Manifest Destinies, Second Edition
Page 1
Manifest Destinies
Manifest Destinies
The Making of the Mexican American Race
Second Edition
Laura E. Gómez
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
www.nyupress.org
© 2018 by New York University
All rights reserved
References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gómez, Laura E., 1964– author.
Title: Manifest destinies : the making of the Mexican American race / Laura E. Gómez.
Description: Second edition. | New York : NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017012909| ISBN 9781479882618 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479894284 (pb : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Mexican Americans—Race identity. | Mexican Americans—Legal status, laws, etc. | Mexican Americans—Colonization—History—19th century. | Racism—United States—History—19th century. | United States—Race relations—History—19th century. | Mexican Americans—New Mexico—History—19th century. | Racism—New Mexico—History—19th century. | New Mexico—Race relations—History—19th century.
Classification: LCC E184.M5 G625 2017 | DDC 973/.046872—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017012909
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Also available as an ebook
For my son, Alejandro
Contents
Preface to the Second Edition
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The U.S. Colonization of Northern Mexico and the Creation of Mexican Americans
2. Where Mexicans Fit in the New American Racial Order
3. How a Fragile Claim to Whiteness Shaped Mexican Americans’ Relations with Indians and African Americans
4. Manifest Destiny’s Legacy: Race in America at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Epilogue
Postscript
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Cover
About the Author
Preface to the second edition
It’s hard to predict how academic books will fare. Often written for tenure (not the case with this book), they may suffer from being written for scholars in a narrow field, and most receive little attention. Once in a while, an author is lucky enough to publish the right book at the right time. That may be the case with Manifest Destinies, first published by New York University Press in 2007 and now released in a second edition on its tenth anniversary.
I routinely hear from people who say how moved they have been by reading Manifest Destinies. In some seventy-five community and academic talks on the book, I’ve been impressed with the hunger—among Latinos and non-Latinos alike—for understanding this period of American history and what it may tell us about the present. I am grateful for the feedback I received at these settings, as well as for the comments provided in dozens of book reviews in the press, blogs, and academic journals in the fields of history, sociology, ethnic studies, and law.1 I am most proud of two unusual ways in which the book has reached audiences beyond academic circles. In 2015 the renowned federal judge Jack B. Weinstein cited Manifest Destinies in a ruling in which he found a violation of the constitutional rights of a Latina mother suing on behalf of her son who has been exposed to lead poisoning.2 In another instance, the Albuquerque Public Schools, which has a student body that is 79 percent non-white and majority-Hispanic, recently announced that it will soon offer ethnic studies courses at its thirteen high schools as a way to combat its high drop-out rate; Manifest Destinies is on the reading list.3 As a graduate of APS elementary, middle, and high schools who learned none of this history as a student, I am heartened to know that future generations of students will be exposed to this chapter of American history.
In part the success of Manifest Destinies is due to a naturally expanding audience. Latinos are now 17 percent of the total U.S. population, and over the next four decades they are projected to be nearly 30 percent.4 Almost 70 percent of Hispanics are Mexican American,5 and it makes sense that they would find compelling this story of the nation’s original Mexican Americans. What’s more, Latinos are a young population, with an average age of twenty-nine (compared to forty-three for non-Hispanic whites). In 2014 (the most recent year for which data are available), there were 2.3 million Latinos aged eighteen to twenty-four who were enrolled in college, graduate, or professional school—an increase of more than 12 percent since the turn of the century.6
Today’s Latino college students can choose to major in Chicana/o studies, Latina/o studies, or ethnic studies more generally, or they can opt to take just a course or two in these programs. While Chicana/o, Mexican American, or Latina/o studies programs exist across the Southwest and in midwestern states including Illinois, Michigan, and Minnesota, they are most numerous in California. It is not surprising that Chicano/Latino studies courses are found on virtually every higher education campus in California, a state with more than fifteen million Latinos, from community colleges to research universities. Several months before this book went to press, I had the honor of guest lecturing about Manifest Destinies to eight hundred undergraduates taking the introductory Chicano studies course at the University of California, Los Angeles. Latino students are putting pressure on colleges and universities to offer courses taught by a growing cadre of PhDs in Chicana/o studies, comparative ethnic studies, history, and the social sciences. Building on the earlier, founding generation of Mexican American scholars, these and other scholars have created an exciting interdisciplinary field that draws on virtually every traditional discipline in the social sciences and the humanities. The blossoming of Chicana/o and Latina/o studies has occurred at the same time that critical race theory has taken root in the academy. This field started in law but has branched out to a variety of other scholarly fields, including education, criminology, ethnic studies, and the social science disciplines. Manifest Destinies, then, arrived at an opportune time in the evolution of two scholarly fields central to its analysis.
