The California of the 21st century will have a decidedly deeper Latino flavor, but it will remain what it always has been -- quintessentially California, a state that exemplifies the notion of America as a "permanently unfinished country."

The California of the 21st century will have a decidedly Latin flavor, but it will remain what it always has been -- quintessentially California, a state that exemplifies the notion of America as a "permanently unfinished country."

The Latino Century. The words evoke a metamorphosis, a profound change, yet one that does not come readily to mind. They do not mean that California will become wholly Latino. Instead, they hold forth the promise that California has moved beyond its often-racist past.

The last quarter of the 20th century -- particularly the 1990s -- witnessed a furor over immigration reminiscent of the mid-19th and early 20th centuries. As the source of immigrants changed from mostly European to predominately Latin American and Asian, California replaced New York as America's premier gateway. Home to nearly one-third of America's immigrants by 1990, California was thrust to the center of a national debate over immigration. Mexican newcomers became the scapegoats of those who would restrict contemporary immigration. The idea that descendants of Latin American immigrants would soon make up a majority of Californians continues to cause alarm in some quarters. But if American history is any guide, the alarm will prove to be misplaced. By the close of the new century, we may even have shed our obsession with race.

The overwhelming majority of California's Latinos derive from the 20th century's two great waves of Latin American immigration -- the first during the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1919 and the second during the mid-1970s, reaching a crescendo in the '80s. In the 1980s, hundreds of thousands of Central and South American immigrants, seeking refuge from political turmoil and economic hardship, diversified the state's heavily Mexican-origin Latino population.

These facts run counter to the traditional view of Latino immigration posed by ethnic advocates and activist historians who, since the 1960s, have chosen to characterize the Mexican-Americans of California and the American Southwest as a conquered people. They assumed this depiction was beneficial to Latinos on two fronts. On one level, it would stress their ancestral rights to a region where Spanish-speaking people lived well before the mass arrival of Anglo-American settlers. On the other, it would confer upon them the additional "protected status" of a colonized ethnic minority. The United Farm Workers Union long has employed the rallying cry, "We didn't cross the border, the border crossed us." By fantasizing that the Southwest was the original homeland of the Aztecs, followers of the now-moribund Chicano Movement of a generation ago took their claim of regional ownership even one step further.

California and the Southwest became part of the United States by way of a massive land grab in the mid-19th century. In 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which concluded the Mexican-American War, set the Rio Grande as the new U.S.-Mexico boundary. The size of the territory that Mexico ceded to the U.S. represented fully one-half of the land Mexico held at the time of its independence from Spain in 1821. Yet, in all the territory comprising the present states of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona and parts of Wyoming and Colorado lived relatively few Spanish-speaking people. In 1848, approximately 75,000 Spanish speakers resided in the territory, most of them in New Mexico. Only 7,500 people of Spanish or Mexican heritage were living in California when the treaty was signed. The Gold Rush, which brought waves of Anglo and other fortune seekers to the Golden State, subsequently rendered the state's original Latinos a small minority by 1899.

The intellectual and political emphasis on the U.S. conquest of the Southwest has obscured our collective understanding of Latinos as an immigrant group. As of 1990, fully 88 percent of adult California Latinos were either immigrants or children of immigrants. Four in five Latino immigrants in the state arrived in the U.S. after 1970. As such, California's Latinos are a relatively new population. Unlike a conquered people, whose culture has been subdued by an unwelcome, outside force, today's Latin American immigrants are willingly uprooting themselves from their countries of birth.

Like previous waves of immigrants, today's Latinos will change America even as America changes them. Demographers project that Latinos -- already more than 50 percent of Los Angeles County -- will make up 40 percent of all California residents within 21 years and assume majority status sometime around mid-century. But what "Latino" will mean by the year 2075, no one really knows. Contemporary journalism is fond of dividing the American people into self-contained ethnic "communities." Reporters search out the opinion of the Asian or Latino communities -- yet never of the "white community." The triumph of multi-culturalism -- the ideology that promotes the co-existence of many separate but equal cultures in one locality -- has propagated the notion that ethnic American subcultures are static and should be preserved as distinct cultures within a larger federation of American nationalities.

This ideal of multi-culturalism, though, is not a new one. At the end of the first great wave of immigration of the 20th century, Horace Kallen argued that the ideal of a unitary American nationality had been subsumed by millions of new immigrants. He advocated that the U.S. create a "democracy of nationalities" in which ethnics could realize their goals "according to their kind."

