SUMMARY: Thirteen young Mexican-American artists explore the ideas of "home" and "place" in the American West in an exhibit called "Mi Tierra" at the Denver Art Museum. Artists tackled topics of immigration, identity struggle and colliding worlds. Jeffrey Brown reports.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): At the Denver Art Museum recently, an emotional moment for artist Ramiro Gomez and his parents.
WOMAN: I'm very proud of him.
JEFFREY BROWN: He'd brought them here to see his newest work, called 'Lupita,' an installation that pays homage to a janitor who worked at these galleries.
It was particularly poignant. Gomez's parents themselves are laborers, his mother a janitor, his father a truck driver.
RAMIRO GOMEZ, Artist: I wouldn't be here without their labor. I wouldn't be here without their sacrifice.
JEFFREY BROWN: Today, Gomez is an up-and-coming artist in Los Angeles featured in galleries and exhibitions for work that captures a life of work by immigrants and others, not typically the subject of art.
RAMIRO GOMEZ: It's important for me to highlight these people that are not going to be recorded in our history.
JEFFREY BROWN:In Denver, Gomez was one of 13 young Mexican-American artists chosen for an exhibition called 'Mi Tierra,' their assignment, to create a new work that explores the idea of home and place in the American West.
There were smaller paintings and large installations, videos about the land before Europeans settled here, and a garden that looked like a giant pinata.
Many of the artists tackled the politically charged topic of immigration. This piece contained an actual panel of the U.S.-Mexico border fence.
RAMIRO GOMEZ: For me, place becomes a very difficult word to focus on, just because place is never permanent. We're constantly moving. It's constantly shifting.
I'm an American-born child to Mexican immigrants. So, I'm at once Mexican and American. I'm in between. That in-between space, that in-between place that I occupy is something that is constantly changing within myself.
SUMMARY: On college campuses, Latino males are perhaps the most underrepresented group. These men are often expected to provide for their families, which can mean a choice between getting an education and getting a job. Hari Sreenivasan reports as part of our Rethinking College series on one program that's trying to combat the issue by creating mentorship opportunities.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Now to the second installment of our week-long series on ideas to transform higher education for students and provide new opportunities.
Tonight, Hari Sreenivasan reports why some Latino males are being urged to turn down a job today in favor of four years of college tomorrow.
JUAN LOPEZ, Graduate Student, University of Texas: The series is called Rethinking College, and it's part of our weekly education coverage, Making the grade.
MAN: If I can have the mentors on one side and the mentees on another.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): Graduate student Juan Lopez wants to bring to college campuses what he sees as largely missing, Latino males.
JUAN LOPEZ: They're not seen as people who will succeed, especially minority males of color.
I want to go to college.
HARI SREENIVASAN: So, on this day, Lopez and undergraduates from the university of Texas at Austin are mentoring high school freshman boys as part of an initiative called Project MALES.
JUAN LOPEZ:Undergraduates mentor high school students. Graduate students mentor undergraduate students.
SUMMARY: While much of the rhetoric regarding Latinos this election cycle has focused on the divisive issue of immigration, a bipartisan group is out to change the narrative. The Latino Donor Collaborative aims to emphasize the growing economic power of Latino-Americans, and the potent political force they can become. John Yang talks to co-founders Henry Cisneros and Sal Trujillo for more.
JOHN YANG (NewsHour): Much of the focus on Latinos throughout this election cycle has centered on the divisive and often heated questions about immigration and its effects.
But now a bipartisan non-profit group is trying to change that. The Latino Donor Collective (sic), as it’s known, wants to emphasize the growing economic power of Latinos and the potential force they can become.
I spoke with its co-founders, Democrat Henry Cisneros and Republican businessman Sol Trujillo. Cisneros was housing secretary in the Clinton administration.
Gentlemen, thanks for being with us.
Mr. Cisneros, I would like to start with you.
The two of you wrote an essay for The Wall Street Journal, and you said that you have been watching this presidential campaign unfold at first with disappointment, then with concern and now with real alarm. What is alarming you?
