Indian south of Mexico “continues to provide much of Mexico’s personality.” In contrast, the wealthier “north is industrious, modernizing, violent, lighter-skinned, and devoid of charm …” In short, the north sounds a lot like Los Angeles.

In Northeastern American intellectuals' assumptions about the impact of massive immigration from Mexico, I notice a lot of assuming that, of course, we are bound to get the best of both worlds -- all the visual quaintness of a Diego Rivera painting of the South of Mexico and all the industriousness of the North of Mexico. 

But, sometimes things work out like John F. Kennedy's description of Washington D.C.: "A city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm."

The evidence from the Southwest U.S. of a century or so of Mexican immigration is pretty similar to the north of Mexico: that you get a fair amount of industriousness, not much enterprise (especially not of a socially cooperative nature), and very little charm. Violence? Hard to say ... a lot in L.A. over the years (although far less than L.A. blacks), not much in El Paso.

Castaneda, by the way, worries about this conundrum. As a way out, he suggests some of the pleasant middle-sized old colonial cities of the middle of Mexico as national models: not too strip mallish, not too burroish.

April 14, 2009

The Pew Hispanic Center

The Pew Hispanic Center, which I've long admired for doing good statistical analyses without all that much political correctness, has a new report out on illegal aliens (or "Unauthorized Immigrants," as Pew terms them). It was written by Jeffrey S. Passel and D'Vera Cohn. As I started to read it, this slab of boilerplate caught my eye:
The Pew Hispanic Center is a nonpartisan research organization that seeks to improve public understanding of the diverse Hispanic population in the United States and to chronicle Latinos' growing impact on the nation. It does not take positions on policy issues. The center is part of the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan "fact tank" based in Washington, D.C., and it is funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, a Philadelphia-based public charity. All of the Center’s reports are available at www.pewhispanic.org. The staff of the Center is:

Paul Taylor, Director
Rakesh Kochhar, Associate Director for Research
Mark Hugo Lopez, Associate Director
Richard Fry, Senior Research Associate
Jeffrey S. Passel, Senior Demographer
Gretchen Livingston, Senior Researcher
Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, Senior Analyst
Daniel Dockterman, Research Assistant
Mary Seaborn, Administrative Manager

This list of names says a lot about why East Coast elites don't feel that massive Hispanic immigration provides any noticeable competition that might hinder their kids from getting ahead in their careers. Here are nine nice, respectable office jobs at the Pew Hispanic Center, and they could only find Spanish-surnamed people to fill two of them.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

June 1, 2008

My VDARE review of "Generations of Exclusion: Mexican Americans, Assimilation, and Race"

Here's an excerpt from my review of the important and fascinating new book from the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA:

Social scientists get a lot of guff for not being "real scientists." But I've always admired the best ones immensely.

Sure, an astronomer (say) can tell you with exactitude when the next solar eclipse will occur. Still, most people don't feel strongly about the timing of eclipses. It's easy to be objective when you deal with things rather than with people.

In contrast, human beings get passionate about what is uncovered by social scientists. In fact, much of what social scientists have learned has been gut-wrenching for the researchers themselves, who typically fall well to the left politically.

Social scientists can't always overcome their biases. But when they do, the results are admirable.

The newest example: the impressive multi-generational study of Mexican-American assimilation carried out by two UCLA sociologists, Vilma Ortiz and Edward E. Telles of UCLA's Chicano Studies Research Center.

Their 2008 book, Generations of Exclusion: Mexican Americans, Assimilation, and Race, decisively concludes a long-running debate about Mexican immigrants.

Telles and Ortiz write:

"Despite sixty years of political and legal battles to improve the education of Mexican Americans, they continue to have the lowest average education levels and the highest high school dropout rates among major ethnic and racial groups in the United States. … However, leading analysts, apparently believing in the universality of assimilation, argue that this is the result of a large first and second generation population still adjusting to American society. … These and other scholars predict that Mexican Americans will have the same levels of education and socioeconomic status as the dominant non-Hispanic white population by the fourth generation."

