Latin republic of the USA.

Translation Nation: Defining a New American Identity in the Spanish-Speaking United States By Hector Tobar Riverhead Books. 308 pages. $24.95.

Latinos comprise 14 percent of America's population, at forty million and growing. Census projections estimate that Latinos will make up 25 percent of the population by the middle of the century. The Latinization of the United States is in full swing.

Los Angeles Times reporter Hector Tobar sets out to explore what he calls the "Latin Republic of the United States" in his enjoyable new book, Translation Nation: Defining a New American Identity in the Spanish-Speaking United States.

From Los Angeles to Dalton, Georgia, from Miami to Rupert, Idaho, Tobar finds Latinos transforming the landscape.

In a great bit of reporting, he goes undercover as an immigrant and travels by bus from Texas to Anniston, Alabama, to work in a Tyson's chicken-processing plant. (Tobar notes that the middleman who recruited him was "implicated in a complex scheme to bring undocumented Mexican workers to its plants in the Deep South, charges that would be outlined in a thirty-six-count federal indictment.")

Tobar lives in a trailer park along with forty other workers, most of them Tyson employees, off Highway 9. His roommates include Frankie and Linda, a young couple from the Texas border who left their eighteen-month-old son with a grandmother in order to escape their old life. Tobar works the nightshirt alongside men like Gregorio, a former goatherd who crossed into the United States from Mexico after goat meat fell out of favor locally.

Tobar spends a lot of time in the South, reporting on the changing demographics. In Dalton, Latinos make up more than half of the school age population, their parents filling the shifts in the area's carpet factories. "A decade earlier, there were only a handful of Latino students" at Roan Street Elementary School, writes Tobar. "Now they made up 80 percent of the student body." After failing to attract bilingual teachers, the school's administrators embarked on an ambitious teacher-training program that sends veteran staff to Mexico to study Spanish.

The author marvels at the expense. The principal explains, "The people here think it's important."

Tobar travels to other cities that haven't embraced their new arrivals so warmheartedly. But he explains that Latinization is inevitable. "Other cities and towns across the continent have undergone the same pattern of response to the creeping advance of Latinization: denial, anger, acceptance," he writes.

The author writes a lot about his own family and its immigration story. He is the son of Guatemalan immigrant parents who settled in Los Angeles in the 1960s, on the cusp of the 1970s great wave of immigration from south of the Rio Grande.

His father wanted young Hector to speak English at school but to speak Spanish at home. "My father was ambivalent about the United States, and in that too he was a pioneer: His ambivalence about WASP culture never faded, never surrendered to acceptance," writes Tobar.

His father is not the only immigrant to feel this ambivalence. Tobar says it stems from an identity "that is colored by the idea of resistance."

"There is no single word that describes this way of feeling about yourself and your family, so people used dozens of synonyras: Latino, hispano, Chicano, dominicano, mexicano, or 'Hispanic' if you live in New Mexico," writes Tobar. "When people use these words it is a shorthand way of saying they have preserved and nurtured a sense of who they are and how their life stories fit inside a larger narrative of colony and empire, of exodus and displacement."

Rather than assimilate into the dominant culture, "people believe ... in a transnational identity, that their bodies and souls can live between two countries," writes Tobar. He says Latinos constitute a "parallel nation."

The 2000 Census gave Hispanics an opportunity to racially classify themselves. (According to the federal government, Hispanics do not constitute a separate race and can be of any race.) On the 2000 Census, 48 percent of Hispanics identified themselves as white, and 2 percent as black, while 43 percent did not choose the traditional racial categories and checked off "some other race."

These numbers reveal much about how Hispanics see themselves, and how race is being lived today in the United States.

A report from the Pew Hispanic Center states, "Latinos who call themselves white and those who say they are some other race have distinctly different characteristics.... Hispanics who identified themselves as white have higher levels of" education and income and greater degrees of civic enfranchisement than those who pick the some other race categories." Whiteness is a measure of belonging and inclusion.

Tobar doesn't fully address the 48 percent of Latinos who consider themselves white, the major weakness in the book.

But he does a good job profiling Latino immigration experiences. The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that of the 10.3 million illegal immigrants in the country, 57 percent are from Mexico. About half of Mexicans in the U.S. are here illegally. The worsening economic conditions in Mexico will lead to increased migration. Four of every ten adults in Mexico say they would migrate to the United States if they could, and two of ten would do so illegally.

President Bush is pushing for immigration reform that includes a crackdown at the border and a guest worker program.

Other legislative ideas are circulating in Congress. The "Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act of 2005," sponsored by Senators John McCain and Edward Kennedy, creates a path to citizenship for undocumented workers. The bill would allow undocumented workers to stay in the country for an initial period of six years, and give these workers the same rights as other U.S. workers.

Senators John Cornyn and Jon Kyl are sponsoring another bill that creates a new temporary worker program with no worker protections and no path to citizenship. This bill ties undocumented workers to specific companies, which could terminate their employment at any time. These undocumented workers would be required to waive their rights for judicial review.

Regardless of what comes out of Congress, this much is true: People will continue to make their way here. Mexico has a surplus of labor and the U.S. has a high demand for labor. As one potential immigrant tells Tobar, "I think that the border will disappear before we lose the desire to cross."

Elizabeth DiNovella is the culture editor of The Progressive.