Stirring The Nation's Melting Pot

Assimilating And Americanizing Latinos In The United States

(CBS) 
A genuine American success story, with books and a lecture series to prove it, Barajas decided the rich didn't need him, immigrants did.

"What I learned was that to become successful in America you had to have a specific mindset, a different mindset. I thought I pretty much had mastered that and I wanted to teach that to the Latinos. Not just financial. But changing the way they think," Barajas says.

Maria Cruz is his client——one of nine children, she grew up in Mexico.

"We were very, very poor, you know. We didn't have enough food to eat," Cruz remembers.

She came to the United States at the age of 18. At 38, she owns three WIC stores in the Los Angeles area, depots where low-income women cash in vouchers for food. There are more than a million and a half Latino-owned businesses in the United States, injecting well over $200 billion a year into the economy.

"Working hard and always trying to have a——what I should say——attitude of 'I wanna be better.' Always better. You never say, 'I'm fine, this is good enough,'" Cruz says.

Now a U.S. citizen, Cruz was an illegal immigrant.

Until after World War I, there really wasn't such a thing as illegal immigration in the United States. Millions of immigrants just showed up in great waves, mainly Europeans escaping poverty and politics.
The United States has always been schizophrenic about Latinos, especially Mexicans, over and over again, inviting them in to fill labor shortages and then when times got tough, throwing them out.

For more than 20 years, there was even a guest worker program. It ended in 1964, but the migrants came anyway——illegally——their numbers multiplying exponentially ever since.

Today, an estimated 12 million are here illegally.

A CBS News/New York Times poll found that nearly 9 out of 10 Americans consider illegal immigration either a serious or very serious problem.

"You just have to say, 'Hey folks, let's go. "Let's be practical. Get over it. Let's think it through in a practical way.' First of all, they're really not going anywhere," Cisneros says.

Born in Mexico, Alex Vega has been in the United States, undocumented, under the radar more than half his life. But in April he defiantly showed himself. He marched through downtown Los Angeles for immigrant rights, one of millions nationwide who understood what it meant to be seen and counted for the first time.

"I'm a ghost. I'm a ghost. I don't——I'm 45-years-old, I got 10 children, I have a business, I own a house, but nothing is in my name," Vega says.

Within five years, all 10 of Vega's children, born here, U.S. citizens, will have reached voting age.

"In 20 years then we gonna run the country. Right now we running the cities. So little by little, we are running the show. Little by little——so the sleeping giant, it's already awakened," Vega says.

Last year, Los Angeles elected Antonio Villaraigosa as its first Latino mayor in more than a century. He joins three U.S. senators and something like 6,000 other Latino officeholders at all levels of government.

If that scares some people, it reassures others.

"Yes, it will change the country, but I believe, fundamentally, it adds to the richness of the country and more importantly, this is a population that understands the basic credo, the basic core of the American idea," Cisneros says.

"They want to be part of the American dream."