The rest of America will just be catching up to where California is today.

SAN FRANCISCO -- If you want to see the new face of America, cometo California. It's turning more Hispanic, more Asian and more gay.

Consider these snapshots. The teacher in our grandsons' playgroupswitches easily from English to Spanish and back again. The freshmanclass at the University of California's Berkeley campus is 44 percentAsian and only 28 percent white. A woman we met in a park drives ablue Volvo station wagon with a car seat for her son and a gay pridesticker that proclaims "Just Married."

These anecdotes reflect the latest projections from the UnitedStates census: By 2050, the number of Asians and Hispanics in thiscountry will triple, and the white population will drop from almost70 percent to barely 50 percent.

But the rest of America will just be catching up to whereCalifornia is today. Hispanics already comprise one-third of thatstate's population, and whites have fallen below the 50 percent mark.As demographer Hans Johnson told the San Francisco Chronicle, "Inmany ways, California precedes the nation. We are a state where nogroup is a majority."

There's nothing new about California preceding the nation. Fromthe Hollywood Hills to Silicon Valley, from the Beat Generation toThe Beach Boys, from the Gold Rush to the Internet boom, Californiahas shaped American tastes and technology for the last 150 years.

But as the census, and our own observations, suggest, the "nextbig thing" coming out of California could well have to do with race,ethnicity and sexual orientation. And the impact on American life andpolitics will be enormous.

Both of this year's presidential campaigns fully understand thesetrends, and are spending heavily on Spanish-language advertising. "Wehad to improve among the Latino population because of how fast-growing it is and how important it is," Matthew Dowd, PresidentBush's chief strategist, told CNN. "And so a day doesn't go by whenwe don't talk about that as an important constituency."

Another telling statistic: There are now about 350 Spanish-language newspapers published in the United States, almost double thenumber from 15 years ago. Monica Lozano, publisher of Los Angeles-based La Opinion, explains why this is so even as papers in otherimmigrant languages are fading: "We're still here because there is aconstant refreshing of new readers, because of our proximity withMexico, and because we cover issues that the mainstream media doesn'tcover."

This week, two large companies, AGmobile and Univision Online,announced plans to expand wireless information and entertainmentservices for "a Spanish-speaking population that continues to explodein numbers and earning power."

The Asian presence here is just as visible, from the fatherplaying soccer with his son in a neighborhood park to the medicalstudents from U.C. San Francisco crowding the cafes along IrvingStreet. When writer Richard Rodriguez was asked by a radiointerviewer whether he considered himself more Mexican or moreAmerican, he replied: "In some ways I consider myself more Chinese,because I live in San Francisco, which is becoming a predominantlyAsian city."

In his book Brown: The Last Discovery of America (Viking, 2002),Rodriguez celebrates another trend: the rising rate of intermarriageamong these racial groups, what he calls "this new brown meltdown."The new American role models, he says, are golfer Tiger Woods,shortstop Derek Jeter, and actors Halle Berry and Keanu Reeves -- allof whom are of mixed-race parentage.

Same-sex couples are clearly a part of this "new brown meltdown,"the blurring of traditional lines and stereotypes about race andgender. We met two gay white men who are parenting a black daughterhere. The woman with the blue Volvo talked happily about raising herson in a "two-mommy family," and about the child's "grandfather," aman we've met in Washington. Then she laughed and added, "It'sactually a bit more complicated than that. His son was our spermdonor."

This side of gay America -- raising kids, driving station wagons,being ordinary -- is fueling the drive to secure more rights for same-sex couples. The fight over gay marriage has obscured the fact thatcivil unions, which grant legal and financial benefits, have movedfrom an extreme proposal to a middle-ground compromise in a veryshort time.

Does this "meltdown," in all its forms, mean that prejudice willdisappear? Of course not. But it does mean that the new family thatmoves in next door could be brown, or gay, or both. That's alreadythe American way in California.

California's diversity illustrates new face of America