Their rising population and income have drawn the attention of academics and
corporations that track buying habits, attitudes and tastes. By ARMANDO
ACUNA, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer.

Refugio Rochin, the director of the new Smithsonian Center for Latino
Initiatives in Washington, D.C., remembers the early 1970s, when research
about Latinos, then a fledgling endeavor, was frowned on by the academic
hierarchy. "My area of interest was migrant farm workers and
Chicanoeconomics, but looking at poverty wasn't considered valued research
and was discouraged," Rochin recalled of his days as a UC Davis professor.
"I was told it would be better for my career if I focused on something
else." Today, Rochin notes with dry understatement, things have turned
around. The nation's fastest growing minority group is being examined as
never before. From think-tank academics studying immigration patterns and
educational attainment to profit seeking companies tracking buying habits,
Latinos' attitudes and tastes are under the corporate and government
microscope. That's what comes with rising purchasing power estimated at $383
billion this year and expanding political muscle that solicitous Democrats
and Republicans feel can sway elections. "The reason is simple
demographics," Rochin said. "As a growing number of Latinos climb the career
ladder and gain more power and responsibility in their jobs, they become
interested in bigger global issues . . . and that makes us mainstream
players," he said. "Yes, we're interested in seasonal farm workers, but in
other things too.

There is growing recognition of that." The number of think tanks devoted
exclusively to researching the nation's 31.5 million Latinos remains small,
though leaders say they are busier than ever. But there is a growing network
of new and revitalized Latino research centers largely connected to colleges
and universities throughout the United States. Many of them are in
California. In addition, independent research organizations are devoting
more resources to evaluating the impact of the state's 10 million Latinos on
a wide range of cultural, political, educational and economic issues. They
include the Public Policy Institute of California, a San Francisco-based
nonprofit think tank founded in 1994 to study the forces shaping the state's
future. "We're here to provide policymakers with high quality research,"
said Abby Cook, the institute's spokeswoman. "You can't track the phenomenal
change at the state level and the effects of that without solid analysis of
Latinos."

The new information is being used by government leaders to make public policy
in areas such as education and economic development, and by politicians vying
to capture votes. It also plays role in litigation on immigration and
political redistricting and in exploring border issues between the United
States and Mexico. The data are also being employed to dispel stereotypes
and to highlight ethnic differences often overlooked under the rubric
"Latino." Businesses are using research to launch new products or to
document marketplace trends. Aided by marketing research, the Gateway
computer company is launching a major program targeting Spanish-speaking
Latinos, which it sees as a rapidly expanding pool of potential customers.
The program, which started Oct. 1, is the first of its kind by a major
personal computer manufacturer. In addition to having ads on
Spanish-language TV and radio, the company is providing Spanish-speaking
customer service and technical support, along with Spanish software and
keyboards featuring Spanish characters. A spokesman for the San Diego-based
company said the research shows that the Latino computer market is where the
general market was two years ago, but is growing twice as fast.

Also capitalizing on Latino marketing research is Fernando Diaz, co-founder
of OYE magazine, whose research showed there was a market for a magazine
targeting second-generation, upwardly mobile, college-educated Latino men
ages 21 to 39. The quarterly publication is set to go bimonthly next year.
In the area of public policy, the William C. Velasquez Institute in San
Antonio has a long record of providing information that has been used to win
more than 80 voting rights lawsuits and gained Latinos increased political
access in California, Texas and New Mexico. The Internet plays a large role
in the Latino research emergence. The virtual universe has dozens of sites
on Latinos ranging from research on health care to chat rooms exploring what
it means to be Chicano. "There is a more recognized need at all levels for
this information, the kind that isn't readily available" without the
Internet, said Richard Chabran, who runs the Chicano/Latino Net on the Web
and is director of the Center for Virtual Research at UC Riverside. Chabran
pointed to a research paper about Latinos and AIDS presented at a UCLA
conference that in the past would have been ignored by mainstream
publications. "We took the bilingual proceedings and put them on the Web,"
he said. "This is information that wouldn't normally go out or be widely
disseminated."

In just the past few years, several policy centers have been created or
planned across the United States. They range from the National Latino
Research Center at Cal State San Marcos to a fledgling center at the
University of Indiana in Bloomington. Attracting the most attention is the
University of Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies, which opened this
fall. The institute aims to provide academic support for Latino-focused
faculty as well as national community service and original research, said its
associate director, Allert Brown-Gort. Notre Dame also has taken over as
headquarters for the Inter-University Program for Latino Research. Begun in
the early 1980s, the program has grown from a consortium of four research
centers to 16 spread throughout the country. It serves as an information
clearinghouse for research on Latinos, and brings scholars together.

When it comes to old-line Latino think tanks, few rival the Tomas Rivera
Policy Institute, which is affiliated with Claremont Graduate University and
the University of Texas at Austin. Founded in 1985, the center--which is
funded by more than 50 corporations and foundations--primarily focused on
education and public policy. But it broadened its scope in 1997. The center
also now looks at the impact of information technology on Latinos, the role
of Latinos in U.S.-Latin American relations and how Latinos fare in the
entertainment industry. Harry Pachon, Tomas Rivera's president, said the
institute receives queries for information nearly every other day, as well as
requests to initiate research. "Latinos just emerged in the last 30 years
[in the nation's consciousness] . . . and there's complete ignorance and a
clamoring for information," Pachon said. Though one of 10 people in the
United States is Latino and, in California, 20% of the growing Latino middle
class earns at least $50,000 a year, there are still significant
"misconceptions and myths out there," he said. Some of them, he said,
include the perceptions that Latinos can be reached only through Spanish,
that Latinos have no allegiance to the United States and are here
temporarily, and that poverty in the Latino community mainly consists of
single women with young children. All these, the research shows, are
false. Pachon cautions that despite the increased breadth of new Latino
research, some studies are of poor quality, due to small sample sizes and
advocacy masquerading as objectivity.

Some say there also is an element of political correctness at play in the new
attention. "Yes, there is additional research on Latinos, but are we getting
reliable and credible findings?" asked Fernando Soriano, director of the
National Latino Research Center, which mainly looks at health and drug abuse
issues. "There is tremendous variability among Latinos, and we have to be
careful what we say." Extensive data collection on Latinos is relatively
new. It wasn't until 1980 that the U.S. Census Bureau created a separate
category for Latinos to identify themselves. The lack of comprehensive
information is well known to commercial interests. Rick Leibert, president
of San Pedro-based Events Marketing Inc., publishes Hispanic Confidential, a
monthly newsletter for corporate clients that is a smorgasbord of Latino
demographic factoids intended to persuade retailers and manufacturers to
invest in Leibert's projects. "At first, it was tough to find stuff, but now
more and more information is out there," Leibert said. "We can read the
[population] numbers like everyone else." The numbers are familiar to Jeff
Vitucci, researcher and economist for Santa Barbara-based Hispanic Business
Magazine, which tracks Latino entrepreneurs and business owners. "The
appetite for information is insatiable. We get calls all the time from ad
agencies and finance institutions," Vitucci said. "They are asking us things
like, 'What's the credit card debt of Hispanics aged 25 to 30 in the U.S.?'
" Over the next 50 years, half of the net population increase will be of
Hispanic origin," Vitucci said. "If you missed jumping on the bandwagon with
baby boomers, don't blink, because another bandwagon is coming."