Latino/as in the World-system

Decolonization Struggles in the 21st Century U.S. Empire

Ramon Grosfoguel, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Jose David Saldivar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317256977
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Contributors Immanuel Wallerstein, Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, Agustin Lao, Lewis Gordon, James V. Fenelon, Roberto Hernandez, James Cohen, Santiago Slabosky, Susanne Jonas, and Thomas Reifer. By the mid-twenty-first century, white Euro-Americans will be a demographic minority in the United States and Latino/as will be the largest minority (25 percent). These changes bring about important challenges at the heart of the contemporary debates about political transformations in the United States and around the world. Latino/as are multiracial (Afro-latinos, Indo-latinos, Asian-latinos, and Euro-latinos), multi-ethnic, multireligious (Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, indigenous, and African spiritualities), and of varied legal status (immigrants, citizens, and illegal migrants). This collection addresses for the first time the potential of these diverse Latino/a spiritualities, origins, and statuses against the landscape of decolonization of the U.S. economic and cultural empire in the twenty-first century. Some authors explore the impact of Indo-latinos and Afro-latinos in the United States and others discuss the conflicting interpretations and political conflicts arising from the "Latinization" of the United States.

PART I

Introduction

Latin@s and the “Euro-
American Menace”

The Decolonization of the U.S. Empire in the Twenty-First Century

Ramón Grosfoguel, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, and
José David Saldívar

Immanuel Wallerstein (1991; 1998) characterizes the beginning of the twenty-first century as a transitional moment, a bifurcation toward the end not only of U.S. hegemony but also of the present historical system. According to Wallerstein, during the twenty-first century we will witness the demise of the U.S. empire and of capitalism as a world-system. Both are in terminal crisis (Wallerstein 1991; 2003). This historical system has lasted for more than 500 years. Moreover, according to Wallerstein (1991), we will witness a bifurcation toward a new historical system. Depending on our social agencies and interventions in this moment of bifurcation, the transition toward a new historical system could lead either to a better or to a worse system than the present one. Nothing is predetermined nor guaranteed about the future. There could be a fairer, just and egalitarian historical system or a more exploitative and coercive one. If Wallerstein (1998) is correct in this assessment, then we need to urgently rethink our utopias in order to create alternative worlds.

As Immanuel Wallerstein has shown in his historical sociology, the transition from feudalism to the modern/colonial world in Europe was not as the Marxist and liberal narratives have represented it: a bourgeois class that emerged in the cities and displaced through reforms or revolutions the feudal aristocracy (Wallerstein 1974, 1979). Rather, it was the same feudal aristocracy that in looking for a solution to the crisis of the old system created a new historical system; namely, the “European modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system” (Grosfoguel 2004). Wallerstein’s provocative thesis is that the new historical system that emerged in the late fifteenth century was worse; that is, less egalitarian, more destructive of nature and more discriminatory than the old system it replaced (Wallerstein 1991). Can this scenario repeat itself? In recent work, Wallerstein suggests that similar to the transition between the previous historical system and the modern/colonial world in the late fifteenth century, today we are facing a moment of bifurcation. And like before, such a moment opens up new historical possibilities. Among those possibilities, one cannot rule out that the twenty-first-century-transnational capitalist elites will follow a strategy similar to the feudal aristocracy of the late fifteenth century and may create a new historical system worse than the one in which we live, in order to maintain their privileges. Another possible scenario is that subaltern groups around the globe—those to whom Fanon referred as the condemned of the earth—effectively mobilize and help to create a new and/or diverse historical system better than the one in which we live now. To be sure, there are many other possible scenarios on the horizon of historical possibility. The power of political and religious fundamentalisms, as they are clearly manifested today in the actions of Western state leaders and “sworn enemies of the West,” cannot be underestimated. The “clash of fundamentalism,” as Tariq Ali has referred to them (2002), gives new impulse to old colonial legacies and not so old racist configurations of society. Subjects who find themselves in the interior of states or regions under the power or strong influence of such ideologies sometime comply, sometime oppose, but many times simply do whatever is necessary to survive. Just like one cannot underestimate the strength and influence of the fabrication of new ideologies of war by the world’s new fundamentalists and their allies, one cannot lose from view the decolonizing potential of multiple projects and demographic changes in many parts of the globe, including the very metropolitan centers that have taken the lead in designing a twenty-first-century ideology of war. Transformations in the metropolitan centers of the capitalist world-system are crucial for future transformations, including any possible bifurcation. One of these transformations is the significant growth and political/cultural impact of Latin@ populations within the United States, the most powerful core country in the capitalist world-system today. We will examine here the topic of the growth of the Latin@ population in the United States in light of the global context of world-systemic changes as well as in relation to the continuous efforts to decolonize the U.S. nation and empire.

