Latinos Facing Racism

Discrimination, Resistance, and Endurance

Joe R. Feagin, José A. Cobas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317256946
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Feagin and Cobas provide the first in-depth examination of the everyday racism faced by middle-class Latinos. Based on a national survey, we learn how a diverse group of talented Latinos Mexican Americans, Puerto Rican Americans, Cuban Americans, and others respond to and cope with the commonplace white racial framing and discriminatory practices. Drawing on extensive interviewing, the authors address the recurring discrimination of ordinary whites directed against Spanish speakers and individuals with presumed Latino phenotypes. These incidents occur in everyday encounters, such as when male and female Latinos travel or shop. The book also chronicles the mistreatment that Latinos face from immigration officials when they cross US borders and from the police when they are racially profiled outside Latino areas. Critical and conforming Latino responses to recurring white discrimination are also extensively examined, as well as the diverse Latino reactions to remedial programs like affirmative action and to the ideal of assimilation into the proverbial US melting pot. "

1

Racializing Latinos

In the spring of 2006, a middle-class Mexican American teenager was viciously attacked and sodomized by two white teenagers yelling “white power” and anti-Latino insults at a party in a mostly white suburb of Houston. Suffering from multiple serious wounds, including a swastika cut into his chest, the young man was hospitalized for months and had numerous surgeries for his severe injuries. He later committed suicide, and his white attackers were eventually imprisoned for the brutal crime (Associated Press, 2007).

While most whites were certainly abhorred by this violent act against a young Mexican American, and while most whites would not shout out extreme white supremacist slogans, they often do hold to significant elements of a widespread anti-Latino perspective. From this white-framed viewpoint, the lives, livelihoods, and cultures of Latinos at various class levels are frequently viewed as having less value than those of whites. Indeed, over the past several decades, the negative racial framing of Mexican Americans and other Latin Americans has increased substantially—framing that is dramatically seen in incidents like this one, in white vigilante groups patrolling the border with Mexico, and in the many whites who support forceful “border security” measures such as vigorous border patrols and big electrified fences on the Mexican border. In numerous areas of the US Southwest, white policing agencies have accelerated the vigorous policing and racial profiling of Latinos of diverse nationality and class backgrounds. Moreover, everyday discrimination targeting Latinos takes not only these more blatant forms but also more subtle and covert forms.

The United States has a very large Latino population, estimated at more than 51 million. This population is larger than that of Spain and second in size, among all countries, only to Mexico’s 112 million people. The current breakdown of the US Latino population is about 63 percent Mexican American, 9 percent mainland Puerto Rican, 4 percent Cuban American, and 3 percent Salvadoran American, with the rest of the Latino population distributed over a large number of national origins in Latin America and the Caribbean (US Census Bureau, 2011). The US Census Bureau (2010) calculated that in 2010 Mexican Americans, by far the largest Latino group today, were about 10 percent of the US population. They also made up large and growing percentages of the population in several important US states: Texas (32 percent), California (31 percent), New Mexico (29 percent), Nevada (20 percent), and Illinois (13 percent). Note that this numerical dominance of Mexican Americans in the US Latino group, to be explained in detail below, ultimately stems from the early annexation of much of Mexico to the United States as a result of the 1840s US war with Mexico.

Although they or their ancestors have come from a number of Latin American and Caribbean countries, US Latinos are increasingly seen by those inside and outside this umbrella Latino category as constituting a distinctive group that shares not only much racialized attention and discrimination from the white Anglo population but also, increasingly, certain distinctive values and perspectives that are shaped by their often similar home-country cultures. This umbrella conceptualization linking together a number of Latin American groups is true for both Latinos and non-Latinos. Also significant is that the growing and influential Latino-owned and Latino-oriented mass media are greatly helping to create a more integrated Latino umbrella group. For example, the two US Latino television networks, Univision and Telemundo, currently have the largest audiences of Spanish-language viewers across the globe, and in numerous areas the local television stations affiliated with them have more viewers than competing English-language stations. With their major coverage of Latin American and US Latino issues, and now with the development of English-subtitled broadcasts for bilingual Latinos, these major networks have expanding influence and help to integrate the diverse national origin groups within the Latino umbrella category (Navarro, 2000; Thielman, 2012).

