Revista da FAEEBA Educação e Contemporaneidade - Uneb

In search of América: latina/os (re)constructing the U.S.A.
process” (1990, p.222). Challenging the national
ideology of monoculturalism and assimilation,
and forcing Euro-Americans to
confront their own checkered past, they have
encountered powerful opposition in the process.
“Producing” themselves within the nation-state,
they have contributed to a
re-defining of what it means to be American.
The “Latinization” of the U.S. goes beyond
cross-over artists, food, and music that have
entered the mainstream; these are only the
most visible elements of a nation in transition.
Latinos are forging cross-national alliances,
revitalizing spent urban areas, remaking
urban ethnoscapes (DAVIS, 2001). “AmeRícan,”
proclaims Nuyorican poet Tato Laviera:
254
REFERENCES
AmeRícan defining myself my own way any way
many
ways Am e Rícan, with the big R and the
accent on the í (1985, p. 95)
As always, the U.S. is being “reinvented”
from forces within and without. But these new
realities co-exist with a nostalgia for an idealized
past. What remains to be seen is whether
“America becoming 24 ” will embrace the diversity
and potential of the growing numbers of
Latinos and become the nation that it has so
long claimed to be. The “threat” to the nation
for the foreseeable future will not be Latinos,
but rather the failure of the national will to create
a more equitable 25 and just society that can
deliver on the promise that is America.
ACUÑA, Rudolfo. Occupied America: A History of Chicanos. (3a ed.). New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1988.
ANZALDUA, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Spinsters/Aunt
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BALLVE, Marcelo. Regaining Mexican Citizenship – New California Media, 2003. Available at: . Accessed on 5 July 2004.
BIGLER, Ellen. American Conversations: Puerto Ricans, White Ethnics, and Multiculturalism. Philadelphia,
PA: Temple University Press, 1999.
BRIMELOW, Peter. Alien Nation: Common Sense about America’s Immigration. New York, NY: Random
House, 1995.
BUCHANAN, Patrick. Commentary on HUNTINGTON, Samuel, The Hispanic Challenge. Available at: . Accessed on 12 July 2004.
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CRAWFORD, James. Bilingual Education: History, Politics, Theory and Practice. Los Angeles, CA: Bilingual
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24 The phrase “America Becoming” was used as part of the title of a report on the state of racial relations and racial equity
in the U.S., commissioned in the 1990s by then-President Bill Clinton
25 A review of statistical data underlines the critical nature of this situation. Almost twenty-two percent (21.9) of Hispanics
live below poverty level (2004), compared to 8.6 percent of non-Hispanic whites. Information available at , accessed September 6, 2006. Only
57 percent of Hispanics have a high school or beyond education (2003) compared to 89 percent of non-Hispanic whites.
Information available at , accessed
September 6, 2006.
Revista da FAEEBA – Educação e Contemporaneidade, Salvador, v. 15, n. 25, p. 239-257, jan./jun., 2006