Boy And Girl Scouts Of America Attracting Nicotine-Addled Gang Members, Little Girls

In South Florida and across the country, the Boy and Girl Scouts of America are attracting more and more young Latinos into their fold. One Eagle Scout in particular, 28-year-old Richard Hernandez, commends the scouts for saving him from a life of gangs, “nicotine, liquor” and abuse. Hernandez says that, like many “Spanish” kids, he looked to gangs as a sort of family away from home:

Now, he’s helping to create the first all-Latino Boy Scout troop in Palm Beach County. The Girl Scouts - which, fun fact, formed the first all-Mexican troop in Houston, Texas in 1922 although troops remained mostly racially segregated until the 1950s - have also seen an increase in Latina members. Broward County-based troop leader Sonia Malter, who also happens to be Latina, is thrilled that some of her scouts have a “different look:”

Broward troops have started to reflect the area’s ethnic diversity, said Sonia Malter, who leads a Junior Girl Scout troop in Weston. Years ago, only one or two girls in her troop were Hispanic, now she has four. However, more still needs to be done, she said.

“It’s no longer that one Anglo look; it’s all looks. It’s very exciting,” said Malter, whose family is from Costa Rica and Puerto Rico.

That’s because typically only  move to Weston to die. JK! We love Broward. In a move that has proved both lucrative and delicious, South Florida Girl Scout troops have also begun selling Dulce de Leche cookies along with the usual Thin Mints and Lemon Chalet Cremes. We can only hope that, like Samoans, we can only hope that we too will have a cookie named for our ethnicity. Yum, right? We can’t wait for the day when we can cram a spicy, cream-filled Latino into our mouth. 

What gets us is the constant referring back to the Scouts’ former, “all-American” look and appeal. Aren’t Latinos who spend their weekends driving the family minivan to the mall to partake in delectable food court offerings or to ignore their parents while loitering outside Hot Topics also all-American? Doesn’t the phrase “all-American” include all the various ethnic groups that make up American culture? We’ve been known to fetishize the Norman Rockwell portrayal of an American that never existed as much as the next person but, we mean. Latinos didn’t just step here, you know? We didn’t fall out of our tree houses, all sticky with exoticism, and decide just last week to become part of the fabric of the U.S. of A. An increase in Latino scouts is interesting (well, to us), but is it really so surprising? God.

Oh, and we’ll take twelve boxes each of Thin Mints and Dulce de Leche cookies. Muchos thank you’s!

Scouts reaching out to Hispanics to grow troops [South Florida Sun-Sentinel]