The arrival of the holiday season this year has also brought the not-so-merry and somewhat dizzying kick-off of the 2012 presidential campaign cycle. Debates seem to take place every other week and candidate histrionics at times are better suited for the E! television network. In the meantime, President Obama is...

This week marks the beginning of New York's Advertising Week. The five-day gathering is put together by an industry keen on showing the world that it's (slightly) more than the cigars, cocktails and witty scripts of Mad Men. Speakers and attendees will attempt, between dizzying networking breaks, to solve the...

Back in 1987 the film Stand and Deliver told the inspiring story of Jamie Escalante, a Mexican immigrant who gave up his engineering job to teach AP Calculus to Latino kids in an underperforming East L.A. high-school. The story shed light on a Latino educational crisis fueled by socioeconomic obstacles...

In my last two HuffPost entries I addressed the stellar showing of Hispanics in the
2010 Census: 50 million strong, accounting for more than half the population growth in the United States over the past decade, and making staggering gains in crucial states like Texas and California...

President Obama's whirlwind tour of Latin America this week delivered some good news and bad news for Latin American watchers. First comes the bad the news, which I don't think was all that bad in light of the milestone trip. The visit, rightfully positioned as a trade mission to help...

The Census updates released during the past couple of weeks paint a dynamic and powerful picture of the growing influence of Latinos in the U.S. According to the official government numbers, Latinos are driving as much as half the growth of the entire U.S. population, surpassing original estimates....

The past couple of weeks have seen a rising number of media stories about the changing demographic makeup of the U.S. These stories are part of a well-orchestrated teaser campaign by the U.S. Census to unveil the decennial count of the nation's population. A consistent thread in the...

The fall of Hosni Mubarack's regime signals some much needed hope for democracy in Egypt, as well as a powerful reminder of the growing restlessness and assertiveness of the developing world's over one billion young people, a record number. The ex-Egyptian leader himself acknowledged the role his country's youth played...

The upcoming U.S. census will show that the American Latino population is now greater than fifty million, which surpasses the population of California, our largest state, as well as any other Spanish-speaking country in the world except Mexico. With this heft comes greater influence as corporations and politicians alike see...

What a difference two centuries can make. As many Latin American nations marked their bicentennial in 2010, there was more to celebrate than just independence from Spain. The motherland may have brought home the World Cup, but in the face of a tanking economy that's about all the conquistadors had...

Harry Reid should have just called Mike Bloomberg to tell it to the Senate straight last week about The DREAM Act. Why? Because the Mayor of New York knows more than most how, without immigrants, his city would hardly even be on the map. As Bloomberg stated quite forcefully last...

There was a different type of celebration happening in Rio this past weekend. After a violent week-long stand off in one of the city's most dangerous slums, national security forces seized control from the notorious drug cartels who had held sway in Rio's poorest districts for close to three decades....

Plenty has been written about the decline of the United States vis-à-vis the rise of the rest of the world, especially the emerging economic power centers in China, India and Brazil. And while the story of our waning influence isn't new (remember our fear of Japan in the 70s and...

As expected, Dilma Roussef easily won Brazil's run-off presidential election this past Sunday, surpassing her more politically-experienced (and conservative) opponent, José Serra, by more than 10% of the vote. This is not terribly surprising: Ms. Roussef was a close advisor to popular outgoing President Luis Inácio Lula de Silva, serving...

Brazil has long been derided as the country of a future that has yet to arrive. At various points throughout history, Brazil has seemingly been on the brink of realizing its vast potential, only to see progress stymied by political instability, corruption, economic mismanagement and poverty to the extreme.