El Norte

by Carrie Gibson

  Into the late 1960s and early 1970s, some Cubans were still not reconciled to the revolution, and Miami and other parts of the United States suffered a series of bombings, the blame for which was put on anti-Castro extremists. Two of the most infamous groups were Omega 7 and Alpha 66, which made a number of attacks against individuals or groups thought to be willing to have a dialogue with the Castro regime. They threatened to assassinate anyone who traveled to Cuba and targeted foreign governments or organizations that maintained diplomatic links with the island. Another group, Cuban Power, ran an extensive bombing campaign, with targets across the United States; it was blamed for the 1968 bombing one of Mexico’s tourism offices in Chicago.17

  In this same period, there were also many airplane hijackings involving Cuba. Initially, in the early 1960s, Cubans hijacked planes demanding to be taken to the United States. Not long afterward, planes were seized by passengers and taken in the opposite direction, sometimes for political reasons, as when Antulio Ramírez Ortiz demanded that the pilots of National Airlines Flight 337 from Miami to Key West on May 1, 1961, divert to Cuba.18 Ramírez Ortiz claimed he had been offered $100,000 by the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo to kill Castro, and now wanted to warn the Cuban leader.19 In 1969, Tyrone and Linda Austin forced an Eastern flight from New York to Miami to take them to Cuba, shouting, “Black power, Havana” during the hijacking.20

  Eventually Castro shifted from welcoming hijackers—and charging the airlines considerable sums to retrieve their planes—to interrogating the hijackers, worried that they were CIA operatives.21 The volume of hijackings was such that for a while, all cockpits had charts of the Caribbean Sea with instructions on how to land at José Martí International Airport, no matter what the intended destination was. In addition, the pilots were given cards in Spanish with phrases like “Aircraft has mechanical problems” in case they needed to communicate with hijackers who did not speak English.22

  By the 1980s, the number of Cuban-born people in the United States reached around 700,000, though not all were in Miami.23 In this decade, the nature of Cuban emigration also began to change when the Marielitos—people who left from the port of Mariel—arrived. These were not members of the elite but poorer Cubans. Among them were people who had been released from prison and other “undesirables” whom Castro announced he would not try to stop. More than 120,000 Cubans arrived in Miami between May and October 1980, as a nonstop flotilla brought people to Florida. These Cubans faced more prejudice, both from within the community and from outside, than those who had come in the 1960s. One stereotype of the Marielito Cuban is Tony Montana, the fictional character played by Al Pacino in the 1983 film Scarface. Montana arrived during the boatlift, entered the drug trade, made a fortune, and lost it. The film depicted a seedy Miami of shootouts, nightclubs, piles of cocaine, and Cuban criminals: a far cry from the images of wealthy Cubans elegantly disembarking from TWA planes in the 1960s.

  By the end of the 1980s, the number of Cubans in Miami reached more than one million. By this point, however, many had become U.S. citizens and so had voting power. This was soon reflected in the political makeup of Miami, as Cubans took posts in a number of public offices within the city, as well as in Washington; the first Cuban elected to Congress, in 1989, was the Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who retired in 2018.24

  Cubans were not alone in the migration of the 1980s. By this point, thousands of people were coming from all over Latin America, often from countries that had been destabilized by U.S. policy or CIA-backed interventions. The United States had been covertly involved in conflicts since the start of the Cold War; its operations included the toppling of the regime in Guatemala in 1954; the coup against President Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973; training and funding the Contras to fight a civil war against the ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), which had overthrown the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua in 1979; and backing government forces in El Salvador’s civil war. Millions of people were displaced by these and other conflicts, though they did not qualify as refugees under the terms of the Refugee Act of 1980.25 Undeterred, tens of thousands of people arrived throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The 2000 census counted 129,000 Central Americans in the Miami area alone.26 The same census calculated that there were more than 1.2 million Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Nicaraguans in the United States, most of whom were first-generation immigrants.27

