by Ray Suarez
Is there a limit to the number of people the United States can admit?
Does a high level of immigration complicate the task of creating one people with a common culture . . . and is that goal even desirable?
Are there costs and consequences to taking on millions of new people that we have not yet reckoned with?
And finally, what kind of peace have these millions of new residents made with taking on American identity, with accepting the acculturation and entry into the mainstream that other immigrant groups have done for centuries?
Everywhere you look, there are different answers, different examples of how Latinos have replied and will reply to those questions. Perhaps now more than ever there is also a wide range of responses you would get from other Americans, standing outside the Latino community and looking in at it. There are two enormous groups of people asking the flip side of the same question: Are we them? Are they us?
Linda Chavez is a descendant of an old New Mexico family. Her father’s ancestors were seventeenth-century Spanish settlers. Her mother was an English-speaking American, not of Latino ancestry. From her work with the United Federation of Teachers and its longtime leader, Albert Shanker, Chavez became the editor of American Educator, a quarterly publication of the AFT focusing on educational issues. “It was clear that under my direction the American Educator had become a conservative journal of ideas. We had William Bennett, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Robert Bork writing for us. Not only did we promote Shanker’s hard-core anticommunist views with articles critical of China, Cuba, and the Soviet Union, but we also took on affirmative action, ethnic studies, and radical feminism.”
From her time at the magazine Chavez caught the attention of President Ronald Reagan. She became director of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, and then White House liaison director. She was the highest-ranking woman in the Reagan White House. She moved from the Reagan administration to become president of U.S. English, an organization critical of bilingualism, multiculturalism, and any efforts to adapt to large numbers of non-English-speaking residents. Immigrants, in the view of U.S. English, should acquire English as quickly as possible, rather than trying to make it in America using government-supplied translations for applications, driver’s license exams, and voter registration materials. The organization supported state drives across the country to establish English as the official language of the United States.
The national face of U.S. English was S. I. Hayakawa, a Canadian-born Japanese-American and a respected linguistics scholar, who had served in the U.S. Senate. Standing behind Hayakawa was the less well-known cofounder, Dr. John Tanton. The organization attracted positive press coverage, well-known supporters among intellectuals and immigrants like Alistair Cooke, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Walter Cronkite, and Saul Bellow. Linda Chavez backed the broad goals of U.S. English, and was particularly distressed by what she saw as the failures of bilingual education in U.S. schools. “Our specific purpose was to convince the country to adopt English as the official language. This would mean that schools would only use English in the classroom. I was concerned with the effects of bilingual education on young Hispanics. In California and elsewhere youngsters were learning to read and write in Spanish instead of English when they entered first grade. Once enrolled in bilingual programs they could be stuck there for years.”
There was a strong appeal in U.S. English’s pitch to common sense and American ideas about assimilation. State after state placed official English referendums on the ballot. The organization found a supporter in conservative champion and U.S. English honorary chairman Senator Barry Goldwater. “You live in this country, you speak English. You live in Mexico, you speak Spanish. You live in France, you speak French.”
Marielito Mirta Ojito did her modest part. After months of dreaming of returning to Cuba, she crossed a threshold. “I went to the movies. I was watching, and for the first time I understood a complete sentence in English. ‘It seems you are coming down with a cold,’ one actor said. The sentence is etched in my memory. It marked the moment I began to feel the possibilities of life in the United States. It felt like I’d been handed a key that could unlock the door into my new world.”
Language was a hot topic. The air was thick with recollections of immigrant ancestors who seemed to have learned English quickly and competently forty, fifty, and sixty years earlier. The newsstands of the Ellis Island generations stuffed with foreign-language newspapers; scenes of grandchildren translating their grandparents’ negotiations with storekeepers; German-language classrooms in the Midwest and Plains states disappeared down the memory hole, replaced with angry anecdotes about retail clerks and lunch counter waitstaff who had trouble taking orders in English.
In the late 1980s, the backlash escalated from Miami to Los Angeles, when debates over the official language emboldened businesses to order Spanish-speaking employees not to speak to one another in any language other than English, with the added threat of suspension and firing. In 1987 a Tucson, Arizona, Ramada Inn forbade employees to speak any language other than English, and in that same year an Arizona Pepsi bottling plant fired Rafael Lugo after sixteen years on the job because he could not speak sufficient English.
Then Dr. Tanton’s wider interests became better known. He was an advocate of official English, and a strong supporter of ending not only illegal but also legal immigration to the United States, with the eventual goal of stopping population growth in the United States. In a private memo in 1986, he wondered whether Latinos would ever get the hang of being American: “Will Latin American migrants bring with them the tradition of the mordida [bribe], the lack of involvement in public affairs, etc. . . . What are the differences in educability between Hispanics (with their 50% dropout rate) and Asiatics (with their excellent school records and long tradition of scholarship)?”
