Are Latinos lucky…or cursed?

You’ve heard of the luck of the Irish. So what is the luck of the Hispanic?

Personally, I think the Latino propensity for serendipity is symbolized by Hugo Reyes, also known as Hurley, from the show Lost.

Despite being a fun-loving, friendly Latino, Hurley kept seeing everybody around him get killed in some random or grisly manner. He constantly bemoaned the fact that he was cursed.

Certainly, many Americans relate to Hurley. For the last decade or so, we’ve all felt jinxed. It’s been a nonstop joyride of economic turmoil, endless war, terrorist threats, and political chaos.

But the extra burden for Hispanics is that our roots are in places that aren’t especially suited to good karma. Much of Latin America is chockablock with war, poverty, revolution, and drugs. Our families escaped — rather than simply emigrated, like so many Europeans did. Many of our ancestors weren’t searching for a better existence or more opportunities. A lot of them flat out fled for their lives.

Perhaps these origins — combined with the socioeconomic malaise that continues to grip Hispanics — are why Latinos are more pessimistic about the future than other Americans. We tend not to believe that good things will just happen, or that we’ll get a lucky break.

Instead, we frequently embrace a crazed work ethic to actually make positive events occur. But working nonstop hasn’t seemed to help Latinos much. In fact, we appear to have slid backward recently.

In contrast, many Hispanics adopt the comforting viewpoint that God is testing us so that we can kick back in the afterlife. This is theologically dubious, however, and can be viewed as another way in which Latinos’ hyper-religiosity often holds us back.

Now, despite my heavy cloak of cynicism (on display in this post), I consider myself an optimist. Still, over the last few years, I’ve often felt like Hurley — always one step removed from calamity. For example, I recently wrote about how my wife and I boarded the Amtrak for a brief, relaxing vacation.

So how did it go?

Well, at the train station, the feds provoked chaos with a sloppy raid on illegal immigrants that freaked everybody out, whether they were citizens or not. Once we got on the train, the air conditioning broke, and we sweated (quite literally) through a three-hour delay.

When we at last got going, my wife received a call that one of her relatives had been in a serious car accident (amazingly, nobody died). Then, shortly before we reached our destination, our train slammed into a drunken driver who almost killed himself while trying to cross the tracks.

But my wife and I finally got to our station and left the doomed train. A few days later, when we boarded the Amtrak for the return trip, we said that this leg of our “relaxing vacation” had to go more smoothly.

And it did — right until a guy in our section unexpectedly dropped dead of a heart attack…

Maybe I’m just bad mojo.

Source  Daniel Cubias

Posted in hispanic , Hugo Reyes , Hurley , Latin America , Latin hispanic market , latino , Lost show