From Where I Stand — “We never talk to them of our necessities, but of their
advantages.” Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations The theme of this year’s iLandscape is One Fiesta: All United/ Todos unidos. When we were considering what the industry needed after the last two years, everyone agreed _ a party. Almost every culture knows how to party _ Oktoberfest, Chinese New Year, Diwali, Carnival, Bastille Day, Mardi Gras, the list goes on. The more we talked, the more we came back to the idea of an old world Mexican street festival. The plaza, fountains, colors, flowers, food, music, and drinks. The more we talked the more we could smell the carnitas, elotes, and cheladas. This theme wasn’t just about a party. The reason we used both English and Spanish was a reflection of the cultures that make our industry great. Never before, have our cultures had to rely on each other for our success and safety. The English and Spanish phrases eventually merge together as One Fiesta. The best parties are the ones where everyone is invited, so let’s get to it. Some context, by 2050, the population of Italy will decline by 11%, Poland 12%, Japan 16%, and Russia 18%. Birth rates are plummeting in developed nations and a pandemic showed deaths can quickly outpace births. These declines have the power to destroy economies. The United States is bucking this trend for one reason and one reason alone _ Latinos. According to the Pew Research Center, the Latino population of the United States will grow from 42 million in 2005 to over 128 million people by 2050 _ a tripling in size. This is a result of authorized immigration, unauthorized immigration, and higher birth rates among US Latinos. Twenty years ago, one in 10 workers was Latino. Today, one in five workers are Latino. By 2050, one in two workers will be Latino. In addition, Latinos are 10 years younger than their American counterparts. As more white and black Americans grow old and retire, millions of Latinos are filling these jobs. These are staggering and unprecedented statistics never before seen in US population growth. These numbers are likely less surprising to the landscape industry. About 65% of the Illinois landscape market is already Latino. Latinos and US-born Americans have been working sideby-side in the landscape industry for decades. Yet how much do we really understand about one another? It is not accurate to compare Latinos to European immigrants such as the Irish, Italians, and Germans entering the workforce in the 1920s. Those immigrants arrived in smaller numbers, ghettoized themselves, but quickly had to acculturate because of their modest populations. Latinos have such massive numbers, that the only comparison is women entering the workforce in the 1950s. The workforce and culture is actually bending towards them. Much of the US economy speaks Spanish even if most Americans do not. Latinos are the first group not to have to acculturate. Many Latinos can live their entire lives in this country, speaking limited English, and still survive. The massive amount of Latinos who have immigrated, as well as the high birth rate among US Latinos, are setting up a showdown of languages and cultures. It is very likely that if the collectivist, family-based culture of Latin Americans and the individualistic, entrepreneurial culture of America don’t make amends, the nation will become bilingual, bicultural,
with no hope for assimilation. That is a key point to be made. Acculturation must always precede assimilation. If there is no need to acculturate, there will be no need to assimilate regardless of the grumbling of the presently dominant culture. The immigrants of the 1920s had to assimilate because their numbers were not robust enough to survive, Latinos do not have that challenge. When was the last time any of us sat down and considered what it means to be born, raised, and live in America? It is almost impossible to examine your own culture in a vacuum. When we think about what it means to be an American, we usually use patriotic clichés. When examining culture, it is helpful to look at two cultures side-by-side to identify the similarities and differences. We are in uncharted waters when it comes to our current population growth and demographic shifts — how can we possibly understand where we are going if we don’t even know who we are. Over the next year, ILCA is committed to finding that out. This winter at iLandscape, ILCA will debut one of our most ambitious educational programs yet. This multi-part series will examine the similarities and differences between Latino and the American cultural values in the workplace. This program will be entirely in Spanish and is aimed at better equipping field staff with an understanding of the American workplace. It will rely on hard data, storytelling, and sharing personal experiences. This is part two in an ambitious plan to alleviate our labor crisis through cultural understanding. Part one arrived last year in the form of a webinar run by Bernie Carranza entitled, Lost in Translation: The Five Things Businesses Must Understand About the LatinX Culture. This webinar was attended by 130 companies and an updated version will be presented at iLandscape 2022 in English. We borrowed the term “Americanos” from Spanish since we don’t have a clear term for those ingrained with American culture. For those who attended the LatinX webinar, they were greeted with paradigm-shifting information. This was a simple, straightforward examination as to how cultural differences exist, can be misinterpreted, and just taking a few minutes to understand cultural underpinnings reduces frustration and builds loyalty. After the popularity of the LatinX webinar, we realized we were merely scratching the surface of this topic. The Board commissioned the creation of a new 10-person subcommittee with five angloAmericans and five Latino-Americans. It would be the awesome and daunting responsibility of this group to talk through our cultural differences and develop training for the members. This committee has been dubbed the Latinos & Americanos (L&A) Committee. The L&A Committee respects they have a tough task ahead of them. Conversations about culture are hard and uncomfortable. We all love talking about the festive parts of our heritage, but holding up a mirror to our culture — both good and bad — takes guts. The goal of the lecture series is threefold: deepen understanding, build respect, and avoid creating stereotypes. The ten volunteers on this committee are showcasing a level of courage and vulnerability that must exist for these conversations to happen. The biggest obstacle to respecting another culture is that we run behaviors through our own cultural lens. Take for example, time. There are very few global cultures as obsessed with time as Americans. Time is linear and flows like a river. Once it is gone, it
Culture Club
The Landscape Contractor December 2021
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