There’s good news in the latest report from the Pew Hispanic Center: According to the most recent Census data, the number of Latino students enrolling in college hit an all-time high of 1.8 million in October 2010. The most staggering fact about that increase is that it reflects an enrollment surge of 24 percent between 2009 and 2010.
In raw numbers, that’s an increase of 349,000 Latino students entering college in one year. And, for the first time, Latino students actually outnumber black ones on college campuses nationwide. So is the increase simply the result of population growth, or is it attributable to deeper factors?
The total population of 18-to-24-year-old Latinos only grew by seven percent during that year, not enough to account for the spike. What’s more likely is that because the number of Latino high school graduates is on the rise, up to 73 percent in 2010 from 70 percent in 2009, more are able to enroll in college.
However, the picture isn’t completely rosy. The data reveals that compared to other groups of students, Latinos remain less likely to attend a four-year college. Roughly 46 percent are enrolling at two-year schools, while only 54 percent head directly to four-year universities. “By contrast, among young white college students, 73 percent were enrolled in a four-year college, as were 78 percent of young Asian college students and 63 percent of young black college students,” the report’s authors found.
And ironically, the increased Latino enrollment at community colleges could spell bad news for both the longevity of the college enrollment boom as well as the nation’s long-term economic prospects. As of 2009, state funding for community colleges was down 26.8 percent. Thanks to all that budget slashing, California turned away 150,000 students from community colleges in 2010. Likewise, earlier this year in Texas, state lawmakers actually proposed closing four community colleges because of funding issues.
Clearly, the boom can’t continue if students can’t even go to college because of these kinds of cuts to higher education. And, for America’s future economic viability, we need Latino students to go to college more than ever. Latinos are expected to account for 60 percent of the United States’ population growth between 2005 and 2050. We know that having a highly educated workforce is necessary to ensure our global economic competitiveness. If the younger versions of these new college students can’t follow in their footsteps, the nation is in serious trouble.
Photo credit: Yasin Akgul/AFP via Getty Images – Children look at developed film in a darkroom during an analog photography workshop held in southeastern Turkey on June 14, 2026.
Film photography is experiencing a resurrection, summoned by unlikely conjurers: Gen Z.
It wasn’t too long ago that analog photography – which uses photographic film and chemical processing – was declaredall but dead, relegated to the province of niche hobbyists and professional artists.
Digital cameras had taken over nearly all areas of photographic production. Film industry titans like Polaroidand Kodak had shrunk dramatically from their heyday, becoming shells of their former selves. Darkrooms, where students learned how to manually develop and print film, shutteredat high schools and college campuses across the country, replaced by digital labs. For most people, the spirit of analog photography was mainly channeled through Instagram filters.
In 2025, 35% of the 42 million active film camera users worldwide were reported to be between the ages of 18 and 30. The year prior, online searches for analog photography saw a 41% rise.
Disposable camera sales have been steadily increasing since 2023. The photography journal PetaPixel went a step further and announced 2024 as “film’s best year in decades,” as major brands have introduced new cameras in response to renewed demand and revived classic models. More than 30% of respondents to a 2024 Ilford Photo survey on film photography were in the 25-34 age group.
As I’ve witnessed more and more of my undergraduate art and design students embrace analog photography, I’m not seeing this as a trend rooted in a nostalgic yearning for the past. Instead, I’m seeing it as young people rejecting algorithms, breaking free from the alienation of social media and reacting to childhoods spent on Zoom and TikTok – a deliberate move to redefine the future of art, social connection and engagement with the world.
Pining for a ‘third place’
In my work as a historian of photography and lecturer at the University of Southern California, I’ll often ask my students about how they take photos – whether they’re using digital cameras their smartphones or analog devices.
This year, for the first time, some of my students discussed images they’d printed and the physical photography albums they’d put together of their friends and family. They talked about how they’d also been sending postcards, writing letters and tacking photographs to their bedroom walls.
New York Knicks forward OG Anunoby snaps a photo with a disposable film camera during the team’s victory rally on June 18, 2026, after winning the NBA Finals. Craig T. Fruchtman/Getty Images
This was a rhetorical move by social media companies, likely designed to help people feel as though they were in a familiar terrain of social connection. Yet the underlying business model of these platforms depended more on maximizing engagement and advertising revenue than on nurturing authentic relationships.
