Latinos: A Demographic Snapshot
I use the terms “Latina/o” and “Hispanic” interchangeably to refer to people living in the United States who trace their ancestry (whether recently or many generations ago) to a Latin American country. The terms thus have meaning as a category within the United States and not globally. This book focuses on the nineteenth-century history of Mexican Americans as the largest Hispanic subgroup with the longest history in the United States. As they represent 70 percent of Latinos, their fate shapes the life chances of other Latinos.
The second largest Latino subgroup, at 10 percent—Puerto Ricans—is not an immigrant group at all, but instead involuntarily joined the United States. As part of the spoils of the Spanish–American War, the United States obtained Puerto Rico in 1898, making it a federal territory. Puerto Ricans are subject to many citizenship restrictions (e.g., they cannot vote for president and do not have voting representatives in Congress), yet they possess the right to travel freely between the island and the mainland. Largely due to a crippling economy, the number of Puerto Ricans on the mainland has increased by 36 percent since 2000. Almost half of mainland Puerto Ricans reside in just two states: New York, long thought of as the heart of mainland Puerto Rican culture, with 1.1 million Puerto Ricans (one-third of the state’s Latino population); and Florida, with 900,000 Puerto Ricans (more than 20 percent of the state’s Hispanic population).
Although they compose less than 4 percent of all Hispanics, Cuban Americans have an outsized impact on national politics and on Latino political dynamics. Today there are four Hispanic senators, three Cuban American men and a Mexican American woman; a total of four Mexican Americans and four Cuban Americans have served in the Senate, showing the national political influence of the latter group, despite being a tiny proportion of Latinos.24 Likewise, of the three Latinos who have ever sought a major party presidential nomination, two are Cuban American: Florida’s Marco Rubio and Texas’s Ted Cruz. As the children of Cuban immigrants (in Cruz’s case, his father is Cuban and his mother born in the United States), Cruz and Rubio surely have lived the American Dream, rising to become senators (Rubio elected in 2010, Cruz elected in 2012) and presidential candidates. Cuban Americans are assumed to dominate Florida’s population—and they surely do in many economic and political aspects—but, demographically, they compose only a quarter of that state’s diverse Latino population.
Cubans have a unique migration experience in the United States, having been welcomed as political refugees immediately following the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Fully 10 percent of Cuba’s population left during that period, and those refugees included (but were not limited to) the nation’s most wealthy and best educated families. Like immigrants from Vietnam and Eastern Europe (under the Refugee Act of 1980 and before that via executive action), Cuban immigrants receive automatic legal status in the United States (including the right to adjust their status to permanent legal residence one year after arrival), the right to work, and “generous resettlement and welfare assistance [and] health benefits.”25 Thus, some of the Latino immigrants with the most human capital in terms of education and job skills have, ironically, received the greatest assistance from the federal government in becoming established in their new nation.
Early Cuban immigrants also had racial privilege in this country because they were predominantly of Spanish origin, rather than of mixed Spanish-African ancestry like the vast majority of Cubans, given the prevalence of slavery in the Caribbean. The Mariel boatlift of 1980 introduced a different wave of Cuban immigrants, who were both more racially mixed and far less wealthy than prior generations of Cuban immigrants.26 More recently, as President Obama opened relations with the Castro government, Cuban immigration to the United States is on the rise, and just before the end of his presidency, Obama reversed the long-standing practice that allowed any Cuban immigrant to gain refugee status once they had touched American soil. Despite the increased diversity of the Cuban American population today, compared to earlier, Cuban Americans still are among the most wealthy and well-educated Latino subgroups in the United States (though a few other subgroups, much smaller than Cuban Americans, are even wealthier, Argentinean Americans among them).
Two more Latino subgroups—Salvadoran Americans, at 3.3 percent, and Dominican Americans, at 2.8 percent—are nearly as large as the Cuban American group yet have nowhere near the political influence at the state or national level. The remaining 10 percent of Hispanics trace their ancestral roots to Guatemala, Colombia, Honduras, Ecuador, Peru, Nicaragua, Argentina, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Panama, Chile, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Paraguay. Each of these Latino subgroups represents less than 2 percent of Hispanics nationally. Given that seven of ten Latinos are Mexican American and that no other Latino national origin group constitutes more than 10 percent of all Latinos, understanding the history of Mexican Americans is essential to understanding where Latinos are today and where they will head in the future.
By legal design, Latinos who are not Puerto Rican or Mexican American have a relatively short history in the United States. Prior to the 1965 congressional amendments, the National Origins Act of 1924 severely restricted immigration from Latin American and Asian nations, while favoring immigration from Europe. In short, Congress’s aim was to maintain a white, European nation. The vast majority of immigrants who came to the United States between 1890 and 1920 came from Southern and Eastern Europe (88 percent). In 1920, one-third of the population consisted of immigrants or the children of immigrants. In the next decade, that proportion of the U.S. population will be about the same, but the ratio of European to non-European immigrants is almost perfectly reversed. Today only 12 percent of today’s immigrants and children of immigrants hail from European countries, whereas half come from Latin American countries (including nearly 30 percent of all immigrants being from Mexico), 27 percent come from Asian countries, and 7 percent come from African nations. This demographic shift among immigrants (and their children) resulted from the 1965 changes to immigration laws, which should be seen as part and parcel of the civil rights reforms of that decade that have so fundamentally changed the nation.