Tanton wondered who would come out ahead in America, groups that limited their fertility, or those that went ahead and had more children? “Can homo contraceptivus compete with homo progenitiva if borders are not controlled? Or is advice to limit one's family simply advice to move over and let someone else with greater reproductive powers occupy the space?”
Tanton saw a grim future for a “minority-majority” California, likening it to apartheid-era South Africa, as long as Latino birthrates remained high. “Perhaps this is the first instance in which those with their pants up are going to get caught by those with their pants down!”
When the note was made public in 1988 it brought a storm of bad publicity and criticism. Walter Cronkite publicly resigned from U.S. English’s board, as did Linda Chavez. “I firmly believed that learning English was the only way to succeed in America, that it was the key to opportunity. But how could I continue to represent an organization whose founder and cochairman harbored such unsavory views? I also discovered that the umbrella organization NumbersUSA, controlled by Tanton, had received donations from a foundation that contributed to eugenics research and advocated forced sterilizations—views I considered beyond the pale.”
Chavez had been caught by an enduring truth of more than a century and a half of debates about immigration and acculturation in the United States. While many sincerely asked tough questions about the ability of a society to welcome, settle, and support large numbers of newcomers, others denounced America’s historic open door out of xenophobia and white supremacy. The two critiques of American immigration policy constitute a persistent strand in the country’s politics going back to the panic over large numbers of central Europeans and Irish in the mid-nineteenth century.
U.S. English was only the best-known of the groups that emerged in this era to question, and militate against, the growing accommodation of foreign languages in American life. There were widespread complaints—and more substantially, campaigns against—such government services as driver’s tests, election materials, and public school instruction in foreign languages. Because of prevailing immigration pattern
s, one language, Spanish, got more attention than any other.
In 1988 voters headed to the polls in Arizona, Colorado, and Florida, all once parts of the Spanish Empire where the language was still widely spoken, and passed English-only laws. Eventually, fourteen more states did the same. In context, this anxiety should not have been surprising. The decade that shaped the country’s self-concept as a nation of immigrants, 1900 to 1910, saw more than eight million legal immigrants come to the United States. Those numbers plunged in succeeding decades (but, of course, the impact was proportionally even greater in a country that had, in 1910, just over ninety-two million people).
Those huge numbers of new immigrants were not reached again until the 1980s, when just over six million immigrants entered the United States (similar to the decade of 1910 to 1920), but this time the 1990s followed with more than nine million, and the 2000s with more than nine million. Even with a much larger-based population of more than 250 million people, these were stunning numbers of new people. Add in millions of illegal immigrants to that total and more than thirty million people came to stay in thirty years.
Since the 1830s, Latinos in the United States could say to America, with some justification, “We’re here, because you were there.” The United States had been deeply involved in the rapid increase in residents with roots in the Spanish Empire through purchase, war, and conquest. Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Cubans could point to eras in history when Uncle Sam reached into their home countries and began encounters that ended with large numbers of people from all those places living in the United States.
In this new era, there would be similarities and differences. Many left economically moribund regions of the hemisphere hoping to find more opportunity in the United States. Others lived in countries whose recent histories had been deeply marked by occupation, influence, and outright meddling in their domestic affairs in either economic or political realms. Often both. The superpower confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union would have a lasting impact in Central America and cause a poignant brand of migration: Hundreds of thousands fled Central America to a country some saw as deeply involved in their country’s troubles.
Carlos Vaquerano was a teenager in the late 1970s, as the rising tide of political violence in El Salvador pitted conservative, pro-Western, Catholic Church–aligned forces against anticapitalist, antiestablishment groups armed by the Soviet Union and its allies. One of eleven children, Carlos joined an antigovernment organization with some of his brothers in 1979. The killings reached his small hometown of Apastepeque, more than thirty miles from the capital, San Salvador, in 1980.
“I graduated from high school in 1979, and became involved in antigovernment organizations. Some of my brothers did the same. On July 12, 1980, a death squad found its way to Apastepeque. I remember that day well. I was at my brother’s house when we saw a group of men dressed in paramilitary gear pass by. All heavily armed. All wearing masks. Like evil spirits.”
Just an hour later, word reached Carlos that his brother Marcial and his cousin Luis had been taken away. He fled to the capital. “When we arrived, our neighbor from Apastepeque told us that Marcial’s body had been found, with six others. The death squad had pulled off their fingernails, beaten them severely. They’d been burned with acid, then shot in the head. And then six of them were laid out in a row for public display. They left the body of my cousin Luis hanging off a bridge.”
