December 03, 2004
Like, Duh
The Los Angeles Times pays a visit to Montebello High School (about 10 minutes east of Downtown L.A. for those of you outside of SoCal), and finds that, surprise, surprise, there's a big difference between American-born Latinos and more recent immigrant arrivals within the student body:
- On the other side of the border, in an area with a brightly painted quad and a new cafeteria, is Senior Park. This is where students immersed in traditional American high school culture hang out. They include football and basketball players, student government leaders and members of the water polo and drill teams. Many students here come from Mexican American families that have been in California for several generations. English is the predominant language. Some don't know Spanish.
The groups don't hate each other. Some cross between the two sides and have friends on both. But some talk bitterly about a divide. Others acknowledge it as inevitable, even if they wish it weren't.
"It's like two countries," said senior Lucia Rios, 17, a Mexican American with blond-highlighted hair who wants everyone on campus to mix more. Rios is co-captain of the drill team and eats lunch in the Senior Park area. She is proud of her Mexican heritage, but relates to American culture. Rios' parents, who immigrated to the United States from Mexico as teenagers, stopped speaking to her in Spanish when she was 5 years old.
This young Latino demographic will really be a test for Hispanic marketers -- hell, for all marketers -- in another short three to five years. As they move from adolescence into adulthood and begin to assert a growing role in shaping the marketplace, they'll not only re-write the rules of ethnic targeted marketing, but of the mainstream general market as well.
So long as the rigid, old-guard Hispanic marketing establishment continually fails to acknowledge this group's viability, while still operating under (and perpetuating) an assumption that all American Latinos are F.O.B.'s, there will be numerous opportunities missed and plenty of mistakes made. Here's more:
- Montebello High illustrates a larger issue of how California and its schools have changed, said Chon Noriega, director of the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA. Last year, 14% of the state's schools had Latino enrollments of 80% or higher, according to a Times analysis.
Nobody expects a mostly white campus to be monolithic. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that Montebello High isn't either, Noriega said. Yet some non-Latinos are oblivious to the differences, he said, because the public thinks "about Latinos in very broad terms," like economic and political power.
The split, he said, is natural and something Californians should understand. "It's important for the schools to take these differences into account," he said. "Otherwise the schools will fail in taking a cookie cutter approach" to a diverse population.
Sage advice for Hispanic marketing professionals too. I think the era of Spanish-language-TV-as-the-default-marketing-vehicle-to-reach-the-U.S.-Hispanic-market is soon coming to an inglorious end. As well it should.
Read the whole article here.