Reading High School marked a milestone this month: a graduation ceremony with its first Hispanic valedictorian. Noe Cabello is unlikely to be the last.
The Hispanic population of this historically white city shaped by English and German ancestry — along with the surrounding Lehigh Valley— has skyrocketed in the past decade, echoing a national trend highlighted by the 2010 Census.
Reading, now 58% Hispanic, is the latest harbinger for a more diverse America in regions where Hispanic migration has been a relatively recent development.
"If you look at the Census data from 2000 and now 2010, you can see that there's this phenomenon of Latinos moving to parts of the United States where there hasn't been Latinos before," says Stanton Wortham, a University of Pennsylvania researcher who specializes in linguistics and immigrant studies. "The biggest research question from a national point of view is the question of, what are these new Latino populations' trajectories going to be over the next decade?" READ MORE
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