Carlos Vaquerano back in El Salvador. As the tensions rose in the small country, Vaquerano decided he had to flee his small hometown, Apastepeque. After a flight to Mexico and a bus ride to the border, he crossed into the United States stuffed under the hood of a pickup truck. CREDIT: CARLOS VAQUERANO
The death squads were often comprised of current and former military officers, out of uniform, schooled in the use of weapons. It would be an exaggeration to say the United States supported these extrajudicial killings, but no exaggeration at all to say Washington supported the governments and political parties from which these squads grew.
In El Salvador, the Nationalist Republican Alliance—Alianza Republicana Nacionalista, or ARENA—rose to oppose the FMLN, the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional, or Martí Front for National Liberation, a Communist-inspired, Cuban-supported left-wing alliance trying to overthrow the Salvadoran junta. ARENA death squads killed Catholic priests and nuns, trade union officials, and left-wing sympathizers. In tiny El Salvador, smaller than the state of New Jersey, more than eighty thousand were killed in the civil war that raged throughout the 1980s, and almost ten thousand simply vanished.
During the years when similar wars engulfed Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Honduras, almost a million people left Central America. Their number one destination was the United States. Vaquerano was one of them. “I was faced with a dilemma: Should I stay in a country that had murdered two of my brothers, my cousin and my friends? I couldn’t go back to my mother’s home without the risk of being tracked down. My sister Lupita had gone to Los Angeles and had a job there. She offered to help me come live there.”
Whether you left Dublin in the 1840s, Poland in the 1890s, or Sicily in the 1910s, what often determined whether you went to Australia, Argentina, South Africa, or the United States was whether a relative was already established one place or another. An advance guard of Salvadorans had already taken root in the city that would attract more than half the Salvadorans heading north: Los Angeles.
The United States supported the Salvadoran government under José Napoleón Duarte, and was helping it fight the FMLN. So Vaquerano could not enter the United States as a political refugee, even though he believed the death squads roaming Apastepeque constituted what U.S. law required, “a well-founded fear of persecution.” If he could not reach el Norte by the front door, he concluded, he would have to figure out a way through the back.
“I had little money, but I was able to fly to Mexico City and take a bus to Tijuana. From there I knew I would have to enter the United States illegally. Two coyotes took me and another Salvadoran man, heading for the border around midnight in a GMC pickup truck.” Coyotes are people smugglers. They stashed Vaquerano under the hood, atop the truck engine, protected only by a thin towel.
“It was unbelievably hot. Burning. We were getting desperate. I almost started screaming. Then, finally, I heard the signal—tapping on the dashboard. Thank God, we made it through. When I got out of that engine cabin I treasured every breath of fresh air my lungs could take in.”
The smugglers celebrated their successful crossing by taking Vaquerano to eat at a place whose red sign and golden arches symbolize America to the far corners of the earth, McDonald’s. At that moment the newly minted illegal immigrant had to confront the ambiguities of refugee life. “To me McDonald’s was a symbol of U.S. cultural and economic domination of the world—the country supporting a government that killed my brothers and other innocent people. So I was very angry at this country. But I was also very hungry. So I ate the Big Mac. And I knew what I had to do. So I started taking English classes right away.”
When Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act in November 1986, it had several goals. It would first and foremost put the enforcement burden for hiring workers who were not authorized to live and work in the United States squarely on employers. Second, but far more noted by the general public, it would open the path to legal residence to millions of people who had come to the country illegally and begun to make lives here. The thinking was simple: The United States would give people who had cheated under the old system a chance to get legal, and then slam the door behind them. Hundreds of thousands of off-the-books and underground workers would now pay taxes, have Social Security numbers and their equivalents, and the new system would work to ensure that millions more would not come illegally to work.
President Ronald Reagan signing the Immigration Reform and Control Act in November 1986. The law require
d employers to verify their workers’ legal right to be in the country, and gave amnesty to people who entered illegally before January 1, 1982. Millions of undocumented people have come into the country and gone to work since the act was signed. CREDIT: RONALD REAGAN LIBRARY
The first half of that idea worked. More than two and a half million people who had been living and working illegally in the United States became legal residents. The new law put enforcement pressure on employers, who would be fined for hiring undocumented workers, penalties that would double with each new infraction.
The years that followed presented an interesting mix of American hunger for low-wage labor, constant complaints about IRS enforcement from employers, and surplus labor in Latin America looking north for opportunity. The result? After years of steady economic growth, there were an estimated twelve million people in the United States by the 2000s who did not come here legally. Though the lack of enforcement ended up giving “amnesty” a bad name in American political debate, the Immigration Reform and Control Act ended the hiding and lying for millions of people.
Carlos Vaquerano became a legal resident of the United States in 1988. In 1992, when the main combatants in the Salvadoran civil war signed a peace deal and promised to do their fighting at the ballot box, Vaquerano did not go home. “Like a lot of Salvadorans, I began to realize that my place in this country had begun to change. No longer were we short-term asylum seekers, but a growing and permanent community in the United States.”