El Norte

by Carrie Gibson

  For the most part, people from Latin American countries identify themselves by their nation of birth: Cuban, Colombian, Venezuelan. As soon as they come to the United States, they often find themselves categorized as Hispanic or Latino/a, or the more inclusive Latinx.** This modern usage is in large part an identity created in the United States and one that brings a certain uniformity—though also vital political clout—to a diverse group of people. Even the assumption that people in Latin America are Spanish-speakers is misplaced, as there are a wide variety of Amerindian languages spoken across the continent. The use of the term “Hispanic” in this book is a way to pick at, challenge, and understand its meaning, and examine the historical forces that formed its linguistic evolution and social context.

  Yet for those of Spanish-American origin who have long been in the United States, a reverse question could be asked: at what point are you allowed to not be Hispanic? People who are identified by the census as “Hispanic” might have a grandparent who arrived from Mexico or Cuba two generations ago, or might speak only a smattering of Spanish, but this is often met with an expectation that as recent arrivals they should be knowledgeable about their “heritage” and “traditions,” which, by implication, are not Anglo-American.

  Language, in particular, is no small matter. Are you Hispanic if you don’t speak Spanish? The share of Hispanic people who speak Spanish at home has declined, with 73 percent speaking it in 2015, against 78 percent in 2006, according to a Pew Research Center study. Despite this drop, another poll of Hispanic people in 2015 found that for 71 percent of respondents, it was not necessary to speak Spanish in order to be considered Latino.8 Despite these shifts, the overall number of Spanish-speakers in the United States remains a source of anxiety to those for whom “becoming American” means speaking English. Some 440 million people are native Spanish-speakers, while around 370 million are native English-speakers, and at least the same number again speak English as a second language. The United States is now second only to Mexico in the number of its Spanish-speakers, with 41 million speakers and nearly 12 million who say they are bilingual.* At the same time, thirty-one states—including Florida, Arizona, and California—have declared English their official language. There is a great deal of silence about this particular aspect of the Hispanic past, as if prohibiting the use of Castilian will somehow erase that history as well as resolve the contemporary issues. “We are never as steeped in history,” the Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot wrote in his classic Silencing the Past, “as when we pretend not to be.”9

  Alongside language is a question that permeates every pore of contemporary American life: race. In this seemingly endless obsession with physiognomy, a toxic hangover from slavery and Jim Crow, is “Hispanic” just another way of saying “not white”? Although scientific notions of “race” have been discredited, as a social force it continues to order society, placing hierarchies in everything from the organization of labor to the distribution of rights. Creating “whiteness” and granting access to it were—and remain—ways to create power and exert social control.10 As the historian Nell Irvin Painter pointed out in The History of White People, race has no scientific basis and so “is an idea, not a fact, and its question demands answers from the conceptual rather than factual realm.”11 Race, at its most basic level, as sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant point out, is a way of “making up people.” To them, the social development of the United States had been shaped by what they call “racialization,” a process by which “racial meaning” is extended to “a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice or group,” in this case, Hispanic people.12

  Historians, activists, novelists, and people in everyday life are trying to make sense of race, while the practice of putting people into racial categories continues. This is not unique to the United States. All Latin American nations share in the colonial legacy of racism, as, too, does Canada. In some places, including Mexico, it is a question of a person looking more indigenous or European. In others, like the Dominican Republic, it is about “blackness.”13 Even seemingly positive trends toward multiculturalism, or in Mexico mestizaje, have led to criticism that such color blindness continues to obscure structural inequalities and ongoing racism. A glance across the powerful and wealthy in Latin America shows the lightest-skinned often at the top. These different whitenesses sometimes do not translate, however, and many people find they go from being white in their home nation to being “Hispanic” or “brown” in the United States. “Brown confuses,” Richard Rodriguez wrote in his memoir about race. “Brown forms at the border of contradiction,” though with its mixture of Indian, African, and European, to Rodriguez brown is the true “founding palette.”14

  Equally muddied is the issue of “ethnicity,” which overlaps with markers such as language or food. There is no clear consensus on where Hispanic people lie on this spectrum, or even how to pinpoint ethnicity. To the historian Alan Gallay, an ethnic identity “becomes apparent only when people are faced with an external threat that draws them together,” a conclusion drawn from his research on Native Americans in the seventeenth century. For Gallay, ethnicity is “relational and situational” and thus there can be no “pure” ethnicities because even elements like religion or language are mutable.15 In the context of Mexican-Americans, the historian George J. Sánchez has described ethnicity as being “not a fixed set of customs surviving from life in Mexico, but rather a collective identity that emerged from daily experience in the United States.”16 For the Californian journalist Carey McWilliams, writing in 1948, the terms “Anglo” and “Hispano” were simply “the heads and tails of a single coin, a single ethnic system; each term has a meaning only as the other is implied.”17

