Latin republic of the USA.

• Author: DiNovella, Elizabeth
• Position: Translation Nation: Defining a New American Identity in the Spanish-Speaking United States - Book Review

Translation Nation: Defining a New American Identity in the Spanish-Speaking United States By Hector Tobar Riverhead Books. 308 pages. $24.95.

Latinos comprise 14 percent of America's population, at forty million and growing. Census projections estimate that Latinos will make up 25 percent of the population by the middle of the century. The Latinization of the United States is in full swing.

Los Angeles Times reporter Hector Tobar sets out to explore what he calls the "Latin Republic of the United States" in his enjoyable new book, Translation Nation: Defining a New American Identity in the Spanish-Speaking United States.

From Los Angeles to Dalton, Georgia, from Miami to Rupert, Idaho, Tobar finds Latinos transforming the landscape.

In a great bit of reporting, he goes undercover as an immigrant and travels by bus from Texas to Anniston, Alabama, to work in a Tyson's chicken-processing plant. (Tobar notes that the middleman who recruited him was "implicated in a complex scheme to bring undocumented Mexican workers to its plants in the Deep South, charges that would be outlined in a thirty-six-count federal indictment.")

Tobar lives in a trailer park along with forty other workers, most of them Tyson employees, off Highway 9. His roommates include Frankie and Linda, a young couple from the Texas border who left their eighteen-month-old son with a grandmother in order to escape their old life. Tobar works the nightshirt alongside men like Gregorio, a former goatherd who crossed into the United States from Mexico after goat meat fell out of favor locally.

Tobar spends a lot of time in the South, reporting on the changing demographics. In Dalton, Latinos make up more than half of the school age population, their parents filling the shifts in the area's carpet factories. "A decade earlier, there were only a handful of Latino students" at Roan Street Elementary School, writes Tobar. "Now they made up 80 percent of the student body." After failing to attract bilingual teachers, the school's administrators embarked on an ambitious teacher-training program that sends veteran staff to Mexico to study Spanish.

The author marvels at the expense. The principal explains, "The people here think it's important."

Tobar travels to other cities that haven't embraced their new arrivals so warmheartedly. But he explains that Latinization is inevitable. "Other cities and towns across the continent have undergone the same pattern of response to the creeping...