In the Midst of a Latino Leadership Crisis

Immigration When asked to identify the most significant challenges facing the U.S. Latino community today, immigration invariably comes to mind. The over 11.2 million noncitizen Latino immigrants in the United States (Census Bureau 2004b) represent a human social force that is undoubtedly changing our nation's landscape as well as impacting multiple facets of America's labor force, international relations, and structures for public education. The press keeps reminding us of the thousands of noncitizen immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries who cross our nation's southern borders daily in search of better paying jobs and opportunities to send money back home to their struggling families. Homeland security officials often characterize this modern-day problem as increasing the threat of terrorism, thus justifying the need to station troops along the border to help stem the flow of illegal entries. From an educational point of view, immigration has become fixed in the minds of our educators who find themselves increasingly concerned with the realities of teaching over 2.1 million (1) young noncitizen children who may not only lack the language skills and capacities to participate in traditional K-12 classroom settings, but who may also fail to have the essential educational references from their homes that encourage them to become active learners. Yet with all of the ills involved with this social force, immigration is not the most pressing challenge facing the leadership of the U.S. Latino community today. Instead, it must be understood as only a singular component of a much greater and more complex crisis. Violence and Dropouts In the views of some, the spread of violence, crime, drugs, and the growing number of Latinos incarcerated in our nation's prison system ought to be perceived as the number one challenge. Others point to an enormous population of Latino high school dropouts whose joblessness results in low earning potentials, which are frequently linked to family violence, illiteracy, and soaring teenage pregnancy rates. Rising Latino Underclass Together these social forces are fueling the apparent rise of a Latino underclass in this nation, which poses a significant threat and cause for alarm due to the instability it will cause in both Latino and non-Latino populations. This constantly expanding and seemingly inassimilable population is now becoming an economically depressed and socially volatile body of men and women. As a whole, it has a tremendously high propensity to become generationally dependent upon state structures, to perpetuate a normalized culture of underachievement, and to maintain a significantly diminished likelihood of producing highly prepared facilitators of change or development in the community. Undoubtedly these are important factors of consideration, yet they are not the core problem. This title goes to a less visible, more precocious and debilitating enemy that daily grows as a danger lurking in the dark. Crisis Defined As a population that has grown from less than ten million prior to 1965 to more than forty million forty years later, we have been losing our leadership capacities to maintain communication and coordinated campaigns within the multitude of internal sectors of the Latino community that are expanding and evolving daily. Despite being viewed as the fastest-growing population segment of America, as well as one of the largest incubators of "minority-owned" (i.e., Latino-based and/or -oriented) businesses, the growth in its internal leadership base and organized sectors (whether defined as civic, business, cultural, faith-based, etc.) has not been congruent to the growth in the overarching U.S. Latino population. Simultaneously, Latinos have lost contact with one another while the organizations that seek to benefit large sectors of the community have become unrecognized and uncoordinated. As a generation, it appears that most of today's Latinos no longer have the same capacities that their previous family members once enjoyed such as being able to influence thinking, alter the social trajectories and directions of collective bodies of Latinos, and cause significant shifts in the social perspectives, beliefs, and outlooks of either various subsectors or the entirety of the Latino community. …