by Ray Suarez
“Sure, there’s bifurcation. There’s a cohort in the population, small but significant, that’s doing well, that’s living the American dream. That percentage, and the number of families, are increasing. But for a majority of the Latino population, it’s a questionable future.”
Yet she comes down on the side of optimism. “Latino culture is more of a ‘we’ culture. Most of American society is an ‘I’ culture. There are leaders coming forward who’ve chosen to make a career running nonprofit organizations. Individuals step forward to run neighborhood organizations that provide services to families in need. Many of them came out of corporate culture, but success there wasn’t enough to fulfill them.
“I think that ‘we’ culture will prevail.”
To hear Angelo Falcón tell it, that “we” culture had better prevail, because the issues that challenge the working-class majority are just not very interesting to most other Americans. The political scientist and activist maintains that things have changed, and not for the better. “Political folks, the users of our research and the focus of our work, they don’t want to talk about poor people anymore. It’s a constant battle against this idea of a postracial America.
“And it’s not just people on the right. When you talk about Latino issues, all you get is a blank stare. Unless you’re trying to get their vote! But issues like and wealth and poverty, it’s hard to raise them, unlike thirty years ago.”
“My mom is detained.” A demonstrator’s sign speaks to an increasingly common challenge in Latino communities. Millions live in “mixed-status” families, most commonly with parents and older children in the country illegally and younger children who are American citizens by birth. CREDIT: AP PHOTO/JOHN AMIS
Falcón came to New York from San Juan as an infant in the early 1950s. One of the biggest changes he notices from his childhood and teen years is the visibility of Latinos, but he wonders whether it means much. “When I was younger and coming up, we were having trouble getting visibility. It was tough to get the media to pay any attention at all to Latino issues. Today, it’s the reverse. It’s almost overexposure, especially since the 2000 census. I’ve never seen so much attention by the political parties.
“But all this exposure has led to an amazing feeling of cynicism about the political process. People realize they’re not invited to the table when important decisions are being made.”
Falcón sees a paradox: tremendous attention to Latinos, increasing cultural awareness of their presence, but an almost total ignorance of anything more consequential. “That’s the irony of it all. There’s growing nativism in this country, growing xenophobia. I’m constantly getting asked, ‘Why do you talk so much about being Cuban, being Puerto Rican, being Mexican? Latinos are doing so well! What’s the big deal?’”
In recent years, increasing numbers of Latinos of all national backgrounds have been more inclined to identify themselves as a race, separate and distinct from white and black Americans. A group of Latino scholars looking at the survey evidence from the Latino National Survey concludes that it is isolation, not being welcomed into the American whole, that is pushing Latinos to define themselves in racial terms. Falcón agrees. “I tell them, ‘It’s your hostility, your treatment, as “others,” that creates that nationalism. It’s not something that comes from the community, but from America’s reaction to that community. If you had been more welcoming, you wouldn’t have had this reaction.’”
The eight members of the Salices family faced the dilemma of millions of other “mixed status” families. After a traffic stop, the matriarch was found to be in the country illegally, and was deported. After a long legal process, the Saliceses are reunited in Dalton, Georgia. CREDIT: JORGE SALICES
To feel more optimistic, Falcón says he would want to see more new leaders, and a national agenda those leaders can use to shape Latino belief in an American future, and the rest of America’s belief in Latinos as part of the American whole. “It took time for the Irish and the Italians. They were discriminated against when they came here, but they all became part of the ongoing American reality. Latinos have not been allowed to be a part of that. So you see a racialization of their reality that’s become more persistent. It’s not clear what it means for the future.”
A comprehensive survey published in 2006, the Latino National Survey was designed to lift the lid on Latino public opinion. Researchers concluded a “substantial percentage of Latinos perceive discrimination and one response to this perception of being singled out because of their accent, skin color, immigrant origin or ethnic background is a strengthening of ethnic attachment and a sense that Latinos are a distinct racial group. Thus, the paradox is that even as Latinos Americanize, they may increasingly see themselves as part of a distinct ethnic or racial group.”
The Latino National Survey makes fascinating reading, in part because it shows how evenly spread Latino public opinion is across countries of origin, regions, even income and levels of education. It should be reassuring to the rest of the country just how sold Latinos are on the possibility of getting ahead in America through hard work, even in the face of ferocious economic setbacks. The values Latinos told LNS opinion researchers they hold place their public opinion on issue after issue directly in the core of the American mainstream.
Latinos showed the pollsters that with more time in the country, fewer and fewer immigrants report an intention to return to their home countries. As they are in the country longer, Latinos consume a greater percentage of their media diet in English. One thing the data did not show was any sign that Ronald Reagan’s old line is yet true: “Hispanics are Republicans. They just don’t know it yet.”
