The keenest recruits to the dream. (America's Latinos) 

Four centuries after Spanish-speakers settled in what is now the United States, how close have Latinos come to making their presence felt?

WHEN Danny Villanueva became the first Latino to play in the National Football League (back in the mid-1960s, before his business acumen made him rich), players travelled in segregated buses. "Sometimes", he remembers, "I'd head for the white bus and the black guys would be hollering out the window, 'Hey, Taco! Taco, come ride with us!' And I'd ride with them. It got to be a joke. We'd head for the buses and I'd just stand there deciding which one to ride. The coach would say, 'OK! You guys on this bus, you guys on that bus; Villanueva, you take a cab."

In the polarised politics of race in America, Latinos have always been caught in the middle. At times they are accepted, at times abused; they have never been enslaved, yet have suffered segregation. Some Latinos are, in effect, native Americans, whose communities in the south-west go back to the 16th century. Far more came in, and still come in, as turn-of-the-century Europeans did: voluntarily, largely penniless, in pursuit of the American dream.

It is almost 400 years to the day-April 30th 1598-since Don Juan de Onate's expedition waded across the Rio Grande, gave thanks, and claimed the lands to the north for Spain. It is also 150 years since the annexation of the south-west after the Mexican-American war, and the centenary of Puerto Rico's entry into the Union after the Spanish-American war. History, it seems, is asking the United States to reflect on its Spanish-speakers. It is high time.

Latinos are the fastest-growing group in the country. There were around 30m in the latest census, in 1990, about 15% of the population (not counting 2m-3m who were in America illegally). On current trends, the figure is expected to rise to 96m by 2050; the Census Bureau predicts a 75% increase by 2015. Latinos immigrate, with or without papers, in far greater numbers than any other group. They have children younger and in far larger numbers than their counterparts. They live longer. And, increasingly, the future lies with them.

Spanish-speaking Americans are as heterogeneous as the United States itself. They come in all shades of brown, white, black and yellow. The breakdown is roughly 63% Mexicans, 12% Puerto Ricans, 8% Cubans, 12% Central Americans and "diverse" Latin Americans, and 5% Dominicans.

Each group brings with it a different history and different loyalties; all agree that the word "Latino", let alone "Hispanic", is unsatisfactory. Texans with Mexican ancestry call themselves Tejanos, other Americans with Mexican ancestry call themselves Chicanos; Hispanos are New Mexicans who trace their roots to Spain. Although Anglo America would like to homogenise them, anything less like an ethnic lump is hard to imagine. It is language (and, to a lesser extent, Roman Catholicism and family values) that brings these people into a category that both black and white Americans can treat as "them".

Latino strength lies not just in how many there are, but in where they are. Apart from the Puerto Rican and Dominican pocket in the urban north-east, they are concentrated in the west, the south-west, and Florida. Latinos are expected to become the majority in America's two most dynamic states, Texas and California, by 2020. But many are also migrating to the heartland to do jobs, such as meatpacking, which blacks and whites are now reluctant to do; and to find, along the way, cheap houses and good schools. States with strong agro-processing industries, such as Iowa, have seen their Latino population double since 1987.

Even poor Latinos have middle-class aspirations. According to David Hayes Bautista, the head of the Centre for the Study of Latino Health at the University of California at Los Angeles, Latinos have the highest rate of male participation in the labour force, the lowest use of public assistance and the highest rate of family formation. Latinos spend nearly twice as much as blacks on mortgages, and, although most arrive with no capital and take rock-bottom jobs, they are reaching the middle class in increasingly large numbers. In Los Angeles there are now around 450,000 middle-class Latino households, three times as many as in 1980.

The number of Latino-owned businesses, too, has almost doubled since 1993 in most states. In Los Angeles County they have grown from 57,000 in 1987 to 210,000 in 1997: much of California's recovery has been achieved by them. Overwhelmingly, immigrant Latinos work in the private sector. Only 3% of Latino immigrant men in Los Angeles worked for the government at the time of the 1990 census, against 18% of black men. Latinos have still not acquired the habit of looking to government either for welfare or for jobs.

