Latino Americans

by Ray Suarez

  Representative James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin). The veteran congressman sponsored galvanizing legislation that would have made being in the United States without legal status a felony. The Sensenbrenner bill helped drive protests nationwide in support of undocumented workers in 2006—protests that in turn provoked a strong backlash. CREDIT: GETTY IMAGES

  H.R. 4437 passed the House with a strong majority. The Wisconsin congressman lit the match, and immigrants of every stripe, naturalized and illegal, longtime and newly arrived, began shouting back. Many of the drum majors leading the marches were radio talk-show hosts on Spanish-language radio. In Chicago, Rafael Pulido, El Pistolero, urged his listeners to take to the streets, and they did. In the following weeks and months of 2006, huge crowds gathered in demonstrations in support of immigrants.

  The marches got America’s attention. Downtown businesses were closed, lacking the workers to make sandwiches, bus tables, take deliveries on loading docks, or staff retail counters. Critics of the first demonstrations were enraged by the Mexican flags carried in the streets of America, heavily critical of the self-confidence the marchers showed in making demands of the United States.

  In Phoenix, two hundred thousand came out. In Los Angeles, nearly a million on just one of the May Day marches that snarled traffic in big metropolitan areas from coast to coast. By May Day the streets were full of American flags to accompany the national flags that made so many so angry. The flags carried alongside the Stars and Stripes were not just Mexican. It was a reminder of how many people had come from so many places under a variety of circumstances. In New York, West Indian and West African immigrants demonstrated the diversity of the country’s foreign-born. In Chicago, Polish and Irish flags were proudly carried with the Mexican banner. In several cities, Puerto Rican flags, carried by people who had no immigration problems, testified to the solidarity many felt, even if they were in no jeopardy themselves.

  “How can a country of immigrants be against immigrants?” asks Mexican-born Juan José Gutiérrez, one of the national organizers of the marches, in a PBS interview. “The truth of the matter is that by the millions, men and women, hardworking men and women that do the tough jobs in America, who pay taxes, abide by the rules, have children, have to work hard to put food on the table . . . they decided to stand up, to do the American thing, you know, to take a page from history of what this great country has had to go through to right the wrongs of this nation: They’ve said, ‘Enough.’”

  The marches of 2006 not only got Americans’ attention; they showed the immigrants and their allies themselves how much organizational power and economic clout they really had. For years before 2006, Republican politicians had taken some comfort in the opinion polls among Latinos that showed a split community, not necessarily supportive of an easy path to legal status or citizenship. Polls earlier in the decade had shown that many longer-term residents were no more sympathetic to the aspirations of illegal immigrants than their non-Latino neighbors.

  The vehemence of the attacks of 2005 and 2006, the harsh rhetoric that surrounded the debate over H.R. 4437, convinced many Latino onlookers that the debate had long since stopped being just about illegal immigrants. In the tone of the attacks, Latinos heard a distaste for their community writ large.

  Univision news anchor María Elena Salinas, born in the United States and raised in Mexico, says Latinos now saw themselves in the immigrants they were defending. “The majority of Latinos in this country are U.S. citizens or residents, and many feel that attacks against immigrants are attacks against their own parents, siblings, cousins, neighbors, or friends. Among the hundreds of thousands who participated in immigrant marches in the spring were legal residents and U.S. citizens. Many carried signs that read, ‘Today we march; tomorrow we vote.’”

  The Sensenbrenner bill may have sparked an explosion in immigrant activism, but it died after the House vote, when it could not be reconciled with a much less stringent Senate bill. There would be no comprehensive immigration reform in 2006, or 2007, or in the years that followed. There was clear interest in both the Democratic and Republican parties in solving the challenges posed by an immigration system that was not making anybody happy.

  By the 2010s, it was hard to remember that just a few years earlier there were bipartisan bills meant to address the widespread complaints about border security, the sclerotic legal immigration system, family unity, and the challenges of the twelve million illegal immigrants already living in the United States. Representative Luis Gutiérrez (D-IL), Representative Floyd Flake (R-AZ), Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA), and Senator John McCain (R-AZ) drafted bills that aspired to give all the contending groups in the debate enough of what they wanted to be able to walk away from the table thinking they had made a good deal.

  As the war between the political parties escalated on Capitol Hill, the idea of a grand bipartisan deal, even with a supportive President George W. Bush in the White House, faded. By the 2008 primary season, John McCain denounced the very version of immigration reform he had helped draft and cosponsor two years earlier.

  One influential combatant in the immigration debate was political scientist and historian Samuel Huntington. His book Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity was widely quoted by those who saw continued high levels of immigration as a threat to any settled idea of what the country is and what it means to be an American. Huntington was straightforward. “In this new era, the single most immediate and most serious challenge to America’s traditional identity comes from the immense and continuing immigration from Latin America, especially from Mexico, and the fertility rates of these immigrants compared to black and white American natives.”