Latin@s and the Decolonization of the U.S. Empire

In the year 2000, non-Hispanic whites were a demographic minority in 70 percent of the U.S. cities while Latin@s were the fastest growing population. Latin@ populations increased 50 percent between 1990 and 2000. The majority are working class and racialized subjects (Chican@s, Salvadoreans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, indigenous People, Afro-Latin@s, etc.) coming from colonial and neocolo-nial experiences in the periphery of the world-economy. They are among the groups with the worst poverty rates in the country (see Table 1). Today the Latin@ population constitutes the largest minority in the United States: they represent around 12.8 percent of the total population. Conservative estimates made by the U.S. Census of Population in 1998 and based on the 1990 U.S. Census, project that by the year 2060 non-Hispanic whites will be a demographic minority in the U. S. (see Table 2) and Latin@s will be the largest minority in the country (25 percent of the total population). Recent estimates based on the 2000 Census, project that non-Hispanic whites will be half of the U.S. population in 2050 (see Table 3). Alternative estimates suggest that if the Latin@ population continues growing at the same rate of the 1990s, they will represent at least half, if not the majority, of the total population of the United States sometime in the twenty-first century.

Table 1. Poverty Status of People in 2001 by Household Relationship, Race, and Hispanic Origin (numbers in thousands)

	All Races	White, not of Hispanic Origin	Blacks	Hispanics
Total Individuals	281,475	194,538	35,871	37,312
-% below poverty	11.7	7.8	22.7	21.4
-% above poverty	88.3	92.2	77.3	78.6
Married	182,212	133,990	1,234	23,544
Couple	5.7	3.6	8.2	15.3
-% below poverty	94.3	96.4	91.8	84.7
-% above poverty
Female Householder, no spouse present	39,261	18,365	4,694	6,830
-% below poverty	28.7	19.9	37.4	37.8
-% above poverty	71.3	81.1	62.6	62.2
Male Householder, no spouse present	12,438	6,823	461	2,736
-% below poverty	13.6	9.9	20.8	17.6
-% above poverty	86.4	90.1	79.2	82.4

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, March 2002. Web Page: http://ferret.bls.census.gov/macro/032002/pov/new04_001.htm

These processes posit important challenges that are at the heart of the contemporary debates about the political transformations inside the U.S. empire and the future transformation of the world-system toward a new historical system. A struggle for the decolonization of the U.S. empire is at the center of the agenda for the twenty-first century. Decolonization has been traditionally used to characterize the transition from colonial administrations to the formation of independent states in peripheral regions of the world-economy. Part of the Eurocentric myth is that we live in a so-called postcolonial era and that the world and, in particular, metropolitan centers, are in no need of decolonization. In this conventional story, coloniality is reduced to the presence of colonial administrations. However, as the work of Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano (1993, 1998, 2000) has shown with his “coloniality of power” perspective, we still live in a colonial world and we need to break away from the narrow ways of thinking about colonial relations, in order to accomplish the unfinished and incomplete twentieth-century dream of decolonization (Grosfoguel 2005).

The Coloniality of Power and Latin@ Migrants’
Incorporation

Latin@s are by no means a homogeneous group. They come from different regions and countries. Some of them did not have to move anywhere in order to suddenly find themselves within the entrails of the United States. One must not assume any kind of allegiance or common perspective among Spanish-speaking peoples and descendents of Spanish-speaking peoples in this country. Some of them identify themselves in relation to their country, others highlight the specificity of their history and situation within the United States (e.g., some Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Chican@s), while others like Afro-Latin@s and Indo-Latin@s continually find themselves excluded from discourses that identify Latinoness with brownness, a notion that tends to privilege whiteness over indigeneity and blackness. These groups either consciously resist or simply find it very difficult to be recognized as “Hispanic” or even “Latin@.” At the same time, there are also those who adopt the “Latin@” label to highlight historical experiences and a social situation that connect and can potentially mobilize politically Spanish-speaking peoples and descendents of Spanish-speaking peoples in this country. For us, any critique or recuperation of the notion of “Latin@” needs to consider the complex ways in which race and ethnicity combine with colonization and migration to produce a neocolonial situation within the United States that affect Spanish-speaking peoples and descendents of Spanish-speaking peoples in this country. One important and often neglected factor is the differential mode of incorporation of migrants and minorities in metropolitan societies.

