other race. Three percent reported Two or more races. Sixty-one percent of the people in Miami-Dade County were Hispanic. Eighteen percent of the people in Miami-Dade County were White non-Hispanic. People of Hispanic origin may be of any race (UCSB, 2005; emphasis added).
I fit within the group cited in the emphasized text above, being a white Hispanic/Latino. My personal experience has been that the people in my immediate environment represent a cultural and ethnic mixture, although I readily acknowledge that there are pockets of ethnic and linguistic uniformity scattered across the region. For example, in Little Haiti, which some locally refer to as the Haitian ghetto of Miami, the dominant languages spoken at home are, in order, Creole, Creole/French, French, English, and Spanish, even though the official demographic profile of Miami-Dade as a whole suggests that Spanish might be the dominant non-English language in the area.
In Miami-Dade, the evidence is that government services accommodate the needs of ethnically distinct communities. An important example is the way that Florida state public-education policy has been set up, particularly in respect of language skills. The hot debate about bilingual education may always be present in American culture at federal and state levels, but meanwhile, the state of Florida has responded to the fact that people's lives are affected by their language skills in a fairly practical way. The state has specific guidelines in place for evaluating and monitoring students from non-American cultures with LEP (limited English proficiency). School personnel who give various tests to LEP students are cautioned to motivate and not to intimidate the student. Specifically, the guidelines say: "Care must be taken when assessing LEP students' basic subject competency not to confuse that assessment with an assessment of English Language proficiency" (Badfa, 2000). In that regard, students are entitled t...