  Today, ethnicity remains as puzzling as race, and it, too, is often shaped by stereotypes. Are you still “Hispanic” if you speak only English, are Protestant, and don’t care for tacos? Language, race, and ethnicity also overlap with the question of citizenship, and so inform one of the key underlying issues: belonging. This can lead to what the legal historian Mae Ngai has called “alien citizens,” which she defined as “persons who are American citizens by virtue of their birth in the United States but who are presumed to be foreign by the mainstream of American culture and, at times, by the state.” To Ngai, a type of foreignness can exist in one’s own homeland, where one group, such as Hispanics, is deemed “illegitimate, criminal, and unassimilable.” Despite being citizens, they are told they don’t belong.18

  Now turn this around: who does belong? Who is allowed to be American? Although it is a nation that puts an immigrant narrative at its core—a story that immediately shunted aside the history of black and Native American people—many of the groups who came to the United States in significant numbers have faced some sort of prejudice. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, was wary of the Germans, asking, “Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanise us?”19 However, in the earliest days of nationhood—itself a political experiment—the United States needed to craft an identity. In some ways this was a reaction to Europe of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which was a kaleidoscope of often warring kingdoms, city-states, and principalities.20 For the fledgling United States, identity was also an existential question. Survival apart from the British empire depended on some sort of unity, not least because the strip of thirteen colonies along the Atlantic was surrounded by Native American nations and the encroaching Spanish and French. In formulating what the United States would be, one founder, John Jay, had this vision of the nation: “Providence has been pleased to give this one country to one united people, a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion.”21

  Like whiteness, being “American” was designed at some level to be exclusionary; it was built on Anglo and northern European ancestry, Protestantism, and, for the most part, speaking English. There was no place for the
Indians or the enslaved Africans, or even southern Europeans. To J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, a French immigrant who arrived in 1759 and was writing around the time of the American Revolution, “Americans” were “a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes.” Crèvecoeur, whose Letters from an American Farmer enjoyed a wide readership in Europe, considered these people to be “melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.”22

  By the nineteenth century, during a time of widespread Eastern and southern European immigration, southern Mediterraneans such as Italians and Greeks were considered not quite “white.” Yet by the early twentieth century, Mexican laborers, who were in demand, were allowed, up to a point, to be “white.” White, it appears, was a gray area. Italians are now considered white, but Mexicans usually are not. Like many of the categories that are bandied about—race, ethnicity, black, white, Latino—“American” is a social construction, supported by a scaffolding of historical precedent, tradition, legal structures, and government legislation. For all the talk of the melting pot or the salad bowl, for all the protests, Twitter feuds, and talking heads, the question of who is allowed to be American remains unresolved.

  This book, then, is devoted to examining the construction of the Hispanic past. The story it outlines is an epic one. It could easily run into many volumes, so there will be no promises of an exhaustive account. There is also no glorification: the Spanish had plenty to be ashamed about. Not every event will be outlined; not every policy of every president will be dissected in detail. For the most part, Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and Puerto Rico are the places of focus, as they dominated the United States’ relationship with its southern neighbors until the 1950s. Likewise, the stories of Native Americans, African-Americans, and Asian-Americans, who are an important part of this history, are necessarily curtailed, as is the connection with Brazil and Portuguese-speakers. Nor is there scope to consider the more mutual aspects of these long connections, namely the extent of U.S. influence in Latin America. However, the full bibliography (available at carriegibson.co.uk) offers a guide to more detailed reading.

  In general, the route I take through this dense history has two parallel tracks. An interstate offers a narrative history of events and people from the arrival of the Spanish in the early sixteenth century to the present day. This is the story of El Norte. The back road, so to speak, is the cultural one. Dotted throughout the book are some observations about how the story of the Hispanic past is remembered, forgotten, or reinvented, reflecting its ever-shifting place in the nation’s wider collective memory.

  El Norte is organized chronologically, with four overlapping sections. The first starts with the arrival of the Spanish in North America. After all, for much of its early history, the United States was not a dominant power. It was a small, though troublesome, English-speaking fringe in a world that was dominated by Spain.23 From there, the book moves into a second section, the independence period, as Spain’s colonies became nations, looking at the relationship of the young United States with these new republics—especially Mexico—throughout the nineteenth century. This was a time of great upheavals, not least the Texas Revolution, the Mexican-American War, and the Spanish-American-Cuban War that closed out the nineteenth century.

  The third part looks at the early decades of the twentieth century, especially immigration, as Mexicans, Cubans, and Puerto Ricans arrived in significant numbers. This is the period when the paths to the present become more recognizable, as stereotypes harden and parts of the social structure begin to shut out Hispanic people. This overlaps with the final section, which considers the changes in wider public attitudes and ideas about immigration after the Second World War—in which Hispanic-Americans played an important part—and the Cuban Revolution, the onset of NAFTA, and the current political climate.

  THE FIRST STOP, however, is not in El Norte, but on the small Bahamian island of San Salvador, where Christopher Columbus is thought to have landed in 1492. Although he is both admired and reviled across the continent, there is no telling the story of Spain in the Americas without Columbus.24

  The Genoese navigator presented his plan for an expedition to the east to the powerful monarchs of Castile and Aragon, Isabel and Fernando, at an opportune moment. They had just finished a drive in Andalusia to expel what was left of the Moorish kingdoms from the Iberian Peninsula, and their victory in Granada in early 1492 ended the centuries-long Muslim era in Spain. The monarchs were buoyed by this triumph, and also interested in possible new sources of revenue to cover their costs.

