This weekend many will use Cinco de Mayo as an excuse to celebrate the Mexican heritage and culture. In the report that I sent you a few weeks ago, “The State of the Hispanic Consumer: The Hispanic Marketing Imperative” released by Nielsen, spells out that Hispanics in the U.S. put effort into sustaining their culture all year round. In fact, Hispanics are the largest population group to exhibit culture sustainability.
While the conventional expectation is that Hispanics will gradually become part of the melting pot, the finding in the report says otherwise.

–
• Thirty-seven percent of Hispanic adults who spoke English mostly when they were young children indicated that they learned enough Spanish to become bilingual at present age. These bilingual Hispanics have high rates of wanting to read, watch and explore more Spanish language media channels in the next five years.
• Nine out of ten Hispanic parents and parents-to-be want their children to be able to speak Spanish, even though they also want them to become fluent in English.
• Hispanic adults say they want to be more Latino (31 percent) or bicultural (60 percent) than they are now, they like telling people from other cultures about Hispanics (75 percent), and they speak to their closest friend in Spanish (51 percent) or both English and Spanish (24 percent).

Although the basic elements of culture sustainability have been identified and some qualitative findings have been reported, these quantitative measures represent much needed efforts to address and anticipate the dynamics of culture change in the U.S.