  While only lightly citing evidence, Huntington concluded that the assimilation “successes” of past immigrant flows was unlikely to be repeated with this latest generation of Latino immigrants. He came to some frightening conclusions, writing, for instance, that if America neglected this threat there was the real possibility that the population would break up into two distinct peoples with two cultures—Anglo and Hispanic—and two languages.

  Ominous signs abound: a Spanish-language late local newscast tops the ratings in one city; “José” replaces “Michael” as the most popular boys’ name in another. The United States is compared to countries with entirely different histories that have led them to persistent conflict over language and culture: Belgium and Canada.

  Huntington conceded that previous immigrant groups eventually set aside their mother tongue and adopted English. Looking at the size and persistence of Latino immigration to the United States, the late historian concluded that the cultural conditions—television and radio stations, cable channels, and big Spanish-speaking neighborhoods—meant Latinos would not have to learn English. The possibility that Latinos might retain some degree of Spanish fluency in subsequent generations while still learning English was rejected, Huntington citing the lack of French ability in Canada’s western provinces.

  There are few more provocative assertions in the entire book than this one: “There is no Americano Dream. There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican Americans will share in that dream and in that society only if they dream in English.”

  Huntington died in 2008. Had he lived, he might have had the opportunity to revisit some of the dire predictions he made in Who Are We? The Great Recession ended the rapid rise in the number of Mexican immigrants in the United States. By 2012 it was estimated that population flows had reached “net zero,” with roughly the same number of Mexicans heading home from the United States as entering the country. He would have had the chance to examine the steady supply of new data from organizations like the Pew Hispanic Center that showed English acquisition taking place at roughly the same speed as it did for other immigrant groups.

  A fellow academic, Marta Tienda, looked at the same country Huntington did and reached a very different conclusion: “
What we are dealing with is fear. It is fear of a large Hispanic presence in this country. People say that Hispanics don’t assimilate like other immigrants, that they don’t learn English. If you look at the numbers they’re just like other immigrants. By the third generation most have assimilated and are English speaking.”

  Finally, Huntington might have had a chance to look at the campaigns of Mayor Julián Castro in San Antonio, Governor Susana Martinez of New Mexico, and Congressman Henry Cuellar of the Rio Grande Valley to see lively, hard-fought races contested among voters who are not burdened by some sort of “historical memory” of dictators and military juntas elsewhere in Latin America. Along with those prominent examples there are thousands of school board members, county executives, and state representatives whose very lives disprove the idea that American-style democracy and traditions are something Latinos have no interest in mastering.

  The real and passionate arguments about what having so many Latinos in the United States really means continued into the data gathering and tabulation of the 2010 U.S. census. People who watch American demography, politics, culture, and commerce all waited for the new numbers, particularly the new stats on the Latino population.

  Over a period of weeks, the Latino numbers were released three states at a time. “And we noticed something interesting,” said Mark Hugo Lopez of the Pew Hispanic Center. “In every new data set, every one, the state numbers were coming in higher than the projections heading into 2010.” Lopez said there was an office pool, and only one person picked a number over fifty million. “And of course, that’s who won.”

  When the final number was released in early 2011, the number was stunning: 50.5 million people, one out of every six people in the United States, identified themselves as having family roots in the Spanish-speaking countries of the hemisphere and Spain. Hiding inside that massive number were people with a lot of differences. Some had milky pale skin and blue eyes, and others were as dark as their African forebears stolen by Spanish and Portuguese slavers centuries earlier.

  Many spoke native Spanish and had only begun to learn English, and many hardly spoke Spanish at all. A portion of that fifty-million-plus were descended from the columns of Spanish soldiers and settlers who headed north four centuries earlier, and many had only just arrived. Their roots were in the Mexican lands that became part of the United States, in the Caribbean, and from Central America clear down to the tips of Argentina and Chile not far from the Antarctic Circle.

  The continuing job creation crisis in the U.S. economy fueled the anxiety that powered the continuing debate over immigration. Meanwhile, Latino families suffered mightily, losing two-thirds of their entire accumulated wealth after the collapse of the housing market. The last decade had begun in great optimism and spurred families to buy that first house. The decade ended in foreclosure, debt, and heavy, long-term underemployment.

  While it was ravaging the balance sheets of Latino families, the Great Recession was doing the same to millions of other Americans. Rising economic anxiety made it a great time to reopen the argument that never really goes away: If you are not legally in the United States, and not allowed to work, why are you here and why do you have a job? State governments, with an ear closer to the ground of public sentiment, took on the anger over illegal immigration.

  More than a dozen states drew up new laws assigning state governments and police agencies more of the responsibility for enforcing national immigration laws. Perhaps the best-known of these efforts was Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070, which was signed into law in 2010. The law gave state and local officers in Arizona not just the option, but the obligation to check someone’s legal right to live in the United States if they encountered police for any reason. Any police business, from a domestic quarrel to a traffic stop to a murder investigation, could trigger inquiries about the legal status of all the parties involved.