Yet, before the 1965 amendments, the three largest Hispanic groups were concentrated in specific regions and, as a result, not seen as one national group. Mexican Americans lived overwhelmingly in the Southwest, along the Mexican border. Puerto Ricans lived in New York City or nearby, and Cuban Americans lived in Florida. In each of these regions, the specific Hispanic population was substantial enough to necessitate a racial narrative that explained where each group fit relative to whites and African Americans, but there was little sense that Hispanics were a single “minority” cognizable at the national level until the late 1960s.
Sociologist Joan Moore, who was part of the team of social scientists who published a landmark statistical study of Mexican Americans in 1970, reminds us that, at the time, there was no nationwide census of Mexican Americans, only the count of “White persons of Spanish Surname” in five states along the Mexican border.27 For Moore and her colleagues, this presented a dilemma: how could they show that Mexican Americans were “the nation’s second largest minority” (as their book’s subtitle proclaimed) and thus deserving of civil rights protections like those African Americans were receiving? An even larger problem, according to Moore, was to convince Mexican Americans and their leaders:
At that time, many Mexican Americans rejected the term minority and its implied association with black America. [Instead of nationwide data, regional] euphemisms prevailed. Mexican Americans in San Antonio were proudly Latin Americans, and Mexican restaurants advertised Spanish food. These practices equated middle-class respectability with whiteness, and advocacy organizations emerged after World War II to challenge them. Later, in the civil rights era of the 1960s, the younger militants actively rejected the drive for whiteness. They insisted on being called Chicanos, a term that embarrassed many in the older generation, even though it was often an in-home label. Being a mi
nority had important implications, given the potential role of the federal government. It was all tied up with the politics of ethnicity.28
It is precisely this dynamic that Manifest Destinies unpacks to reveal the racial order that resulted in the original Mexican Americans being defined by others and defining themselves as somewhere “in between” white and black. While the fantasy of viewing Mexican Americans as a (white) ethnic minority group rather than as a racial minority group may have been maintained at the level of ideology (for reasons explored in this book), in practice Mexican Americans suffered extensive racial discrimination in the Southwest. In that region, as in the Northeast for Puerto Ricans and in Florida for Cubans, particularized, regional racial narratives developed that made it clear that these Hispanics were not white, even as they were distinguished from African Americans.
Today Latinos are concentrated in four of the most populous states: 28 percent of all Latinos live in California, 19 percent in Texas, more than 8 percent in Florida, and 7 percent in New York. Yet no one would assert that Hispanics do not constitute a national population. Between 2000 and 2010, all fifty states and the District of Columbia saw growth in their Latino populations. In eight southern states and South Dakota, Hispanics have doubled in number since the turn of the century. While Latinos in these nine states constitute less than 10 percent of each state’s total population, the rapid rate of growth in such a short period of time helps explain why Trump’s appeals to nativism and border security played so well in so much of the country. It is also telling that six hundred thousand Mexican immigrants and their supporters rallied in a hundred southern cities and towns against the Sensenbrenner immigration bill in 2006.29 For white southerners, Mexicans were at their doorstep, refusing to be docile and polite, instead marching in the streets.
But Trump’s anti-Mexican and anti–Mexican American rhetoric is surely a double-edged sword—at least for the long-term health of the GOP. Overall, eight of ten Latinos voted for Clinton; although national exit polls showed closer to 30 percent of them voting Trump, these polls have been discredited.30 Of the nine states that formerly were part of Mexico, six of them have sizable Latino electorates, ranging from a low of 14 percent (Colorado) to a high of 40 percent (New Mexico) of the state’s voters. California’s 15.2 million Latinos and Texas’s 10.4 million Latinos make up 21.5 percent of the electorate in each state.31 The Latino electorate is growing, as the young population ages; consider that 6 million native-born Hispanics turned eighteen years old during Obama’s two terms as president. Another 2.2 million Latinos born outside the United States. became naturalized citizens during those eight years. Of the 27.3 million Latinos eligible to vote in 2016, more than 30 percent have at least one foreign-born parent, helping explain why immigration policy remains a durable issue for Latino voters.32 What is more, surveys show that two-thirds of Latino registered voters personally know an undocumented person, with the vast majority of those connections including a family member.33 For these voters, immigration law and policy are not abstract but highly personal.
