Some salsa with your Cinco de Mayo

For those of you who celebrate Cinco de Mayo--yes, we all know it's a manufactured holiday, invented to sell salsa and Taco Bell to the gringos--here are some facts and figures about Aztlán in a (not so?) strange land that may be fun to pull of the hat at that Cinco de Mayo barbecue I'm sure you'll be invited to.

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• CB08-FF.07
• March 5, 2008

Cinco de Mayo

Cinco de Mayo celebrates the legendary Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862, in which a Mexican force of 4,500 men faced 6,000 well-trained French soldiers. The battle lasted four hours and ended in a victory for the Mexican army under Gen. Ignacio Zaragoza. Along with Mexican Independence Day on Sept. 16, Cinco de Mayo has become a time to celebrate Mexican heritage and culture.

28.3 million

Number of U.S. residents of Mexican origin in 2006. These residents constituted 9 percent of the nation’s total population and 64 percent of the Hispanic population.

17.86 million
Number of people of Mexican origin who lived either in California (10.84 million) or Texas (7.02 million). People of Mexican origin made up more than one-quarter of the residents of these two states. (The unrounded total for California and Texas combined is 17,866,191.)

25.7
Median age of people in the United States of Mexican descent. This compares with 36.4 years for the population as a whole.

630,000
Number of Mexican-Americans who are U.S. military veterans.

1.2 million
Number of people of Mexican descent 25 and older with a bachelor’s degree or higher. This includes about 350,000 who have a graduate degree.

37%
Among households where a householder was of Mexican origin, the percentage of married-couple families with own children younger than 18. For all households, the corresponding percentage was 22 percent.

4.1
Average size for families with a householder of Mexican origin. This compares to 3.2 people in all families.

14%
Percentage of employed civilians 16 and older of Mexican heritage who worked in managerial, professional or related occupations. In addition, 23 percent worked in service occupations; 20 percent in sales and office occupations; 19 percent in construction, extraction, maintenance and repair occupations; and 20 percent in production, transportation and material moving occupations.

$37,661
Median household income in 2006 for households with a householder of Mexican origin.

23%
Poverty rate in 2006 for people of Mexican heritage.

69%
Percentage of civilians 16 and older of Mexican origin in the labor force. The percentage was 65 percent for the population as a whole. There were 13 million people of Mexican heritage in the labor force, comprising 9 percent of the total.

51%
Percentage of householders of Mexican origin who owned the home in which they lived.

Source for the preceding statements: 2006 American Community Survey <http://factfinder.census.gov>

Trade With Mexico

$347.3 billion
The value of goods traded between the United States and Mexico in 2007. Mexico was our nation’s third-leading trading partner, after Canada and China.
Source: Foreign Trade Statistics <http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/www/>

Businesses

701,078
Number of firms owned by people of Mexican origin in 2002. They comprised almost 45 percent of all Hispanic-owned firms. Among these Mexican-owned firms, 275,896 were in California and 235,735 in Texas. The Los Angeles-Long Beach-Riverside, Calif., combined statistical area had 174,292.

$96.7 billion
Sales and receipts for firms owned by people of Mexican origin in 2002.

Source for statements in this section: Hispanic-Owned Firms: 2002 <http://www.census.gov/prod/ec02/sb0200cshisp.pdf>

Mexican Food

$100.4 million
Product shipment value of tamales and other Mexican food specialties (not frozen or canned) produced in the United States in 2002.
Source: 2002 Economic Census <http://www.census.gov/econ/census02/guide/INDRPT31.HTM>

337
Number of U.S. tortilla manufacturing establishments in 2005. The establishments that produce this unleavened flat bread employed nearly 14,000 people. Tortillas, the principal food of the Aztecs, are known as the “bread of Mexico.” About one in three of these establishments was in Texas.
Source: County Business Patterns: 2005 <http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/county_business_patterns/010192.html>

Editor’s note: The preceding data were collected from a variety of sources and may be subject to sampling variability and other sources of error. Facts for Features are customarily released about two months before an observance in order to accommodate magazine production timelines. Questions or comments should be directed to the Census Bureau’s Public Information Office: telephone: 301-763-3030; fax: 301-763-3762; or e-mail: <pio@census.gov>.

