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For the truly committed, there are the supermercados that cater to the most exotic tastes. At Tianguis, a 68,000-sq.-ft. Los Angeles market, shoppers can buy beef lips for 89 cents per lb., 24 kinds of sausage, a host of chilis, not to mention Mexican-made disposable diapers in bright colors. The built-in tortilleria churns out handmade chips, corn and flour tortillas, the bakery offers Mexican pastries, and a fish market sells live catfish from a 100- gallon tank.
As Latin styles spread through Middle America, over the airwaves, down the fashion runways and in the grocery aisles, they inevitably become exaggerated or diluted to fit Anglo images and tastes. That is reason enough for many Hispanic artists and designers to resist the labels that are often attached to their work and concentrate instead on their individual visions.
Yet their impact is potent nonetheless. Sensibilidad is already reaching, subtly but unmistakably, into America's tastes and moods, flirtations, diversions. The change comes in little ways and large, in new favorite foods and on MTV, in movies and television shows that no longer reduce Hispanics to cartoons, in clothes for a dinner dance with romance and rhythm sewn into the very seams, in public places where a spirit of community overcomes the anonymity of the city. It comes when the family takes a vacation to Mexico or the Caribbean and finds the landscape less foreign, if not quite familiar.
With a kind of healthy covetousness, America will no doubt continue to sample and borrow and absorb all that it finds most irresistible in the styles of its Latin neighbors and newcomers. A coalescence and collaboration that began 400 years ago show no sign of slowing now. So perhaps sensibilidad is bound to flourish in a society that thrives on the generosity of its people and the diversity of its bloodlines.