This year, instead of making New Year's resolutions for myself, I thought I'd make a few for the nearly 40 million Latinos in the United States.
These resolutions aren't for every Latino. But for those for whom the zapato fits, I'd be happy if this year folks did just five things:
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Become U.S. citizens.
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Learn English.
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Teach their children the importance of education and set the example.
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Become engaged in the society they live in.
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Promote and practice unity and tolerance toward one another.
That last one is the biggie. Not that this will come as a big surprise to many of you. A newspaper executive mentioned to me recently how Latinos were destined to wield a lot of power in cities like Dallas (or Denver or Phoenix or Charlotte) if only they'd become unified. Yeah, if only.
About 10 years ago, I wrote an essay that remains to this day the most often requested and reprinted piece I've written. It was about envidia, or envy. About how Latinos are so often their own worst enemies because they can't stand to see one of their own succeed. I still see traces of that phenomenon.
In fact, I got a real good look recently when I agreed to address a group of Dallas-area Latinos. As so often happens when I speak to a Latino audience, I wound up in an argument. This time, it was about something I call the Latino Litmus Test. It's how some people in my community go about assessing the authenticity of others.
That's quite a responsibility, and I suppose I should be thankful that there are still folks willing to bear the burden.
A person in the audience asked when I was going to write a column criticizing Al Día, Dallas' only daily Spanish-language newspaper and a product of The Dallas Morning News, for having a top executive who "doesn't speak Spanish fluently."
For what it's worth, the person in question does speak Spanish — although perhaps not as well as that audience member would have liked. But what really bugs me, and I said so at the time, is that this executive has done more for Latinos in journalism and the local Latino community than a dozen other people I know who speak Spanish perfectly.
You see the problem. Readers accuse me of being "biased toward [my] race," so now seems a good time to spell out one area in which I think many of my fellow Latinos could stand some improvement.
Too many Latinos can't wait to thin their ranks of those whom they consider not up to snuff culturally. If you don't speak Spanish like a Mexican diplomat, or if you have light skin, or if you marry a non-Latino, or if you belong to the wrong political party, or hold the wrong beliefs, then you're out in the cold.
And then those pure enough to remain in the club wonder why their numbers are such that they can hold meetings in a broom closet. Even then, they still sometimes splinter into even smaller factions. That's been the inside joke about Latino organizations for as long as I can remember. First, there's one group. Then two. Then three. Sometimes it's because they can't agree on a mission statement, or a funding source, or an agenda.
Sometimes, it's simply because they can't agree on who should be in charge. Too many generals, not enough soldiers.
I'm sick of it. It's dumb and childish and counterproductive. And it goes a long way toward explaining why Latinos, for all their population growth in recent years, aren't more of a force in America and may not be for some time. How can they be when they have to confront so much — discrimination, poor political representation, a mediocre educational system, lack of health care, depressed wages and on and on. And they can't seem to attack any of it because they're too busy attacking one other.
Enough of that. The destiny of the nation's largest minority is in its own hands. Instead of constantly complaining about what's being done to them, Latinos should think long and hard about what they're doing to themselves.