  Columbus, an experienced navigator, had been trying for years to raise money. He believed his calculations would eventually deliver him to the east—even though he would be sailing west—and to Cipangu, as Japan was labeled on early maps. There he would encounter all the riches this part of the world was said to contain. He finally secured the backing of the Catholic monarchs, organized his ships, and set sail, not realizing that he was thousands of miles off in his calculations. Rather than arriving in Japan, he spotted the Bahamas in October 1492. His initial encounter with the people there did not inspire him to linger—the sandy isle did not match his expectations of great eastern cities—and so his three ships pushed on, landing on Quisqueya. He claimed it for the crown, and renamed it Española (also called Hispaniola, today’s Dominican Republic and Haiti). There he found enough evidence of gold to convince him to search for more.25 Columbus had also been on a trading mission, and he would have been familiar with the sort of transactions between Africans and Portuguese that had been taking place for decades at the trading posts that dotted the West African coast, including exchanges of cloth, gold, weapons, and humans.

  The arrival of Columbus and his men sowed the seeds of destruction for the indigenous way of life, and the initial friendliness and curiosity on the part of the people of Quisqueya soon turned to hostility and fear, as Columbus and his men started to enslave them or they fell ill with unfamiliar diseases. Columbus wanted to establish a colony and implement what became known as the encomienda.26 This entitled the leaders of a successful expedition who had been given a grant, known as encomenderos, the right to collect tribute from the vanquished. In the case of Hispaniola, this required making deals or using force to exact tribute from the indigenous chiefs, whom the Spanish called caciques. Although some of it went into the crown’s coffers, there could also be a vast personal reward for raising an expedition. Initial anger at the behavior of the Spanish was thought to have led to the disappearance of La Navidad, the first colony, on the north coast of the island, named to reflect its founding near Christmastime. Columbus had left thirty-nine men there and returned to Spain in January 1493 to show the king and queen what he had found, as well as to resupply. By the time he came back to Española in November 1493, the settlement was empty. Undeterred, Columbus moved farther east along the coast and established La Isabela, in honor of the queen, which survived.

  Gold was not the only concern: there was also God. In exchange for the tribute the people of Quisqueya paid, the Spaniards offered them protection from any enemy and conversion to Christianity. To the minds of the crown and the conquistadores, this was a legitimate transaction; these Spaniards, as one historian put it, could “serve God, country, and themselves at the same time.”27

  Religious conversion was bound up with the colonization project for Spain and Portugal from the beginning. In 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued the bull Inter Caetera, which outlined this spiritual dimension, stipulating that on these voyages to non-Christian lands there must be “worthy, God-fearing, learned, skilled, and experienced men, in order to instruct the aforesaid inhabitants and residents in the Catholic faith.”28 The document also gave Spain and Portugal spheres of influence, and these demarcations were confirmed in 1494 by the Treaty of Tordesillas, which put the limit of the Portuguese boundary at 370 leagues (around 1,185 nautical miles) west of the Cape Verde Islands. Spain was given everything to the we
st of that line, which was the vast majority of the American landmass, with only the easternmost part of Brazil falling to the Portuguese. When these documents were being drawn up, the size of the area was speculative and the number of possible converts could scarcely have been imagined.29 Although it is thought that no priests were on Columbus’s first voyage, by the second, in September 1493, two or three Franciscans were aboard. From then on, religious orders became intimately involved in the conversion of the Americas.30

  While the term “Spanish” is used as shorthand to describe Columbus’s men, they were anything but; calling them Europeans—or at least Mediterraneans—is more accurate. Columbus, although long associated with Spain, had grown up in Genoa and spent much of his seafaring life sailing out of Portugal. The geographical boundaries of the Iberian Peninsula contained a broad mix of people, many of whom, including Catalans, Basques, and Galicians, as well as the Portuguese, would become part of the imperial project in the New World. Spanish, as an identity, did not exist in 1492. It developed over time, as crowns and kingdoms consolidated.31 Indeed, as explorers pushed into new territories on the Central and South American landmass, they added to what were then considered kingdoms—not colonies—under the crown of Castile.32 Part of what it meant to be a Spanish subject was forged in the colonies of the growing empire, as Catholicism and the use of Castilian (rather than other languages, such as Basque or Catalan) became integral to that identity. Also, within the space of Columbus’s four voyages between 1492 and 1502, Spanish and indigenous people began to mix sexually, by desire, force, or pragmatism, and a group of people known as mestizos were born, blending together these worlds.

  The Spanish managed to survive in Hispaniola, despite ongoing attacks from the island’s indigenous communities, while the crown became alarmed by reports of conquistadores’ abuse of the Amerindians.* Even Columbus fell afoul of the monarchs by granting land to men on the island without royal permission, and in 1499 Francisco de Bobadilla was dispatched to Hispaniola to replace Columbus as governor. The following year, in 1500, the crown issued a royal cédula (decree) that freed any Amerindian slaves who had been brought to Spain, although native people in the Caribbean could continue to be enslaved if they resisted conversion to Christianity.