Everyone knows what happened next: The more connected young people became online, the more isolated and detached they started to feel. The COVID-19 lockdown pushed social life online even further, and researchers are only now starting to see how the combination of increased screen time and isolation negatively affected adolescents’ mental health. By 2023, 51% of American teenagers reported they spend at least four hours a day on social media.
I see the attraction of analog photography as a response to life lived through screens, a pathway toward community engagement and the desire for what sociologists call “a third place.”
Coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book “The Great Good Place,” third places are meant as a space separate from home and work. They offer a reprieve for the in-between, generating the conditions needed for creative cross-pollination. They might include a local cafe, a neighborhood writing group, a weekly Magic: The Gathering game or a college fraternity – any space that allows for social interaction and personal growth.
These spaces also combat loneliness. They get people out of their heads and into a community. Oldenburg also referred to them as “havens of sociability,” places or gatherings where people can arrive alone to join others, and the atmosphere is “democratic and festive.”
Analog communities IRL
In April 2026, the inaugural AnalogCon took place in Los Angeles. Organized by the Los Angeles Center of Photography, where I serve as executive director and chief curator, it was a festival for all things analog photography. It didn’t just serve as a third place for photography enthusiasts; it also showed how analog photography – as a practice, ritual and community – is flourishing.
Vendors, industry leaders, artists and teachers participated in the two-day event, which included exhibitions, panels, demonstrations and guided photography tours around Little Tokyo. The excitement and thirst for similar events was palpable.
Photography now joins a broader trend of a generational preoccupation with physical cultural objects and media. Although music streaming represents 82% of revenues generated in the music industry, vinyl records sales have been rising for over a decade, crossing the US$1 billion threshold in the U.S. in 2025.
But beyond that, record stores and video rental shops have become third places in their own right. There’s a big difference between selecting a film to stream from your bed and getting out of the house, going to a store and talking about movies with a clerk and fellow film enthusiasts.
Think about the sound a tape cassette makes when you open and close it, or the vibrant graphics on the covers of DVDs or VHS tapes. Think about rewinding or making a mixtape for your recent crush. These are objects of belonging that signal specific cultural moments, rituals and aesthetics, and many young people today are starting to experience them for the first time.
Now, think about gently inserting a roll of film into a camera. Think about choosing an angle carefully when snapping a photo, because the number of frames is limited and you want to make them count. Think about the thrill of discovery when the pictures finally emerge as objects on paper.
To me, these are more than fleeting trends. They signal a push against a digital culture that is designed to cultivate envy and reward outrage, insults and humiliation.
Instead, armed with rolls of film, more and more Gen Zers appear to be opting out of their algorithmic feeds in favor of experiencing life in ways that feel more deliberate, personal and tangible.
Photo credit: Heather Diehl/Getty Images – A stretch of Route 66 in Albuquerque, N.M., pictured on June 7, 2026. Towns and cities located along the highway are gearing up to celebrate the iconic road’s centennial.
Working in concert, the American Association of State Highway Officials and the Bureau of Public Roads adopted a uniform highway numbering system and corresponding map on November 11, 1926. The numbering system and map replaced the confusing patchwork of highways and trails, like the Lincoln Highway or the Old Trails Road, with an official network of numbered highways sanctioned by federal and state highway authorities.
Since then, a small group of these highways have attained the status of cultural icon. There’s Route 1, which snakes all the way from Maine to Florida. Route 101 is celebrated for its majestic views of the Pacific Ocean, while Route 6 was immortalized in “On the Road,” Jack Kerouac’s classic novel.
The most famous, though, is arguably Route 66, nicknamed the “Main Street of America” and the “Mother Road.”
Yet as the towns that dot the highway prepare to celebrate its centennial, I’ve found myself wondering what it is, exactly, that’s being celebrated.
As a historian of Route 66, I’ve written about how there are really two versions of this 2,448-mile (3,940-kilometer) stretch of pavement.
