Never before have things seemed so hard for Hispanics. The signals are stark and dire: A drowned father, cradling a dead daughter. A lone mother, defending herself against an armed
Border Patrol agent, with a terrified toddler at her side. A
diatribe hectoring whites to purge the country of a rising brown tide. A
Walmart in El Paso, strewn with the dead. Caravans of the hopeful willing to suffer indignities, splinter their families, cower in
cages, risk life itself for a distant dream. And looming over it all: a
president who shrugs when a voice in the crowd shouts , “Shoot them! ” and who tells Hispanics with
roots in this country to go back to the cesspools where they belong. The ground
seems to have shifted in this land of the huddled masses.
It has not. These are long-held resentments. For centuries they
have been fed by ignorance, racism and a stubborn unwillingness to understand a
population whose ancestors were here by the millions — long before the first
pilgrim set foot on Plymouth Rock.
Now and then, the animus bubbles up. But bigotry against
Hispanics has been an American constant since the Founding Fathers. Not 10
years after drafting the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson
smugly suggested that
these United States might want to snatch Latin America “piece by piece.” John
Adams held that a revolution in South America “would be agreeable,” but
he wanted little
to do with “a people more ignorant, more bigoted, more superstitious, more
implicitly credulous in the sanctity of royalty, more blindly devoted to their
priests . . . than any people in Europe, even in Spain” — managing to demonize
a religion and dismiss a whole human order in one tweet-able and peevish
rhetorical flourish.
The hatred was not reserved for Latin America alone but also for
its overlords, the Spanish — a hatred inherited from the English, who had
warred against Spain for centuries, raiding its shipments of silver and gold to
Europe and Asia and profiting from Spain’s woefully mismanaged riches. More
rabidly, it extended to the long-suffering indigenous population that predated
the European arrivistes. The rationale was not much different from the
arguments that had gripped Europe shortly after the conquest: Were the
indigenous really human? Wasn’t it more likely that they were beasts of burden?
Whoever they were, they were hardly of much importance. They were meant to work
the soil, the mines, the bricks; and bear the conquistadors’ children. The law
agreed.
By the mid-19th century, when the United States barged past its
borders and pushed its dominion into the formerly Mexican lands that are now
Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Nevada and California, that
indigenous population had become a mestizo or mixed-race people. Still, the
rancor continued. Presidents John Tyler and James Polk seized territory after territory
in a fevered campaign to expand America’s Manifest Destiny: in other words, to
spread the virtues of American superiority. A grand project of expansion
followed, all the way to the wilds of the Rio Grande. The Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo in 1848, which marked the end of the Mexican-American War, handed 55
percent of Mexico’s territory to the United States. But that victory came with
hostages: the Mexican American people. That grudging population was not easy to
exterminate; not by war, nor by verdict. There were too many to be herded down
trails of tears or consigned to faraway exile, and they were useful, if
vexatious. They knew the land, worked the land and could be put to work for
white overlords.
Eventually, President William Taft crowed, “the whole hemisphere
will be ours in fact as, by virtue of our superiority of race, it already is
ours morally.” Taft went on to steel the hand of Porfirio Díaz in the infamous
dictator’s murderous reign over the Mexican people, to care about nothing so
much as protecting American business interests and to order the U.S. occupation
of Nicaragua.
But the hand extended to Mexico did not extend to Mexican
Americans in Taft’s own country. Lynchings of Hispanics became
legion from California to Wyoming during those years, and they went ignored,
tracked only by outraged Mexican diplomats who had little power to control the
carnage. As the early 20th century progressed, the volatile politics of our
southern neighbor spurred even more Mexican emigration to the United States,
delighting American businessmen who needed cheap labor to build railroad
tracks, erect towns, toil on ranches and stoop over agricultural fields.
Mexican Americans were wanted for their sweat, their military service, their
taxes, but not for their children or their company.
Resentment against a growing Hispanic presence in cities and
schools found voice in English-only edicts, emboldening white Americans to
treat Latinos as an unwelcome foreign underclass. In the small Texas town of
Three Rivers, a Hispanic soldier returning from World War II in a coffin was
denied a proper funeral. Farther west, in California, political cartoonists and
crime novelists were characterizing a rising tide of young Mexican American
males as a menace. In Los Angeles, thousands of soldiers and civilians
descended on Hispanic youths in 1943 in a virulent attack known as the Zoot
Suit Riots. Brown Americans were pushed into segregated communities, forbidden
from serving on juries, their children made to attend “Mexican” schools. In
southern Arizona, migrant farmworkers were kidnapped, robbed, tortured — their
feet seared over fire — and told to go home.
Within our own lifetimes, things have often looked grim. “Latin
America doesn’t matter,” said Richard Nixon, even as he was issuing directives
to throttle Chile’s economy and bring an inconvenient socialist government to
its knees. “People don’t give a s---” about the place. Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger concurred: What happens down there “has no importance,” he said. And
so Americans have not been very curious about the region that is feeding our
burgeoning Hispanic population. We’ll do anything for Latin America, except
read about it, James Reston, a former executive editor of the New York
Times, once quipped.
