The Future of the Hispanic Family

Transcript

ROBERTO SURO: What I tried to do with this paper was to sort of address two themes. One is the question of how the growth of the Hispanic population is affecting larger trends involving family structure in the United States. We have this just -- this substantial demographic event adding this particular population to the mix and so, the question is how does that added population affect the larger trends we’ve seen in family over years.

And the other was to try and address some of the distinctive characteristics and dynamics involving the Hispanic family. This is obviously a growing population. It’s a diverse population and the nature of the fact that so much of the growth is driven my immigration or the fertility among immigrants means that a great deal of the activity around family formation, marriage, childbearing, child rearing, takes place in the context of migration and the many kinds of changes that accompany it.

As a result, I think when you talk about family policy matters as regards to Hispanics, you need an even broader context than is normally the case. Family dynamics, whether you’re talking about marriage or age of first childbearing or the way families are formed is obviously related to a great many other questions in terms of socioeconomic processes, income, education, a whole series of other questions in any population.

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