There’s the actual highway, which reflected the 20th-century expansion of the nation’s infrastructure. Then there’s the mythic highway – a cultural icon imbued with nostalgia for a specific, 20th-century idea of romance, adventure, freedom and the American West.
There was almost no 66
As state highway commissioners in the 1920s wrangled over the specifics of the nation’s new highway system, they prized highway numbers that ended in zero, since they indicated a cross-country route. The thinking went that these routes would get the most traffic and, with it, the most business.
Oklahoma State Highway Commissioner Cyrus Avery had been a big booster for a Chicago-to-Los Angeles road in order to juice highway traffic through the Midwest. He suggested calling it Route 60, claiming a coveted cross-country number.
But commissioners from Kentucky and Virginia objected, noting that Avery’s proposed road didn’t go from coast to coast. As an alternative, they suggested 62. Avery countered with a number that he thought had a better ring to it: 66.
With the numbering controversy settled, the map of America’s first highway system was approved. But another 12 years would pass before Route 66 was fully built out, making it the first U.S. highway to be paved end to end.
In this detail of the official highway system map adopted in 1926, Route 66 winds through New Mexico and Arizona before ending in Southern California. United States Geological Survey/Wikimedia Commons
Adventure, redemption and reinvention
While it took over a decade for the full, physical stretch of road to be completed, the making of the Route 66 myth began almost immediately.
Construction of the road had barely begun when Avery, John T. Woodruff and other prominent civic leaders along the highway’s path convened in January 1927 to form the U.S. Highway 66 Association to promote travel along the route.
The association began advertising Route 66 as the best West Coast travel route and even trademarked a slogan for the road, “The Main Street of America.” The association also sponsored spectacles like the Trans-American Footrace to help publicize Route 66.
The race, which started on March 4, 1928, in Los Angeles, received widespread media coverage. Reporters breathtakingly described the epic struggles of the racers, coupled with vivid descriptions of the Southwest landscape. The effect was a marriage of Route 66 to ideas of adventure and romance in America’s collective subconscious.
During the Great Depression and Dust Bowl years, thousands of migrants from the Great Plains and Midwest traveled west along Route 66, hoping to rebuild their lives in California.
Author John Steinbeck dubbed Route 66 the “Mother Road” in “The Grapes of Wrath,” likening it to an umbilical cord that delivered Oakie refugees fleeing the Dust Bowl in the Oklahoma Panhandle to a new life in California. Working for the New Deal-era Farm Security Administration, photographer Dorothea Lange documented the same Oakies fictionalized by Steinbeck. Her 1938 photograph “Family on the Road” captured a husband, wife and their two young children hitchhiking on Route 66 near Weatherford, Oklahoma, after losing their farm.
For families devastated by the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, Route 66 served as a conduit for redemption and reinvention, inspiring author John Steinbeck to call it ‘The Mother Road.’ Bettmann/Getty Images
Together, Steinbeck and Lange helped imbue Route 66 with new layers of meaning tied to loss and redemption. Then, after World War II, Route 66 came to mythologize the postwar boom.
Bobby Troup’s 1946 song “(Get Your Kicks) on Route 66,” first recorded by the Nat King Cole Trio, cast the road as a postwar rite of passage. Millions of Americans went on to take family vacations to the American Southwest via Route 66, staying at roadside mom-and-pop motels, grabbing burgers at neon-lit diners and posing beside oversized roadside landmarks.
Myth versus reality
But the iconic imagery and myths of Route 66 are often at odds with the reality of the road.
I’ve come to see Troup’s song as encapsulating the tension between these two versions of Route 66.
In 1946, when Nat King Cole recorded “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66,” Cole and his band were unable to get their own “kicks” on Route 66. That’s because few businesses located along Route 66 were willing to serve them. Jim Crow-era copies of the Green Book – a directory of businesses that would accommodate Black road trippers – show just how few options there were.
‘(Get Your Kicks on)’ Route 66’ helped immortalize the highway in American culture. Al Drago/Getty Images
It would take passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – and subsequent enforcement efforts by the Justice Department – for the travel amenities and services along Route 66 to be equally available to all Americans, regardless of their race.
Yet by the time the highway’s motels, diners, auto repair shops and gas stations were open to all travelers, Route 66’s downturn had already begun.