Manifest Destinies entered the scene when readers were increasingly interested in the growing Latino population and its origins. It gave voice to those who had the sense that the conventional history of the American West was, at best, lacking and, at worst, malicious in its omission of the force Americans used to establish control over the Mexican and indigenous populations in the vast territory it took from Mexico. Manifest Destinies provided a necessary correction to the history of race and racism in nineteenth-century America, given its focus on slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. This book reached beyond white-over-black oppression to tell a connected yet different story about imperial expansion west and south that produced distinctive racial dynamics involving Native Americans and Mexican Americans. I hope this anniversary edition of Manifest Destinies appeals to both new and returning readers who seek a more complete history of the Southwest and the original Mexican Americans whose destinies, along with other social groups, unfolded in unexpected ways.
/> What a Difference Ten Years Makes
As I was writing this book in 2006–7, there was a sense of the burgeoning political power wielded by Hispanics. In 2005 Antonio Villaraigosa appeared on the cover of Newsweek with the banner “Latino Power!” as the newly elected mayor of Los Angeles, the first mayor of Mexican origin to lead the city in more than 130 years.7 New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson in 2007 became the first Latino candidate to seek a major political party’s nomination for president, participating in the Iowa and New Hampshire Democratic Party primaries.8 Apart from electoral politics, as many as five million people (most of them Latinos) rallied in 2006 in 160 cities across the country to successfully kill a federal immigration bill broadly considered anti-Mexican and anti-immigrant.9 The spring 2006 protests especially galvanized young Latinos, with surveys showing that upward of half of the participants were thirty or younger.10 While research shows that three-quarters of the 2006 protesters were American citizens, there is no question that the rallies marked a turning point, with immigrants—including undocumented immigrants—openly and proudly demanding respect and civil rights.11 Many observers of these marches and rallies—along with participants in them—have concluded they fostered the politicization of Latino participants (as well as Latinos consuming media about the marches), which, in turn, catalyzed a range of political activities, including voter registration, naturalization in order to exercise the right to vote, and lobbying at all levels of government.12 Indeed, many activists attribute the Dreamers’ movement that advocated for federal legislation to provide legal status to young people who were brought to the United States as children but who have made their lives here; though this legislation failed, President Obama took executive action to provide such status (a legal status now being clawed back by President Trump).13 Manifest Destinies appeared in the same month that Americans elected Barack Obama president, an event that gave great hope to so many, especially African Americans and other people of color.
Yet after two Obama presidential terms, a very different attitude toward immigrants grips the nation. Obama presided over more deportations than any other president, and his Homeland Security apparatus put in place some of the most draconian immigration policies ever implemented, including E-Verify and Secure Communities,14 which have caused many immigrants and certainly those without papers to live in constant fear of deportation. Obama was unable to push forward comprehensive immigration legislation (as he did on the health care front), and he presided over an era of increasingly repressive, anti-migrant laws enacted at the state and local levels, in part due to the vacuum at the federal level. Exemplified by Arizona’s SB 1070, these laws contributed to larger trends that transformed immigration violations from civil offenses to criminal offense with harsh sanctions, massive deportations, and prison-like detention of migrants, including children. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) branch of Homeland Security entered hundreds of agreements with state and local law enforcement to help ICE enforce immigration policies.15 These laws and law enforcement practices led to pervasive violations of the civil rights of “Latino-looking” Americans, a particularized variant of racial profiling by police without regard to whether Latinos were born in the United States or had a legal right to be in the country. As this book goes to press, the nation is six months into the presidency of a man who explicitly campaigned on an anti-Mexican platform.
In the decade since Manifest Destinies was published, Americans have ricocheted through several popular ideas about race and racial inequality. For example, the color-blind idea of race was the most popular, mainstream idea about race at the close of the twentieth century. Color-blind race is the notion that neither individuals nor state actors should “see” race, but instead, by ignoring racial difference, we will achieve racial equality. With Obama’s election in 2008, the post-racial narrative became ascendant, as in the notion that “we have an African American family living in the White House, so how can there still be racism?” Post-racialism, however, was dealt a severe, if not life-threatening, blow when the public was galvanized by continuing and now videotaped police killings of African Americans that produced outrage and political mobilization via the Black Lives Matter movement.16
A fundamental argument in the introduction is that racial categories and racial hierarchies are socially constructed—and this too emerges as a popular idea about race.17 To say race, racial categories, and racial hierarchies are socially constructed is to acknowledge that they are the product of social, political, and legal practices and processes, such that they change over time, as social conditions change. At the same time, race and racism do not change in a vacuum but, rather, are shaped and limited by history. Race has been a persistent feature of social organization as long as the United States has existed. That does not mean that racial categories and the racial hierarchy do not change, but that such change is constrained. Today the claim that race is socially constructed likely seems second nature to many readers, as it has become a popular idea among scholars and laypersons alike, whereas in 2007 many on the right argued that to claim race was socially constructed was tantamount to saying it was not “real,” no longer socially relevant but simply a matter of individual “choice”—“identity politics,” after all. Today, after a historic presidential election, however, it is whites who are openly embracing their racial identity as a driver of their political beliefs and behavior.
