0.1 Preface  (Page 6/7)

Hispanics will continue to develop their heroic resistance on all fronts, demanding equality of opportunities at work and regarding education, equal treatment by the law, bilingual-bicultural education, greater representation in politics; they are extending the utilization of mediums of communication in Spanish, press, radio, television; they are creating movies, literature, theater works, murals, poetry, paintings, in reality, an art that reflects their problems and utopias, reinforcing their identity and ethnic pride.

Three more factors, that are ordinarily silenced, contribute to the renewed survival of the Hispanic culture in the United States: the religious communitarian experience in language and in a traditional ritual-festive way of the Hispano-American popular religiosity; folklore dance-music-food in the version of mariachis, salsa, or other versions; and the mothers and grandmothers who teach their children to pray in Spanish.

The person who has been sung to sleep, blessed, or danced in Spanish, will always conserve a permanent mark pertaining to a nation and a singular culture; a nation that by its braid of language-race-religion-family-art-folklore and for its vocalist temporality, historically forms part of the Latin American Community, having the exciting challenge to create in the heart of the richest and most powerful society of the world a new and singular version of Hispanic culture, within the ample mosaic of Hindu-Black-Latin American national cultures. But being a contributor and citizen nation with rights of the United States, where they are called to make their historical destiny and heroic commitment: “the historical and spiritual mission of the Hispanic minority in the American democracy - as written by Octavio Paz - consists in expressing the vision that represents our culture and our language. The United States has become, not without slips, during the past 30 years, in a multiracial democracy; the first in history. The action of the Hispanic community can be the beginning of another great historical mutation: the coexistence of a plurality of cultures within a democratic society. It would be the dawn of a true universal civilization.” Octavio Paz, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos , Madrid, ICI, nº 44, junio de 1987.

"the hispanic threat," according to samuel huntington

The thesis of Samuel Huntington in Who are We? (2004), visualizes Mexican immigration as a threat to the “white and Protestant United States,” valorizing the WASP as the only culture in the US; it has been criticized from ample and diverse sectors. “Masked Racist,” has been the title of an article on Huntington’s thesis of Carlos Fuentes ( El Pais, 23-III-2004); “The False Prophet,” denominated by Enrique Krauze ( El Pais , 13-IV-2004). Latin “Barbarians” at the Empire’s door? The sociologist Samuel Huntington prophesies that the Mexican “invasion” will be the finish of American progress, as titled in El Mundo , (22-III-2004), which translates an article of Dan Glaister of the London newspaper The Guardian . “The Genius of Crossbreeding” was the title the magazine Letras Libres de Mexico , gave its cover and editorial in response to S. Huntington’s thesis (April 2004, Year VI, number 64), in which the danger of “the United States is on the way to fracturing in two parts, with two divorced cultures and two languages,” the Magazine notices that “the culture and the progress are children of the mix; and that the Mexicans know something of that... it shows that our culture has been inclusive for centuries, and crossbreeding is our particular genius: here, the Indian and the Spanish merged with admirable results.” Jose Vidal-Beneyto also criticized S. Huntington, accusing his position of fundamentalism in an article titled “The Hispanic Danger” ( El Pais , 28-V-2004). Also the newspaper of Catalonia, La Vanguardia , (30-V-2004) becomes the echo of Huntington’s book in an editorial advance of his book Who we are? The challenges of the American national identity (Paidos, 2004).