HispanicTrending

Nestle Opens Water Store Targeting Hispanics in Bronx

2009-11-12T21:05:00-06:00

November 12, 2009
By Literanista

Dios mio; on Saturday Nestle is opening its first U.S. "Nestlé Pure Life Mercado del Agua" (Water Store) to "bring the benefits of Nestlé Pure Life Purified Water to the Hispanic community." And they've got Hispanic TV personality and Pure Life spokesperson Cristina Saralegui to appear at the grand opening to help target the demographic. In the press release announcing the store, Saralegui (the Hispanic Oprah) says, "It is my privilege to join Nestlé Waters in celebrating the grand opening... I want to help increase awareness for our community about how drinking water is critical to living a healthy lifestyle."

At last, those poor, dehydrated people in one of the most indigent counties in the United States will be able to buy Nestle water! Sure, NYC has some of the best tap water in the world, but boring old tap water doesn't have celebrity brand ambassadors like Nestle, which owns Poland Spring and other bottled water varieties. And you know who else liked tap water? Hitler. Also, we've never seen tap water promoted in incredible commercials in Arabic like this one below.

We're still trying to determine exactly where the Mercado del Agua will be in the Bronx, and it's also unclear how much the water will cost. (A case of 16.9oz Nestle Pure Life Water usually retails for $15.99.) The grand opening is part of a larger marketing campaign targeting Hispanics, who've been treated to their own series of TV commercials promoting Pure Life as a healthier alternative to sugary drinks. [Via Literanista]

Source: Gothamist

Meet Tony, The Intern

2009-11-12T21:02:15-06:00

November 12, 2009
by Lee Vann

We recently hired an intern named Tony to help us with a couple of projects here at Captura Group. As I have gotten to know him, I realize that he personifies the online Hispanic consumers that we marketers are trying so hard to reach.

Below, I introduce you to Tony and to the millions of Hispanics like him online today.

Tony is bilingual and bicultural

Jose Antonio Uribe, a/k/a "Tony," was born in San Diego to first-generation Mexican immigrants. He is 26, and lives with his parents and sister in National City, a suburb of San Diego that's about 60% Hispanic. Tony's family is very much Mexican American. Spend a few minutes in his home and you'll notice something that's happening in millions of Hispanic households across the United States: Communication is a flawless mix of both English and Spanish.

He speaks only in Spanish to his mom, exclusively in English with a sister, and mixes both with his father. He watches television mostly in English, but he also catches "Sábado Gigante" with his parents and telenovelas with his girlfriend.

Tony is a proud "American Latino"

He celebrates Christmas on Dec. 25, but also Reyes Magos on Jan. 6, one of the most important Catholic holidays in Mexico. He celebrates Thanksgiving, but with a Chipotle turkey, and drinks tequila instead of eggnog.

Like many Latinos, he entered the workforce at a young age to help his parents. He was considered an "at risk" student by his high school counselor, and as a result enrolled in a program that helped him keep up his grades while earning extra money.

He would later graduate from the University of Phoenix with a BS in marketing.

Tony is tech-savvy

Tony has been online as long as he can remember. He vividly recalls an old PC that his dad bought for the family and connecting to the Internet with NetZero and chatting on AOL. A music trendsetter among his friends, Tony was a big fan of music sharing sites Napster and LimeWire. Although Tony mainly visits English-language websites, he communicates online with friends and family in both English and Spanish. He prefers Facebook to MySpace, although he still visits the latter once a week to keep in touch with 350 friends there.

Although Tony considers himself value-conscious, he'll save up hundreds of dollars for a product he considers worthwhile. Today, Tony sports an Apple Mac Mini and orders Chipotle burritos from his iPhone, a product he purchased "the day it came out."

His iPhone boasts about two dozen applications, which he switches constantly. He uses the Facebook application the most to communicate with his 185 "friends."

Tony says "Don't try too hard"

What advice does Tony give to marketers looking to reach him and his peers? "Don't try too hard."

Tony feels that stereotypical Hispanic advertising misses the mark with him.

He rarely clicks on an online ad, but rather goes directly to the product website when he sees something that catches his eye. He goes online to buy clothing, books, music and event tickets. He is always looking for websites that offer a Spanish component so that he can share his interests with his monolingual friends or family members.

"My world is very multi-cultural," he says. "America is very multi-cultural. Campaigns that reflect who I am appeal to me."