The US Census Bureau projects that by 2020 the US Latino population will reach more than 60 million, nearly a fifth of the total population. Yet, relatively little systematic attention has been given to the everyday experiences of this large group of Americans with racism and related racialization issues. Most popular and scholarly discussions focus on undocumented and other immigrants from Latin America in regard to their putative impact on crime, government programs, health care, and public schools in the United States, as well as on their supposed failure to assimilate and conform to the core Anglo culture and institutions.

The Assimilation Tradition and US Immigration

US Latinos are very frequently viewed by media commentators, politicians, and social scientists from a societal assimilation perspective. Such assimilation perspectives mostly conceptualize this process as ideally involving a gradual and orderly integration of a racial or ethnic group into the dominant core culture and social patterns of the United States. Today, both popular and scholarly analysts make extensive use of this concept of societal assimilation in referring to Latino immigrants and their individual and group adaptation, or lack of adaptation, to the dominant culture and institutions of the host US society.

There is a long social science tradition of this generalized and agent-less approach to immigrants. Robert Park (Park and Burgess, 1924), an early white sociologist, focused on assimilation and proposed an ongoing cycle that characterized intergroup “race relations.” Initial intergroup contact, often generated by migration from one country to another, was normally followed, sequentially, by competition, accommodation, and eventual full assimilation into a society like the United States. For contemporary societies, Park and most subsequent scholars in this assimilationist tradition envision a long-term societal trend toward large-scale assimilation of immigrant groups. Even those who are racially subordinated are often viewed as eventually assimilating substantially into the core culture and institutions of the United States (Park and Burgess, 1924: 735–760; Gordon, 1964). Presumably, the core culture and institutions they have in mind include US legal, political, economic, and educational institutions.

More recent social science analysts, especially sociologist Milton Gordon (1964), have presented a detailed perspective on societal assimilation. Gordon emphasized specific dimensions of this racial-ethnic assimilation (for example, primary group assimilation, marital assimilation, civic assimilation) in which the outcomes for various groups can occur at different rates. Gordon and other analysts in his tradition have often focused rather substantially on European immigrant groups and their subsequent generational processes of assimilation. For Gordon there are three possible outcomes for groups in the process of societal assimilation—a blending together in a melting pot, a cultural pluralism where groups remain distinctive, and a substantial conformity to the white-Anglo culture and institutions. Examining the relevant history of the United States, he accurately concludes that the reality has mostly been one of Anglo-conformity assimilation. Historically, all immigrants and their descendants have abandoned much of their home-country heritage and conformed substantially to important aspects of the dominant Anglo core culture. For European immigrant groups, thoroughgoing assimilation to the core culture has typically been completed in a few generations. Assimilation analysts have understood that racial bigotry impedes full assimilation for non-European Americans but tend to be optimistic about (especially middle-class) members of groups of color eventually being fully assimilated into the dominant culture and institutions.

Contemporary assimilation analysts such as Richard Alba (2009) have argued that numerous racial-ethnic identities are weakening significantly. Increasingly, especially for European American groups, ethnic identity is mostly symbolic and decreasing greatly in importance (Gans, 1979). According to Nee and Alba (2009), the sociocultural mainstream to which immigrants and their descendants assimilate includes US institutions that substantially weaken their national origin identities. Not just contemporary white ethnic Americans, but also the descendants of immigrants of color over time will be fully assimilated into what Nee and Alba present as a relatively unproblematic sociocultural mainstream without significant racial barriers. Their reasoning includes the idea that, as the contemporary white baby-boomer generation retires, new economic opportunities are opening for people of color. They seem rather optimistic that whites’ racial views and discrimination targeting people of color will greatly change, thereby allowing them to integrate fully into mainstream sociocultural institutions. The assimilation analysts continue the optimistic tradition of mainstream social scientists and media analysts who view these white-dominated core institutions as essentially inclusive and receptive to ongoing emancipation of non-European Americans from major racial barriers.

