Latin Republic of the USA

...Elizabeth DiNovella is the culture editor of The Progressive...

...Los Angeles Times reporter H?ctor Tobar sets out to explore what he calls the "Latin Republic of the United States" in his enjoyable new book, Translation Nation: Defining a New American Identity in the Spanish-Speaking United States...

...Other cities and towns across the continent have undergone the same pattern of response to the creeping advance of Latinization: denial, anger, acceptance," he writes...

...This bill ties undocumented workers to specific companies, which could terminate their employment at any time...

...The 2000 Census gave Hispanics an opportunity to racially classify themselves...

...He says Latinos constitute a "parallel nation...

...These numbers reveal much about how Hispanics see themselves, and how race is being lived today in the United States...

...His father wanted young Hector to speak English at school but to speak Spanish at home...

...Tobar says it stems from an identity "that is colored by the idea of resistance...

...By Elizabeth DiNovella Latinos comprise14 percent of America's population, at forty million and growing...

...According to the federal government, Hispanics do not constitute a separate race and can be of any race...

...As one potential immigrant tells Tobar, "I think that the border will disappear before we lose the desire to cross...

...Hispanics who identified themselves as white have higher levels of education and income and greater degrees of civic enfranchisement than those who pick the some other race categories...

...The worsening economic conditions in Mexico will lead to increased migration...

...Tobar lives in a trailer park along with forty other workers, most of them Tyson employees, off Highway 9. His roommates include Frankie and Linda, a young couple from the Texas border who left their eighteen-month-old son with a grandmother in order to escape their old life...

...My father was ambivalent about the United States, and in that too he was a pioneer: His ambivalence about WASP culture never faded, never surrendered to acceptance," writes Tobar...

...Now they made up 80 percent of the student body...

...There is no single word that describes this way of feeling about yourself and your family, so people used dozens of synonyms: Latino, hispano, Chicano, dominicano, mexicano, or 'Hispanic' if you live in New Mexico," writes Tobar...

...has a high demand for labor...

...A decade earlier, there were only a handful of Latino students" at Roan Street Elementary School, writes Tobar...

...About half of Mexicans in the U.S...

...Tobar spends a lot of time in the South, reporting on the changing demographics...

...Tobar doesn't fully address the 48 percent of Latinos who consider themselves white, the major weakness in the book...

...Regardless of what comes out of Congress, this much is true: People will continue to make their way here...

...The "Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act of 2005," sponsored by Senators John McCain and Edward Kennedy, creates a path to citizenship for undocumented workers...

...His father is not the only immigrant to feel this ambivalence...

...But he explains that Latinization is inevitable...

...The author marvels at the expense...

...Other legislative ideas are circulating in Congress...

...Rather than assimilate into the dominant culture, "people believe . . . in a transnational identity, that their bodies and souls can live between two countries," writes Tobar...

...He is the son of Guatemalan immigrant parents who settled in Los Angeles in the 1960s, on the cusp of the 1970s great wave of immigration from south of the Rio Grande...

...These undocumented workers would be required to waive their rights for judicial review...

...But he does a good job profiling Latino immigration experiences...

...In a great bit of reporting, he goes undercover as an immigrant and travels by bus from Texas to Anniston, Alabama, to work in aTyson's chicken-processing plant...

...When people use these words it is a shorthand way of saying they have preserved and nurtured a sense of who they are and how their life stories fit inside a larger narrative of colony and empire, of exodus and displacement...

...A report from the Pew Hispanic Center states, "Latinos who call themselves white and those who say they are some other race have distinctly different characteristics...

...The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that of the 10.3 million illegal immigrants in the country, 57 percent are from Mexico...

...On the 2000 Census, 48 percent of Hispanics identified themselves as white, and 2 percent as black, while 43 percent did not choose the traditional racial categories and checked off "some other race...

...are here illegally...

...The principal explains, "The people here think it's important...

...Senators John Cornyn and Jon Kyl are sponsoring another bill that creates a new temporary worker program with no worker protections and no path to citizenship...

...Four of every ten adults in Mexico say they would migrate to the United States if they could, and two of ten would do so illegally...

...Mexico has a surplus of labor and the U.S...

...The author writes a lot about his own family and its immigration story...

...After failing to attract bilingual teachers, the school's administrators embarked on an ambitious teacher-training program that sends veteran staff to Mexico to study Spanish...

...Tobar travels to other cities that haven't embraced their new arrivals so warmheartedly...

...Tobar notes that the middleman who recruited him was "implicated in a complex scheme to bring undocumented Mexican workers to its plants in the Deep South, charges that would be outlined in a thirty-six-count federal indictment...

...President Bush is pushing for immigration reform that includes a crackdown at the border and a guest worker program...

...The Latinization of the United States is in full swing...

...In Dalton, Latinos make up more than half of the school age population, their parents filling the shifts in the area's carpet factories...

...The bill would allow undocumented workers to stay in the country for an initial period of six years, and give these workers the same rights as other U.S...

...Census projections estimate that Latinos will make up 25 percent of the population by the middle of the century...

...workers...

...Whiteness is a measure of belonging and inclusion...

...Tobar works the nightshift alongside men like Gregorio, a former goatherd who crossed into the United States from Mexico after goat meat fell out of favor locally...

...From Los Angeles to Dalton, Georgia, from Miami to Rupert, Idaho, Tobar finds Latinos transforming the landscape...