Source: MediaPost

Men, especially Hispanics, hard hit by loss of good jobs

2009-11-12T21:00:00-06:00

November 11, 2009
By: Tom Abate

"Good job" pays 60 percent of the median household income, plus health care and retirement benefits.

Good jobs with benefits and an hourly wage capable of supporting a family have been a casualty of this recession, according to an analysis by the liberal Economic Policy Institute (EPI).

EPI defines a good job as one that pays at least 60 percent of the median household income and also provides health care and retirement benefits. It says the wage threshold for a "good job" in 2008 was $14.51 per hour, or $30,180 a year. EPI analyst Algernon Austin writes:

By that measure, American men are losing ground . . . the share of male workers employed in good jobs dropped from 46.5 percent in 1979 to 31.3 percent in 2008 . . . Hispanic men experienced the largest percentage-point decline . . . In 1979, 30.8 percent of Hispanic men were employed in a good job. By 2008, only 15.3 percent were in good jobs . . . Without a national agenda to create good jobs, more fulltime workers will struggle to pay for basic necessities.

Source: San Francisco Chronicle

Yahoo Launches Spanish Version of Mobile Home Page

2009-11-12T20:56:15-06:00

November 12, 2009
By Chris Crum

Yahoo has launched Yahoo Mobile in Spanish. This is a Spanish-language version of the Yahoo Mobile home page, which is customized specifically for U.S. Hispanic consumers, and is available on over 1,900 devices.

"By bringing together U.S. Hispanic consumers' favorite content and services from across the Internet, Yahoo! Mobile en Español enables users to create both culturally and personally relevant mobile experiences," a spokesperson for Yahoo tells WebPronews.

"Yahoo! Mobile en Español targets a significant addressable set of influential and increasingly mobile U.S. Hispanic consumers," she says. "According to the U.S. Census Bureau there are 46 million U.S. Hispanics, making it equivalent in population to the second largest country in Latin America behind Brazil. According to comScore, mobile Internet usage among Hispanics is outpacing that of all other groups, with 88% of Hispanics consuming content on their mobile phones."

Yahoo says Yahoo! Mobile en Español will give users the ability to:

    - Discover via results from Yahoo!'s award-winning mobile Search, editor-selected content, and U.S. and global news content presented in Spanish, including the “América Latina” news section, which provides relevant content from the Latin American region.

    - Stay connected through access to email and social networking accounts from the most popular Web providers, as well as instant messaging, address book, and calendar functions.

    - Stay informed by bringing favorite Web content —sports, news, local information, RSS feeds, weather, stocks, horoscopes, and more — to a single location.

Users can find Yahoo Mobile en Español at espanol.yahoo.com. There are more details in Spanish in this blog post from Yahoo.

Source: WebProNews

Citadel Media en Espanol Partners with Terra to Develop Online Brand Extensions for Radio Portfolio

2009-11-11T21:59:43-06:00

Nov. 10, 2009
Via PRNewswire-HISPANIC PR WIRE

Terra, a leading original digital content producer with a primary focus on the U.S. Hispanic experience, has partnered with Citadel Media en Espanol to manage the online brand extensions of the network's portfolio of radio products. The first joint initiative is the launch of a new Web site for Maria Marin's radio show, Tu Vida Es Mi Vida. A motivational speaker, author and syndicated columnist, Marin brings her message of Latina empowerment to radio audiences across the country with her program, which is syndicated by Citadel Media en Espanol to 27 affiliates in major Hispanic DMAs such as New York, Los Angeles and Miami.

Beginning with today's launch of www.mariamarinradio.com, Terra will work with Citadel Media to manage all aspects of Maria Marin radio in the digital arena, including editorial programming, advertising sales, user experience and Web design. The cross promotional site will be home to exclusive interviews, photos and discussion boards. In addition, behind-the-scenes video of the radio show will be available via the Maria Marin channel on Terra TV.

"The convergence of digital and traditional media offers us the opportunity to reach an unparalleled audience, particularly as more and more U.S. Hispanics go online," said Carlos San Jose, Vice President of National Sales for Citadel Media en Espanol. "Our partnership with Terra will provide advertisers with a must-have media component when targeting the Hispanic demographic, a growing segment of the consumer market."