Serious Flaws in Assimilation Perspectives

In our view, such optimism about this adaptation process is problematic for a number of conceptual and empirical reasons. One problem with these aforementioned assimilation perspectives is that they typically view assimilation from a substantially individualistic perspective and/or give too little attention to the societal structures that hamper or prevent the immigrant adaption processes. Thus, several researchers focusing on Latino and other immigrants of color (for instance, Portes and Zhou, 1993; Telles and Ortiz, 2008) have accented significant structural barriers and developed important concepts like “segmented assimilation.” From their empirical studies, they have demonstrated that various immigrant groups have significantly different paths to assimilation as they adapt to the host society within structurally different socioeconomic sectors and with divergent adaptive patterns—including downward mobility in the case of certain Latino immigrant generations. For instance, contrary to optimistic media reports (see Anonymous, 2000), the children and grandchildren of Mexican immigrants frequently do not move up the US education and socioeconomic ladder as readily as children of earlier white immigrants did, and many have faced stagnation or downward mobility over the last few generations (Telles and Ortiz, 2008: 131–132; Feagin and Feagin, 2011: 226–228). In addition, even middle-class Asian immigrants and their children—the most stereotyped “model minority”—are not being assimilated into white middle-class society nearly as completely as numerous assimilation analysts have suggested. These immigrants and their children continue to report numerous serious problems with whites’ racist views and associated racial barriers (Tuan, 1998; Chou and Feagin, 2008). Certain physical differences, especially those associated with stereotyped cultural differences, remain highly visible and negatively viewed by large numbers of white Americans.

A more fundamental problem with contemporary assimilation theories lies in the very concept and term of “assimilation,” especially its underlying unidirectional assumption. As some assimilationists like Milton Gordon have recognized, yet not critically and thoroughly questioned, the conceptual assumptions of mainstream assimilation analyses have long embedded a serious white-Anglo “establishment” bias. Historically, both popular and academic analysts of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century immigration to the United States considered certain new immigrant groups to be quite “unassimilable.” For example, during the 1870s–1920s era of significant Asian immigration to the United States, Asian American leaders rejected whites’ constant insistence that Asian immigrants were inferior and incapable of being assimilated into the white-dominated culture and society. In this era, dominant ideas about immigrant group assimilation were usually racially framed with a built-in assumption that only certain European immigrants could ever integrate well into the core culture and institutions (Feagin and Feagin, 2011: 286).

Note too that, then as now, assimilation theories have been very problematic because of their constant portrayal of “good” assimilation as a one-way adaptation process to the white-Anglo core culture and institutions. Over many years whites have often said something like, “If Mexicans [or other Latinos] have left their country because they do not like it there, why do they insist on keeping their culture here?” Such persistent commentaries make clear the ordinary expectation that assimilation should be one- way. However, from the viewpoint of most immigrants of color, much of this Anglo-conformity assimilation process is not good, for it requires them to abandon cultural preferences and other important home-culture elements (for example, language) that they greatly value and depend on. They often, accurately, feel this Anglo-conformity assimilation as a direct attack on their home cultures. Indeed, one might term some of it an effort at “cultural cleansing.”

Yet another serious flaw in most mainstream assimilation analysis is that it hides the principal white agents who control major societal processes of adaptation by immigrants of color and others coming into the society. These white agents, who are often agents of substantial discrimination, are not called out and analyzed in the mainstream conceptual tradition. Historically, elite whites, and their white and other acolytes, are the ones who shape and control most of the employment, educational, and political access in society, along with the discriminatory barriers (periodically including violence) that restrict and limit societal access for immigrants and their descendants, most especially for those who are racially subordinated. Indeed, as we noted above, the immigrants who are the main focus of most of these contemporary assimilation analyses are typically among the least powerful in the societal assimilation scenarios.

The Melting Pot: Challenging Traditional
Assimilation Perspectives?

Throughout its history the Anglo-conformity perspective on this country’s assimilation process has appeared to be in tension with certain variations of a melting-pot perspective. Indeed, a certain pluralistic diversity of early immigrant groups was welcomed by the country’s first president, George Washington. In a letter written in 1790 to members of a Jewish group in Newport, Rhode Island, he expressed this view of US tolerance and inclusion:

The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for giving to Mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support. (Freeman, 1992: 565)

Washington exaggerated the lack of state-supported bigotry but did extend his welcome to Jewish immigrants from Europe to the new US mixture because they qualified as substantially white, at least for some in the era’s white elite. This is evident too in the fact that the Jewish immigrants being admitted were given access to naturalized citizenship under a 1790 law, one that limited such US citizenship to “whites” (Jacobson, 1998: 177).