  At the same time, Mexicans were coming north, trying to escape the dire straits of the economy in this period. Despite strong growth through the 1960s in Mexico, the economy suffered, as did many others, in the 1970s oil crisis triggered by OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries). Although Mexico was an oil-producing nation, it felt the impact of the overall global slowdown. Mexicans began to see high inflation, a devalued peso, and a decline in real wages. All this was coupled with ongoing political violence, as seen in October 1968, less than a fortnight before the Olympic Games were to begin, when Mexican troops opened fire on protesting students in Tlatelolco Plaza—the exact death toll remains unknown.

  In 1982, Mexico, owing billions, defaulted on loans given by foreign banks. The default led to an 85 percent devaluation of the peso relative to the dollar. This series of events triggered what has been called the década perdida, or lost decade.28 Mexicans began to look north again, and by the 1980s and early 1990s, the number of “alien apprehensions” rose significantly, reaching more than one million a year, a 50 percent increase over the volume in the 1970s.29 Overall, the Hispanic population more than tripled in the 1980s and 1990s, going from 4.2 million in 1980 to just over 14 million by 2000. Of those, the number of undocumented people entering was estimated at 2 million for 1980–89 and around 5 million from 1990 to 1999, though around 20 percent of those people were not from Mexico or Central America.30

  Within the United States, calls for immigration reform grew louder, and the result was the Immigration Reform and Control Act, signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986. This legislation granted amnesty to anyone who was undocumented and who had been in the United States since 1982. Some three million people qualified to have their status legalized. In return, security on the border was increased and more responsibility was placed on employers, who had to prove their workers had the correct papers. Despite this adjustment, in the 1990s some states started to propose or pass their own legislation that was considered hostile to immigrants, such as 1994’s divisive Proposition 187 in California. This bill called for taking away all public support—including access to schools—for undocumented people, the sole exception being emergency medical services. It became so controversial that the incoming president of Mexico at the time, Ernesto Zedillo, denounced it.31 It passed 59 percent to 41 percent, though it was never implemented, as legal challenges were quick to follow.

  Further significant changes were introduced under Bill Clinton throughout the 1990s, including the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, which cut off almost all welfare benefits for people who were not U.S. citizens or who were undocumented. The law stopped access to food stamps and left it to the states to decide if these people could have recourse to any sort of temporary assistance, as well as access to Medicare.32

  Reforms to Cuban immigration were also introduced. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the enormous sugar subsidy that Cuba received from Russia dried up, and the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall were known in Cuba as the período especial (special period), when severe shortages of everything afflicted the island. People were desperate to leave, and they crossed the Florida Straits on whatever they could find, from dangerous balsas (rafts) to hijacked boats. The United States introduced a new visa system to control the number of arrivals. A processing station was set up just outside Cuba’s territorial waters, where Cubans were intercepted in Operation Sea Signal and taken to the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay to have their papers examined. Before long, the United States was overwhelmed and forced to come to a new agreement with
Cuba: the United States would grant twenty thousand visas a year to Cubans if the island’s government would do more to stop people from leaving.33 Included in the 1994–95 reforms was the creation of the “wet foot, dry foot” policy, by which any Cuban caught at sea was returned to the island, but those who reached the United States were allowed to stay. In 1996, Congress passed the Helms-Burton Act after Cuba’s military shot down two civilian aircraft flown by members of a Cuban exile group. The legislation was meant to discourage international investment in Cuba, curb travel to the island, and tighten the existing embargo. The Castro regime continued to survive, however, despite the decades of U.S. effort to undermine or destroy it.

  Although thousands of people from Latin American came to live in Miami throughout the 1980s and 1990s, no one group has superseded the Cubans’ influence on the city, as Calle Ocho in Miami’s Little Havana testifies. A stroll around the neighborhood reveals a persistent patriotism, and a not insignificant number of markers and monuments: one to the exiles who died at the Bay of Pigs in 1961; a statue of Nestor A. Izquierdo, an anticommunist Cuban who died in a plane crash in 1979. The indestructible José Martí also has a presence. Under a large, leafy tree sits a beige stone slab with a raised map of Cuba on it, on which are his words: “La patria es agonía y deber.” The homeland is agony and duty.