"Maria Marin embodies Latina empowerment and Tu Vida Es Mi Vida has become an institution in the community and we have no doubt that adding this content to the Terra network will be valuable to our audience," said Angel Sepulveda, Vice President of Programming, Terra USA. "We're looking forward to providing our audience additional Citadel Media en Espanol talent and programs as our partnership grows."

Citadel Media en Espanol has already received significant interest from several top advertisers across the Hispanic platform regarding integration opportunities.

I have only Begun to Tell Our Stories with 'Latino in America'

2009-11-11T21:57:21-06:00

November, 2009
By Soledad O'Brien

Let me start by saying I think it's an enormous victory that a major network has enhanced its coverage of our community this year, culminating in a 2-part, 4 hour documentary called "Latino in America." I am also very proud to have co-authored with Rose Arce, a book about our community, "Latino in America," published in October by Celebra (Penguin USA). Some of the chief goals of both projects were to initiate conversations about our community, enhance our visibility and start a conversation about relevant issues. All the comments that The NiLP Network drew make me feel as if we have been successful on all those fronts, just by having engaged you.

When I began to plan our project, I saw it as a news documentary about a vast population, people with roots in some 21 countries who had distinct histories and very different experiences. There is no way to do justice to that range of experiences even with a number of pieces and an additional 4 hours of documentaries. What my team decided was that we would call it "Latino in America" because it was not to be a documentary about history or discrepancy, as the term Hispanic might imply, but about what happens after we've arrived, about an American experience we share and an identity that is born of this country, one that brings together people with roots from all over the Latin world, people who predate the US or came yesterday, people who have some shared values but don't necessarily have similar racial or ethnic roots or even language. It is a story about a group of Americans and their American experience, a US experience at that.

We also decided that, in the spirit of CNN, we were doing a NEWS documentary. That means that we follow real people through their human experiences wherever they may take them, their ups and downs and how they confront the greatest issues our community is facing, whether that be by achieving their dreams or confronting obstacles. If they falter, we watch them falter. When they succeed, we are there to record the moment.

Some of you have spoken about negative and positive images in the documentary and it is clear there is vast disagreement as to what each of those means. A lot of it reflects the socioeconomic status of the person defining the terms, their own life experience and the way they see media. Many educators have hailed us for telling the story of what an enormous sector of our young population is facing in overcrowded and under funded schools that do not address their unique needs as children of families struggling with a host of economic, cultural and immigration issues. Others would rather we had highlighted only success stories and stayed away from casting a spotlight on the struggles of our school children.

The same was true of immigration stories. So many in our community told us we could not do a story about Latinos without showing how our controversial immigration debate is tearing apart families and encouraging some folks to target the most vulnerable among us. Others wanted no immigration experiences in the documentary because they considered them depressing.

At the end of the day, I am a journalist and I made every effort to report the unfolding drama of human beings in our community. I take many of your suggestions to heart and urge those of you who did not yet watch the documentary to watch it and also read the book, and give me even more criticism and suggestions. I like the ideas I've heard and I too walked away from this project wanting to tell so many more stories, to provide more history and context, to increase our visibility in the media on a daily basis. I could have re-worked and re-shot this forever trying to hit the right balance.

What I do know is that I am unapologetic about our need to cast a light on inadequate services and unfair treatment and to tell some of the stories of the most vulnerable among us. For example, I have fought too long over my career to get the media to talk about the terrible Hate Crimes committed against our people, a 40% increase in one year, to not seize an opportunity to tell that story. It is a sad story, it is disturbing that there is so much hate in some quarters, but it is a very real issue and we cannot close our eyes and say we'd rather see a profile of a thriving Latino business. When the Shenandoah killing happened, very few members of our community stepped forward. There was only one person from one Latino organization present the night of the verdict to represent the victim. That tells me that story has not been widely told, because we are not a community that fails to speak up when trouble is afoot.

I feel the same about teen dropout rates, suicide and teen pregnancy. Our community suffers disproportionately from these ills. Our rates are rising. They are higher than they are for other ethnic or racial groups and they are undercutting the lives of our young people. I am surprised how many people have written on the NiLP site and others that they wondered why we'd look at these issues in our community rather than some other community. That tells me that Latinos, even leaders who make policy decisions, live unaware of exactly what the statistics are and I feel even more strongly that even our own community needs to be educated about what's happening to too many of our children. We need to challenge bad schools, shabby health education, even look at our own family dynamics. Not talking about these issues is not going to make them go away, nor is doing PR for those who have escaped them going to change the reality too many face.