Gary Segura, a professor of political science at Stanford University and one of the lead researchers who compiled the data from the Latino National Survey, reminds leaders of both parties that for now, Latinos are anything but latent supporters of the GOP. “There is no evidence of the claim that Latinos are closet Republicans. There are two things that Republicans look at to make that conclusion. They look at entrepreneurial behavior among Latinos, which is very high; I’ve never met a Mexican immigrant who doesn’t have an idea for a business; it’s just . . . maybe it’s the self-selection process of who chooses to migrate or whatever, but Latinos are starting businesses left and right.
“The second is that this is a very churchgoing, family-oriented subculture that would appear to be consistent with the family-values segment of the Republican coalition. In fact in neither instance does that represent a core ideological commitment.
“There is very clear evidence that on things about wanting government to do more, versus do less, or thinking government should grow to address problems, versus shrink, or reliance on government versus the free market . . . In every one of those survey questions supermajorities of Hispanics—seventy percent or more—articulate a position in favor of a more progressive government involved to solve social and economic problems.
“So I would say about two-thirds—between two-thirds and three-quarters—of Hispanics are socially, politically, liberal progressive, and that’s a real problem for the Republicans, who can’t really stop being Republicans in order to appeal to this group. I mean, they are a conservative party and that’s their role.”
When Segura takes a closer look at the intersection between religion and social issues in politics, he recalls the results of a poll taken by his own firm. “Overwhelmingly Hispanics are churchgoing. Overwhelmingly Hispanics report that religion guides them in everyday life. But when we asked them, ‘Should ministers or priests be allowed to direct parishioners or congregants to vote for someone?’ they absolutely opposed that. Over seventy percent of Hispanics opposed that. When we asked, ‘Is government really about economic issues, gas prices, taxes, jobs? Or is government about family values, same-sex marriage, abortion?’ seventy-five percent of our respondents—including seventy-five percent of Catholics, seventy-five percent Protes
tants, seventy-five percent of self-identified born-agains; there was not variation across subgroups—three-quarters of Hispanics believed that politics is about bread-and-butter issues; it’s not about morality.
“So finally we asked the question, ‘Should politicians who have strong religious beliefs rely on those beliefs when they are making decisions about policy?’ Over two-thirds said no. So they are a religious community. But religion is religion and politics is politics, and they are not dragging one into the other.”
For now, with Latinos relying so heavily on public schools, public transit, and other government-sponsored or -supplied services, it seems unlikely a big shift is under way toward a political party that heaps scorn on public services and promises to supply fewer of them. Other immigrant groups in earlier generations moved to the Republican Party once they durably and securely reached the middle class. It will be fascinating to watch whether Latinos do the same, and if so, when. Even as they are less uniformly aligned with the Catholic Church with each passing decade, Latinos still share that Church’s disdain for contraception, homosexuality, and divorce.
There is a fascinating “two-ness,” the duality that we have witnessed before, now with regards to the conversation inside and outside the Latino community about what the present tells us about the future. A Pew Hispanic Center projection of America in 2050 sees a national population of 438 million, and a Latino population more than twice its current size, of more than 130 million, approaching one of every three Americans.
As we have mentioned, U.S. population growth in the early twenty-first century was driven by young Latinos, and after the 2010 census, half of all people added to the U.S. population in any given year were Latino. This demographic pattern was established at the same time a wave of baby boomers came crashing into their sixties and seventies. In the next thirty years America’s population will increasingly feature a growing cohort of young Latinos and a huge population of white elderly.
By some estimates, one third of Americans will trace their family history to Latin America and Spain by the middle of the twenty-first century. That would mean by 2050 a tripling of the 50 million Latinos counted in the 2010 census, as the United States grows by about 150 million people. CREDIT: GETTY IMAGES
What is not clear is how these young Latinos will see themselves. “There is a new level of multiculturalism among our youth,” says Sylvia Puente. “My daughter’s generation doesn’t totally get it. The world she and her friends grew up in is totally multicultural, so she can’t relate to the struggles she hears about from me and others about how difficult things were for Latinos in the past.
“So youth may not have the same affinity for strong ethnic identity in a country that’s not defined by the standard of white American culture.”
You cannot forget that Latinos are “marrying out”—that is, marrying people of other racial and ethnic backgrounds—at a very high rate. A quarter of all marriages involving Latinos are to a person of another ancestry. Of the more than 275,000 mixed marriages counted in 2010, more than half were between Latinos and what the census bureau calls “non-Hispanic whites.” Play that trend out into the big-number Latino future, and millions of the projected 130-million-plus may be people whose relationship to a Latino “community” may be pretty tenuous. Add the quickening pace of movement away from traditional residential centers into the suburbs, and the gradual abandonment of Spanish, and what does it mean to have a country that is 30 percent Latino at midcentury? Maybe not much. Maybe a lot.
Angelo Falcón has noticed a great deal of attention from people trying to sell things to Latinos, from car insurance and toothpaste to public school vouchers and abortion bans, while at the same time “media and politicians try to deracialize politics and policy questions.
