What are Hispanics’ main contributions to mainstream America?
There are two main valuable aspects. The first is a theme promoted by conservatives in the U.S. that speaks about family values. As a community, we Latinos have true family values: the love, the “calor humano”, what I call the emotional wealth. We tend to be very open, very warm, to identify with others in a very humane way. That is the greatest contribution we can make to this society, which is loosing that side. My kids are in their thirties, and they are still my kids. In a sense I would be very disappointed if they could not take care of themselves. But my greatest accomplishment is that they relate to one another in very close terms. To me, that is an important value helping us to succeed in any society. The second is work. There is also a lot of hard work in the Latino community that has been widely overlooked. Unfortunately we do work hard but not smart, not everyone goes to college, not everybody recognizes school as the universal equalizer. That is why I insist that we have a