According to Jeffrey Humphreys at the Selig Centre of the University of Georgia, the buying power of Latinos has risen 65% since 1990 to $348 billion today, or more than the GNP of Mexico. The buying power of California Latinos alone increases by $1 billion every six weeks. Because Latino consumers are concentrated in certain markets (California, Texas, New York, Florida and Illinois, in order of importance), sophisticated Latino advertising agencies can aim precisely at them. Not only is the Latino market large and growing fast, but it also has a reputation for brand loyalty that warms a corporate executive's heart. In short, there are big rewards to be had here.

There is, of course, another side. Immigrant Latinos are the most likely to live under the poverty line. Latinos may be less reliant on welfare generally, but 40% of the children on welfare in California are Latino. In the colonias of south Texas food stamps stave off malnutrition. Under the recent welfare reforms, legal immigrants will lose food stamps to the tune of $200-300 a month.

Meanwhile more Latino immigrants, both legal and illegal, keep pushing in. The newer they are, the more eager they are to work for any pay, and they are so useful that employers rarely question their credentials. Every large border town has, loitering round the bus stations, recruiters for slaughterhouses or chicken-processing plants across the mid-west. A building foreman picking up workers in Houston confides that he seldom sees non-Latinos lining up for work. "When I do see blacks or whites," he says, "I think of them as the last resort. Your Guatemalan is going to give you more value for money." They do so in the fields, too, where crops such as lettuce, tomatoes and strawberries are picked almost exclusively by Latinos, most of them now legal immigrants, working for a pittance for 16 hours a day.

Most of these workers eventually settle down; some remain as migrants, following the harvests from state to state, taking their children in and out of school. Yet even Latinos who stay put do not shine in the classroom. They lag behind both whites and blacks by almost every measure: higher drop-out rates, lower test scores, fewer college graduates. "Our growth means nothing if we remain under-educated," says Antonia Hernandez, the head of the influential Mexican-American Legal Defence Fund. "We Latinos have to become obsessed with education."

At present, that obsession is often focused in the wrong place: at university level. Both California and Texas, where Latinos account for a third of high-school graduates, have struck down affirmative action-preference for minorities-in their universities; this year, far fewer Latinos will be going to the top-rank colleges in those states. This weakens one stepping-stone to economic success, as well as ensuring that the best and brightest Latinos will be lured away from the states where they have the best chance to advance in public life. Yet the key to Latino advancement lies not in the universities, but in the public-school system; and that system, already dilapidated and short of cash, threatens to be overwhelmed by enrolments of Latino schoolchildren that will grow from 4.9m in 1994 to 6.9m in 2000.

Would these children be helped if they were taught in Spanish rather than English? The issue has been debated for years. Many Anglos suppose that Latinos do not want to learn English, and often they do not need to; by dint of market forces and grudging acceptance of history, Spanish has become as commonplace in south-western America as French in Canada.

Yet most polls say that over 90% of new immigrant Latinos want to learn English, and Latino parents want their children taught in English at school. They see it as the obvious route to a better life. They would rather not have to forget their Spanish; they want to be able to write cheques in Spanish, and chat to each other in Spanish at the office. Yet they overwhelmingly want to have English as well. It is a key to their approach to the American enterprise.

You might think such shifts in demography and culture would bring political change. So far, it has been slow to come. For all their numbers, Latinos have not yet swung a presidential election; in 1996, the only state where the outcome depended on their votes was Colorado. Years spent on the political margins have left them woefully under-represented at every level of government. Nor have they had much luck. Henry Cisneros, the best-known Latino politician, left his job as secretary of housing and urban development under a cloud; the next-most-senior Latino, Federico Pena, the transport secretary, is leaving to spend more time with his family. There are now no Latinos left in Mr Clinton's cabinet, which was meant to "look like America".

At state and city level, however, the picture is more encouraging. There are more Latinos in elected office than ever before. In some counties of Texas and New Mexico almost every elected official is a Latino. Mr Cisneros and Mr Pena both rose to the cabinet after successful careers as mayors (Mr Cisneros in San Antonio, Mr Pena in Denver). A bigger breakthrough has been in California, where Antonio Villaraigosa has become the first Latino speaker of the state legislature. Texas has a Latino attorney-general, Dan Morales, and a secretary of state, Al Gonzalez, who was raised in poverty by first-generation Mexican immigrants.