Hip, hip, Latinas!

Hispanic Business magazine lauds successful Latinas making an impact on America's workplace by naming 20 to their Winner's Circle of Elite Women. They include an astronaut (Ellen Ochoa, already on our Wall of Fame), a California State Senator (Gloria Romero), IT entrepreneur (Nina Vaca), and a university president (Dr. Elsa Murano, Texas A and M).
http://www.hispanicbusiness.com/news/newsbyid.asp?idx=94479

(Brief, but not) Close Encounters with Junot Diaz

Some years ago, let’s say 4, I was in Jamaica for the Calabash Literary Festival, a yearly throw-down of writers, most of them Caribbean-rooted. The affair takes place at a now-trendy, but once funky complejo of sunny-colored bungalows overlooking the sea on the island’s south coast. Jake’s is where my many Jamaican adventures began nearly 15 years ago, and will always have deep associations for me.

I was pleasantly surprised to find Junot Diaz’ name on the roster of presenters, who’ve numbered, over the years, major leaguers like Sonia Sanchez and Derek Wolcott. I’d been clocking his rising star through his edgy, sometimes irritating, but always engaging short stories published in the New Yorker with enough regularity to pay the rent. They referenced dominicanos trying to get it on, get over, get smart and get out. While I wasn’t always captivated by his surrogates’ predicaments—but maybe that was his ploy: to get me to struggle with my sympathies—his characters were always fully-formed and deeply penetrated; the dialog was snap your fingers true and oftentimes hysterical.

I can’t remember what Junot read (nor did I know that he was then, as he would be for 10 long years, in agony over a hiccoughing first novel that needed to expire several times before being birthed). But, I remember he wore a fly Panama hat that made him look, at the same time, muy caribeño and positively Princess Line, and that he made us all crack up.

Back in New York less than a week later, near my home, I spied Diaz on the street, unmistakable this time in his wire frames and face and pate powdered in fuzz.

I approached, uncharacteristically bold, probably in unconscious acceptance of a generally inviting vibe. “Hey, I know you. I saw you read at the Calabash Festival last week.” We talked easily, not so much about our craft as about Jamaica. I was impressed at how, after just that one brief other-focused visit –by then, I’d probably notched in 20—he’d been able to digest and articulate so clearly Jamaica for all its dysfunctionality and misplaced humanity, assimilating what would seem the most inconsequential clues into an unassailable identikat.

I put Junot Diaz into my teeny evening purse of perfect intellectuals—those who use their gut instincts and superior power of observation and poetry to navigate the world and then apply left brain formatting to legitimize their findings in order to communicate and, hopefully, make a defining contribution to society.

When the story of Oscar Wao’s brief encounter with life came out, I rushed to buy the book, but put off reading it. I was afraid I’d be disappointed and, with it, the Junot Diaz bubble would burst.

But the searching interviews of the author, officially conferring his brainiac status, while confirming his earnest humility, moved me to get to it. The undertaking was epic.

Diaz’ apportioned history of the DR is doctoral yet reads like a Classic Comic, his Oscar Wao (from Wilde, you see, but the homies can’t put the ‘l’ and the ‘d’ together) is redemptively not cloyingly pathetic, and the narrator, Yunior, the homie hustler is the perfect foil, and alter ego, to outsized Oscar. In the end, because they both ring so true, I think our professor of English at M.I.T. has crafted the two characters from the dead-set middle that is himself.

And here’s Diaz, with his home-honed humility bigging up the big heads (as they say in Jamaica) at M.I.T. for allowing their brilliance to nurture “Oscar Wao’s” womb.* But, au contraire, Junot. It’s your brain, that perfect ping pong left brain, right brain, 2-stepped merengue that’s feeding them mouthfuls indeed!

* "I'm just so proud and overjoyed and happy to have finished this book at MIT, surrounded by so many brilliant colleagues and students." MIT News (online—9th April, 2008)

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See, too, Carolina Gonzalez on Why Wao's Pulitzer Matters on the HAV home page.