Latino Crossings

Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and the Politics of Race and Citizenship

Nicholas De Genova, Ana Yolanda Ramos-Zayas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781135952365
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

Despite being lumped together by census data, there are deep divisions between Mexicans and Puerto Ricans living in the United States. Mexicans see Puerto Ricans as deceptive, disagreeable, nervous, rude, violent, and dangerous, while Puerto Ricans see Mexicans as submissive, gullible, naive, and folksy. The distinctly different styles of Spanish each group speaks reinforces racialized class differences. Despite these antagonistic divisions, these two groups do show some form of Latinidad, or a shared sense of Latin American identity. Latino Crossings examines how these constructions of Latino self and otherness interact with America's dominant white/black racial consciousness. Latino Crossings is a striking piece of scholarship that transcends the usually rigid boundary between Chicano/Mexican and Puerto Rican studies.

CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Latino Crossings

This book explores the possibilities for and, more importantly, the obstacles to the emergence of a shared sense of “Latino” identity, or Latinidad, between two of the largest and most historically significant Latin American groups in the United States. Based upon ethnographic research in Chicago—one of very few major sites where Mexicans and Puerto Ricans have both settled over several decades—this study is concerned with the sociopolitical relations between Mexican migrants and Puerto Ricans within the space of the U.S. nation-state. Through the critical analytic lens enabled by these two experiences and their intersections, this research is focused primarily on the politics of race and citizenship in the U.S. “Racialization” and “the politics of citizenship” are posited as the central categories of our analysis.

The analytic framework of racialization emphasizes the ways that “race,” or “racial difference,” cannot be presumed to be based upon the “natural” characteristics of identifiable groups or the “biological” effects of ancestry, but rather comes to be actively produced as such, and continually reproduced and transformed as well. To the extent that “racial differences” appear to be self-evident, our point of departure is to inquire into the social struggles over the ways that those apparently stable distinctions between groups have come to be naturalized and fixed. Thus, “race” is always entangled in social relations and conflicts, and retains an enduring (seemingly intractable) significance precisely because its forms and substantive meanings are always eminently historical and mutable. The analytic framework of racialization, furthermore, attends to the extension and elaboration of racial meanings to social relations, practices, or groups that have previously been unclassified racially, or differently racially classified (Winant, 1994:58–68; cf. Omi and Winant, 1986:64–66).

“Race,” even in its most crudely biological formulations, has always been preeminently construed not simply around what particular groups of people naturally and inherently “are” but also, more importantly, in terms of differences that might otherwise be glossed as “cultural”—what people “do” and how—which serve to distinguish them as distinct groups. Nevertheless, even the most purely “cultural” notions of racial difference always fall back on a presumed concept of the existence of identifiable, enduring, and relatively bounded “groups,” and thus, always retain quasi-biological assumptions about shared kinship and common ancestry as the ultimate basis for “community.” Indeed, to the extent that the concept of “culture” has been persistently deployed, historically, to account for the differences among “groups” that might otherwise have been depicted in terms of shared “blood,” the idea of “culture” has never been coherently or consistently separable from racialized notions of groups defined by their putative “biology.”

In light of the predominantly “cultural” focus of contemporary racialization processes, therefore, it is crucial to emphasize that we are not interested here to produce an account of the differences between Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in a manner that would contribute to the objectification of these social and political differences in terms of a presumed inventory of supposed “cultural” characteristics. Much less would we attribute these divisions and antagonisms to any kind of inherent conflict purported to arise from some essentialized “cultural” disparity between the two. Rather, we want to examine how the construction of differences—whether “cultural” or “biological”—between Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, as groups, operates within a larger social framework of racialized inequalities of power and opportunity. Theodore Allen argues that what is substantive and systemic about racial oppression is precisely oppression, rather than “race” itself (as a phenotypic or phylogenic category of distinction). “By examining racial oppression as a particular system of oppression—like gender oppression or class oppression or national oppression,” he explains, it becomes possible to consistently theorize the organic interconnection of these systems of oppression (Allen, 1994:28). Allen's critical intervention is instructive, in that it makes it possible to sustain an analytic distinction between racialization, on the one hand, and racism (or more precisely, racial oppression), on the other. This distinction is critical for our purposes here, where two racially oppressed groups each find themselves ensnared by a larger racist hegemony that is sustained, in part, by the extent to which they come to position themselves socially in racialized opposition to one another.¹

A crucial difference that Mexican migrants and Puerto Ricans often produced as a racialized distinction between one another—as groups—directly or indirectly concerned their respective positions in relation to U.S. citizenship. Mexican migrants ordinarily arrive in the U.S. as noncitizens; by contrast, people born in Puerto Rico, a colony of the U.S., are automatically counted among its citizens. Insofar as the institution of U.S. citizenship is commonly presumed to differentiate subjects in relation to the power of the nation-state, differences, divisions, and inequalities are elaborated in terms of “citizenship” and “immigration”: Who is a U.S. citizen? Who is a “foreigner,” or an “alien”? Who is eligible for citizenship? Who is deportable? And moreover, who is a “real American”? Furthermore, how do apparently formal or legalistic distinctions of citizenship translate into substantive inequalities of “rights” and entitlements, such as access to various social welfare benefits? This is the spectrum of concerns that comprises what we are calling “the politics of citizenship.”

