Manifest Destinies, Second Edition

by Laura E. Gómez

  Celia Lacayo has studied racial dynamics in Orange County, California, where Asian Americans and Latinos combined outnumber whites. Lacayo finds that whites are comfortable living near Asian Americans because they perceive them as racial equals, whereas they express anxiety about living near Latinos. To be sure, these different orientations may reflect the fact that 55 percent of Asian American immigrants and second-generation Asian Americans have a college education or higher, while only 21 percent of Latino immigrants and second-generation Latinos do, and, thus, reveal class bias. However, Lacayo concludes that they also reflect deeply ingrained white stereotypes of Latinos as crime-prone, as dependent on public assistance, as rejecting the value of education, and as generally resistant to mainstream assimilation. In short, Lacayo’s interviews and other data on whites’ views of Latinos place them squarely in a racially superior/inferior dyad that operates with tropes similar to those that American whites hold of African Americans. Her research shows how individual viewpoints and daily interactions (micro level) shape practices in institutions like work and schooling (meso level) and predict whites’ policy preferences that ultimately find reflection in elections and enacted policies at the level of national politics (macro level).54

  Evicted from Whiteness: Latinos in the Twenty-First Century

  At the start of the new century, Latinos—now counted as a national population—outnumbered African Americans as the nation’s largest non-white group. Despite this 2004 demographic milestone—or maybe because of it—Americans still are wrestling with where Latinos fit in the racial landscape. Manifest Destinies has argued that the legacy of American racism includes the mid-nineteenth-century colonization of Mexico and the absorption of the original Mexican Americans. Although Mexican immigration has been continuous since that time, the racial framing of Mexican Americans as inferior and the way they were pitted against African Americans and Native Americans during the nineteenth century continue to shape Latinos’ racial reality. In particular, the ethnic frame persists, even as a growing chorus of scholarship provides empirical validation for the racial frame that I have advanced.

  For example, in their recently updated Immigrant America, sociologists Alejandro Portes and Ruben G. Rumbaut embrace the idea that, over time, Mexican Americans and other immigrants (regardless of race) will become culturally assimilated, even as they acknowledge that some immigrant groups will experience blocks to what they call structural assimilation.55 They nod to the longitudinal analysis by sociologists Vilma Ortiz and Edward Telles that shows that even third- and fourth-generation Mexican Americans (that is, the great-grandchildren and the grandchildren of Mexican immigrants) continue to experience significant residential and educational segregation, discrimination in schooling and work, and the like, but Portes and Rumbaut fail to seriously grapple with its implications.56 For example, in a concluding chapter that considers President Obama’s executive order providing school and work permits for undocumented young people (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) and the host of state and local laws that recently have targeted Mexican immigrants, they term the anti-immigrant movement “intransigent nativism” and Latinos’ political resistance to it as “reactive ethnicity.”57

  Instead, there is more purchase from the sharper focus that a racial analysis brings, wherein we see the roots and fruits of anti-immigrant politics as racist and Latinos’ counterhegemonic resistance as having a strong element of racial identity.58 In framing the contemporary period, crime control emerges as an important site for the contestation of race and racism. We have, of course, seen this theme over the course of the book; consider the centrality of the criminal courts as a place where race was policed, from the “treason” trials of 1847 to the power of Mexican American legislators and jurors in the late nineteenth century. It has, likewise, emerged in this postscript’s review of the twentieth-century experience of Mexican Americans in a variety of cities and states.

  It’s no surprise that crime and policing serve as key sites for racializing Mexican Americans and other Latinos as non-white and racially subordinate, given the central place of criminalization in maintaining the oppression of African Americans. At least since the early twentieth century, whites have asserted that Mexican, Mexican American, and Puerto Rican men have a propensity for criminal activity and violent behavior. From the Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles to over-policing in the Latino neighborhoods of Chicago and New York and the New York Police Department’s stop and frisk policing of the early twenty-first century (later found unconstitutional), Latinos have learned from police that they are presumed to be criminals and, in this way, have learned their racial place in America.

  In recent decades, the presumed criminality of immigrants has been added to the mix—and not only by Donald Trump. At present, we are witness to a multi-decade, national phenomenon (though stronger and weaker in various cities and states) in which all Mexican (and often all Latino) immigrants are assumed to be “illegals.” As political scientist Alfonso Gonzales has noted, race is at the center of current immigration rhetoric and policy, which he aptly labels “the homeland security state” in order to highlight its twenty-first-century distinctiveness.59 We saw the culmination of this in the warm reception Trump received for his campaign rhetoric about “Mexican rapists” threatening (white) Americans’ way of life, one of the bedrocks that led him to be elected president. Yet it is equally certain that the seeds of Trump’s message were sowed during the post-9/11 period and especially during the two Obama administrations, as immigrants were increasingly criminalized in a variety of ways. The twin emphases on immigrants who by their very presence in the United States without legal permission are deemed criminals and on those few who commit violent crimes serve to foster the notion that immigrants come to this country for the purpose of violating the law, as opposed to acknowledging undocumented immigration as the product of global wage inequalities. For example, the U.S. minimum wage (even before a spate of recent increases in California, New York, and elsewhere) was six to seven times the prevailing wage in Mexico (and even higher than that for Central American countries).60

