T
hank you for having me back at Liceo Manzoni again. Some of you may remember that we met in February 2005, when we brought in a team from the Consulate to describe African American history month, introducing you to my colleague Don Moore, the head of our Consular Section, and to the Commander of our Marine Security Detachment, Gunnery Sergeant Wesley Moran. In 2005 and again earlier this year, it was my pleasure to help prepare your Model United Nations team to defend the policies of my country. At your request, I spoke last year at the opening of the Model United Nations at Bocconi University. I have gained a lot of respect for you in the past year and a half, and am very pleased to have the opportunity to be here with you again to speak about a topic that – this time – describes my family and me.
I think that, if you remember the points that Gunnery Sergeant Moran and Don Moore made last year, you will hear them echoed again today by me, and by my colleague at the U.S. Consulate General in Milan who is also here to share his experience as a Hispanic in the United States. I am here at the table with Marine Corps Sergeant, and Deputy Detachment Commander, Carlos Melendez. Although we were raised in different parts of the United States, and, as you will hear, have careers in different fields, we are united by the fact that our Spanish speaking families brought us to the United States to give us opportunity, and that, along the way, we have retained our original culture and – in varying degrees – our command of the Spanish language. We have also become part of the great cultural mosaic that is the United States, being enriched by our society’s cultural diversity, and enriching the nation with our own cultural Heritage.
Sergeant Carlos Melendez (seated left) and Consul for Press and Cultural Affairs
David Bustamante (center) at the Liceo Linguistico Manzoni in Milan with the school's
Director, Prof. Giuseppe Polistena (speaking).
That cultural mosaic comes under discussion every time the U.S. population passes a significant benchmark. Our most recent benchmark was passed last week, when U.S. population passed 300 million. In 1915, the U.S. reached a population of 100 million. It took us until 1967 to reach a population of 200 million. So it took us a couple of hundred years to reach our first one hundred million, 52 years to reach 200 million, and only 39 years to reach 300 million.
There has also been discussion of the change in the regional balance of the U.S. population. That balance has moved away from the east coast, and today, our two most populous states are in the southwest: California, with almost 40 million inhabitants, and Texas, with almost 23 million. Since 49% of American Hispanics live in those two states, we have become a subject of great discussion. In fact, questions about what we buy, whether or not we still speak Spanish, and which party we vote for, are becoming lively national debates.
Every year, the President of the United States designates the period from September 15 to October 15 as Hispanic Heritage month. Hispanic Heritage week, Instituted In 1968, took place in the second week of September, in part to commemorate the Grito de Dolores, the first cry for independence in Mexico, which took place on September 16, 1810. In 1988, recognizing that Americans of Hispanic origins come from many countries, not just Mexico, the period was lengthened to a month to include important events in other Hispanic countries of the Americas. September 15 was chosen as the starting point for the celebration because it is the anniversary of independence of five Latin American countries: Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. In addition to Mexico, Chile celebrates its Independence Day on September 18. October 12, Columbus Day, also known as the Día de la Raza, falls within this 30 day period.
So who, apart from Carlos and me, are these Hispanic Americans, and how did we come to be Americans? Let me give you two answers to the second of these questions, and then tackle the first question in just a second.
People who have not studied American history may think that there is only one answer to the question of how we Hispanics got to the United States: we crossed a border and took our places as immigrants. That is the story for all three of us here today, but we must also bear witness to the fact that some Hispanics were already living where they live today when the U.S. grew to include the places they called home. In fact, the two oldest cities in the United States today were established by the Spanish. Saint Augustine, the Spanish capital of Florida, was founded in 1565, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, the capital of the Spanish province of New Spain, was founded in 1598. Spanish settlements that are part of the United States today include the entire states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Florida. Areas explored by the Spanish included Nevada, Utah, Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas. Spain ruled French Louisiana from 1762 until 1800, and administered it for France from 1800 until 1803, when France sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States. Louisiana, in those days, was not simply the state at the end of the Mississippi River that we think of today – then it was a huge buffer zone of territory separating the Spanish settlements western America from the English settlements in the east. It extended from New Orleans north to southern Manitoba and Alberta, Canada, included all the watershed of the Mississippi River, and was bordered by the Rocky Mountains to the west and the Ohio valley to the east. So the Hispanic footprint in what is the U.S. today was consistently large.