  The law’s supporters maintained that the state had to take over responsibility because the federal government was not enforcing immigration laws and Arizona was overrun with people crossing the border into its southern deserts. The opponents said S.B. 1070 would open up a legal way for police officers across the state to racially profile suspects, intercepting people going about their business in order to inquire about immigration status. They alleged that police would equate Mexican with illegal status, in a state that is between a quarter and a third Latino.

  The Obama administration, fighting to protect its right to be the sole enforcer of national immigration laws, went to court to stop S.B. 1070 from going into effect. The U.S. government won the argument in various federal courts of appeal, while Arizona under the leadership of Governor Jan Brewer continued to fight for the state’s right to enforce federal laws.

  When the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in 2012, it handed down a split decision, forbidding Arizona from putting several parts of the law into place, while allowing a core provision empowering local law enforcement to investigate any individual’s immigration status.

  S.B. 1070 was the model for similar laws in a dozen other states. In letters to the editor, television interviews, town halls, and Internet chat rooms, the attitude of many Americans could be summed up in one rhetorical question: “What part of ‘illegal’ don’t you understand?” Efforts to frame legislative fixes that would start collecting income taxes and fines from illegally resident workers were bashed as being insufficiently tough on people who had broken the country’s laws when they stayed, and then kept on breaking them every day they went to work.

  In the morality play of immigration debates, one more sympathetic group of people were called “Dreamers,” after the law popularly called the Dream Act aimed at finding a way to let some immigrants stay in the United States. They were brought to the United States as children, sometimes even babies in the arms of parents, unlike many of their own brothers and sisters who were born in the United States and were thus citizens. These youngsters often had no memory of having lived anywhere else, but were vulnerable to deportation “back home” if caught by immigration authorities.

  The Dreamers were sometimes called the “low-hanging fruit” of the immigration debate, an easy sell for advocates of a wider amnesty, hard to disdain by immigration hard-liners, since they took no active role in their illegal migration to this country. They faced a particularly tough set of choices as they reached adulthood, unable to vie for scholarship money for higher education, and legally barred from paying in-state tuition for colleges and universities.

  In 2012, President Obama ordered his immigration enforcement agencies not to deport young men and women who would have qualified for legal residence under the Dream Act proposal that was unable to pass Congress at the end of 2010. The new policy required that these undocumented people come forward and give all their personal information. In return, they would be assured of two years of a form of legal residence.

  Representative Luis Gutiérrez, who represents a Mexican and Mexican-American majority district in Chicago, insists Americans have been moved by the personal stories and the bravery of the young Dreamers, and deporting them would bring “a political backlash” no political party would court. Others were not so sure, questioning the wisdom of telling the government that has the power to send you out of the country where you are, where you work, and where you go to school. “No one has an answer [to] what it means after the two years,” Latino political analyst Angelo Falcón said. “Are these young people who are relishing a victory, or are they turning their families in to the federal government?”

  WHEN CUBAN-BORN AROLDIS Chapman unleashed a screaming fastball, clocked at more than a hundred miles an hour from the Reds’ mound in Cincinnati . . .

  When New York–born and Dominican-reared Alex Rodriguez of the New York Yankees sent another pitch sailing into the stands, burnishing his credentials as one of the greatest players ever to take the field . . .

  When Puerto Rican–born Iván Rodrígue
z of the Texas Rangers and Florida Marlins read a base runner’s lead perfectly, and gunned him down with a precise throw to a waiting infielder . . .

  . . . you were seeing the fruits of one of the great transformations in modern baseball—the steady march of players from Latin America and American players of Latin American ancestry to a central role in baseball. Major League Baseball named an “all-Latin” team in 2011, and the lineup shows a fearsome team: along with Iván and Alex Rodríguez, Dominican superstar Albert Pujols; Puerto Rico’s Roberto Alomar; Venezuelan shortstop Luis Aparicio; one of the game’s earliest Latino stars, Puerto Rican outfielder Roberto Clemente; Mexican-born pitcher Fernando Valenzuela; and Dominican hurler Juan Marichal, among others. This Spanish-speaking dream team would be led by Dominican Felipe Alou, who enjoyed a solid major-league career along with brothers Mateo and Jesús before winning more than a thousand games as a manager.

  The time line that culminates in Latin players filling more than a quarter of all roster spots on major-league baseball teams (and making up almost half the rosters of U.S. minor-league teams) starts in the second half of the nineteenth century.

  Cubans who came to the United States mainland for an education headed back to their island home with bats and balls. The same cross-pollination that saw Caribbean culture and political movements take root in the United States brought baseball to Cuba. The Guilló brothers, Nemesio and Ernesto, studied at Springhill College in Alabama, and upon their return to Havana founded the Havana Baseball Club in 1868. In 1878, the Guilló brothers’ club played the first “away game” in Cuban history in Matanzas, the story goes, against the crew of an American schooner that put in to the Cuban port for repairs. Later, in 1874, again in Matanzas, the Havana club played the first professional baseball game in Cuba.