“Yes, it’s a paradox, but it does make sense to me. The whole idea is to create a passive, malleable political consumer group. You can get the money out of them. Get the votes out of them, without really having to invest in them.”
When Arturo Madrid, a professor at Trinity University in San Antonio, looks back at his family’s, and his people’s, four-hundred-year history in what is now the United States, he remembers a grandmother’s decision to join “an American church,” to become a Protestant. A pastor warned, “If they don’t let you in the front door, you go in the back door. And if you can’t get in the back door, go in the side door. And if you can’t get in through the side door, you go in through the window.”
To Madrid, it is emblematic “of the experience of most Latinos who have not been able to enter the institutions of American society through front doors, but had to come in through back doors and side doors and some of them even through the window at night.”
Even as the holder of an endowed university chair, widely published, traveled, and experienced, Madrid finds not all doors are open in the academy, even now. “It’s space that Anglo-Americans feel is theirs, particularly intellectual, academic, cultural space. They own it and we are hard put to penetrate it. We have to be far more prepared, far more intelligent, far more accomplished, far more productive in order to be accepted.”
Yet Madrid is sure the grandchildren who carry his name will not be “anomalous,” but instead will be “part and parcel of the fabric of this society, where the ‘other’ is not constructed as a poor, illiterate recent immigrant but part of the fabric of society.”
When Gary Gerstle looks at the old Ellis Island requirements of fitting in, he sees “the jettisoning of your immigrant ethnic heritage, and a full-scale embrace of what the people already in America decided an American should be.” Now Gerstle wonders if there is a different model that may not demand that people lose their pasts entirely. “Maybe America will be a better and more interesting place if there is more diversity, if they bring their ethnic cultures, if they maintain them, and inject parts of their cultures into the American mainstream.
“In this new style of becoming American, you are not expected to relinquish everything.”
Latinos have spent 175 years learning to adapt. Luis Antonio Dámaso de Alonso of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, became Gilbert Roland, and a Hollywood star.
Jordi Farragut Mesquida of Minorca, Spain, moved to the United States at the beginning of the American Revolution and became George Farragut, and an officer in the young navy. His son, David Farragut, won the critical Battle of Mobile Bay during the Civil War and became an admiral.
One of America’s great twentieth-century poets, William Carlos Williams, was the son of an English Caribbean father and a Puerto Rican mother. He rarely referred to this heritage when talking about his life as a poet. When speaking at a writers’ conference at the University of Puerto Rico in 1940, Williams said, “We in the United States are climactically as by latitude and weather much nearer Spain than England, as also in volatility of our spirits, in racial mixture—much more like Gothic and Moorish Spain.”
It is an old story. But it is also a story that never ends. When the outlines of the modern country were complete—in other words, when America stopped coming to Latinos, and Latinos started coming to America—a love affair filled with ambiguity began and continues to this day. The United States holds the possibility of a better life, and the pain of exclusion. This amazing country has given more people from more places than any other country in the world a better, freer life, with an even better set of chances for their children.
The people who cling to the tops of railroad cars to make it to the border . . .
. . . who risk their lives sneaking across burning deserts or hide in trucks stuffed with other desperate men . . .
. . . who lash together scraps of wood into rafts to float out of Cuba . . .
. . . who for more than a century have left everything to try their chances in el Norte . . .
. . . are nothing more or less than the heirs of mission soldiers, ranchers, nuns, colonial civil servants, miners, farmers, blacksmiths
, sailors, midwives, and governors who started writing the story of this country along with the Pilgrims, along with the Jamestown settlers, the Dutch in New York, the French Protestant refugees, the West African captives, and the Portuguese Jews fleeing Brazil.
America belongs to us all. Its history is made by us all, and someday may be written about us all. We are well along a path that will change, over time, what Americans look like, what the food on your dinner plate tastes like, and what music will sound like in your car and in your home.
You have marched across the deserts of the Southwest. You have charged up San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt, sailed into Ellis Island with Isabel González, and walked out of the jungle leading Japanese prisoners with Guy Gabaldon. You have handed out leaflets for the new GI Forum with Dr. Hector Garcia, and stood firm on the picket line with Dolores Huerta. They are all part of your inheritance. They have all contributed DNA to your American present. Latino history in the United States is your history, wherever you’re from. And you won’t be able to understand the America that’s coming, without remembering the history you’ve just read.
Viva America.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THERE IS ONE byline name on the cover. However, a book, any book, is inevitably the work of many hands. Special thanks go to my trusty research assistant, Michael Melia; my indulgent bosses in this project, Jeff Bieber, Adriana Bosch and Ray Garcia; my editor, Ian Jackman, and my agent, Rene Alegria.
Thanks to all the people who shared their memories and their personal histories for this book and the accompanying television series. They make any journalist’s work better and more interesting. Thanks also to Salme Lopez at Bosch and Company, Gabriela Schulte at WETA and Kim Suarez at Penguin for their help in bringing this book to fruition.