Opinion: Generation Dora

BY ALICIA MENENDEZ

Last week’s news that minority babies now represent a majority of American births was met with anxiety in some quarters of American society. Even before the announcement of this tectonic shift, 53 percent of non-Hispanic Whites admitted to being concerned about America’s demographic transformation, saying that it will fundamentally alter the nation’s “character and values.” The truth is that cultural change is already underway.

Rodriguez, Garcia, Gonzales and Lopez are among the top ten most common last names on Facebook, outranking Martin, Taylor, and Thomas. There is an entire generation of non-Hispanic Americans that are being raised in a more Latin, America. Call them Generation Dora, a nod to the universally loved cartoon Dora the Explorer and its bilingual, bicultural star. These children watch Selena Gomez on the Disney Channel. They live in a country where Jennifer Lopez is an American idol. And guess what: these kids are as American as ever.

This shouldn’t surprise us. For all the anxiety about a changing America, America is evolving in a uniquely American way. Just take a look at GenXers and the oldest Millennial Latinos. Lin Manuel Miranda’s Tony Award-Winning broadway hit “In the Heights” borrowed as much from hip-hop as it did from Latin music. The lyrics featured a reference to “nights in Bennett Park, blasting Big Pun tapes”— a shout-out to Nuyorican rapper Big Punisher— and a constant refrain of “no pare – sigue, sigue,” a Spanish adaption of the hip-hop exhortation, “don’t stop – get it, get it.”

Pulitzer Prize winning author Junot Diaz counts Bruce Lee, The Breakfast Club and Sandra Cisneros among his influences. He writes about diaspora, New Jersey and science fiction nerd-dom that is often more foreign to his reader than his portraits of Santo Domingo. Bachata group Aventura takes classic Dominican music and adds guitar riffs that bespeak American rock classics of the 1990s. Cultural change is reflexive. Miranda, Diaz and the Santos’ are making their mark on America, and those marks are informed over and over again by American culture.

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