Number of Hispanic kids growing rapidly in Tampa Bay area

Jose Arce was a baby when his family moved to Tampa from Mexico.

Growing up, he played soccer like his father, uncles and cousins. But when he started at Chamberlain High School, the now 17-year-old senior decided to play football — American football.

The team's lone Hispanic member, Arce said his decision to put on a helmet and shoulder pads upset his father and perplexed relatives back home.

But this is not a story about a son of immigrants abandoning his roots for an American lifestyle. Arce is among a growing wave of youths from Hispanic countries and other parts of the world trying to fit into American culture while holding onto their own traditions.

Arce speaks unaccented English but also speaks Spanish fluently and still has strong ties to his family in Mexico. He's happy being Mexican and American.

"Just because I don't play a Mexican sport doesn't mean I'm not proud of being a Mexican," he said before football practice last week. "I wanted to show people that Mexicans don't just play soccer."

Past generations of immigrants shed cultural ties to their homelands to become fully American, but today's young minorities are finding value in their differences.

A century ago, it may have been easier for immigrants, most of whom were white Europeans, to blend into American society; but today's immigrants, who come from all over the globe, stand apart from the country's dwindling white majority and from each other.

As they grow up and take their places in society, minority children will help create a 21st century America that more closely reflects the rest of the world instead of just Europe, said Aziz Talbani, director of the University of South Florida's Multicultural Center.

Having a more diverse population will benefit the country in a global economy in which China, India and Latin America will play ever-larger roles, Talbani said.

Overall, Hispanics make up about a quarter of the region's population.

As a group, Hispanic children are growing faster than any other. The number of Asian youths — a group that includes the children of Indian doctors, Vietnamese business owners and Burmese refugees — doubled in size in the past decade, but remain less than 4 percent of the region's youth population.

In Hillsborough County, white children remain the majority, but their numbers have slipped to about 60 percent from nearly two-thirds a decade ago. Blacks in Hillsborough remain about 20 percent of the youth population.

White populations in Pinellas and Pasco have seen similar slips, though they remain substantially larger than other racial groups in those counties.

The local growth in the number of Hispanic children mirrors a nationwide trend that has seen Spanish-speaking populations explode in small towns and big cities alike.

One reflection of the region's growing diversity lies in the 128 languages spoken by students in Hillsborough County schools. Teachers work with students who speak everything from Spanish to unwritten tribal dialects from Southeast Asia, said Sandra Rosario, who runs the district's programs for English-language learners.

The region's youngest age group, comprising those younger than 5, also is the most diverse, with the largest percentages of Asians, blacks and Hispanics, according to the census.

Talbani sees the cultural shift in his own daughters, 12 and 14, who speak only English and are losing their taste for some Pakistani traditions.

"It's so difficult to feed them a curry," he said.

History suggests today's multicultural, multilingual schoolkids eventually will become the parents and grandparents of fully Americanized descendants whose only link to their cultural heritage is a surname, religious practice or holiday, said Hernan Ramirez, a sociologist at Florida State University who specializes in Hispanic assimilation.

That evolution already is visible in Tampa, where the thoroughly Americanized descendants of Italian immigrants — the Grecos, Nuccios and Iorios — are integral parts of the city's social and political fabric.

Eventually, the large waves of Hispanic children being raised here will assimilate, too.

"By the third generation, the majority of these kids will speak very little, if any, Spanish," Ramirez said.

Arce hopes that doesn't happen in his family.

"I want my kids to speak Spanish," he said.