Mr Gonzalez is that rarest of elephants, a Republican Latino. And thereby hangs a tale. Latinos, with their work ethic, their religion and their love of family, might seem natural Republicans. But most of them dislike the party's hard line on immigration-and nowhere more than in California, where Governor Pete Wilson drove through Proposition 187, which cut off benefits to both legal and illegal immigrants.

This has pushed Latinos into unexpected political solidarity both in California and outside it. They have been galvanised both to vote, and to register to vote, in substantial numbers; and Republicans can no longer take comfort in the fact that Latinos have a miserable turnout at elections. In Texas alone, 400,000 new Latinos registered to vote in 1996. The political coming of age of the Latino middle class is, says Mr Cisneros, "a genie that cannot be put back in the bottle."

This does not yet mean that Latinos have become a political unit. They vote all kinds of ways, and not necessarily for their own. In Odessa, a grimy oil town in west Texas where half the population is Latino, there is only one Latino on the six-member city council. "I don't care whether a politician is white, black, or brown," says Nicky Hernandez, a local car mechanic, "as long as he's down here in the neighbourhood getting things done."

Conciliation goes further. Most Latinos prefer to walk away from abuse and confrontation. A Latino effort to imitate the black Million Man march was a humiliating failure. Latinos lack the leaders the black community has, and they are less clear about what offends them. When Taco Bell recently used a Spanish-speaking chihuahua called Dinky to advertise their burritos on television, some indignant Latinos demanded an apology; but more Latinos thought the dog rather cute. In these crazy times, almost any other minority in America would have united in outrage.

In some ways, Latinos are not yet fully absorbed into America. Their Catholicism, though it does not unite them politically, has other, subtler, effects: it gives them a sense of belonging to a larger world, and a certain resistance (at least for now) to American materialism. Their language keeps them close to the southern half of the continent, and new dual-nationality rules allow Mexican-Americans to stay fully involved in Mexican politics. Latinos, though well involved in baseball, are almost absent from other mainstream American sports. Most of them prefer soccer, so much that Major League Soccer depends on them to stay afloat.

Latinos are largely absent from mainstream culture, too. Latino actors used to Anglicise their names, and Latinos are still stereotyped on screen (as blacks used to be) as dim-witted labourers. Public libraries carry few books on Latino culture. One large bookshop in Los Angeles has Jimmy Santiago Baca's award-winning poetry shelved with homosexual poets under "Minority Interests": ironically, it was Mr Baca who wrote that Latinos had been "erased" from the American landscape.

Yet, for all that, the Latino internal market is exploding. Established publications such as Hispanic magazine (with 1m readers) or La Opinion, an excellent Spanish-language daily in Los Angeles, have been joined by many other magazines aimed at Latinos, notably People en Espanol and Latina. Popular-music performers who used to be concerned with breaking out of the Latino market now get rich from it. Spanish television networks-Univision, now headed by Mr Cisneros, and its rival Telemundo-are hugely popular, acting as a filter for all things American in most Latino households. And all over the south-west the Latino radio stations have a stronger signal than the country-music stations.

America tends to reduce its people's assorted origins to the flimsiest of tokens: a kilt, a leprechaun, a pizza. As the Latino population grows larger it will also become more assimilated, particularly as Latinos have high rates of inter-marriage with non-Latinos. Yet this is, after all, a very big chunk of the population, and one bolstered by the only language that is now a world rival to English. Spanish-speaking America is already the world's fifth-largest Hispanic nation. Within ten years, only Mexico will have more Spanish-speakers.

Even if they can be digested, how strong will they become? Some Latinos like to think that, once they have come to run the south-west and south Florida (which is not far off), it will be a short step to running the country. That is too blithe. Latinos will not punch their weight politically or economically for some time. If their education does not improve, most Latinos will be servicing rather than running 21st-century America. Even so, their eagerness for betterment, their readiness to do lowly jobs and, above all, their refusal to choose between the white bus and the black will make them perhaps the most vital group in the whole American experiment.