Latino Citizenship Issues Paper

1792 Words8 Pages
The Hispanic population is one of the fastest growing multicultural groups in the U.S. and is often an amalgam of European, Indian, and African traditions and values (Kirst-Ashman & Hull, 2012). It is necessary for an agency’s administration to be aware of the needs of this vast and diverse population. This means the agency’s administration should know the actual demographics of their service area, and perhaps even be linked to other agencies that serve Latinos. In general, major aspects involved in Latino ethnicity include: language, country of origin, spirituality and religion, the importance of family, immigration or citizenship status, art, and cultural expression (Kirst-Ashman & Hull, 2012). Citizenship status has particularly become important amongst Hispanic in the U.S. as tensions have arisen between undocumented and legal workers especially near the U.S.-Mexico border (Delgado, 2007). When working with Hispanic clients a practitioner should ask where the client is from specifically (to identify nationality) and ask whether the client identifies with an ethnic group within that nationality. Before the next meeting the worker should become familiar with the group and its…show more content…
Platicando (“informal and leisurely chatting”) helps to create a healthy rapport (Kirst-Ashman & Hull, 2012). Being bilingual helps immensely with communication, however speaking the language will only help to the extent that you are able to make the subject matter culturally relevant to the client and his/her family. Additionally, Hispanic communication patterns have a strong nonverbal tradition (Kirst-Ashman & Hull, 2012), the worker must be alert to body postures facial expressions to adequately assess a

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