The challenge, and it is one I certainly find daunting, is to discuss these issues in context. I did my level best this time. I have learned a lot and I continue to listen, have an open mind and learn more. I am continuing to tour this country many months after this project is over in hopes of getting more ideas, more input, continuing to educate myself about our community and its issues. I pledge to you that I continue my mission to illuminate the many good things about our culture and our life here. There are many stories yet to be told, about our incredible successes, our astronauts and Congresspeople and Ivy League graduates, as well as how our schools are failing our future leaders. I have just begun to tell them. And, for every one of you who wanted more, I say thank you many times over for joining me in the fight to tell our story . . . and "stand by."

Source: Hispanic Link

Classical music station may get Spanish channel

2009-11-11T21:54:05-06:00

Nov. 07, 2009
By Mark Washburn

Charlotte's classical-music station, Davidson College's WDAV-FM (89.9), is looking at adding a Spanish channel.

Called "Concierto," it would be broadcast on one of WDAV's HD radio channels and streamed on the Web. HD radio is a digital broadcasting service that requires a special tuner to pick up and enables radio stations to offer extra specialty channels.

"Concierto's" programming would focus on Spanish composers and performers. Ben Roe, WDAV's general manager, says that none of the three dozen classical stations in the nation offers such a service.

WDAV already has three staffers fluent in Spanish: announcers Myelita Melton, Lauren Rico and program director Frank Dominguez.

"We have some tremendous assets in-house that other stations would have a hard time duplicating," says Roe, who joined the station in 2008 after a 20-year career at National Public Radio, where he was director of music and music initiatives.

Roe says he doesn't know how big the Charlotte market would be for such a channel, but is eager to see how it would do.

"In all the years I've worked at NPR and in national arenas, everyone has always talked about launching a service to reach the Latin audience but nobody has done much about it ... There's a huge upside and the risk is relatively minimal."

Part of the upside is the possibility of national syndication of the channel, particularly to public radio stations in cities with a high Hispanic population such as Miami, San Antonio or Los Angeles.

South Carolina was No. 1 in the growth of Hispanic population from 2007 to 2008, and North Carolina was No. 2. Hispanic population is estimated at about 7 percent in each state. Nationally, Hispanics comprise about 15 percent of the population.

Launching the channel would be dependent on raising money - likely from foundations or grants - for the project. Roe is working toward an April start.

Media Movers

WCNC (Channel 36) names Corrie Harding as its news director. Harding has been director at Pittsburgh's NBC affiliate since 2005 and starts in Charlotte on Nov. 30 ... Bill White, news and program director at WBT-AM (1110), moves up to operations manager at Greater Media's Charlotte stations in the wake of general manager Rick Jackson's departure to San Diego. Carl East moves up to program director ...

Jeff Katz, who left WBT-AM about a year ago, has a new full-time gig. He's afternoon host on WFTL-AM in Fort Lauderdale-Miami ... Country star Jimmy Wayne is profiled in a Great American Country channel special 10:30 p.m. Sunday. He grew up near Bessemer City. His father abandoned him as an infant, and his mother was sent to prison when he was 13. He ended up in foster homes and lived on the streets as a runaway. In the show, he returns to Tuckaseegee Elementary School where he found the inspiration through a teacher to weather life's challenges ...

Dec. 10-13 will be this year's "Our Kids Come First Radiothon" with Jen Byrum and Jim Schafer of WLYT-FM ("Lite" 102.9) at Levine Children's Hospital. This is the 10th year of the fundraiser ...

WFAE-FM (90.7) will air five weeks of the public radio storytelling show "The Moth Radio Hour" beginning at 6 p.m. Sunday ... WHVN-AM ("Heaven Radio" 1240) has added a low-power transmitter to its new tower off Randolph Road so it can be picked up in Charlotte on the FM dial at 104.3.

Source: Charlotte Observer

HBO, Harley-Davidson, Rite Aid, Arby’s and Cheetos Use HipCricket’s Hispanic Mobile Marketing Network to Reach the Hispanic Market

2009-11-11T21:51:43-06:00

November 10, 2009
Via BUSINESS WIRE

Working with mobile marketing leader HipCricket, major brands and retailers are uniquely and effectively reaching Hispanic customers through permission-based offers and advertisements sent to their mobile phones. As part of the only comprehensive Hispanic Mobile Marketing Network, HBO, Harley-Davidson, Rite Aid, Arby’s, Cheetos and others are reaching a market that is overweighted with mobile phones, has a desire to interact with brands, and has buying power that is projected to exceed $1 trillion in 2010.

