My local newspaper carried an editorial yesterday morning slamming Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington's forthcoming book, as did no less an authority than The Economist, in a column last week. Huntington's book Who We Are should cause astir when it is released in May.

The premise, according to press reports, is that the current Latino immigration, unlike previous arrivals from Europe, is not integrating into mainstream America. While this does seem at first blush to fit into the "Ivy League professor brilliantly states the obvious" category, both newspapers argued that his conclusions are false.

"Lexington," one of The Economist's famed unsigned columns, makes the argument in the March 4 issue that Latinos are, in fact, becoming mainstream. While the highly visible first generation continues to speak Spanish and even travel back to Latin America to vote (Mexican dual-citizens can do this), younger Hispanics, born or raised in the U.S., feel less of a connection with the "old country."

The difference, Lexington maintains, is that the first generation's ties to "the old country" are heightened in an age when television and the Internet are shrinking the world and in the geographical reality that unllike the Irish or Czechs of immigrations past, many Latinos in Southern California, Texas, etc., are only a few hours' drive away from the land they fled.

Nonetheless, Lexington backs up his (or her) claim by noting that Latino children and young adults see themselves as Americans first, Guatemalans (or whatever) second.

The Worcester (Mass.) Telegram & Gazette made a different case in a March 9 editorial, basically denying that a "melting pot" ever existed. Because the T&G requires a 60-cent-per-day toll for nonsubscribers to access its site, here's a free taste of what they said:

... History suggests it is risky to predict that America as we know it is in danger of being culturally submerged by newcomers. For more than two centuries, immigrants representing hundreds of national, ethnic and religious groups have assimilated, but, thankfully, have not disappeared. The melting pot contains not a homogenized "American" puree, but a stew of diverse, distinct and mostly complementary flavors -- as the cultural richness of communities such as Worcester attests.

That's one way of looking at diversity, and in fact it's the one that was in vogue in the fairly liberal school district in which I was educated. But it's not a melting pot; it's what we called "the salad bowl" -- a meal to be taken as a unit, but you surely can pick out the individual croutons, lettuce leaves, tomatos and carrots just as distinctly as you can pick out the individual Britons, Argentinians and Russians at a meeting of the U.N.

In the true melting pot, it comes as a revelation that John Kerry is not really Irish, because we're so used to seeing Irish-Americans who act and talk, well, like Americans. Because of the factors that Lexington (and, we are led to believe, Huntington) mentioned -- proximity to the old country, advances in international communication -- substantial numbers of Latinos SEEM TO see themselves as Hispanics first, Americans second.

Two questions arise that, in my mind, make or break Huntington's hypothesis, which is that the "melting pot" is not working for Hispanics. One: is Lexington right? Is the integration of Hispanics into mainstream American culture farther along than it seems? Two: did the Irish, Czechs and others really integrate into American culture as readily as we seem to think? In other words, is it NORMAL for a group to assert its separateness prior to being fully assimilated?

I don't have the answers, but Huntington is a guy I'm willing to trust to a certain extent. In 1993, he wrote a brilliant book, The Clash of Civilizations, which I recently read. Recall that in '93, we had just finished the Cold War and most everyone expected a Pax Americana and the democratization of just about everyone else.

This, of course, did not happen, even though there was no great ideological conflict (as had existed between Russia and America prior). Communism was dead, but conflict continued. Why?

Huntington's hypothesis was that in the post-Cold War world, conflicts would arise at "civilizational fault lines" -- that is to say, places where distinct religious and ethnic groups meet. He was criticized for singling out the Muslim world as a probable source of many of these conflicts, but the history of the 2000s seems to be bearing him out.

He fears, according to the T&G editorial, that America will become a "two culture" nation, which they say has happened in nearby Canada. This is at once a clear analysis of what should be one of Huntington's great fears and a disservice to his ideas.

To have a cultural fault line running through your own country is probably the worst-case scenario, under Huntington's Clash of Civilizations logic. Iraq is seeing this with its Kurds; Russia is seeing it with its Muslim enclaves, like Chechnya. But to call Canada's French-English divide a "cultural fault line" doesn't make sense; sure, they eat more baguettes in Montreal than in Moose Jaw, but the divide in Canada is more linguistic than anything else. Both France and England are members of "the West," a unified cultural history that draws on Greek, Roman and Enlightenment, among other, sources.

On the other hand, Latin America -- source of the immigration to the U.S. -- is sometimes counted as culturally distinct from "The West." South and Central America missed out on the 20th-century economic boom of North America and Europe. Immigrants to the U.S. come from countries that are poorer, less educated and more religious, on average.

If Huntington is right, there are indeed profound implications. We might see a large-scale cultural shift, the likes of which we haven't seen since the 1960s and the rise of the Baby Boom generation.