User:Fusionistas

Fusionistas is a marketing term coined by Hispanic advertising agency Alma to describe a growing class of young, bicultural Hispanic adults with unique behavioral characteristics.

The term was first defined in a 2009 research-based marketing paper titled “A Brave New World of Consumidores…Introducing Young Fusionistas.”

The key descriptor of this group of 15-35 year-olds is their deliberate blending of two or more cultures to create something new. The value of identifying this demographic lies in the fact that fusionistas are trendsetters in both cultural directions. Their influence is therefore larger than their slice of the U.S. population.

The reason -- a high degree of sociability inherent in Hispanic culture melds perfectly with the well-documented phenomenon of early and voracious technology adoption among young Hispanics. They are social media beasts and their influence on culture and the marketplace of the Western Hemisphere has increased exponentially in the last decade.

Definition: Alma defined fusionistas as a subset of the bicultural Hispanic young adult segment. They are the mostly U.S.-born children of immigrants. They prefer the English language, but their tie to Hispanic culture is nearly as strong as those of their Spanish-oriented, high-Hispanic-affinity peers. Spanish language plays an important role in that dual identity, which happily expresses itself in a voracious appetite for music, food, social networking, fashion, sports and other forms of culture.

What sets them apart from previous generations of young Latinos is that they feel 100 percent Hispanic and 100 percent American. For this group, assimilation is neither a goal nor an endpoint. Yet there is a natural tension in them between the need for authenticity (the Latineo, or Latin style) and an aspiration to realize their potential to create something new and better.

Fusionistas currently represent less than a third of American Hispanics. But because 36 percent of Hispanics are under the age of 18, the future of the fusion trend is clear.

History: Alma is a Miami-based advertising agency that specializes in creating innovative multicultural media campaigns for major U.S. brands such as McDonald’s and State Farm. Founded and headed by industry leader Luis Miguel Messianu, the award-winning agency is comprised of creative talent from nearly every Spanish-speaking country in the world. This pan-Latin petri dish turned out to be ideal for producing insight into a phenomenon of proud, self-defining U.S. Hispanic culture with the viral potential to transform the American identity faster than mere population growth would indicate.

For many years, American brands tended to market to U.S. Hispanics as if they were one vague group from a mythical province called Hispania.

Hispanics themselves were struggling to define what this term really meant in a country that includes large populations of Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Cubans, Colombians, Argentineans and many other Spanish-speaking groups. Not to mention the Portuguese-speaking Brazilians, which the U.S. Census doesn’t define as Hispanic, but many real people do. Each group has unique ethnic and cultural components reflected in colloquial language, music, food, and fashion.

In the 2000s, the term Latino was popularized to the extent it is interchangeable with Hispanic, and is widely preferred in the western half of the United States. But even this term fails to adequately describe the broadening demographics.

The pan-Latin communities in the United States, currently including more than 50 million people, are as varied as the countries from which they and their ancestors came. It is as different as Los Angeles is from New York, and as Miami is from Chicago or San Antonio. As if nationality and geography are not enough to mix the pot, there is also age and relative assimilation of other Latin and non-Latin cultures to consider.

All of this variety has resulted in a Hispanic America that is less defined by language than by a shared culture. The emergence of the fusionistas represents the latest evolution.

Over the last decade, Alma executives began to notice something that hadn’t been evident before -- an emerging pride in Hispanicity that was showing up both in pop culture and in the more detailed focus groups they were doing for marketing research.

This was reflected in subtle ways at first; Ricky Martin’s “Livin’ La Vida Loca”, a trend of wearing rosaries and other religious items as jewelry, reports of more children speaking some level of Spanish. Being Latino started to be cool.

Then in 2007, Macy’s caused a media furor when it stocked t-shirts with the message “Brown is the New White.” This was hardly the first time “brown pride”  gear was sold, but what Alma saw in the controversy was the clearest indication yet that Latino pride had moved beyond the “we are proud to be different” stage.

The essence of the reaction was that young Latinos did not see a paradox between their American selves and their Hispanic culture. Two years of research and writing about this group resulted in the agency dubbing this demographic segment “fusionistas”.

Language: Being a bicultural Hispanic in the U.S. means you can start a sentence in one language and switch to another two or three times before reaching the end. In previous generations, the goal was to assimilate toward English. Later, young Hispanics began a trend of retro acculturation, i.e., connecting to their Hispanic roots through learning the Spanish their parents hadn’t wanted to teach them (so they would be more successful in the larger American culture). Now, the fusionistas are no longer seeking to return to their roots. Today they are stereo (bilingual) from the moment they are born.

Roughly 62 percent of Hispanic young adults speak Spanish to some degree, while 49 percent speak English to a degree. Nearly half of them speak both languages comfortably and interchangeably.

The closest mainstream amalgam of the actual fusionista experience is MTV Tr3s. The network is English-language dominant, but just barely. Spanish and Spanglish are heavily used, and in fact integral. The content is equal parts urban, American, and Latino, very self-aware and tongue-in-cheek.