Make Room for ‘Chico’ at Silicon Valley
Cecilio Morales     [Photo]

If the television series “Chico and the Man” were put on the air today, it would not be set in an auto shop but in a computer networking company. Latino star Freddie Prinze Jr. would argue passionately for Linux servers and open-source software against his white boss, Ed Harris, who’d defend Microsoft Windows and other commercial wares.

The updated Chico character, according to data from a new report from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, would not likely have earned his information technology spurs at MIT, the University of Illinois, or Carnegie Mellon.

Instead, he would have been what the AAAS calls a “nontraditional” student, someone who has taken a more winding road to postsecondary education.

Chico would have attended a publicly funded Hispanic-serving institution, such as the City University of New York’s Baruch and Lehman Colleges, Florida International University, or New Mexico State University. Or, to the surprise of AAAS researchers, a proprietary school, such as DeVry Institute of Technology — a for-profit school newly accredited as a university, which is No. 2 among institutions drawing Hispanic nontraditional IT students.

And, yes, you’re almost saying it yourself: Chico will probably work alongside Chica, a snappy young woman whose come-hither pout belies a take-no-prisoners attitude. Chica’s sultry voice will rearrange his algorithms in rapid-fire techie-speak. (Shall we cast Jessica Alba for that role?)

Intuitively, the Hispanic presence among nontraditional students makes sense. Hispanics have long had disproportionately high dropout rates.

Now we know what some of them have done. They eventually got to sentar cabeza (or get one’s head together) and realized that a credential in a fast-growing field can make a difference bringing home the bacon, or as tía would say, la vianda.

They’ve been clever about it, too.

Hispanic culture has a reputation for impractical lyricism, at least compared with the nation of tinkerers with which immigrants from northwest Europe identify U.S. culture. Yet way back in the Hispanic collective unconscious lie the engineering feat of building Granada smack in the middle of the mountains and, as Jaime Escalante famously noted, Mayan mathematical prowess with calculus.

In fact, Latinos can outtinker the competition any day of the week to the point that a Chicano auto mechanic became a cliché that even a television producer could recognize, spewing the character brought to life by the late Freddie Prinze Sr. in the 1974 “Chico and the Man” show.

Today even the old Chico would have to learn computers to run the auto shop. The latest model Mercedes Benz, for example, offers the ability not only to plug a much-coveted iPod into the sound system, but to display the song title on the dashboard, next to the speed and oil pressure.

Second only to nursing, IT jobs are projected to grow off the charts for as far into the future as the eye can see.

Computers are in all sectors of the economy. Most jobs require some computer use, and all those computer systems have to be managed by people who can do more than cut and paste paragraphs in a word processor.

In the post-September 11 world, moreover, there are increasing difficulties with importing talent, although some remote and offshore venues are being tried. But even if the private sector comes up with new high-tech sweatshops tapping technology into our computers, there’s still security and defense.

Hispanics, who have long been noted for their valor on the battlefield, can expect to find plentiful offers of computer analysis work on the intelligence battleground against hidden international cells of urban bombers.

I guess we’ll have to wait for that TV show: Data Warrior Diego.

In the meantime, the number of Hispanic computer systems analysts has grown — from about 30,000 in 1994 to well over 90,000 in 2002, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Employers told AAAS researchers that nontraditional employees have more real-world experience, are more driven, disciplined, focused, committed, versatile and broader thinking. The one drawback: they have more family responsibilities. Not bad.

AAAS points out that the white, male, non-Hispanic pool that has traditionally filled the ranks of science and engineering graduates will stop growing completely in 2030, then begin to decline. Men and women of color will have to fill the gap; among them Hispanics, who will contribute 44 percent of the population growth through 2020 and rise to 62 percent by 2050.

But wait a minute. Hispanics with pocket protectors and taped up glasses? Doesn’t sound like our style, does it? Perhaps it’s time to begin mainlining a more stylish technology geek, one with the look of IT’s futuro.

(Cecilio Morales is editor-in-chief and publisher of the Employment and Training Reporter in Washington, D,C, He may be contacted by e-mail at cecilio@miipublications.com)

© 2005, Hispanic Link News Service
08/21/05
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