COMMENTARY
Hawai'i is proof that heritage, assimilation can co-exist

By John Griffin

It may seem a long way from the clashing cultures in Iraq to the flow of Latinos into the United States to our racial situation in Hawai'i. But let's see if any dots connect.

Back in 1993, Harvard scholar-author Samuel Huntington sparked a heated debate with an essay predicting a "Clash of Cultures" between Islam and the West as globalism grew.

While we still appear a ways from Armageddon, we are dangerously deep in cultural conflict in the Middle East. That's due to a mixture of Islamic extremists, fears of another 9/11 and the ideological ambitions and alarming ineptitudes of the Bush administration. Add in our alliance with Israel's current hard-line regime.

Now political scientist Huntington has moved on to set off another heated controversy with an essay in Foreign Policy and a new book citing Hispanic immigration as a threat to America and its core values. His conclusions are summed up this way in the magazine:

"The persistent inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures and two languages. Unlike past immigrant groups, Mexicans and other Latinos have not assimilated into mainstream U.S. culture, forming instead their own political and linguistic enclaves — from Los Angeles to Miami — and rejecting the Anglo-Protestant values that built the American dream. The United States ignores this challenge at its peril."

Irate Latinos, various scholars and others have gone to battle against Huntington and virtually every point in his detailed arguments. He has responded to many, not always convincingly.

For example, when it's noted that many of the Americans serving and dying in Iraq are Hispanics and that their commander, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, grew up in Texas among Mexican-Americans, Huntington is likely to respond that he is not talking about people but about ideas and practices.

(In a recent interview in The New York Times magazine, he calls himself "an old-fashioned Democrat," against the war in Iraq, who supports fellow Bostonian John Kerry. That helps make the point that immigration is basically not a partisan political issue.)

After reading much of this, I feel Huntington is essentially wrong about Latinos, now our nation's largest minority group, but he has some points worth considering.

Most disturbing is his claim that assimilation essentially means adapting to "Anglo-Protestant" values. Yes, that's what founded the nation. But it's also too narrow. We have gone beyond that to enrich our culture with a continuing flow of immigrants and ideas from many lands. Hawai'i and many places in the country stand as testimony to that.

He's right that today's Latino immigration is different from previous waves. Where my Irish relatives came thousands of miles across an ocean, effectively severing ties with the homeland, Mexico is right next door. Mexican immigrants can and often do go back and forth for visits or even voting. ÊIn addition, several of our western states are on land that was taken from Mexico in wars in the mid-1800s.

And Hispanic immigrants, now more than half of those entering the United States, keep coming, legally and illegally, in large numbers. They total almost 40 million. Among other things, this record-high, continuing flow often means dependency on speaking Spanish and living in immigrant enclaves.

Still, most of the data also indicate that Latinos do assimilate into American society over time, learn to speak English by the second or third generation, are intermarrying to a high degree andÊbelieve in those core values (respect for law, hard work, human rights, etc.) as they make their own contributions to American culture.

One of Huntington's interesting points warns against backlash:

"A plausible reaction to the demographic changes under way in the United States could be the rise of an anti-Hispanic, anti-black, and anti-immigrant movement composed largely of whites, working and middle-class males, protesting their job losses to immigrants and foreign countries, the perversion of their culture, and the displacement of their language. Such a movement can be labeled 'white nativism.' "

One of the more constructive answers to Huntington I saw came from former Mexican foreign minister Jorge Casta–eda, who called the eminent professor a conservative but not a racist.

Critical of Huntington for not offering a solution to the problem he describes, Casta–eda concedes that Mexican immigration and its background are different, and he calls for new attitudes and policies on both sides of the border.

He adds that "we must distinguish between those who come and go and those who stay in the U.S. The latter increasingly want to acquire U.S. citizenship and there is no reason why they shouldn't. Those who wish to come and go should be able to do so — securely and legally — through a bilateral immigration agreement."

Odds are Latino immigration won't be a big issue this presidential election year. Both parties woo the Hispanic vote. Unions now see a new source of members, while business likes the cheap labor immigration provides.

In addition, President Bush has Latino family ties and has been interested in addressing the immigration problem. Democrat Kerry has a Portuguese wife who calls herself Latino.

Still, areas for possible political battles were suggested in a recent article on the Huntington controversy in The Economist that said:

"(The United States) needs to scrap the failed experiment with bilingual education which has left so many immigrants unable to speak English. And it needs to stop pandering to ethnic demagogues with special programs for ethnic minorities."

Such issues resonate in Hawai'i and elsewhere in the nation.

Hawai'i, of course, is a special case (as well as a special place) and the mainstream Latino issues rarely present themselves in dramatic ways and numbers here.

Yes, there is a Latino community that claims 100,000 people here, ranging from old-time Puerto Ricans to newer Mexicans and others. That figure doesn't include Portuguese (different language) or Filipinos, who have a separate Hispanic heritage.

The Hispanic Center of Hawai'i is in the phone book. It has a Web site that says it provides various services involving translations, health, education and jobs advice.

Hawai'i is "very Latino friendly," says Jose Villa, a New York-raised Puerto Rican now works at the Office of Hawaiian Affairs and is editor and publisher of the now-on-hiatus Hawai'i Hispanic News.

The Islands are friendlier than many Mainland communities because Hispanics blend in with the local population and Island culture and live all over, instead of in separate neighborhoods or barrios, he says.

"Here, it's not as politically correct and more pan-Hispanic than on the Mainland," he adds. People from Spanish-speaking countries get together and enjoy each other's culture and are far from the Mainland ethnic enclaves.

So in a Hawai'i where everyone is part of a minority, Latinos, who can be of any race, are another welcome layer. They reinforce the point that heritage and assimilation are not mutually exclusive.

Still, headlines from the Middle East and echoes from Mainland cultural debates remind us there can still be a lot of distance between those dots people seek to connect.

John Griffin, former editor of The Advertiser's editorial pages, is a frequent contributor.