Sep. 2012

How many years was America called "The New World"? Well maybe that was right right in more than one sense. Do you want to dream in colors? Welcome to the new America! Welcome to the new world! Do you want to speak several languages, understand different cultures? Welcome to the new America! Welcome to the new world! "Mi casa es su casa" like they say in the movies, and speaking of movies, do you remember almost 30 years ago in the movie Blade Runner that the L.A. police speak a "polilingua"? As the Harrison Ford character said while he was arrested by Edward James Olmos: "That gibberish he talk, was city speak, gutter talk. A mismatch of Japanese, Spanish, German, what have you. I didn’t need a translator, I know the lingo, every good cop did." Well, the future is here: Latinos, Africans, Arabs, Asians, Hindus, Pakistanis, Eastern Europeans... everybody has a cousin here. We are the new immigrants and we are building a new mainstream. (With our special thanks to the old inmigrants for building the old mainstream).

Thing are different now from how they were in the past when immigrants had to cut their cultural roots and adapt to the new environment. Today and thanks to the global village we all can keep in touch with our cultural origin, no matter where we are on the globe, without leaving our new one. Thanks to the communicational blogosphere, we can keep watching the mass medias of countries of our birth. On top of that, here are the social media that allows us to keep in touch with our inner circle of friends, family, issues and, yes, gossip.

And it’s because of these connections that we can say: Welcome to the new world! To the world of "post postmodernism" the world of "Transcontinentalization." Where a terrorist attack in one country can trigger wars everywhere, the rise of commodities, recessions and depressions; nobody is safe! (Anyway, I’m saving for my piece of beach in Costa Rica)

"The world is flat" as Friedman says in his book. Flat, but not thin. It’s corpulent in connections which means in its understandings and misunderstandings. Today the world has become the McLuhan "Global Village", and the USA has become the metaphor country for this transformation.

We are here but in some sort of "cultural" Spanglish culture, In the oldest meaning of the world "culture", We are here to cultivate, but with our seed and in our way. And to prove it, there was "Lopez Tonight" every night on TBS for a while.

But as representatives of the biggest minority, we have the opportunity to catalyze this process in a harmonious way that it’s beneficial for everybody. As beneficial as every evolutionary process must be, if it wants to be successful.

And these days, with the two-way-communication model on our side, we can both adapt it and adapt to it. Because it seems more obvious every day that a country’s, capacity to adapt to an integrated world is the key to that country to continue to be part of the change instead of being some "stage" that the world has to overcome. And if you think that we are here forever ask the "Romans" or the "Egiptians" after all, they were here forever, first and long before us.

But if you are a representative of a minority you can’t start celebrating just yet, and don’t even dare to start screaming "Here I come to save the day." This is not Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. There are going to be more "Arizonas Laws", and some of the new inmigrants will try to import the worst part of their countries. But we have to make a decision to move in the direction of aligning all the variables (economical, religious, moral, social, political, etc.) The globalization process that started long ago with Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus is not going to stop; because one thing that we can learn from History is that History never stops. And one thing we can teach History is that the New America is here to stay.

Pablo Carpintero