  In the past, immigration offenses were a matter of civil law violation (not unlike most traffic violations); but today, especially since 9/11, illegal entry into the United States is treated both informally and formally as a serious criminal offense. Deportations of immigrants without authorization reached nearly half a million in 2009 and 2010, after the Great Recession.61 These deportations were in large part the result of Obama’s Secure Communities initiative, started in 2009, which essentially set up shared databases for local police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.62 Homeland Security claims that racial profiling is not the basis for arrests under Secure Communities, but the reality is that the local police have gained federally authorized license to pursue and arrest those people who “look undocumented.”63 Indeed, it is these federal-local partnerships that have produced a countermovement, with more than sixty American cities proclaiming themselves “sanctuary cities,” where police will not routinely inquire, of those arrested or reporting crimes, about citizenship.

  In the vernacular, it has become commonplace to assume that all Latinos are Mexican, to presume they are immigrants, and to presume that they entered this country illegally. I use the word “presumed” to capture the idea that these are assumed true until and unless proven inaccurate. The entire system, then, depends on all of us (Latinos included) being complicit in policing who is and is not an immigrant, and who is and is not undocumented. In a recent study revealing how African American and Latino men (especially) are dehumanized in Cook County, Illinois, criminal courts, criminologist Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve describes how Latinos who did not speak fluent English were especially targeted for abuse by judges and prosecutors:

  They were met with a racial degradation ceremony tailored to amplify their contested citizenship in the United States and the parasitic trope that accompanies such contestations. The [racial stereotype] assumes blacks as t
he reference group, a category of people who are seen to be lazy, degenerate, and leaching off society and the criminal justice system; the notion of Latinos as “illegals” is also compatible with this construct. They are . . . overloading the system . . . perceived as a parasitic drain on the country’s resources. Being brown inscribes criminality on the body with the implication that “Latino” and “illegal” are one and the same. In fact, the notion of “illegal” implies criminal guilt. For that, abusing Latinos, anyone with brown skin, and especially those with language difficulties becomes an acceptable sport [in the courtroom].64

  Mexican Americans and other Latinos have responded in diverse ways to the hypercriminalization they are assumed to embody. Some have redoubled their efforts to assimilate, distancing themselves at every turn from immigrants, especially Mexican immigrants. Yet contemporary social science research also shows that Latinos have actively resisted the dominant society’s portrayal by engaging in political resistance. Even Cuban Americans have not been immune to pushing back. For example, in response to the passage of an English-only language initiative in 1980 in Miami-Dade County, they became politically active, with the result that, by 1985, the “established native-Anglo leaders, including those who had supported the [language] referendum, were voted out of office, replaced by former (Cuban) exiles.”65

  A decade later, a similar pattern occurred in California. In 1994, voters passed Proposition 187, which sought to deny public benefits to undocumented immigrants and to specifically empower local police to report the undocumented status of arrestees. Major provisions of the law were found unconstitutional, and the state of California eventually refused to appeal the decision, leading the law to whither unenforced. Two years later, the conservative sponsors of Prop. 187 succeeded in enacting a ballot measure that killed affirmative action in public education and employment (Proposition 209), setting off a rash of similar legislation in Washington, Florida, Michigan, and elsewhere. Four years after Prop. 187, the same conservative coalition secured passage of a ballot initiative that severely curtailed bilingual education in California (Proposition 227); that law was just reversed by voters in the November 2016 election. These three ballot measures should be read together to show the race-based nature of the conservative backlash to California’s changing demographics.66

  But the story does not end there. Political scientists Matt Barreto and Gary Segura have analyzed a host of resultant unintended consequences—that is, unintended by the proponents of Prop. 187—labeling them “the Prop. 187 Effect.” Most specifically, they argue, the middle 1990s effectively marked the end of the Republican Party in California. Between World War II and 1994, “Democrats lost every presidential election in [California] save two. . . . In gubernatorial elections . . . Democrats won only four races during this period, to the Republicans’ nine.”67 Republican Governor Pete Wilson, who actively promoted Prop. 187, lost reelection, and the Democratic Party now controls every statewide office and has supermajorities in the California Senate and Assembly.68 Population growth among Latinos and Asian Americans led to large increases in the numbers of newly registered voters between 1994 and 2004, 66 percent of whom were Latino and 23 percent of whom were Asian American.69 Other studies have shown that sizable numbers of Latinos became naturalized citizens in the wake of Prop. 187, and these voters actually were significantly more likely to vote and to vote for Democrats.70

  Another unintended consequence of the anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies of the past twenty-five years has been to galvanize grassroots activism by Latinos. This was most evident in the pro-immigrant rallies across the country in 2006 and 2007, as previously noted. These spontaneous, grassroots mobilizations spawned a more formally organized immigrants’ rights movement that fought for passage of comprehensive immigration reform (which most recently was represented in the so-called Gang of Eight legislation in the U.S. Senate in 2013). The movement also produced a corps of young undocumented persons who “came out of the closet” to demand legal rights, eventually culminating in Obama’s 2012 executive order providing undocumented persons brought to the United States as children the legal status to study and work in the country. Studies also have found that the 2006–7 protest activity led to a greater sense of collective identity as Latinos and to greater solidarity among Latinos across the board, that is, transcending differences in national origin, nativity, and/or having foreign-born parents.71 In short, there has been a backlash to the backlash, with Latinos—especially young Latinos—increasingly politicized over immigration as the civil rights issue of our time.