Table 2. Projections of the Resident Population by Race, Hispanic Origin and Nativity: Middle Series, 2000 to 2070 (numbers in thousands consistent with the 1990 estimates base)

Source: National Population Projections, I. Summary Files, Total Population by Race, Hispanic Origin, and Nativity: (NP-T5) Projections of the Resident Population by Race, Hispanic Origin, and Nativity: Middle Series, 1999 to 2100. Population Projections Program, Population Division, U.S. Census Bureau. 1998. Web page: http://www.census.gov/population/www/projections/natsum-T5.html Internet Release Date: January 13, 2000.

Table 3. Projected Population of the United States, by Race and Hispanic Origin: 2000 to 2050 (in thousands as of July 1 Resident Population)

	2000	2050
USA Total Population	282,125	419,854
Non-Hispanic Whites	69.4%	50.1%
Hispanics	12.8%	24.4%

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2004, “U.S. Interim Projections by Age, Sex, Race, and Hispanic Origin,” http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/usinterimproj/. Internet Release Date: March 18, 2004.

In order to understand the transnational processes of migrant and minority incorporation into the metropolitan societies, it is important to make some conceptual distinctions among diverse migration experiences. The application of the “coloniality of power” perspective to migration studies would allow us to come up with a different conceptualization from the rest of the literature. Migrants do not arrive to an empty or neutral space. Rather, migrants arrive to metropolitan spaces that are already “polluted” by a colonial history, a colonial imaginary, colonial knowledges, a racial/ethnic hierarchy linked to a history of empire. That is, migrants arrive to a space of power relations that is already informed and constituted by coloniality. There is no neutral space of migrant incorporation. If we apply the coloniality perspective to the history of U.S. migration studies we would need to distinguish between three types of transnational migrants: “colonial/racial subjects of empire,” “colonial immigrants” and “immigrants” (Grosfoguel 2003). Latin@s are no exception to this history. Within the Latin@ category there are multiple experiences of incorporation inside the United States.

“Colonial/racial subjects of empire” are those subjects that are inside the empire as part of a long colonial history that included racial slavery such as African Americans, Native Americans, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Pacific Islanders, Filipinos, Chinese Americans, etc. The metropolitan colonial imaginary, racial/ethnic hierarchy and racist discourses are frequently constructed in relation to these colonial subjects. They arrived to the United States or the United States “arrived” to them as part of a colonization process that gave wealth and privileges to Euro-Americans. There is a long history of racialization and inferiorization toward “colonial/racial subjects of the empire” that informs the present power relations of the U.S. empire. The “coloniality of power” of the metropolitan country is organized around and against these colonial subjects with a long history inside the empire. Colonial subjects are frequently at the bottom of the racial/ethnic hierarchy.

In the conceptualization used here, “immigrants” are those migrants that are racialized as “white” (other European migrants such as British, Dutch, Germans, French, Italians, Polish, Jewish, Irish, etc., or migrants coming from other regions of the world but from European origin such as Euro-Australians, Euro-Latin@s, Euro-Africans, etc.) and that experience upward social mobility in the first, second or third generation. These are migrants who, once they adopt the metropolitan language, accent, demeanors and manners, are assimilated, within the public domain, to the dominant metropolitan populations. They pass as “whites” or are constructed as “honorary whites.” These migrants are composed of the following: European migrants that after one or two generations become incorporated into the mainstream as “white”; Japanese executives that are invited as “honorary whites”; or the 1960s cohort of Cuban anti-communist refugees who, through a combination of U.S. foreign policy and federal government policies, were transformed into a Cold War showcase and incorporated as “honorary whites” in Miami (Grosfoguel 2003).

“Colonial immigrants” are those migrants coming from peripheral neo-colonial locations in the capitalist world-economy that, although they were never directly colonized by the metropolitan country to which they migrate, at the time of arrival were “racialized” in similar ways to the “colonial/racial subjects of empire” that were already there for a longer time. We refer here to the “Puertoricanization” of Dominicans in New York City, the “Chicanoization” of Salvadoreans in Los Angeles, the “Africanamericanization” of Haitians and Afro-Cuban marielitos in Miami, the “Algerianization” of Turks in Paris, the “Antillanization” of Dominicans in Amsterdam, the “Arabenization” of Dominicans in Madrid, the “Antillanization” of Moroccans in Amsterdam, the “Afrocaribbeanization” of Africans in London and so on. When racist discourses constructed toward the “colonial/racial subjects of empire” are transferred to the recently arrived migrants from the per...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyrigh Page
• Table of Contents
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Latin@s in World-Historical Perspective
• Part III Decolonization, Afro-Latin@s, and the African Diaspora
• Part IV Indigenous People in the Americas
• Part V Decolonizing Spiritualities
• Part VI Latinization and Decolonization
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Series Page