With the exception of old Hispanic communities in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Puerto Rico and a very small number of Californians, though, the rest of us have immigrated to the United States. And we have come in great numbers. The U.S. Census Bureau estimated that, as of July 1, 2005, there were 42.7 million Hispanics in America, not including almost 4 million residents in Puerto Rico, almost all of whom are Hispanic. This means that, after Mexico, with 107.7 million, Colombia, with 45.5 million, and Spain, with 44.4 million, we are the most populous Hispanic country in the world. In 2002, Hispanics became the largest minority group in the United States. Today, we constitute 14 percent of the U.S. population, but the census bureau estimates that, by July 1, 2050, Hispanics will make up 24% of the U.S. population.
As the increase in our numbers indicates, we are really two populations: those of us born in America and those of us who have immigrated to the U.S. Almost all of us are becoming Americans, though. In the 2000 census, 40% of Hispanics were foreign born, and half of those of us who are foreign born arrived between 1990 and 2000. Our recent arrival notwithstanding, by 2000 70% of American Hispanics had already become citizens – meaning that those who were not born in the U.S. were rapidly becoming U.S. citizens.
Who are these Hispanic Americans? We are a patchwork quilt of peoples who define ourselves by our heritage. The U.S. Census Bureau makes it clear that we cannot confuse ethnicity with heritage when speaking of Hispanics: It defines a Hispanic or Latino as:
“A person of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race.”
In the 2000 census, we represented this diversity proudly. Even though almost two-thirds of us are of Mexican origin (59%) – almost 21 million Hispanics fit in this category – in origin as in race, we are a complex group. 9.7 percent of Hispanics are of Puerto Rican descent, 3.5 percent of Cuban descent, 5.1 percent from Central America, 4.0 percent from South America, 2.3 percent from the Dominican Republic, and 0.3 percent from Spain. Fifteen point seven percent of us list ourselves as “other Hispanics”, possibly because we are now thoroughly American, or maybe because we represent more than one Hispanic group, or are mixed Hispanic and non Hispanic. In appearance, Hispanic Americans are a mini-United Nations. Some are the descendants of Africans, some are of European descent, some are almost pure Native Americans, and some of us are a mix of all these groups.
American Hispanics are more likely to be young than other populations in America. In 2000, the median age for Hispanics was 26 years, while the median age for the total population was 35 years.
More Hispanics live in family groups than is the case in the general population. In 2000, 81 percent of Hispanics were living in family households, as compared to 68% of the general population.
Overall, only 18 percent of Americans over five years of age spoke another language at home. Over 75% of Hispanics, however, spoke a language other than English – 99% of this group spoke Spanish – in the home. So Spanish is our unofficial second language in the United States.
As has been the case with all groups that include a large number of immigrants, we lag behind the rest of America in educational level, employment, and income. Still, by 2000, 52% of Hispanic Americans had attained at least a high school degree, and 10% had earned a university degree. The percentage of Hispanics in the total labor force is almost the same as the percentage for the general population, both for men and women, although we are still underrepresented in the area of management and professional positions – which we occupy only half as often as the general population. The U.S. government, for example, in 2005 employed 125,000 Hispanics in full time Civil Service positions, but only 557 in senior pay positions. So we definitely have some catching up to do.
Median family income for Hispanics in 2000 was $34,400, lower than the median for family income in the general population, which was $50,000.
I think you will see from the statistics I have quoted, that we Hispanics can be proud of what we have accomplished in the United States, although we acknowledge the challenges we face as we look to the future.
As a growing force in the U.S. economy, with growing family and individual income, advertisers have begun to place Spanish language advertising on television, billboards, and in the newspapers in order to attract us to their brands, and encourage our consumption of their goods. These Spanish language ads are not simple copies of the ones designed for the population at large. They often depict our extended families, show us at church – 30% of us attend Mass or go to a Protestant church every Sunday – or tend to endorse values that they associate with us, including a love of sports and gatherings with friends and family. In fact, my home county of Los Angeles is home to the highest population of Hispanics of any American county – 4.6 million people from a total population of just over 10 million – so we see a lot of advertising aimed at the Hispanic community.
