Hispanic American Diversity

Hispanic American Diversity
Mexican Americans made up 66.9% of the population in the United States as of the year 2002. As of 2002, about 23 percent of Mexican Americans are English dominant. Until the last 20 or 30 years, there was a conscious effort to devalue the Spanish language and to discourage Hispanics from using it in schools In the political arena, some of our candidates relied heavily on tickets that were written in the Spanish language. Both political parties have recognized that Hispanics form a force in the election process. Federal law now requires bilingual or even multilingual ballots in voting districts where at least 5 percent of the voting-age population or 10,000 of the population do not speak English. Latino household income has increased over the last 20 years, but there is still a significant gap in relation to non-Hispanic Whites. Just like the rest of the Hispanic groups, most of them are of the Roman Catholic faith. Language retention or assimilation is an index of how well a group of immigrants become part of a new country.   In areas of high concentrations of Mexican Americans, language retention is high.   At that 2000 census, almost 75 percent of Mexican Americans still spoke Spanish at home. Mexican Americans do not have many entrepreneurships or a wide-spread ethnic economy like the Cuban Americans established in Miami. Throughout the history of immigration to America, Mexicans seem to have made little progress in moving up from immigrant status to mainstream social status, partly due to the amount of discrimination and the poor educational systems provided to them (Alba, 2006).

Puerto Rico is a self-governing territory of the United States. Puerto Ricans in the United States tend to be more English-language oriented, with 39 percent English-dominant, 40 percent bilingual, and 21 percent Spanish dominant. Spanish and English are both official languages of Puerto Rico.   Puerto Rican constitution guarantees freedom for all...