In the 1780s, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, a French agriculturalist who immigrated to the United States, penned a panegyric praising his adopted country, one reflective of this supposed open-immigration perspective. His Letters from an American Farmer stated that “Americans” were a “mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans and Swedes” (De Crèvecœur, [1782] 1997: 42). The result of their interactive and mutual mixing and amalgamation, he averred, would be the emergence of a “new man” in the United States. He was apparently the first to write so publicly of these Americans as “melted” into a “new race,” a new people whose “posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.” His view was essentially a melting-pot perspective without that exact name, and he envisioned various European immigrants blending together in an apparently reciprocal adaptation process to create this new “American man.” However, de Crèvecœur and others in the early white elite viewed this emergent new man as involving only a limited melding of US groups. For these analysts only white Europeans were part of the exciting new meld, and they excluded the fifth of the new country that was then African and Native American. This French American adhered to the early white racial axiom that only whites could be truly “American.”

This conception of some type of a new American blend seems to have been accepted by some members of the white elite of the nineteenth century. Confronted with the need for white laborers and farmers in newly conquered western areas of the United States, many (but by no means all) of the nineteenth-century white elite manifested an uneasy but receptive attitude toward millions of new European immigrant workers. They further developed a version of this blended-American ideology—a cluster of ideas including the “belief that a new nation, a new national character and a new nationality were forming in the United States, and that the most heterogeneous human materials could be taken in and absorbed into this nationality” (Gleason, 1964: 20). Yet again, the new and diverse “human materials” said by white leaders to be blending together in a new American character were white and European in ancestry.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Israel Zangwill, a Jewish immigrant from England, wrote an acclaimed play, The Melting-Pot (1909), that continued and amplified this ideology. Indeed, this play appears to be the first influential public statement to make explicit use of melting-pot language. Its melting-pot imagery was similar to de Crèvecœur’s, and also sanguine, but with a new twist. Not surprisingly, Zangwill’s concern was to find a niche for eastern European Jewish immigrants and their children in the ever-growing United States. To facilitate that task he pushed for their being truly “American” and “white.” In Act 1 of his influential play, one of the central characters proclaims these famous lines:

America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming. … Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American.

Like de Crèvecœur earlier, Zangwill constructed a roster of the peoples who would idealistically make a mutually melded composite of important immigrant groups, again termed the new “American.” Yet Zangwill too envisioned a restricted melting pot of only those with European ancestry. Unlike de Crèvecœur’s entries, however, Zangwill’s list included European Jews. Still, even as he brought the proclaimed melting pot fully into US discourse and legend, Zangwill and fellow publicists did not include the substantial proportion of the US population that was then Native, African, Latino, and Asian American.

Not surprisingly, many US residents still celebrate a rather idealistic vision of an interactive blending of people from many countries into one US melting pot. We will see this celebration in the commentaries of our Latino respondents in Chapter 6. However, empirically speaking, the melting pot, conceptualized as a mutually blended composite of peoples, has never happened. It is one of the enduring fictions of US society, for even the later European immigrant groups adapted in a substantially one-way Anglo-conformity process of assimilation, with mostly only modest reciprocal influences on the core Anglo-American legal, political, economic, educational, and other major institutions. In addition, to the present day, most European Americans have never envisioned the melting pot as a mutual blending of European Americans with Americans of color to make a truly “new American blend.” The melting pot that matters to them has been viewed as a white-dominated cauldron. Today, as in the past, most whites reciprocally adapt only to modest aspects of the cultures of immigrants of color, such as certain food and music, that do not endanger continuing white dominance in the core culture and major societal institutions such as those of law, politics, and the capitalistic economy.

What Would Full Assimilation Mea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Racializing Latinos
• Chapter 2 Spanish Language: Denigration and Racialization
• Chapter 3 The Racialization of Place and Space: Latinos in Public Spaces
• Chapter 4 Operating Out of the White Frame: Latino Adaptation and Conformity
• Chapter 5 Affirmative Action Programs: Latino Opposition and Support
• Chapter 6 Melting Pot, or Not: Latinos and Whiteness
• Chapter 7 The Great Demographic Shift and the US Future
• References
• Further Readings
• Index
• About the Authors