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COPYRIGHT 2005 President and Fellows of Harvard College, through the John F. Kennedy School of Government
When I started the Harvard Journal of Hispanic Policy (1) along with a small handful of fellow Latino students at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University now twenty years ago, Hispanic Americans were effectively an invisible minority. Though numbering only 10 percent of the national population, our people were effectively absent from the media-based national narrative of America, university faculties, corporate and foundation boards and staffs and leading institutions that govern U.S. public decision making.
Our purpose in creating the journal was to establish a space to comment on and address these disturbing realities on the public record at one of America's premier institutions--Harvard University. By elevating national attention to Latino community groups and institutions, their perceptions of the issues of the day and their still-untapped leadership and intellectual capital, we hoped to advance the civic good. We hoped to encourage Hispanic community integration into the national mainstream and at the same time to promote needed new governance models and perspectives that would strengthen American democracy by making it more inclusive of Latino--and other diverse community--experiences.
Twenty years later, Latinos, now projected to comprise fully one-quarter of the national population by 2050, constitute the United States' largest minority population. (2) Leading Hispanic Americans, moreover, now inhabit key positions in national and regional governance, media and industry. Important Latino community institutions, such as the National Council of La Raza, the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Hispanics in Philanthropy, have become part of the fabric of U.S. civil society. In addition, established mainstream policy-shaping institutions have begun to appoint Latino executives to top positions, including organizations like the American Civil Liberties...
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