In The New Mainstream, journalist, novelist, and Internet entrepreneur Guy Garcia attempts to define how the "multicultural consumer" is transforming American business. He begins by writing:

When Christopher Columbus set foot on the shores of the New World, one of his first recorded impressions was of the natives, whom he described as "young . . . well made with fine shapes and faces . . . Some paint themselves with black, which makes them appear like those of the Canaries, neither black nor white; others with white, others with red, and others with such colors as they can find." Columbus could have hardly guessed that more than five hundred years later his description of America as a youthful, multicolored tribe enhancing and inventing their identity from a palette of countless hues would ring uncannily true.

America is a nation transformed by the fulfillment of its own ideals. Never has its population and culture been more vibrant and diverse, never has it been more reflective of - and connected to - the rest of the world. The new America is taking root in major cities, suburbs, and towns. The new America exists at the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder and is striving for a better foothold at the top. The new America is defining - and defined by - the urban lifestyle, but it is also moving to the suburbs and smaller rural towns. The new America is transforming life at the office, where managers seek to increase productivity by diversifying their workforce; at the beauty parlor, where Anglo socialites use hair relaxers created for African Americans; and on the Internet, where online communities created for Hispanics, Asians, African Americans, and other groups are competing with major portals for eyeballs and cybercash: it is changing how we look and what we drive, what we eat and why we eat it. Most of all, it is changing how people make money and spend it, where it comes from and where it is going.

Garcia's clearly optimistic perspective on the ongoing transformation of American culture is largely premised upon demographics. He describes the "new mainstream" as representing a loose but "sweeping" coalition of groups - Hispanics, blacks, Asians, and other minorities - who have long felt that they fell outside the traditional mainstream culture, or that they were not represented in that culture. As he points out, these groups each have significant purchasing power, and that power is only growing. Today the roughly eighty million people who fall within the elastic confines of this "new" mainstream make up approximately a quarter of the population and spend some $1.2 trillion a year. In less than fifty years, however, those traditionally "minority" groups will comprise almost half the country's population and their purchasing power and income growth only continues to expand.