Today’s Politics in Historical Context
Having seen the reception of Manifest Destinies over the past decade, three enduring takeaways have impressed readers. First, while this is a book about New Mexico and its history, it ultimately contributes to Chicano history more generally. We cannot understand the current status of Mexican Americans without understanding what happened to the original Mexican Americans. This is so because, in 1848, twice as many Mexicans lived in what would become the federal territory of New Mexico than in California and Texas combined. More crucially, the social, political, and legal dynamics faced by Mexican Americans in New Mexico were unique given that, in both California and Texas, Mexican Americans were demographically and politically outnumbered by Anglos at the outset of the American period (Chapter 1). Rather than New Mexican exceptionalism, which claims that racial conflict there has been mild and holds to the “bloodless conquest” thesis, the facts show, as one reviewer put it, that Mexican-Anglo conflict in New Mexico has been “grossly underestimated.”34 In this respect, New Mexico is exemplary of the Mexican American experience, rather than an exception to it.35
A second takeaway is my original concept of double colonization, elaborated in Chapter 2. Double colonization refers to the fact that the American Southwest was subject to two different colonial regimes. The first was the Spanish colonization of all of Mexico in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The second layer of colonization of the region occurred in the nineteenth century with the U.S. military invasion of Mexico and subsequent incorporation of Mexico’s vast northern territory. American historians have had no problem recognizing and naming the first, Spanish conquest as a colonial process; but they have chafed at labeling the American conquest a colonial project (in part due to the hegemonic force of the bloodless conquest idea). As political scientist Ray Rocco puts it: “Gómez convincingly demonstrates that the dynamic of racialization cannot be explained without taking into account the way that colonization influenced the processes involved. She introduces the notion of double colonization to describe the particular mode of racialization that took place.”36 Manifest Destinies puts into sharp relief the contradiction between nineteenth-century American ideals of liberal republicanism and the military force used to achieve the goals of its imperial designs. Double colonization also invites us to think about the ways in which the American Southwest is similar to Latin American countries that experienced American imperialism (economic and political) in the twentieth century. In terms of understanding the nature of the American racial order, moreover, double colonization reminds us that the United States does not exclusively have a heritage of binary racial categories (white over black), but also has a long history of multiple racial categories.
The final takeaway from Manifest Destinies that I want to rehearse here consists of its contribution to understanding racialization and its connection to the reproduction of racism. Following the lead of Omi and Winant’s landmark sociological analysis Racial Formation in the United States, I have shown how diverse, sometimes conflicting “racial projects” abounded with respect to the original Mexican Americans, racializing them both regionally and nationally.37 A central feature is what can be understood as comparative racialization (sometimes referred to as relational racial dynamics): the idea that, given the inherently hierarchical nature of race, the fate of one racial group is tightly linked to the fate of other groups. Typically, sociologists and other scholars have focused on whites and African Americans, with an emphasis on white-over-black subordination. My research contributes to a growing body of work that looks at how various non-white groups relate to each other and, specifically, at how one type of racial subordination by whites reinforces another group’s subordination by whites. At the regional level, Robert Castro has remarked on the book’s contribution to understanding how American colonizers adopted a divide and conquer strategy: whereas prior to American control Mexicans and various Indian communities “had previously developed strong cultural and blood related affinities . . . Mexican elites began to form embryonic alliances with American political and legal institutions, which in turn, helped U.S. administrators to resurrect long dormant ethnic and class tensions between New Mexico’s elite Mexican and Pueblo Indian populations.”38 At the national level, scholars have noted that Chapters 3 and 4 of Manifest Destinies make a powerful contribution to understanding the comparative racial formation of “Mexican Americans in relation to whites, free and enslaved blacks, and indigenous populations.”39 In the postscript, I return to this topic with a focus on the contemporary racialization of Latinos.
More than ever, all Americans should be aware of the long and rich history of Mexican Americans as well as the complex position of the original Mexican Americans who negotiated their place in both the regional and national racial landscapes of the late nineteenth century. This book is required reading for anyone who hopes to understand the dramatic and unstoppable demographic shift
that is changing the United States from a majority-white to a so-called majority-minority nation. Manifest Destinies provides a starting point for thinking about social policies that will move us forward as a nation in ways that allow for the full incorporation of Latinos. Rather than repeat the mistakes of the past, we must understand how we got here in order to move forward in a way that seeks to perfect our national promise of equality and civic incorporation for all.
Moreover, the book gives us the historical context to understand that today’s racial politics have not developed in a vacuum. Mexicans have been intertwined with this country since 1846, when the United States invaded Mexico under a pretext. The result was the taking of land, but it was also the taking of people—the original Mexican Americans and a steady stream of Mexican migrants since then. Along with the 1965 amendments to immigration laws that ended racial discrimination against immigrants from Latin American, Asia, and Africa and the more conventional civil rights legislation of the 1960s, our population has changed dramatically, along with our notions of who has the right to call themselves American in every sense of the word. Now with a president who campaigned on the slogan “Make America Great Again,” we must confront the fact that those who chant the slogan really are nostalgic for the time before 1965, when America was genuinely a different place.
Manifest Destinies, Second Edition Page 2
