Novelist and ex-journalist Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez in Sunday’s Washington Post provides some basic facts about Latinos that may surprise you. My favorites:
5 Language is not genetic. The Pew Hispanic Center shows that
by the third generation, 100 percent of Latinos speak English as their
first and often only language. This is the precise assimilation pattern
for every other foreign-language immigrant group in this country. P.S.
If you’re so opposed to non-English words, you may speak the names of
only 13 American states and almost no cities in the Southwest.6 Hispanics
like to remind you about America’s Hispanic past not because we want to
go back to it, but because we are sick of you assuming that all Latinos
are immigrants. My family has been in New Mexico for seven generations. Bet I beat Lou Dobbs on that one.7 Please stop sending e-mails saying things such as, "All you Hispanics should go home." I, like most Hispanics you see every day, am already home.
