Latino Diversity: Finally, a Serious and In-depth Look at the Latino Reality in the USA

by Andrés Tapia – On our way to becoming one-fourth of the US population within the next twenty years, news coverage of Latinos in the USA has continually fallen into classic traps: most of the time nonexistent, and when covered, it’s around polarizing issues such as that of undocumented immigrants (aka “illegal aliens”!) and drug wars near the US-Mexico border or idealized soft focus features on fiesta and family.  Or into this trap as described by CNN columnist Ruben Navarrette, Jr. when he writes of TV news programs that “haven’t grasped the absurdity of producing Sunday morning talk shows where journalists and pundits gather for roundtable discussions that touch on Latino issues without a single Latino at the table.”

But this week, María de la Soledad Teresa O’Brien — more commonly known as Soledad O’Brien, the daughter of a Latina and Black mom and an Australian and Irish dad – is airing a four-hour special presented in two parts that blows past shallow and stereotyped treatments. Hers is a multilayered, complex, and at the same time both inspiring and heartbreaking look at the realities Latinos face as we navigate American society with it’s own contradictory environment of vast opportunities and seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

In the special, this journalist who personally has experienced these complexities, highlights Latinos and Latinas skyrocketing on the American Dream and as well as those succumbing to an American nightmare. She shows the vibrancy of family ties and yet how at the same time they can tie down young people ready to venture out through education but whose parents won’t support them in that quest. O’Brien explores the complex spiritual reality of the massive conversions to Pentecostalism within what has been a traditionally Catholic community and yet at the same time how in the browning of the American Catholic Church Latinos are the hope of the Church’s future.

Along with Soledad’s special, CNN has a full page dedicated to what I would say is the first complex news coverage of Latino issues. Latinos, you see, are changing America and we are being changed in turn. It’s time we get to know each other intimately.

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