But 85 years later, it is clear that the U.S. has not broken up into a federation of ethnic fiefdoms and that U.S. cultural unity is not at odds with a multitude of American ethnic identities. Multi-culturalism, the contemporary heir to Kallen's brand of cultural pluralism, is also destined to become a well-intentioned idea that never came to pass. Indeed, in California and other states with non-white majorities, multi-culturalism will likely collapse under its own weight.

Ironically, multi-culturalism, which can be characterized as a type of cultural time-sharing scheme, advocates provincialism in an increasingly cosmopolitan society. Its fundamental flaw is its steady focus on the diversity of group identities and not on the everyday convergence of people and cultures that is creating the new California. While ethnic identification will not disappear, over time it will cease to play as central a role in social organization. The Irish were considered a distinct "race" when they became the majority of Bostonians in the 1880s. Over time, however, they ceased to be seen as a group apart from the mainstream. Indeed, according to former Boston City Council President Bruce Bolling, a prominent black politician, everyone in the city is "a little Irish by osmosis." Paradoxically, just as Latino-American culture will increasingly influence non-Hispanics, Latinos themselves will refuse to be confined within the boundaries of multi-culturalism.

In their initial stages of social integration, Latinos, like many ethnic groups before them, will continue to leverage their ethnicity to gain access to the mainstream. Politicians will count heavily on the support of co-ethnics to catapult them into seats of power. But after another generation of Latinos in leadership positions, Mexican-American politicians will prefer to be seen as Californian rather than Latino leaders. Already, ambitious Latino politicians seeking broader appeal, most notably Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa (D-Los Angeles), bridle at being pigeonholed as "Latino leaders." Similarly, to be confined within one's ethnic category will ultimately be considered as inhibiting one's career ambitions. As they approach majority status, Latinos in many walks of life will not be content with such a circumscribed life space and the limited opportunities it affords.

Irish-Americans, who perfected ethnic politics at the end of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, initially employed ethnocentric "shamrock politics" to get elected. But as they gained in power and confidence, Irish politicians sought recognition as mainstream American candidates. When Irish-American Al Smith became speaker of New York's Legislature, then governor in the 1910s, both he and Irish-controlled Tammany Hall, the powerful Manhattan Democratic Party organization, agreed that he had to become much more than just a Tammany politician. While never forgetting his ethnic base, Smith broadened his outlook and became more politically independent, seeking allies in all corners of the state. Even though he would face virulent anti-catholicism in other parts of the country while running for president in 1928, Smith's overtures helped bridge the distinction between Irish and non-Irish in his own home state.

In contemporary California, the most successful Latino politicians are doing for Latinos in California what Smith's political ascendance did for Irish-Americans in New York. By deftly balancing their ethnic and national loyalties, they are paving the way for the day when the terms Latino and California will be redundant.

Over the past few decades, assimilation has become America's dirty little secret. However obscured by the slogans of multi-culturalism, assimilation remains a potent force in American life. At the dawn of the third millennium, the United States is perhaps the most culturally influential nation in history. Its language has long since become the lingua franca of business and diplomacy, and its popular culture permeates even remote points on earth. It is naive to think that immigrants living within its borders remain somehow immune to its assimilative power. News of an impending Latino majority in California has been greeted with both alarm and celebration, but there is no reason to believe that the state's ethnic transformation will alter its core values.

Today, as in the past, some immigration alarmists see the seeds of secessionist movements within immigrant enclaves. They argue that the desire of immigrants to live together in ethnic neighborhoods and to retain the language, symbols and tastes of their native countries are signs of active resistance to, or resentment of, mainstream U.S. culture. But assimilation -- residential, cultural and economic -- is not now, nor has it ever been, an instant transformation in which an immigrant suddenly becomes a "full-fledged American." Instead, it is a long-term, sometimes multi-generational process, which may never end.

Sociologist Nathan Glazer has called the U.S. "the permanently unfinished country," and no state of the union exemplifies this protean American dynamism more than California. The most diverse state in the nation, California will not be the first state to have a majority group that belongs to an identifiable national minority. Seventy percent of Utahns are Mormon, and Hawaii has been majority Asian since it became a part of the United States. While both culturally unique, neither state is considered to be utterly foreign from the national culture. Indeed, more than anything else, immigration patterns have made America a pluralistic nation by default.