  Notes

  Preface

  1 Augustine-Adams, “Manifest Destinies”; Behnken, “Manifest Destinies”; Castro, “Manifest Destinies”; Cole, “Manifest Destinies”; Echeverria, “Manifest Destinies”; Gonzales, “Manifest Destinies”; Greene, “Manifest Destinies”; Hernández, “Manifest Destinies”; Padilla and Rodriguez, “Manifest Destinies”; Perea, “Manifest Destinies”; Ramos, “Manifest Destinies”; Razack, “Manifest Destinies”; Saka, “Manifest Destinies”; Smith, “Legal and Social Status of a People”; Tirres, “Manifest Destinies.”

  2 G.M.M. v. Kimpson, No. 12-CV-5059, E.D. New York (2015).

  3 Burgess, “All APS High Schools.”

  4 Ennis, Rios-Vargas, and Albert, “Hispanic Population.”

  5 My calculation includes 63 percent of Hispanics who indicated on the 2010 census that they are of Mexican origin, as well as 7 percent who identify as Hispanic/Latino and who did not specify a particular national origin group. Ibid. I surmise that this latter group of some 3.4 million persons is disproportionately descended from either the original Mexican Americans or those Mexicans who freely migrated to the United States between 1848 and 1900, prior to any American policing of the southern border. If I am correct, these persons see themselves as rather distantly connected to their Mexican ancestors yet still identify as Hispanic/Latino.

  6 Krogstad, “5 Facts about Latinos and Education.”

  7 Barreto, Ethnic Cues, 154.

  8 Gómez, “What’s Race Got to Do with It?”

  9 Gonzales, Reform without Justice, 3. The proposed legislation was the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005 (H.R. 4437), also called the Sensenbrenner Bill, after its chief author.

  10 Pallares and Flores-Gonzalez, “Introduction,” xvii.

  11 Ibid., xvi–xxii.

  12 On these topics, see Gonzales, Lives in Limbo (on undocumented youth); Rocco, Transforming Citizenship (on grassroots activism and the 2006 protests); Pallares and Flores-Gonzalez, “Introduction” (on the legacy of the 2006 marches).

  13 As this book went to press, President Trump announced that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program would end in March 2018, making its 800,000 registrants deportable. Shear and Davis, “Trump Moves to End DACA.”

  14 Varsanyi, Taking Local Control.

  15 Ibid.

  16 For a recent claim that “racial realism”—the idea that there are conditions under which it is necessary and socially advantageous to take account of race—is now a dominant idea about race, see Skrentny, After Civil Rights.

  17 Morning, Nature of Race.

  18 Aranda and Rebollo-Gil, “Ethnoracism.”

  19 Corasaniti and Ahmed, “Donald Trump to Visit Mexico.”

  20 The Washington Post gave Trump’s claim four Pinocchios, the worst possible rating on veracity. Lee, “Donald Trump’s False Comments.”

  21 Epstein, “Trump Attacks Federal Judge.”

  22 Ibid.

  23 Rappeport, “That Judge Attacked by Donald Trump?”

  24 Catherine Cortez Masto has represented Nevada since January 2017. The first Hispanic U.S. senator was Mexican American Dennis Chavez of New Mexico, elected in 1936. The first Cuban American to serve in the Senate was Melquiades (Mel) Martinez, who represented Florida (2005–9).

  25 Portes and Rumbaut, Immigrant America, 45.

  26 Ibid., 199.

 
27 See Grebler, Moore, and Guzmán, Mexican American People.

  28 Telles and Ortiz, Generations of Exclusion, xx (emphasis added).

  29 Zepeda-Millán, “Weapons of the (Not So) Weak.”

  30 Sanchez and Barreto, “In Record Numbers.”

  31 “Mapping the Latino Electorate by State.”

  32 Krogstad, “5 Facts about Latinos and Education.”

  33 Barreto and Segura, Latino America, 173–74.

  34 Echeverria, “Manifest Destinies.”

  35 Scholars frequently and fruitfully debate whether we can generalize from a case study (the exemplary thesis I assert) or whether we should stay true to the specific context of a case study (the exceptionalism thesis). For an excellent argument of the latter on New Mexico from 1821 to 1910, see Gonzáles, Política.

  36 Rocco, Transforming Citizenship, 75.

  37 Omi and Winant, Racial Formation.

  38 Castro, “Manifest Destinies,” 473.

  39 Hernandez, “Manifest Destinies,” 219.

  Introduction

  1 For studies of the nation’s early multiracial history, see Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines; Takaki, Different Mirror; Zinn, People’s History.