The New Mainstream: How the Multicultural Consumer Is Transforming American Business

An economic revolution is transforming America. It's called The New Mainstream.
The New Mainstream explains how Americans will eat, work, play, learn, and spend money in the twenty-first century -- and why any organization that ignores the lessons of the New Mainstream is doomed to fail.
In The New Mainstream, Guy Garcia offers us both a wake-up call and a road map to the new multicultural reality in America. The New Mainstream is a corporate survival guide for the uncharted markets of the twenty-first century as well as an intellectual toolkit for anyone hoping to get a handle on -- or get ahead of -- the demographic and marketing trends of today's increasingly diverse global society.
Somewhere between the moment when salsa replaced ketchup as the nation's most popular condiment and the rise of a pugnacious white rapper named Eminem to a top-selling recording artist, America changed for good.
The change was both subtle and seismic. The change was demographic and social, cutting across corporations and organizations, and putting a multicultural spin on everything from business and politics to entertainment and technology. Mainstream America, the way we knew it, was gone for good. But what has replaced it?
The New Mainstream is the most profitable sector of the U.S. economy, and it will be the one to have the deepest impact on the very nature of what it means to be an American.
Led by the growing statistical and buying power of blacks, Latinos, and Asians, the New Mainstream is the loose coalition of minorities that have been forced to forge their own identity outside the Old Mainstream -- even as they use and consume mass-media and mass-produced products targeted to the general public. This new consumer economy is transforming how products and services are developed, marketed, and bought. And by tapping the core values that have helped to make the United States the world's most powerful country, the multicultural consumer is also America's best hope for the future.

Business & Money

Garcia, Guy

Management & Leadership

Rayo/Harper Collins

In the Roaring Twenties, two worldly young aristocrats embark on a journey to see one of their idols, the sublime Italian actress Eleonora Duse, who, to their utmost delight, has recently returned to the stage. What follows as they prepare for their adventure and, later, when they arrive in the Cuban capital, is a hilarious, erotic, and political tragicomedy, told in hallucinatory language, replete with Rabelaisian characters: among them, a quasi-widow who runs her family as if it were an army, sisters too ugly to marry off, a kind friend with the face of a monkey, a hermaphrodite nun, an iconoclastic, dissolute painter, the handsomest communist who ever lived, disheartened phantoms, bands of irresistible Cuban men, transmigrating souls, and, finally, the very seed of a demon who will one day make the Island his own. As they struggle to meet the celebrated actress, the two protagonists find themselves bouncing from the somber offices of the Cuban secret police to an Arabian Nights-inspired ball, to an agitated Lenin tribute and a drum celebration honoring Babalu Aye, to a horrific crime scene in the heart of Havana's Chinatown, and through a world of sordid brothels and interracial orgies. Yet at the heart of The Last Masquerade is the sickly, reclusive, and wearied stage legend Eleonora Duse, whose voice is heard at intervals throughout, as if from a distant land, revealing for the first time the story of her private life. She was rivaled in her day only by the great Sarah Bernhardt, and Duse's passing encounters with her two aristocratic fans reveal a person different from the one they had imagined: an ordinary woman whose life has been fueled by loss and sorrow, haunted by the fragility of love and by an inordinate intimacy with death, all of which she has used as instruments with which to sharpen her craft. As the final curtain drops on the novel, we are let into the mystery of a world long forgotten, of two cosmopolitan centers outside Europe and America where the ruling class had as much fun as anyone in the world, and, like everyone else, had to suffer the consequences.

The Last Masquerade

Literature & Fiction

Antonio Orlando Rodríguez

Humor & Satire

Latina daughters finally have a chance to honor their mothers and inspire readers -- by paying homage in this book to the strong women who have sacrificed and struggled, laughed and cried, and fought hard to create a better life for their daughters. Maria Perez-Brown spoke with Latinas from a variety of nationalities and lifestyles -- some are famous, and some not so well known. The women she interviewed include actresses, doctors, filmmakers, as well as such public figures as Cristina Saralegui, Esmeralda Santiago, Jaci Velasquez, Rosario Dawson, and Celia Cruz. In their own words, these daughters tell us about their relationship with their mothers -- and of a bond every women will recognize. Over 100 photos.

Mama: Latina Daughters Celebrate Their Mothers

Arts & Photography

María Pérez-Brown

Photography & Video

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