Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Latinas, Fertility and Jonathan Swift?



I'm feeling Swiftean today. No, not quite the biting satire of A Modest Proposal. This is a bit more tame, but the debate should be vigorous. As I look around at the first generation immigrants from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Ecuador, et al in this area, I see young women with lots of kids. Very young. I see Latinas in their 30s who look fifty...and again, with kids. Is it the same with Mexican teens and young women in California, in Texas, or Puerto Ricans & Domincans in New York? Or with the "hey we're just white people with accents, not Indians & negroes" Cuban nobility in Miami?
Public intellectual Richard Rodriguez posits that the label "Hispanic" (a Nixonian construct designed, ironically, as with his formulation of affirmative action, to control or divide rather than empower minorities) is uniquely American because as Americans we are in reality all a mixture, all impure. So I pose this question, Swiftean style: How would Hispanic culture, politics, economic concerns be utterly transformed if young Latinas would simply stop having kids, perhaps putting that off till their 30s? [whew imagine the maschismo metldown...the illegal alien & healthcare wingnuts' kerfuffle...school building budgets etc on top of that...]

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Since I know something about what Swift was trying to convey, I know you're NOT trying to be racist. But...

Toni said...

The transformation would be apocalyptic. They are based on having kids, and on machismo. That is culture. You would be asking themto utterly change, like turning a tree into a rock. It just wouldn't happen.

Anonymous said...

I don't believe it's that simple. We (Latinos), regardless of our color or our national origin, do share a few common threads of culture. We're generally religious, family-oriented, and passionate about such. To ask us to give that up would be asking us not to be Latino. It's not feasible any more than it would be to ask blacks to stop playing basketball or stop respecting their mothers. It's culture. Live and let live. Not to bust balls here, and I do believe in increased border security simply as a matter of mathematical necessity, but we've been here since before the Anglos got here. Learning English and a base level of assimilation are necessary, but not asking for a fundamental shift in Latino culture itself.

What I want to know is if you'd support the same cultural shift for blacks, Chinese, Filipinos, or any other group.

ALSO: I have a bone to pick with your assessment of Cubans. Cubanos, Puertoriquenos, Uruguyans, Mexicans, Chileans, all come with majority white populations. In Uruguay and Argentina, it's conceivable to have a Spaniard or Italian family that has never mixed with Indios. My question to you is, does that mean that you base your understanding of impoverished or disadvantaged on race, as opposed to actual financial factors and place of origin?

levitra cialis said...

This is truth, I'm gonna say something maybe will be funny but it's truth, the reason that women in those countries have a lot of children is because they're really poor and they don't have television and any other entertainment, that's why the only way is having sex and making a lot of babies, thats' the reality, actually there are some surveys that support it.

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