Admittedly, a small portion of whites are to the extreme right, that is, white nationalists who openly denigrate Hispanics, blacks, Muslims, Jews, and others as racially inferior. But a much larger, not only socially acceptable but now politically ascendant segment of whites openly embraces the idea that they deserve rights and privileges as whites. These voters are die-hard Trump fans who openly challenge a society in which non-white people claim social equality and political rights. The mantra “Make America Great Again” harkens back to the 1950s, before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the 1965 amendments to our immigration laws that removed racist restrictions on immigrants from countries in Asia and Latin America. The old approach where white normativity was hegemonic precisely because it was assumed but did not have to be openly articulated has broken down. Today, whites are splintered, divided into two large camps: those who would silently maintain white normativity even while openly embracing racial diversity and those who contest the utility of racial silence as white Americans.
The primary target of the new white identity movement is immigrants, presumed to be “illegals,” presumed to be Mexican. It does not matter that one-third of undocumented immigrants are not Mexican (including First Lady Melania Trump for a time because she overstayed a work visa). All Latinos are assumed to be undocumented—even Puerto Ricans who are not immigrants at all.18 This is certainly not to say that blacks (including immigrants from Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean) are off the hook as racial scapegoats, but to assert that Latinos and specifically the 70 percent of them who are Mexican American today are perceived by many whites as a primary racial threat. In this climate, those on both the right and the left still struggle with the question of where Mexican Americans and Latinos fit in the American racial order, the question at the heart of Manifest Destinies.
Candidate Trump did not cause this turn of events, he simply seized upon it and ran the touchdown play. Trump’s tirades against Mexico and illegal aliens were the red meat he continually fed to rally his voter base during the Republican primaries, with no softening occurring during the general election campaign. Mexican hating was central to launching his candidacy in June 2015: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. . . . They’re sending people that have lots of problems. . . . They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”19 The Mexican man as criminal, especially as sexual predator of white women, fits comfortably with the long-standing trope of the black man as predator that white politicians have relied on for so long
. It did not matter that Trump’s claim that either Mexican immigrants or undocumented immigrants in general commit more violent crimes than either legal immigrants or native-born Americans (he was never overprecise on the nature of his claim) is contradicted by a wealth of empirical evidence.20
The 2016 presidential election also functioned as a litmus test between those right-of-center voters who take it for granted that the children (and perhaps even grandchildren) of immigrants from Latin America will be perpetual foreigners (never “real” Americans), on the one hand, and those whites who reacted in outrage to Trump’s attack on a Mexican American federal judge who was randomly selected to preside over two lawsuits against Trump University. Judge Gonzalo Curiel was born in East Chicago, Indiana, a working-class town that has had a thriving Mexican American population for more than a century (as well as a growing Puerto Rican population since World War II). In May 2016, Trump lashed out at Curiel at a San Diego rally, after generating audience chants of “build the wall.” Trump referred to Curiel as “Mexican,” goading his audience: “I think Judge Curiel should be ashamed of himself. I’m telling you, this court system, judges in this court system, federal court, they ought to look into Judge Curiel. Because what Judge Curiel is doing is a total disgrace.”21 A few days later, in a Wall Street Journal interview and on Twitter, Trump doubled down on his claim that Curiel was unfit to hear two class-action lawsuits by former students of Trump University, claiming Curiel had a conflict of interest in the case because he was “of Mexican heritage” (and a member of Latino lawyers associations): “I’m building a wall. It’s an inherent conflict of interest.”22
Although many criticized Trump’s judge bashing (including Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, who called Trump’s statement “the textbook definition of a racist comment”), Trump refused to apologize. The fact that Trump criticized a pillar of the Latino community, who had in one generation climbed from being the son of a Mexican immigrant steelworker to becoming an Article III judge under the Constitution, was not lost on Latino voters. Before becoming a federal judge, Curiel worked as a federal prosecutor, going after drug dealers in San Diego (even as his life was threatened by the Mexican cartels) and later in Los Angeles and was then appointed a state judge in California by a Republican governor.23 Despite his education and professional achievements, Curiel was still “just a Mexican” to Trump, and this reinforced the fact that non-Hispanics often see Latinos as unwelcome immigrants, perpetual foreigners. In the postscript I explore these dynamics in greater detail, arguing that Latinos in the twenty-first century are racialized as non-white, rather than placed in the liminal off-white racial status of the original Mexican Americans who are the subject of Manifest Destinies.