Tuesday, December 29th, 2009
Although most of us celebrate New Year’s, for the most part, mainstream American New Year’s celebrations aren’t all that imaginative. There are traditions, like getting together with friends or family and partying, drinking champagne, and watching the ball drop over a city skyline. However, these traditions are somewhat bland compared to Hispanics’ New Year’s rituals, like wearing yellow underwear, gobbling grapes, and caroling throughout town. New Year’s is a holiday rich in symbolism, as an opportunity to shed the past and start anew, and Hispanics richly celebrate that opportunity.
Let’s start with the yellow underwear. It’s a tradition for many South American women to put on a pair of brand new yellow underwear right before midnight for good luck in the new year. The yellow symbolizes gold and good fortune. The underwear tradition is said to go back to Spain in the Middle Ages when wearing bright colors was forbidden. So yellow underwear became a secret way of wishing for good fortune. Wearing yellow underwear is only a tradition for women, which is probably a relief to most Hispanic men.
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Tags: 2010, culture, Hispanic, HispanicPR, Latino, New Year, Tradition
Posted in 2010, Hispanic, HispanicPR, Holiday, Latino, New Year, Tradition, culture | 4 Comments »
Friday, October 2nd, 2009
The 2010 Census is expected to show an explosive growth in America’s Hispanic population over the last decade. When the Census Bureau compared the Hispanic population in 2000 and 2006, it found the population’s growth rate was nearly quadruple the rate of the overall U.S. population. Hispanics were responsible for half of all population growth in the country during that period.
The Census Bureau then projected that at that rate they would count approximately 47 million Hispanics living in the U.S. in the 2010 Census. Two years later, they increased their projection to over 49 million, or just over 16 percent of the American population. At their current rates of growth, Hispanics are likely to cause non-Hispanic whites to be the minority of the population before 2050.
Along with the anticipation of the next census’ findings, though, is the fear that Hispanics may be undercounted. The Census Bureau estimates that it missed close to a quarter of a million Hispanics in the 2000 Census. Other groups like NALEO, the National Association of Latino Elected Officials, have estimated that number at closer to a million.
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Tags: 2010, Census, census bureau, growth, Hispanic, HispanicPR, immigrant, Latino, NALEO, Network, novela, Population, Spanish, Telemundo, telenovela, television
Posted in 2010, Census, Hispanic, HispanicPR, Latino, NALEO, Network, Population, Spanish, Telemundo, census bureau, culture, growth, immigrant, language, novela, telenovela, television | 4 Comments »