If the advertisers have found us, you can be sure that the political parties have also tried to recruit us. While Mexican, Dominican and Puerto Rican voters have traditionally supported the Democratic Party, Cubans and Spaniards have traditionally supported the Republican Party. But until recently, few of us actually went to vote, so we could be ignored. However, the 2004 election was a watershed for us. 7.6 million Hispanics went to the urns in 2004, a 27% Increase over the 2000 Presidential elections, and to the greatest degree ever, we endorsed Republican candidates, including President Bush, who is somewhat bilingual. In California, we did not elect Cruz Bustamante to be governor – we selected a governator instead. But we did elect the first Hispanic mayor of Los Angeles in over 100 years – Antonio Villaraigosa. In Florida and Texas, Hispanic voters swayed the election toward the Republican Party. This year, both parties, including a chagrined Democratic Party that thought it could always count on the lion’s share of the Hispanic vote, are courting Hispanic voters as never before.
As we have grown in numbers, we have begun to be seen as cultural icons not just among ourselves, but to all Americans.
In our history, Hispanic heroes have often not identified themselves as Hispanic, but, in fact, Hispanics have been involved in all U.S. military conflicts since our Revolutionary War. As an example, the most decorated member of the U.S. Navy in our 1861-65 Civil War was named David Farragut. He worked his way up through the ranks to become the first U.S. admiral. He won this rank after leading some hotly contested amphibious assaults along the Mississippi River in support of a general named U.S. Grant – who went on to win the war and be elected President – even capturing New Orleans. He is best known, however, for chaining himself to the mast and under a constant and deadly fire from Confederate forts and amid ever-present mines, uttering his famous line “damn the torpedoes – full speed ahead!” His fleet thus captured the strategic cotton exporting port of Mobile, Alabama. His father Jorge was a Catalan merchant from Minorca, Spain who had been an early supporter of the U.S. Revolutionary War.
In all, 42 Hispanics have won the nation’s highest military recognition – the Medal of Honor.
But from the earliest times, American Hispanics have distinguished themselves in every field. Below is a list of some of those Americans and their accomplishments:
Film & TV
Jessica Alba, actress
Sammy Davis, Jr., singer, actor
Cameron Diaz, actress
Emilio Estevez, actor
Andy Garcia, actor
Eva Longoria, actress
Jennifer Lopez, actress, singer
Anthony Quinn, actor
Charlie Sheen, actor
Martin Sheen, actor; father of Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez
Jimmy Smits, actor
Music
Christina Aguilera, pop singer
Mariah Carey, singer and artist
Ricky Martin, singer
Carlos Santana, musician
Literature
Julia Alvarez, writer
Rudolfo Anaya, writer
Sandra Cisneros, writer
Oscar Hijuelos, writer
Luis Valdes, playwright
Artists
Jean-Michel Basquiat, artist
Richard Serra, sculptor
Jose Limon, modern dancer and choreographer
Television News
Elizabeth Vargas , ABC news co-anchor
Business
Mark Cuban, Internet entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks NBA team owner
Roberto C. Goizueta, former Coca Cola CEO
Civil Rights Activist
Cesar Chavez, labor leader
Government & Politics
Henry Bonilla, United States Representative and former mayor of San Antonio
Alberto Gonzales, Attorney General
Carlos Gutierrez, Secretary of Commerce
Bill Richardson, Governor of New Mexico, former U.S. Secretary of Energy,
former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. and former U.S. Representative
Sciences
Luis Walter Alvarez, Nobel Prize-winning physicist
Mario Molina, Nobel Prize-winning chemist
Severo Ochoa, Nobel Prize-winning biochemist
10 NASA astronauts
Sports
Oscar de la Hoya, boxer
Nancy Lopez, golfer
Ted Williams, baseball player
I believe that a case study or two might be useful in explaining the concepts I have raised. In order to give you some color to go with all the statistics I have given you, I will speak just a minute about my own family’s history in America, and the role of Hispanics in the Foreign Service. I will then invite my colleague to tell you a little bit about himself. Sergeant Melendez will speak about the role of Hispanics in the military.