  The journalist Joan Didion observed in her 1987 book Miami that for “Anglos who did not perceive themselves as economically or socially threatened by Cubans, there remained considerable uneasiness on the matter of language” in the city, in part because at some level not speaking English could “undermine [the Anglos’] conviction that assimilation was an ideal universally shared by those who were to be assimilated.”34 Local resident Milton Weiss, in a 1990 letter to the Miami Herald, complained of always being asked for directions in Spanish on the street in Miami. Despite speaking the language and being married to a non-Cuban Hispanic woman, he wrote, “If I wanted to live in a Latin country, I would have moved to one. Instead, one has moved here.” He pointed out in the letter that this was the reason for Anglo flight from Miami, remarking, “Many non-Hispanics feel threatened by these developments. The threat is not physical: it’s sociocultural, psychological.”35

  These feelings were not exclusive to Miami, nor were they new. The presence of Spanish-speakers who were unwilling to give up their language has long elicited a range of emotions, ranging from indifference to outright hostility. For Mexicans, Cubans, and others, their language was often under attack, leaving many puzzled about what the nature of U.S. assimilation was supposed to entail. The response by Spanish-speaking communities has varied over time as well; in the 1950s some parents in Texas, for instance, spoke English at home so their children would learn, but by the more activist 1970s there was renewed interest and pride in speaking Spanish.

  Schools were an obvious battleground for this. Many Hispanic people who grew up in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s can recall being punished for speaking Spanish at school. The chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa remembered being rapped with “three licks on the knuckles with a sharp ruler” for speaking Spanish at recess, and being “sent to the corner of the classroom for ‘talking back’ to the Anglo teacher when all I was trying to do was tell her how to pronounce my name.”36

  Decades later, in 1998, Californian voters considered Proposition 227, which had the state’s bilingual education program in its sights. The Bilingual Education Act had been introduced in 1968, with the aim of using federal funding in schools for language help; this included all immigrant children, not just the Spanish-speaking ones, assisting more than one million children in kindergarten through the fifth grade who were not proficient in English. Proposition 227 provided for replacing the existing long-term program with a one-year immersion program for such students. The proposition, which passed by 61 percent to 39 percent, split the Hispanic community, as some felt that students needed to learn English quickly to thrive in California.37 Arizona passed similar legislation in 2000, intensifying language immersion in its schools.

  In 2013, the Tucson Unified School District in Arizona voted to rescind an unpopular ban that it had imposed the year before on seven books, including such titles as Occupied America: A History of Chicanos by Rodolfo Acuña and Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement by Arturo Rosales.38 The school district had already come to national attention for its part in banning Mexican-American studies in 2010, with the passage of Arizona House Bill 2281, legislation that has been challenged in court on First Amendment grounds; its enforcement was blocked by a district judge in 2017.

  School textbooks have also prompted controversy. Texas has exercised increasing influence by virtue of the fact that it has more pupils than any other state except California. Because Texas orders so many books, publishers have adopted Texan standards and then sold these texts in the rest of the country. A powerful conservative faction on the Texas board of education voted in 2010 to make significant and controversial changes to the state’s history curriculum. One board member defended the decision, saying, “History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.” At issue was the inclusion of concepts well outside mainstream historical thinking, such as calling into question the founders’ intention to separate church and state. Efforts to include the Hispanic contribution or focus on the long struggle for equality for Mexican-Americans in the state and country were rebuffed. Hispanic board members were left frustrated, with one saying the board was empowered to “just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.”39 In 2015, activists scored a victory of sorts by pressuring the Texas board of education to include Mexican-Americans in the curriculum, though the resulting textbook, The Mexican American Heritage, was derided before it even went to press. A review of a sample of the book in 2016 described it as “racist, revisionist and in some parts just blatantly false,” claiming that, among other errors, it conflated U.S.-born chicano with recent immigrants; played down Hispanic land claims in the Southwest; and described Mexican-Americans as lazy.40