Since creating the network in 2008, HipCricket can point to significant successes seen by major brands and retailers, including:

* HBO PPV used HipCricket to drive awareness and purchases of the Mayweather-Marquez fight, and to generate opt-ins for its mobile VIP club. Consumers were asked to text “PELEA” (“FIGHT”) to a shortcode for a chance to win a signed boxing glove and received an SMS message back inviting them to join the VIP club. An impressive 12.9 percent clicked through, and of them, nearly 70 percent opted into the club, giving HBO a valuable database for re-marketing purposes.
* Rite Aid saw a significant increase in store traffic by providing coupon offers when consumers texted “MARCA” (“BRAND ”) to a specific shortcode: a coupon for $3 off a purchase of $15 or more produced a 7.6 percent click-through rate; 2.5 percent clicked on an offer for a $25 gift card given to those who transferred their prescriptions to Rite Aid.

“Without HipCricket, we would not have reached these Hispanic customers,” said Angela Poe, online marketing, promotions and social media manager for The Gary Group, the agency behind the HBO campaign. “We’ve seen firsthand the tremendous benefits of this network, and the large database of opted-in consumers means that we have a valuable asset for remarketing purposes as we look to increasingly reach the important Hispanic market.”

The domestic Hispanic market is fast-growing—four times the rate of the general population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau—and highly lucrative. Like most populations, however, it has increasingly eluded mainstream advertisers using traditional, broad-brush media to reach its members with culturally-relevant messages. The answer has been mobile. Key indicators show mobile, and in particular, SMS, to be the ideal medium for marketing to Hispanics: 32 percent of Hispanic mobile subscribers are interested or highly interested in receiving offers (Mobile Marketing Association); 87 percent of Hispanic households have multiple mobile phones (Mobile Marketing Association), more than half regularly text (Mobile Marketing Association), and text messaging has increased nearly 60 percent year-over-year (comScore).

HipCricket tapped into this market when it launched the first Hispanic Mobile Marketing Network in 2008, and expanded its operations through HipCricket de Mexico, in Mexico City, earlier this year. The network involves more than 70 radio and television stations and brand distribution partners. It reaches Hispanic Americans in more than 40 markets, including 14 of the top 15 Hispanic markets.

The company offers a quick-to-implement, easy-to-measure turnkey solution that empowers marketers with reply-based SMS ads, click-to-call messages, click-through-to-mobile-Web messages, brand messages, and 40-character ad injections into existing content delivery. Unique to the market is HipCricket’s 140-character push messages, which provide 3 ½ times additional creative real estate for marketers to provide compelling mobile messages. Real-time key-performance indicators allow marketers to test, measure and optimize their campaigns on the fly to achieve optimal performance objectives.

“Since we launched the Hispanic Mobile Marketing Network last year, it has delivered tremendous value to our brand as well as retail and broadcast partners, by providing them with a conduit to reach very valuable, loyal customers who are ready to engage,” said Eric Harber, HipCricket President and Chief Operating Officer. “These results represent just the beginning of the capabilities of the network which will continue its rapid growth in the weeks and months to come.”

Female Hotel Workers Injured More Than Men, Study Shows

2009-11-11T21:49:11-06:00

November 10, 2009
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

A new study of workers at 50 hotels in the United States found that women were 50 percent more likely to be injured than men, and that Hispanic women had an injury rate two-thirds higher than their white female counterparts.

The study, which will be published in January in The American Journal of Industrial Medicine, said the injury rate was higher for female hotel employees because they worked disproportionately as housekeepers, which is the most injury-prone hotel job.

According to the study, housekeepers have a 7.9 percent injury rate each year, 50 percent higher than for all hotel workers and twice the rate for all workers in the United States.

Other academic studies have concluded that housekeepers have a high injury rate because they do repetitive tasks, lift heavy mattresses and work rapidly to clean a dozen or more rooms.

The study found that Hispanic housekeepers had the highest injury rate — 10.6 percent a year — compared with 6.3 percent for white housekeepers, 5.5 for black housekeepers and 7.3 percent for Asian housekeepers.

The study did not speculate why the injury rate was so much higher for Hispanic housekeepers, but several experts said the reasons could include their smaller stature or that managers gave them heavier workloads.

