There’s a joke, told by comedian Paul Rodriguez, about Latinos in the United States: Remember when Time put Edward James Olmos’s face on the cover of their magazine and proclaimed the ’80s “The Decade of the Latino”? It turned out to be more like a weekend sponsored by Bud. The sighing disappointment tucked into that punch line—of a people coming up short, failing somehow to achieve and maybe even reshape the American Dream—calls to attention how Latinos have been waiting more than a century for a time when their voices might be listened to and not merely heard.

The work of Ilan Stavans bears this out. A prolific author, editor, and essayist, Stavans is originally from Mexico City, where he grew up middle-class and Jewish. Stavans (who is nimble with Spanish and English) not only edited the Library of America’s I. B. Singer collection and The Shocken Book of Modern Sephardic Literature, but he also wrote a novel-like biography of Oscar “Zeta” Acosta—the Chicano civil-rights lawyer who wrote gonzo journalism long before his pal Hunter S. Thompson did—and authored a study on the evolving, uniquely American dialect of Spanglish. He’s written about his long love affair with words in a memoir, Dictionary Days, coauthored a graphic novel, Latino U.S.A.: A Cartoon History, and edited a Penguin Classic edition of the works of Nicaragua’s stellar poet Rubén Darío, not to mention his soul-searching The Hispanic Condition: Reflections on Culture and Identity in America (1996). Along with Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory, Stavans’s book Hispanic… points to the new circumstances that frame the question “What does it mean to be American?”

Late in 2005, I had dinner with Stavans near the Jewish Community Center in San Francisco. Over braised beef ribs we described our respective visions of the future for Latinos in the U.S. What came out of that conversation, as we segued between Spanish and English, was the way our concerns seemed absent from the pages of newspapers and the programming on television—really, from mainstream media altogether. What follows is the continuation of that conversation, carried out mostly by email. Many assertions are made here, and they all are open to debate. In fact, more questions are raised than plausibly answered. But one thing is indisputable: “The Decade of the Latino” will last long past ten years.

—Oscar Villalon

I. THE CULTURAL SAFARI

OSCAR VILLALON: By 2010, according to census projections, Latinos will account for more than fifteen percent of the U.S. population, and by 2050, fully a quarter of it. Not only that, but within ten years their numbers will render whites as a “non-majority”...