Why do Latinos fail to promote themselves?

OPINION

With Derek Jeter having retired this season, Major League Baseball finds itself scrambling to look for a new face for what was once the national pastime. Hispanics in America should take notice. They find themselves in a similar situation. They are bemoaning the fact that there aren’t enough Latinos being recognized for their accomplishments in the country.

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The similarities between MLB and Latinos runs even deeper when you consider that neither baseball nor Hispanics appear to have the kind of mechanism in place necessary to promote their brilliant and promising faces. Baseball, in fact, is often criticized by sports commentators and analysts for seemingly failing to aggressively market its stars in the way that, for instance, the National Basketball Association has been doing for decades.

The result has been that today the NBA has more recognizable high profile stars per capita than any of America’s professional sports leagues, having employed clever marketing campaigns dating back to the days of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird to promote their best players and their product.

For Latinos, the problem is even more profound, beginning with the fact that there is no Hispanic organization with the money, profile or clout of any sports league, much less with the marketing capability.

But that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be, that any of the alphabet acronymed Hispanic groups – from LULAC to NALEO ? couldn’t put together campaigns to effectively sell the top 50 or top 100 Latinos in America with the same effort used in voter registration and education.

Too often, all they do is recognize those rising Latino stars at a banquet or on the cover of an ethnic magazine that winds up being like preaching to the choir, assuming those publications have any kind of circulation even among Hispanics.

Television time, of course, is costly but radio and TV stations are still under federal regulations requiring them to offer public service announcements, often provided by nonprofit groups.

But when was the last time you saw a public service announcement promoting a Latina principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, a Hispanic nuclear physicist working for NASA, a Latino biochemist involved in cancer research, a Hispanic poet or playwright?

More often, unfortunately, those organizations use the promotional service time they are given to promote themselves over those whom they should be serving. Should we not be too surprised then when the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts fails to recognize the contributions of Latinos, as they did again this year?

It’s not right.

The Kennedy Center and other organizations like it should be actively seeking out honorees to recognize who reflect the diversity of America.

At the same time, why can’t Latino groups aggressively make the job of the Kennedy Center and others easier, putting the faces of deserving Hispanic stars front and center.

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Maybe we will see these in the days, during National Hispanic Heritage Month, but more likely these PSAs will focus on trailblazers of the past.

But as the late civil rights leader Carlos Guerra, founder of La Raza Unida in Texas, used to say, “It’s not the past that’s holding us back – it’s the future.”