0.1 Preface  (Page 5/7)

Thirty-five million Hispanics live, work, suffer, enjoy, sing, and pray in Spanish in the United States. They belong to the “Latin American Community” because of history, culture, language, race, and religion. Hispanics are and belong to the North American society by their nationality, their work, their participation in social and political life, and because of many customs and ways of life, including the use of their language; this is an identity sign that differentiates them from their national culture of origin, and from the rest of the Latin American nations. But their cultural soul, their vision of the world, radically opposed to the Anglo-American, their sentimental heartbeat and roots of belonging, the keys of their temporality and axiology, that is to say, their “pathos,” “ethos,” and “logos” move around the Hispano-American cultural orbit; they are Iberoamerica culturally, even though they are also North Americans and citizens with rights of this country. They are transnational ethnic communities in a globalized world; that is the new dimension that differentiates them from old groups of European emigrants, like the Irish, Italian, Russians, in a world-wide network of the XIX and XX centuries, uncommunicative and more village-like, less globalized.

In this dialectic tension, sometimes antagonistic, of Hispanic North Americans, resides the explanation of many ambivalences and ambiguities, described improperly as schizophrenic; but it is in this tension where the key of its singularity and specialty as a nation resides as well, the source of its cultural wealth and historical challenge they are called to, contributing Anglo and Latin Americans, with a new form of living and feeling the world, a new culture, connected but different from their ancestors, one more pearl in the cultural creation of human history. Those that want to amputate one or another dimension of the Hispanic North American communities are mistaken; it is neither sociologically possible nor desirable. The historical mission of Hispanics in the United States is not the automatic reproduction of a copy of their culture, nor the castration mode of assimilation, or the mere sum of Hispanics and Anglo-Saxons; their commitment is to recreate, transfigure, and to dialectally surpass that duality in a new synthesis; it is to create a new culture and a new crossbreeding, that has been the most valuable and singular that has ever been produced, that we call the Latin American Community, a new society and a new culture of Hindu-Black-Iberian roots. Tomás Calvo Buezas “Una mirada antropológica a los Hispanos de EE.UU. desde hace más de 25 años (1973-2002)”, en J.L. Ponga y M. F. Rice (Coords), Beyond our borders , Universidad de Valladolid y Universidad de Texas, Valladolid, 1993, pp-533-556. As it was written by Octavio Paz (ABC, 9-IV-1987): "This is a fact filled with hopes for the future: the communication between Hispanic minorities and Latin American nations has been and still is continuous. It is not presumable that it will be broken. It is a true community, not ethnic, or political, nor economic, but cultural.”