“You’d be surprised!” Ronald Reagan told the American
people, after his first official trip to Central America. “They’re
all individual countries!”
So it should surprise nobody that a generation later, in 2006,
Hal Turner, a prominent radio talk-show host in New Jersey whose show is
broadcast across the country, would revel in the idea of Latin America as the
sinister, dark continent. “These filthy, disease-ridden, two-legged bags of
human debris are too stupid to believe,” he said on the air. “Just think,
America, if we bring enough of them here, they can do for America exactly what
they did for Mexico! Turn our whole country into a crime-ridden, drug-infested
slum. . . . These people are subhuman. I would love it if folks who do have
such weapons used them on the crowds. . . . I advocate machine-gunning these
invaders to death at their rallies!”
It’s not a big leap from those words, uttered on American radio
waves a dozen years ago, to the rhetoric in the statement linked to the El Paso
shooting suspect (“If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can
be more sustainable”). And it’s not a far cry from labels like “subhuman” to
the tweets of a president: from words like “stupid,” “filthy,” “human debris”
to words like “rapists,” “criminals,” “invasion.” These slurs against Latinos,
in one form or another, have been in the American parlance for a very long
time. The pity, of course, is that like the starving Irish fleeing the
famine, or the Russians eluding the life-or-death dangers of the pale, or the
Germans shucking the very real hazards of religious oppression, Latin American
immigrants risk the flight north to escape concrete, life-threatening
conditions: crime, drugs, poverty. Of the 50 most violent cities in the
world, 43 are in Latin
America. Of the 25 countries with the highest murder rates, nearly half
are south of the Rio Grande. To understand why this is so, we need to
understand a half-millennium of history, the cruel legacy of a brutal colonial
structure and the rampant corruption of the white-brown caste system it has
engendered. We need to understand the region’s greatest affliction: its dire
inequality.
It’s not a big leap from those words, uttered on American radio
waves a dozen years ago, to the rhetoric in the statement linked to the El Paso
shooting suspect (“If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can
be more sustainable”). And it’s not a far cry from labels like “subhuman” to
the tweets of a president: from words like “stupid,” “filthy,” “human debris”
to words like “rapists,” “criminals,” “invasion.” These slurs against Latinos,
in one form or another, have been in the American parlance for a very long
time.
The pity, of course, is that like the starving Irish fleeing the
famine, or the Russians eluding the life-or-death dangers of the pale, or the
Germans shucking the very real hazards of religious oppression, Latin American
immigrants risk the flight north to escape concrete, life-threatening
conditions: crime, drugs, poverty. Of the 50 most violent cities in the
world, 43 are in Latin
America. Of the 25 countries with the highest murder rates, nearly
half are south of the Rio Grande. To understand why this is so, we need to
understand a half-millennium of history, the cruel legacy of a brutal colonial
structure and the rampant corruption of the white-brown caste system it has
engendered. We need to understand the region’s greatest affliction: its dire
inequality.
Latin America is the most unequal region on Earth precisely
because it has never ceased to be colonized — by exploiters, conquerors,
proselytizers, and, for the past two centuries, by multinational corporations
and its own tiny elite. As economists have long argued, extractive societies
such as Latin America’s are built on social injustice. They are designed and
maintained by a ruling class whose primary goal is to enrich themselves and
perpetuate their power. They thrive when absolute privilege reigns over
absolute poverty. But extractive nations are also programmed to fail. The
damage caused by their endless raid on natural resources is all too enduring.
It is violence, resentment, poverty, environmental damage, crime. Fear is the engine
that drives Latin Americans north.
The irony is that so many are here because they were always
here; as Mexican Americans like to say: They didn’t cross the border, the
border crossed them. Or they are here because the lure to emulate Hispanic
Americans who are living better lives is irresistible. Never before has a wave
of immigrants joined such a large minority. Latinos in the United States now
number 56.5 million, a full 18 percent of the population. According to the
Pew Research Center, that’s a whopping 40 percent increase over 40 years. Almost
two-thirds are native-born. By 2050, Hispanics will account for a third of this
country’s residents.
Which is to say that whatever Jefferson and Adams and Nixon
thought is obviously wrong. Latin America does matter to
the United States, and it always has. The long, complicated history that has
convulsed nations and propelled Hispanics to our shores should be of utmost
importance to us. Latin America’s history is not remotely like U.S. history.
Its colonies were more exploited, its revolutions more extreme. It is a region
unlike any other, where theories or doctrines fashioned elsewhere seldom have
purchase. We would do well to study it. It’s about time we understood what
Latin Americans bring with them when they come. And it’s about time we
understood the deeply held racism that has always met them.
