Out Of The Barrio: Toward A New Politics Of Hispanic Assimilation [Paperback]

Linda Chavez (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 11, 1992

Are Hispanics “making it”—achieving the American dream following the pattern of other ethnic groups? This controversial book shatters the myth that 20 million His panics—fast becoming the nation’s largest minority—are a permanent underclass. Chavez considers the radical implications for bilingual education, immigration policy, and affirmative action.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Hispanic Americans are not an impoverished minority group on the fast track to the permanent underclass, despite all the rhetoric to this effect coming from the victimization industry. To the contrary, they are an upwardly mobile group in pursuit of the American dream. Like immigrants in the past, they simply need time to adapt to their new home. In this brilliant analysis, Linda Chavez conclusively shows that the main obstacle to their progress is not racism or nativism among the native-born but misguided public policies such as bilingual education that inhibit Hispanics from entering the mainstream.

From Library Journal

The explosive theory that Hispanics are keeping themselves in the barrio by refusing to assimilate into the majority white culture is covered unevenly and, despite a flurry of statistics, at times unscientifically. While Chavez, a former director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, starts out with the basic premise that today's Hispanics should be treated like the immigrants of yesteryear and be forced to forsake their language and culture for their own good when inconvenient, she argues the reverse midway through the book. She presents an accurate and well-cited discussion of bilingual eduation, a cornerstone issue of the Hispanic community, but then drops the academic analysis to press unpopular views with little foundation. For more complete coverage of bilingual education from an educator in the field, a preferable choice is Rosalie Porter's Forked Tongue ( LJ 5/15/90). Unfortunately, since little has been written solely on Hispanics as an ethnic minority, this may fill gaps in some collections.
- Sharon Roman, Carroll Cty. P.L., Westminster, Md.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (November 11, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465054315
• ISBN-13: 978-0465054312
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,948,265 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great book..., January 13, 2002

By 

Beercelo (Money-makin Tucson) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Out Of The Barrio: Toward A New Politics Of Hispanic Assimilation (Paperback)

I was coming home from a Dia de la Raza march in 1993 and was asked to steal this book from the public library in Yuma and destroy it. So I stole the book and ended up flipping through it on my way back to Tucson. I read the entire book, and for the first time in my life, I realized that I could be both the American patriot who loves the U.S. and the proud Chicano who never forgot where he came from. After I read this book I thought about being more open-minded and started listening to opposing viewpoints. In reading the works of Linda Chavez and others, such as Alan Keyes and Thomas Sowell, I saw that being a minority and believing in less government and lower taxes and being opposed to the welfare state didn't automatically make you a sell-out. This, I believe, has been the mistake of civil rights leaders in the past: if you're white and disagree with Jesse Jackson when he says that racism and nothing else accounts for minorities being turned down for home loans, then you're a racist homophobe; if you're Mexican and disagree with Octavio Paz that the only truly original creations of America were pre-Columbian, then you're a coconut - that is, brown on the outside, white on the inside; brown, wishing to be white. Actually, we are not a monolithic group and we don't all have to agree on important issues to have genuine Latino credentials. In truth, we a growing and still-evolving people, and there are a great number of us who love being Mexicano, proud of the Indian blood we carry, and love our beautiful Spanish language, and happy to live in the U.S., and proud to defend its honor. (*And in case you're wondering, yes, I took the book back the library, and yes, the alarm went off as I walked in through the front door trying to sneak it back to the shelf.)

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, April 28, 2002

By A Customer

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This review is from: Out Of The Barrio: Toward A New Politics Of Hispanic Assimilation (Paperback)

Chavez criticizes a number of policies pursued by Hispanic activists over the last thirty years, but she is particularly critical of bilingual education. She provides evidence that the program has strayed from its original mission of helping Spanish-speaking children keep up with other subjects while learning English. Now it's more concerned with the retention of Spanish. Moreover, the longer children stay in these programs, the more money the bilingual education bureaucracy gets.

She also points out that civil rights groups and activists who lobby on behalf of Hispanics are not actually accountable to the people they claim to represent. They are unelected and their funding comes from elite foundations. (So whose agenda are they really promoting?)

Furthermore, these groups can only maintain or increase their funding if they present Hispanics as a permanent underclass. They do this by including recently arrived immigrants--both legal and illegal--in all the data pertaining to education, housing, income, etc This clouds the data about older groups of Hispanics who have assimilated or who are still making progress. Because most immigrants come from Mexico, the information about Mexican-Americans is skewed the most. The more negative the data, the more jobs and funding the lobbyists get. They're fighting for the bottom.

She says that these groups ignore assimilated, successful Hispanics. I recently read that Mexican-Americans are the nation's largest group of minority business owners, and that in 1995 a Mexican-American man won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The lobbyists and civil rights groups don't mention it.

I highly recommend this book. I am not at all surprised that people have tried to censor it.

19 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stir the Melting Pot Again, March 8, 2001

By 

Steven Fantina (Phillipsburg, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Out Of The Barrio: Toward A New Politics Of Hispanic Assimilation (Paperback)

Linda Chavez presents a detailed view of the state of Hispanic residents of the United States. Despite the recurring media myth and the noisy claims of some self-appointed spokespeople, Hispanics overall are not an underachieving victim group. As Ms. Chavez articulates before the affirmative action mentality took hold, there was no Hispanics minority. Rather there were Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Guatemalans etc. Cleverly she proclaims, "it is only in the United States `Hispanics' exist; a Cakchiquel Indian in Guatemala would find it remarkable that anyone could consider his culture to be the same as a Spanish Argentinean's." One ironic angle to the multicultural mumbo-jumbo is the stripping away not only of individuality but also the uniqueness of various nationalities. Today Poles, Italian, Irish, Russians, Germans, and a host of other Caucasians are regularly lumped as "whites" as though they are all one and the same.

Within the sub-Hispanic groups, a great variance exists in terms of overall level of success. Immigrants from Cuba in many ways have achieved equality with any white ethic group in the United States. Perhaps this unprecedented success rate can be seen as at least one factor in the left's justification for anti-Cuban bigotry. (Can anyone imagine Elian Gonzalez being ripped away from his family and sent back to a slave state had he been black or white or Puerto Rican?) Among Cubans a very low divorce rate exists as do lower numbers of unwed births and female headed households which certainly bodes well for them. As Ms. Chavez writes, "no institution is more important to the success of Hispanics (or any group) than the family."

In Linda Chavez' broad evaluation, one of the most threatening detriments facing America's Latino population is it out-of-touch self-appointed spokesmen. In her words, "Hispanic organizations that insist on special benefits, not just for Hispanic citizens but for immigrants as well-legal and illegal-severely strain the comity of the American public. Moreover there is no reason to believe that the Latin immigrants who are purported beneficiaries of such policies seek their implementation." She shrewdly contradicts those who place racism toward Hispanics on a par with what black citizens were once forced to endure. The slave trade never treated Latinos as chattel.

In stead of the separatist mentality now strenuously promulgated by multicultural martinets, Linda Chavez lays out a brilliant argument for assimilation-dirty as that word may have become in some liberal circles. She sites increasing intermarriage rates and other quotidian interactions between Latinos and non-Latinos as doing far more good for all communities than the current race-obsessed regulations putatively enforced. "From 1820 to 1924 the United States successfully incorporated a population more ethnically diverse and varied than any other in the world. We could not have done so if today's politics of ethnicity had been the prevailing ethos." The Statute of Liberty welcomes all to a land where no one should ever be a hyphenated-American.