Hispanics pursue the American Dream.

• Author: Chavez, Linda

The more than 21,000,000 Hispanics now living in the U.S. rapidly are becoming the nation's largest minority group. Some demographers already can see the day when one of three Americans will be of Hispanic descent. Will this mean a divided nation with millions of unassimilated, Spanish-speaking, poor, uneducated Hispanics living in the barrios?

In 1990, the president of the National Council of La Raza, one of the country's leading Hispanic civil rights groups, stated: "Each decade offered us hope, but our hopes evaporated into smoke. We became the poorest of the poor, the most segregated minority in schools, the lowest paid group in America, and the least educated minority in this nation."

This pessimistic view of progress is the prevalent one among Hispanic leaders and is shared by many outside the Hispanic community as well. Hispanics are perceived widely as the dregs of society with little hope of participating in the American Dream.

The trouble with this perception is that it is wrong. The success of Hispanics in the U.S. has been tremendous. They represent an emerging middle class that is a valuable addition to American culture and the nation's economy. However, their story effectively has been suppressed by Hispanic advocates whose only apparent interest is in spreading the notion that Latinos can not make it in American society. This has been an easy task since the Hispanic poor-even though they constitute about one-fourth of the Hispanic population -- are visible to all. These are the Hispanics most likely to be studied, analyzed, and reported on, and certainly they are the ones most likely to be read about. A computer search of stories about Hispanics in major newspapers and magazines over a 12-month period turned up more than 1,800 stories in which the words Hispanic or Latino occurred in close connection with the word poverty. In most people's minds, the expression "poor Hispanic" is almost redundant.

Rather than being poor, most Hispanics are achieving solidly lower middle- or middle-class existences, but finding evidence to support this thesis sometimes is difficult. Hispanic groups vary one from another, as do individuals within any group. For example, many Cubans are highly successful. Within one generation, they virtually have closed the earnings and education gap with other Americans. Although some analysts claim their success is due exclusively to their higher socioeconomic status when they arrived, many Cuban...