HENRY CISNEROS, Former Secretary of Housing:Well, what alarms me is that the rhetoric about Latinos seems to be giving people permission to denigrate this population, to diminish its place in American life. And that’s just wrong.
This is a population of 55 million people, growing to 100 million people. It is essential to the American future. It is already making a major contribution in many areas of American life; from religion, to politics, to entrepreneurship, and to corporate business, and as consumers.
And one of the most important areas is in its contribution to the American economy, what Sol has come to call the mainstream economy, the mainstream American economy, the next American economy. And it’s just wrong to categorize a people somehow as — using phrases related to rapists and murderers and freeloaders, et cetera, to characterize an entire population.
And someone needs to stand up and say, let’s talk about the truth of this population. And it’s role in American life.
JOHN YANG: Mr. Trujillo, why are the politicians missing this? What aren’t they getting?
SOL TRUJILLO, Republican Businessman:No one talking how we drive growth, how we’re creating jobs, what’s creating jobs, what is our upside in terms of the economy.
And is where today we have a new mainstream economy driven predominantly by Latinos in growth. Let me give you some quick statistics. There’s about a trillion-and-a-half dollars of spend[ing] by Latinos in this country today, growing at $80 billion to $90 billion per year.
On top that, let’s talk about job creation and what are drivers of domestic GDP growth. Think about housing. Think about home purchases. Over the last decade, 51 percent of all new home mortgages taken out in the United States of America have been taken out by Latino families.
When you look at entrepreneurship, in the last half-decade, 86 percent of all new business formations in the United States, based upon a recent Hoover study commissioned through the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative, shows that Latinos were creating 86 percent of all new business formations.
Without Latinos in the mix, we as a nation would have had net negative business formations. And I can go on with more data, John. But, as an American, as somebody that cares about our economy, which all of us at the Latino Donor Collaborative do, we want to make sure that this story is understood, rather than mischaracterizations, incorrect facts, which will mislead policy decisions that could be very damaging to our economy.
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): Now a different look at providing care to those in need. It's part of our occasional series on aging and the challenges of providing long-term care.
Tonight, we focus on Latinos, who will comprise 20 percent of the elderly population by the year 2050.
The "NewsHour"'s Mary Jo Brooks has our report.
MARY JO BROOKS (Newshour): Seventy-six-year-old Nicolasa Romero still gets teary when she talks about how much her life has changed after suffering a stroke eight years ago. A legal resident who immigrated from Mexico, she had been living with her daughter in suburban Los Angeles. But the stroke forced her into a long-term care facility.
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): Now back to the U.S. for a significant, but often untold piece of our nation's history, how Latino Americans have shaped the country.
Our own Ray Suarez has written a book on the topic, and he sat down recently with Gwen Ifill.
Here's their conversation.
GWEN IFILL (Newshour): From the first Spanish settlers who arrived in America decades before Plymouth rock or Jamestown, to the 53 million Hispanic Americans living here today, Latinos have helped form what is now the United States in ways we were often never taught in school.
From the Wild West to the civil rights movement to the current fight over comprehensive immigration reform, it has been a five-century journey, one that our own Ray Suarez (Newshour) chronicles in "Latino Americans: The 500-Year Legacy That Shaped a Nation."
SUMMARY: For the first time, Hispanic politicians were major speakers at both national conventions, illustrating the growing power wielded by those politicians and Hispanic voters, who make up a critical portion of the population in three swing states. Ray Suarez reports.
RAY SUAREZ (Newshour): That's no coincidence. The 2010 census counted more than 50 million Latinos in the United States.
New Mexico's former Governor Bill Richardson, who ran for president himself in 2008, says a threshold has been crossed.
I am Retired U.S. Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Veteran. After my Navy retirement I was in the computer related industry, now retired. In 2000 I was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. Six months of having Bush in the Whitehouse forced me to re-evaluate my political stance. I had always thought of myself as a Moderate Republican, but was a Republican by "default" NOT because of close examination of the GOP. Due to what has happened in America since 2000, I now consider myself a progressive, and registered as a Non-Affiliated voter.
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