Hispanic and Asian men were 1.5 times more likely to be injured than white men, the study found. Men disproportionately hold hotel jobs as banquet servers, cooks and dishwashers.

“These alarming results raise many questions as to why injury rates are so high for women, and Hispanic and Asian workers in the hotel sector,” said, Dr. Susan Buchanan, lead author of the article and a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health.

The study, “Occupational Injury Disparities in the U.S. Hotel Industry,” was first presented on Monday at the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association in Philadelphia. The study focused on 50 unionized properties and examined 2,865 injuries over a three-year span.

The study found the highest injury rate for housekeepers was at the Hyatt chain, at 10.4 percent, and lowest at the Hilton chain, at 5.47 percent, for housekeepers. Hyatt did not respond to inquiries about its injury rate.

“This study is stunning evidence of the unequal impact of injuries in the hotel industry, and it calls into question whether discriminatory workplace practices play a role,” said John W. Wilhelm, president of Unite Here, the union representing hotel workers.

Source: New York Times

Hispanics Dodge a Bullet

2009-11-10T21:33:12-06:00

November 9, 2009
By Louis Caldera

The Hispanic community breathed a sigh of relief last Thursday when Senate Democrats defeated an attempt to change the 2010 census. Conservatives had proposed adding a question to the census—which every 10 years is supposed to count every person living in the United States—that essentially asked “For every person living in your home, is he or she a citizen, a lawful immigrant of the U.S., or undocumented?” They wanted to use that information to exclude all noncitizens, legal or undocumented, from being counted in deciding how many elected representatives the people of each state are entitled to have in Congress. This would have hurt the Hispanic community in critical ways, including reducing its political representation at the federal level.

The idea of asking these questions originated with the notoriously anti-immigrant organization FAIR, which wanted to reduce the number of congressional representatives who care about the well-being of Hispanic and other immigrant communities and who advocate for their interests, including those who support comprehensive immigration reform. Their view is that representatives in Congress should represent only citizens and that states with large immigrant populations should be penalized for welcoming immigrants.

Even though the census assures everyone that their answers will be confidential, many Hispanics would likely not have responded at all, or would have responded incompletely if it meant reporting to the government that a family member in their household was here illegally. That would have led to an undercounting of Hispanics even larger than is usually the case.

Hispanics, the poor, the homeless, and migrant agricultural workers are already considered “hard to count” populations, and every census millions of Hispanics go uncounted. This undercount costs the Hispanic community because federal funding for schools, health care clinics, public transportation, job training, and many other benefits the Hispanic community counts on are distributed according to population-based formulas that use census information to determine how much money each state and community gets. Not participating in the census, therefore, hurts Hispanic kids and communities.

But the real danger for the Hispanic community was the proposal to exclude noncitizens, including millions of Hispanics, from the population counts used every 10 years to determine how many elected congressional representatives each state gets based on its share of the total U.S. population—not just its citizen population. That information is then used to draw congressional and state legislative districts, and local city council and school board districts. The U.S. Supreme Court has said clearly that all legislative districts must be as equal in population as possible and that Hispanic and African-American communities must be allowed to elect representatives of their own choosing if such districts can be created. These decisions have led to the election today of 29 Hispanic and 42 African-American members of Congress.

But these congressmen and women represent districts that are home to large numbers of immigrants. Excluding these immigrants, including many in the process of becoming citizens, from the process of determining the number and the location of congressional and state legislative seats would have seriously reduced the representation of the Hispanic community in Congress and in the country’s state legislatures and local offices.

UCLA demographer Dr. Leo Estrada estimates that in states like California it takes at least 40 percent of the voters in a given electoral district to be Hispanic for a Hispanic candidate to win the election. When not all Hispanics—citizens or noncitizens—are counted, there are fewer electoral seats at all levels of government that can be created in which Hispanics can make up 40 percent of the voters.

Precisely at the time when the Hispanic community is growing and in need of more representatives who can deliver better public services in areas as broad as education, job training, affordable housing, and enforcing antidiscrimination laws, conservatives were plotting ways of reducing Hispanic political representation in Congress and elsewhere.

Now that the conservatives’ measure has been defeated, the Hispanic community must redouble its efforts to be counted in the census, to convince more immigrants to become citizens, to achieve comprehensive immigration reform, and to vote for a better future for our children and our country.

Source: Center for American Progress