East Coast pundits, such as Michael Barone and Tamar Jacoby, frequently imply that, while Mexican Americans may appear to be lagging alarmingly, that's mostly because they've all just recently arrived from Mexico.

After all, whoever saw a Mexican in New York, Washington, or Boston before the last decade or two? So their future is wide open! This will catch up by the third generation, or maybe the fourth—but in any case, Real Soon Now.

Due to "the great, slow, mysterious absorptive alchemy of assimilation" (to quote Jacoby's review in National Review of Barone's 2001 book The New Americans, the descendents of Mexican immigrants will no doubt be flourishing just like the descendents of the Ellis Island immigrants.

So why enforce the borders? …

To natives of the Southwestern United States, like myself, this conventional wisdom that Mexicans are just newcomers who will turn into Italians or Jews in "only" three or four generations is simply Eastern ignorance.

Mexican Americans are new to the East, but they've been in the Southwestern U.S. since before there was a U.S. The 1920 Census found one million Hispanics in the U.S.—that's an ample sample from which to draw conclusions.

Social scientists in the mid-20th Century paid intense interest to European ethnic newcomers and African Americans. But Latinos were largely overlooked. Telles and Ortiz note that Mexican Americans "were well off the radar screen of the largely Eastern and Midwestern-based social sciences. At best, they were viewed as some inexplicable frontier anomaly."

This lack of awareness still allows Eastern writers descended from Ellis Island immigrants to spin fantasies about the benign long-run effects of Mexican immigration, based largely on ethnocentric nostalgia about their own lineages' spunky underdog wonderfulness.

Indeed, many Eastern elites seem to regard expressions of skepticism about illegal Mexican immigrants as personal insults directed at their beloved ancestors. They're more concerned about the issues of 1908 than of 2008.

During the Great Society, UCLA organized the first major survey, the Mexican American Study Project. In 1965, UCLA academics interviewed 1576 individuals of Mexican descent in the two largest Mexican American metropolises of the time, Los Angeles County and San Antonio.

This kind of cross-sectional analysis is valuable but it's not totally definitive about assimilation. For that, you need longitudinal analyses that follow people over time. However, surveys that cover decades are extremely expensive.

Fortunately, workers in 1992 stumbled upon the 1965 survey forms in a storage room at the UCLA library. Sociologists affiliated with UCLA's Chicano Studies Research Center came up with the audacious notion of searching out the original respondents, then interviewing them again, along with some of their children. This would turn the old 1965 cross-sectional study into a much-needed longitudinal one.

This would allow progress to be tracked across four generations. And researchers could even inquire about the children's children, extending the analysis out to a fifth generation since immigration. …

Telles and Ortiz write with justified pride: "As far as we know, this research design is unique and for many reasons it is the most appropriate for addressing the actual intergenerational integration of immigrants and their descendents." …

Their multiple regression analyses show that the key factor, driving all the others, is education. They conclude:

"Throughout this book, our statistical models have shown that the low education levels of Mexican Americans have impeded most other types of assimilation, thus reinforcing a range of ethnic boundaries between them and white Americans."

As is well known, American-born Mexicans average more years of education than do their Mexican-born immigrant ancestors. Unfortunately, as Telles and Ortiz report, the third and fourth generations of Mexican Americans do not continue to close the gap relative to non-Hispanic whites: "In education, which best determines life chances in the United States, assimilation is interrupted by the second generation and stagnates thereafter."

The fourth generation (whose grandparents were born in America) was particularly unaccomplished: "Sadly and directly in contradistinction to assimilation theory, the fourth generation differs the most from whites, with a college completion rate of only 6 percent [compared to 35 percent for whites of that era]."

The fourth-generation Baby Boomers averaged 0.7 years less schooling than the second and third generation Mexican Americans born in the same era.

Telles and Ortiz found: "…the educational progress of Mexican Americans does not improve over the generations. At best, given the statistical margin of error, our data show no improvement in education over the generations-since-immigration and in some cases even suggest a decline."

In 2000, the UCLA interviewers also asked the Baby Boomer children of the original subjects about their own children (i.e., the grandchildren of the 1965 respondents). These grandchildren (who are third to fifth generation Mexican Americans, Generation X-ers born in the 1960s and 1970s) "seemed to be doing no better than their parents" at graduating from high school.

