Mike Gonzalez doesn’t care for the word “Hispanic.” He’s not a big fan of California, either.
For Gonzalez, “Hispanic” and “California” are stand-ins for liberal statism and the roadblocks that consign millions of people just like him to the margins of the American Dream. Still, he reserves his most bracing message for conservatives:
“By letting liberals be the ones to integrate Latinos,” he says, “conservatives in many cases have gotten exactly the immigrant alien they feared.”
Translation: Get off your rumps and start taking your message of faith and family and free markets to the fastest-growing population in the United States.
This columnist first met Gonzalez more than two decades ago in Hong Kong, where we became friends while working for The Wall Street Journal.
His affinity for that little speck of freedom on the edge of China was no accident. Like so many of the Chinese entrepreneurs who transformed the British colony into a world-class economic power, Gonzalez had himself been a refugee — though the communism his family fled was Fidel Castro’s, not Chairman Mao’s.
Now he has put his thoughts together in an extraordinary book called “A Race for the Future,” which goes on sale Tuesday. It’s Paul Ryan’s economics and Charles Murray’s sociology applied to the Hispanic experience.
His argument? That the American future conservatives hope for will largely depend on the future of Hispanic America.
Gonzalez comes out swinging. The whole concept of “Hispanic,” he points out, didn’t even exist before the 1970s.
It is an artificial identity, created by the federal government to paper over the huge differences among Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Salvadorans, Mexicans, Guatemalans and lump them into one category.
He quotes Grace Flores-Hughes, the bureaucrat in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare credited with coining the term.
The government, she said, needed a term “all federal agencies could use in . . . more clearly identifying the underserved people that were the target of their various programs.”
It worked out more or less as she said. For Washington’s massive expansion of the welfare state happened to coincide with the arrival in America of hundreds of thousands of Hispanic migrants.
Gonzalez concedes the intentions of these programs were good. But the consequences have been devastating, exacerbating racial divisions and effectively condemning many newcomers and their children to a balkanized existence.
It’s not because they aren’t assimilating. To the contrary, Gonzalez argues they are — but that “too many are assimilating downward” into the dysfunctions that come with dependency.
For example, we see third- and fourth- generation Mexican-Americans doing worse on income and education than their immigrant forebears.
Gonzalez calls this the California model, rooted in all the things identity politics brings with it: expanded welfare, affirmative action, bilingual education and so on.
The good news, he says, is that there’s a compelling alternative for Hispanics. It’s called Texas.
California and Texas are the two largest states in the union. The population of each is about 38 percent Hispanic. But there the similarities end.
Texas is a low-tax state that looks to family and community before government. The numbers suggest Hispanics, like everyone else, fare much better under such regimes.
Hispanic Texans are more likely than their California counterparts to open a business, to be employed, to be married, to have served in the military, to live in an owner-occupied home, to attend church, etc.
But politics has its own incentives, and Hispanic Texans are at the prize in a high-stakes contest. Because Republicans need Texas to win the White House.
Democrats understand this, and are working overtime to turn Texas into a battleground state. They are targeting the Lone Star State’s burgeoning Hispanic population, especially its large percentage of untapped voters.
“It is not for nothing,” says Gonzalez, “that the keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention was none other than San Antonio’s photogenic mayor, Julian Castro.”
So what’s a conservative to do? Gonzalez offers a host of prescriptions ranging from supporting church and civic programs aimed at making men more marriageable to advancing school choice to encouraging savings.
However disparate they sound, there’s a common thread: All are about building the capital — human, social and financial — Hispanic Americans need to move up in society.
The point is it’s not enough for the GOP to cut taxes and rail against the welfare state. These arguments can seem highly abstract when set against all the goodies liberals offer a struggling family.
If conservatives want to win this argument, Gonzalez says, they need to join it.
That means making the moral as well as the economic case for capitalism — and reminding people that voluntary associations such as church and civic groups that thrive in a market society do more to strengthen community than government ever can.
“I’m not asking conservatives to learn to speak Spanish,” he tells me. “I’m asking them to speak to Hispanic Americans in the language of opportunity.”