In early 1915, my grandfather, Josè Pedro Bustamante Duque, left the colonial Mexican city of Guanajuato, where he was the manager for the Banco de Guanajuato, to escape the Mexican Revolution. By summer, my grandmother and their five children had joined him in Los Angeles. My father was a few months old. He grew up in a Los Angeles that was still small, agricultural and friendly. Hispanics, however, were not always welcome in the upper echelons of society, and my father’s brothers were ambitious. One of them, my uncle Josè Roberto, dreamed of working as a screenwriter in Hollywood, but realized that there was no future there for Hispanics. So he wrote scripts under the name J. Robert Bren. In 1934, he got his start as the writer of Daryl Zanuck’s first film at 20th Century, Looking for Trouble, a story about the 1933 Long Beach earthquake, and wrote for cinema and television from his position at RKO for the rest of his life. His brother Federico became Fred Busty, and worked for the rest of his life as the Executive Assistant to the owner of a number of department stores. Only my father kept our surname alive. Fortunately, the family was large, and on Sundays and holidays, the Bustamante family would gather at one of the family homes. I grew up with about forty family members, including fifteen cousins more or less my own age, as best friends. We kept up speaking Spanish as long as my grandmother was alive, until I was eight years old. Of my generation, I am the only one who still speaks fluent Spanish, and that is due in part to my year of study in Madrid, and twelve years in Latin America as a U.S. diplomat. Fortunately, my two sons, Robert, who is 17 years old, and Mark, my 13 year old, understand Spanish and will speak it if absolutely necessary. They knew and loved my father, who died in 2004. I am confident that I have passed on my Hispanic Heritage to the next generation.
When I arrived in Washington D.C. to take up my position in the U.S. Foreign Service in September 1983, I took a long look around and was surprised to see almost no other Hispanics – not in my class of new diplomats, and certainly not among the senior diplomats, either. Most of the people I met were east coast children of previous diplomats who did not truly reflect the regional or ethnic diversity of America. I have been pleased to see that in every new class of diplomats, there has been an increase in the number of Hispanics. Both in the civil service positions in Washington, and in the Foreign Service, I have seen bicultural and bilingual people rise to the highest ranks, including ambassadors like Alberto Fernandez and Crescencio Arcos. And I have been pleased to also see an increasing number of bright young Hispanic women take their just places in the Senior Foreign Service. Today we have fairly well closed the gender gap among Hispanics in the Foreign Service, and are beginning to occupy senior positions in the same measure as our percentage of the populace at large would imply.
So I hope that this statistical overview has proven useful, and that you feel that you know the Hispanic community in the United States. The United States has truly become a diverse and richer country thanks to the Hispanic presence. Whether one thinks of street fairs on Saints days in New York, or Mexican food at the famous annual taste of Chicago event, quinceañera parties, confirmation classes at Hispanic parish churches, western riding at the tournament of roses parade, or a game of soccer in a public park in which one team is wearing the colors of Cruz Azul and yelling “al centro, al centro!”, Hispanic culture is a part of America that lends color and values to a nation on a fast march into the future. We are proud to be a part of the mosaic of America, and are sure to be a large part of its future.
I would like to finish my address by quoting President Bush’s 2006 proclamation of Hispanic Heritage Month:
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Through hard work, faith in God, and a deep love of family, Hispanic Americans have pursued their dreams and contributed to the strength and vitality of our nation. They have enriched the American experience and excelled in business, law, politics, education, community service, the arts, science, and many other fields. Hispanic entrepreneurs are also helping build a better, more hopeful future for all by creating jobs across our country. The number of Hispanic-owned businesses is growing at three times the national rate, and increasing numbers of Hispanic Americans own their own homes. We continue to benefit from a rich Hispanic culture and we are a stronger country because of the talent and creativity of the many Hispanic Americans who have shaped our society.
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I thank you for your attention and invite you to hear my colleague Sergeant Carlos Melendez as he relates to you his personal and professional experiences.
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