But, don't worry, be happy. The sixth generation will assuredly get it into gear and catch up with the American mainstream. Only evil, uncouth people could possibly doubt that. Ask Michael Barone.[Email Barone]

Seriously, America is supposed to be a middle class country. Yet, what we appear to have on our hands here is a "Permanent Proletariat," which our elites have corruptly saddled us with.

In Generations of Exclusion, Telles and Ortiz have created a monument to disinterested, objective social science.

[More]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

August 14, 2007

Pancho Gonzales

African-American sports history (e.g., Jackie Robinson, Arthur Ashe winning the U.S. tennis title in 1968, etc.) is so heavily publicized that it's striking to notice how little attention is paid to Mexican-American sports history.

For example, when Tiger Woods won the Masters golf tournament to become the first (part) black to win a major championship, it was widely announced that this was a historic breakthrough for minorities in the previous lily white game of golf that would get minorities interested in the sport for the first time, etc etc. This struck me as a bit odd considering that Lee Trevino, a Mexican-American driving range pro from a dirt poor background in El Paso, had won the U.S. Open 29 years before and had gone on to win six major championships in all, in four of which the great Jack Nicklaus, who intimidated everybody except Trevino, was the runner-up. Trevino was also the likely the funniest golfer of his era -- he told the reporters after his Open win in 1968, "When I get enough money I'm going to become a Spaniard instead of a Mexican" -- and one of the biggest draws.

Similarly, Nancy Lopez, a Mexican-American from
New Mexico who debuted in 1979, was likely the most popular woman golfer of all time.

A reader wrote in recently to mention a name I hadn't heard in years, even though I live in his hometown: Pancho Gonzales, who was probably the most famous tennis player in
America when I was a little kid. The son of Mexican immigrants, Gonzales was born in Los Angeles in 1928, and grew up on the streets, spending a year in juvenile hall. His mom gave him a tennis racket for his 12th birthday, but he never had a lesson. He grew to be well over 6 feet tall and was considered the best athlete in tennis.

The tennis powers-that-be in LA didn't want him around but after he got out of the Navy in 1946, he got so good that they started to help him. In 1948 and 1949 he won the American leg of the Grand Slam at
Forest Hills. He went pro in 1950, and was #1 from 1954-1960,Back then, the Grand Slam tournaments were reserved for amateurs (unlike golf, which had Open championships for pros and amateurs alike since the 19th century), so when he went pro in 1950, and was #1 from 1954-1960, but he was locked out of the Grand Slams until they went open in 1968. At age 41 in 1969, he won the longest Wimbledon match ever, over Charlie Pasarell 22-24, 1-6, 16-14, 6-3, 11-9. That year, he was the leading American money winner, and remained highly competitive and a major draw for several more years. I would imagine he was the best over-40 player ever.

Gonzales was a mean son of a gun with a Ty Cobb-size competitive streak. He was a chain smoker, even on the court, dying of cancer in 1995. He had five wives (marrying one of them twice). His last wife, whom he married when he was 55 in 1984, was Andre Aggasi's sister Rita. Pancho's new father-in-law, Andre's dad, an ex-boxer from
Iran, was so mad, he thought about having him rubbed out. Pancho died broke and Andre paid for his funeral.

It's a helluva story, but that kind of thing just isn't very interesting to the modern sporting press. Gonzales (who looks in pictures like a mestizo weighted more toward the European than Indian side) had to deal with discrimination, but compared to what blacks had to put up with, it was kind of vague. Also, perhaps because Jackie Robinson came up with the Dodgers of Brooklyn, the black cause in sports got imprinted emotionally on a lot of young Jewish boys in Brooklyn, who went on to have a huge influence on the media. Mexicans never interested Jewish sportswriters very much. Finally, this history never really went anywhere. Today, there are 30 million Mexican-Americans, but there don't seem to be many more Mexican-American sports stars (outside of the fading sport of boxing, which Oscar de la Hoya is sacrificing his body to keep alive) than in the days of Pancho Gonzales and Lee Trevino.