In contrast to older mom-and-pop businesses, national corporate chain motels, restaurants and gas stations dominated the new interstate highway exits. Rather than risk exposing themselves to Justice Department Civil Rights scrutiny, they made it known that they welcomed all travelers, further enticing drivers away from older establishments.
Now, as Route 66 turns 100, there’s a gap between how the road is remembered by some and how it functioned for most. Free and easy travel on the road and “getting your kicks” were limited to white Americans. Much of Route 66’s iconography emerged from early highway association marketing efforts aimed at white Americans. Few African American or Latino travelers likely feel the same nostalgia.
Today, a lot of Route 66 nostalgia has a “back to the 1950s” vibe that celebrates pre-Civil Rights America as a purer, simpler, more authentic era. This faux-authentic America better reflects the place some Americans today wish they could live in – a less complicated, less diverse land of adventure, romance and opportunity, rather than the nuanced, complicated America they actually inhabit today.
Oversized neon signs, like at this Route 66 motel, enticed weary drivers to stop and stay, but these establishments were not available to all travelers. Al Drago/Getty Images
Beverly Thomas was in trouble. The 79-year-old retired nurse in Willoughby, Ohio was summoned to court due to the state of her lawn. The judge told Thomas she could possibly be jailed for failing to maintain her property. Fortunately, Thomas was saved by people she never even met.
Thomas has arthritis and tremors, making yard work incredibly difficult for her to do. She also lives on a fixed income, unable to afford either landscaping or legal bills. She had no idea what to do.
“I went to court and heard [the judge] say that I can be put in jail over it, making it sound like a crime, then I got nervous and had trouble sleeping at night,” Thomas said to News 5 Cleveland.
Local news viewers reached out
After Thomas’ plight was reported on the local news, she had a knock on her door the following day. Standing right in front of her were the two people she needed most: a lawn care professional and an attorney offering their services.
“They said, ‘We don’t know each other, but we just showed up at the same time.’ Wow, good people at that same time, amazing and reassuring,” Thomas said.
The lawn care professional, Norburt Sanek, came across Thomas’ story while on Facebook. Since he was nearby and could do something, he felt compelled to act. He and the attorney weren’t alone.
Dozens of people reached out to News 5 Cleveland to see how they could help Thomas. Sanek organized volunteers to help. Some even took the day off work to drive down to Thomas’ home to cut grass, pull weeds, and haul trash.
“I walk slow because of the arthritis. There were two people there. They said, ‘We don’t know each other, but we just showed up at the same time.’ Wow, good people at that same time, amazing and reassuring,” 79-year-old Beverly Thomas said.
While significant progress had been made on Thomas’ property, Sanek knew that Thomas still needed more help that couldn’t be accomplished through human muscle. So, he set up a GoFundMe for Thomas.
“We are asking for $6,000 to cover the cost of removing dangerous trees, a dumpster to haul away debris, paying her fines and court costs, installing a security system and building her a small garden that reflects her love of nature,” wrote Sanek on Thomas’ GoFundMe page.
When the Western Reserve Area Agency on Aging caught wind of the story, they decided to chip in. The agency provides advocacy and assistance for senior citizens so they can live independently.
“I know that she has a GoFundMe account going on right now and we’re actually willing to match it up to $3,000,” said Christopher Hall, the chief operating officer for the Western Reserve Area Agency on Aging.
As of this writing, Thomas’ GoFundMe is a little over $5,000 of its $6,000 goal. Many of the donations came from locals and people across the country alike. Thomas was astounded that so many strangers would show up to help her, whether it was through volunteer work or donations.
“I didn’t know there were kind people out there willing to help like this. I’m touched,” Thomas said. “I hope God blesses them for giving of their time to help somebody who can’t do it anymore. Thank you one and all.”
How to help the elders in your community with their lawns
If Thomas’ story speaks to you, you may notice a neighbor’s lawn growing neglected. It might be worth it to knock on their door and offer to mow or trim hedges.
If you’re not comfortable doing that or lack the tools, you can still help. Search online for volunteer groups in your area that can help this person. There are also national nonprofit organizations such as I Want To Mow Your Lawn Inc. that could provide the help your neighbor needs.