  One critical factor in the persistence of Spanish has been its constant reinvigoration by the steady arrival of new immigrants; by contrast, other language groups, such as Germans or Italians, saw their numbers decline. According to census data, the overall number of Spanish-speakers rose throughout the period 1980 to 2000, with an increase of 60 percent to just over twenty-eight million by 2000.41 During the 1990s, the number of people in California who spoke a language other than English at home rose from 31 percent to 39 percent, making it the state with the largest percentage of people who did not speak English, with Spanish being the most prevalent language spoken at home other than English.42

  In Miami, one effort to promote English was the government-funded sitcom ¿Qué Pasa, U.S.A.? aired on Miami’s WPBT in 1977. The show, based on the fictional Cuban Peña family who lived in Little Havana, was in both English and Spanish, with the aim of helping people improve their English. It ran for only four seasons but was enormously popular.43

  Less fondly remembered is the campaign launched the following year, in 1978, by Miami resident Emmy Shafer. Frustrated because public employees in the city did not speak a level of English that she deemed acceptable, she wanted to put an end to the city’s bilingualism. A survivor of a Nazi concentration camp, she explained her position: she had to learn English and did not understand why other refugees were not made to do the same. She launched a petition that garnered twenty-six thousand signatures. In November 1980, an “anti-bilingual” referendum to make English the official language for government business was put on the election ballot. The vote, which took place soon after the arrival of tens of thousands of people during the Mariel boatlift, passed with 59 percent in favor. The resulting ordinance was repealed in 1993.44 However, in 1988, the Florida constitution was amended to make English the official language.

  Similar battles erupted around the country. In Arizona, a 1987 petition to make that state’s
constitution include English as the official language became Proposition 106, which passed by fewer than twelve thousand votes, a margin of 1 percent. However, its victory was met by a lengthy court battle, in part because it stipulated that state employees, government agencies, and even elected officials could use only English. In 1998, the Arizona supreme court ruled that what had become Article 28 in the state’s constitution violated the First Amendment rights of elected officials and public employees, and limited non-English-speakers’ access to the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The ruling forced proponents of Article 28 to amend it to make English the state’s official language but not prohibit government employees from speaking other languages.45

  As English-only laws continued to spread, individuals, activists, and immigration rights groups mounted legal challenges. The Alexander v. Sandoval case, involving a class-action suit over Alabama making English the official language, reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 2001; in a 5 to 4 decision, it upheld Alabama’s English-only law.46 English as an official language has now been adopted by thirty-two states.

  Throughout the changes of the 1980s and 1990s, another development was quietly taking place: the invention of the “Hispanic.” The diverse Spanish-speaking groups still had an uneasy solidarity, in part because of geography: the East held largely Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Cubans, and the West had Mexicans and people from Central America. Their historical relationships to the United States had been both similar and varied. Puerto Ricans were living with the island’s commonwealth status; Cubans had a long history of U.S. interference; and Mexicans had to contend with the legacy of 1848. Some mutual suspicion also divided the groups. Puerto Ricans, for instance, thought the demographic clout of Mexican-Americans meant that more resources would be diverted to the Southwest rather than the Northeast.47 Government agencies were struggling as well. “Mexican” had been taken off the census by 1940, and by the 1960s legal interpretation positioned Mexicans as “white.”48 By the 1970s, when concern grew that the needs of the Spanish-speaking population in the United States were not being met, there was no way to compile social data based on the census. The 1970 census had asked Hispanic people to identify their origins or descent among the following options: Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American; other Spanish; or none of these.49 This still left many dissatisfied because it felt too limited.