A fragmented look at the business of multiculturalism

My friends laugh at me for watching ''Passions," the campy daytime drama about occult doings in a New England hamlet. But my favorite soap is cutting-edge: It has been praised for featuring a Mexican-American family, a rare dash of color in the largely white world of recurring TV characters.

The acknowledgement of Hispanics' existence is as much a hard-headed recognition of audience and its money as it is an effort at nondiscrimination. ''US Hispanic population growth rates and purchasing power are both rising faster than those of the general population," writes journalist Guy Garcia in ''The New Mainstream." He cites one study projecting Hispanic income after taxes, $653 billion last year, to almost double by 2008.

''The New Mainstream" is actually two books in one. The first, to which the title refers, is a business tome about how our multicultural population -- not just Hispanics but African-Americans and Asian-Americans -- is reshaping the products business makes and the way it goes about selling them. The emblematic indicator of America's increasingly diverse population, Garcia reports, is the fact that salsa has bumped ketchup as the country's most popular condiment.

The second book moves beyond commerce to make a full-throated defense of diversity and immigration, melding history, politics, and anthropology. Both books, alas, leave intriguing insights bobbing in oceans of tangential or eye-glazing data.

Black, Hispanic and Asian-Americans, now one-quarter of the population, are expected to swell to almost half of all Americans by 2050, Garcia writes. ''As a group, the nation's non-Anglo minorities purchase more consumer goods than the general population, are more brand loyal, and collectively represent other important new social patterns, influencing everything from images in advertising to attitudes about religion, family, education, and the afterlife."

Unfortunately, Garcia pounds you almost insensate with a battering ram of numbers and laundry lists of examples.

Touching on topics from Charles Darwin to Howard Dean, Walt Whitman to Sitting Bull, the Mexican War to Wounded Knee, and language theory to the botanical history of chili peppers, Garcia rebuts Pat Buchanan and like-minded critics of diversity. For good measure, he tosses in an endorsement of gay rights and the Supreme Court's decision to overturn anti-sodomy laws.

Artfully used, these meditations could have added an erudite, Renaissance person's perspective to the topic. But in Garcia's hands, they're overpowering.

The observation that 19th-century expansionism ''inadvertently planted the seeds of a multicultural society" is interesting, but he could make his point without rehashing manifest destiny and Custer's last stand.

To pick one small but telling bit of flab, among the sign posts of the New Mainstream Garcia offers is Spider-Man, whose movies depict how ''mutants with strange powers are the misunderstood saviors of an intolerant world that persecutes them for being different."

At the risk of offending arachnids, this is a prodigally flimsy connection, and while it's just a fleeting sentence, there are paragraphs of such throwaway lines and other superfluous information in ''The New Mainstream."

Ultimately, Garcia's not worried about the Buchanans of the world. ''Luckily, most Americans intuitively understand that tolerance is not capitulation to politically correct fascists, but a necessary component of liberty and social stability," he writes.

This is a thoughtful book that means to argue a serious case about a profound topic. It embraces an admirably optimistic philosophy of our civic and economic future. But the economic argument has the off-putting prose that hobbles too much business writing, while the rest of the book sprawls like a suburban subdivision.

''The New Mainstream" has good intentions and offers patient readers a solid brief for diversity. But the biggest threat to diversity here is not Buchanan but boredom.