While few would dispute that the seeds of Germany, Ireland, Japan and the Russian Pale have gradually been absorbed into the American mainstream, large immigrant groups have always influenced the regions of the country where they clustered. Foods and customs that were once considered foreign became part and parcel of regional culture. The bratwurst served at County Stadium in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, as well as the presence of a large beer industry in that city, reflects Milwaukee's long history of German immigration. To this day, things Irish attain greater popularity in Boston than anywhere else in America. The Irish rock band U2 credits Boston for its initial popular success in America. "Angela's Ashes," Frank McCourt's Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir about growing up poor in New York and Ireland, stayed atop the Boston bestseller list longer than anywhere else. In San Antonio, Texas, which has long had a Mexican-American majority, no one doubts that the world-champion San Antonio Spurs are an American basketball team. With its well-established Mexican-American population, San Antonio, the quintessential Latino-American city, does not even have a daily Spanish-language newspaper.

Today's Latin American and Asian immigrants will continue to give California's cities new cultural, linguistic and even phenotypic traits. Yet, these cities are also likely to remain quintessentially American. Heavy Scandinavian immigration has made the typical Minnesotan look and speak differently than the typical Pennsylvanian (whose roots are German). Similarly, the appearance and speech patterns of the average Californian of the next century will draw heavily from south of the border. Indeed, these influences are already noticeable. A decade ago, David Letterman joked that he decided not to move back to Los Angeles because after 10 years away, he finally had lost his Mexican-American accent. He stayed in New York, where, incidentally, the impact of Jewish immigration is manifest throughout -- particularly in the cadence of its language and the extensive use of Yiddishisms by both Jews and non-Jews.

In their groundbreaking book, "Beyond the Melting Pot," Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan stressed that American ethnic subcultures are not mere transplants of the ways and customs of the homeland. Rather, they are a new social form forged by the melding of immigrants into their new American environment. Though Latinos will become a larger portion of the state, they will not be immune to the influence of other ethnic groups. Whereas Mexicans in places like Texas come into contact with a relatively homogenous Anglo population, California Latinos will rub shoulders with significant Chinese, Filipino, Vietnamese, Jewish, and Armenian neighbors, to name a few. A third-generation Salvadoran-American raised in the heavily-Jewish Westside of Los Angeles will have significantly different cultural references than his cousin raised in heavily Chinese-American San Francisco.

In the future, Latinos are likely to continue to intermarry with other ethnic groups at healthy rates. Intermarriage will be particularly common among the more educated and well-to-do Latino Californians. At the last available census in 1990, fully one-third of middle-class Latinos born in the U.S. were married to non-Latinos. The chances of intermarriage also increase with each additional generation. Poor Latino Californians will probably have much lower rates of intermarriage. Though we can expect Latinos to be represented at all strata of society by the late 21st century, the working class will be more singularly Latino and less culturally mixed. With Latino Californians distributed throughout the economic landscape, future debates over access and equality will cut on class and not racial lines.

UCLA professor David Hayes-Bautista was among the first scholars to look at the Latinization of California. He has concluded that the presence of a critical mass of Latinos in the state and the proximity to the border help to ensure that Latinos will benefit from a distinct cultural ecology than have previous immigrant groups. In other words, even as Latinos become part and parcel of the mainstream, their numbers help them preserve remnants of Old World behaviors, particularly those regarding work, family life and faith.

A glance at contemporary statistics show that Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles County demonstrate a stronger work ethic, higher propensity to form traditional families, and lower divorce rates than the average Southern Californian. While not disputing that immigrant cultures change over time, Hayes-Bautista argues that certain core behaviors will persist and become the societal norm. Just as the frugal, non-ostentatious ways of Scandinavian immigrants are now considered to be average Minnesotan behavior, many basic Latino tendencies will one day be considered average California behaviors.

American culture at large will no doubt undergo major upheavals in the Information Age. Whatever it means to be Latino -- and Californian -- in the late 21st century is very much contingent on the social, cultural, and economic trends of the coming decades. There are precedents and signposts throughout the American past, but California is not known for its predictability. With any luck, after the initial and difficult stages of integrating millions of newcomers is finally complete, Californians will become far less interested in where they are from and more concerned with who they are becoming.