Latino Identity and all its Complexity
August 9, 2010 :: Posted by: Daniel Dahlman
I recently came across an Ad Age article entitled “Hispanic Market Hits Tipping Point” that addresses an issue I see a lot in marketing articles and demographic data surrounding the Hispanic community. The article details early U.S. Census predictions, expected to count 50 million Hispanics, and how marketers are adapting to serve this growing “sweet spot.” The writer makes the assertion that “one of the biggest challenges for marketers is reaching young, acculturated bilingual Hispanics who behave differently than their parents who didn't grow up in the U.S. […] but still feel a deep sense of Latino identity.”
While many Hispanic American children certainly do have “a deep sense of Latino identity,” it often seems taken for granted that there is a large group of young Hispanics who will be receptive to cultural messaging of this sort. The Hispanic community is so diverse in culture, language, and heritage that it's very challenging to find a large group of young U.S. Hispanics who are all similar enough for marketers to speak to at the same time.
I know from personal experience that the feelings first generation children have of their ancestry are often complicated and can differ drastically even among siblings (let alone other Hispanic Americans). I myself come from a multicultural family, the product of a Colombian father and a Brazilian mother. My siblings and I are all first generation Americans and yet we each have very different feelings about our Hispanic heritage.
Take for instance, my older sister Ana. Ana feels 100% Brazilian, inarguably the “most Latino” of us all. The oldest of the four children, she spent a lot of time in Brazil as a toddler as my parents traveled to Brazil much more frequently when they were newlyweds. Ana was already speaking Portuguese with my Brazilian cousins before my older brother was even born.
Two years later, when my brother Andre was born, trips to Brazil were less frequent and my parents had taken to speaking English at home. Years later, when my younger sister and I were in grade school, our family moved to Mexico City for three years for my father’s work. My younger sister and I were at the age where a foreign language is picked up intuitively while my high school age brother struggled considerably more.With Spanish as a base, my sister and I were able to picked up Portuguese quickly on subsequent trips to Brazil. My younger sister and I were also lucky enough to have cousins our age who were windows into what our lives would be like had my mother stayed in Brazil.
So, although my younger sister I, having spent a lot of time in Brazil, relate more to our Brazilian side of the family, we are more comfortable in Spanish than we are in Portuguese. My older sister, who has lived and taught English in Brazil and was in boarding school most of the time my family was in Mexico, is simply a Brazilian. My older brother, the only one of us with freckles, pale skin, and an inability to speak foreign languages, explains his difference by saying he must have inherited “all the Swedish genes” from my Swedish paternal grandfather.
How could a marketer approach me, or any of my siblings, in a way that would resonate? I think marketers are going to lean that in order to be successful, rather than simply targeting young Hispanic Americans with a one-size-fits-all approach, they are going to have to develop a clear understanding of the segments of the Hispanic American audience they want to each before they target them with anything as complicated and nuanced as ethnic and cultural identity.
Comments
Leba Nexican said on Thu September 2 at 11:37
Hi Carla, you make the point that all people marketing to Hispanics need to keep in mind. Yes, there is so much diversity within the Hispanic experience, even within families! I speak fluent Spanish, and my brother does not, but he once owned a lowrider(!) and makes Mexican food much more often than I do. Neither of us looks particularly Mexican, but we feel it in our hearts, in different ways. Extrapolate that to the broader Latino community, and you have a lot of difference among us.
Saludos! http://lebanexican.wordpress.com/