Our account of the differences produced between Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Chicago is, therefore, concentrated on the centrality of politics in the most everyday senses of the word. Specifically, this study reveals the constitutive way that the unequal politics of citizenship produced by the U.S. nation-state for these two Latino groups, respectively, has entailed radically different relations to the U.S. state on the part of each, and thus, has engendered significant divisions between their two experiences. Likewise, we emphasize the ways that these divergent relations to U.S. citizenship have come to be racialized in distinct and historically specific ways—including in the ways that the two groups are positioned, and position themselves, in relation to one another. Ultimately, then, this ethnographic research enables an interrogation of the institution of U.S. citizenship itself as a mode for producing social inequality and racialized subordination, within the larger framework of U.S. nationalism as a racial formation.

This introductory chapter provides an historical overview of Mexican and Puerto Rican migrations and their distinct relations to the legal economy and racial order of the U.S. nation-state. Furthermore, this chapter provides a discussion of the two research projects that are the source of the ethnographic materials examined in this book, and addresses some of the methodological comparisons relevant to the collaboration that sustains this study. Finally, this chapter also outlines the thematic concerns that will be the focus of the rest of the book.

Mexican Migration and “Illegality”

Mexican migrants are very commonly the implied if not overt focus of mass-mediated, journalistic, as well as scholarly discussions of “illegal aliens” (Chavez, 2001; J. García, 1980; Johnson, 1997). The genesis of their condition of “illegality,” however, is seldom examined. The figure of the “illegal alien” itself has emerged as a mass-mediated sociopolitical category that is saturated with racialized difference, and moreover, serves as a constitutive feature of the specific racialized inscription of “Mexicans” in general, regardless of their immigration status in the United States or even U.S. citizenship (De Genova, 1999; in press; Ngai, 1999; in press). Although the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) itself has estimated that Mexicans comprise only 54% of the total number of undocumented migrants in the U.S.,² the vigilance and enforcement by the INS (and especially the Border Patrol) against so-called “illegal aliens” has consistently been directed overwhelmingly against Mexicans in particular, historically.

There has long been a commonplace recognition of the fact that significant numbers of Mexican migrants came to work without documents in the U.S. (Gamio, 1930; Taylor, 1932; cf. Calavita, 1984; J. García, 1980; Martínez, 1976; Ngai, 1999; Reisler, 1976:24–25; Samora, 1971). The fact of undocumented Mexican migration arose as a consequence of a shared, albeit unequal, history between Mexico and the U.S. At the outset, it is instructive to recall that, in the first instance, it was white U.S. citizens who were the “illegal aliens” whose undocumented incursions into Mexican national territory provided a prelude to the eventual U.S. invasion and war in 1846 (cf. Acuña, 1981:5; Mirandé, 1985:24; Vélez-Ibáñez, 1996:57–62).³ The U.S. conquest of Mexico's northern frontier imposed a border where there had previously been none, dividing Mexico in half; it also entailed the colonization of the Mexican population on the U.S. side of that new boundary. According to the terms codified by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, approximately 80,000– 100,000 Mexicans were summarily disenfranchised of their Mexican nationality the following year and became U.S. subjects, if not quite citizens (Griswold del Castillo, 1990:62). Despite official (“legal”) guarantees, therefore, they were despoiled of their land, and their civil rights were regularly violated, often through outright racist terror (Acuña, 1981/1988/2000; Barrera, 1979; De León, 1983; M. García, 1981; Montejano, 1987; Pitt, 1971). As a regional political economy took shape in what came to be called the “American Southwest,” mining, railroads, ranching, and agriculture relied extensively upon the active recruitment of Mexican/migrant workers (Acuña, 1981/1988/2000; Barrera, 1979; Gómez-Quiñones, 1994; R. González, 1981). In the following decades, a steadily increasing and effectively permanent importation of Mexican labor by U.S. employers cultivated and sustained a largely unregulated and numerically unrestricted migration between the two countries (Samora, 1971). During and after the years of the Mexican Revolution and World War I, from 1910 to 1930, over a million people—approximately one-tenth of Mexico's total population—relocated north of the border, partly owing to social disruptions and dislocations within Mexico during this period of political upheaval, but principally driven and often directly orchestrated by labor demand in new industries and agriculture in the U.S. (cf. Cardoso, 1980).

After its creation in 1924, the Border Patrol quickly assumed its role as a special police force for the disciplining and repression of Mexican workers in the U.S. (Cockcroft, 1986; Mirandé, 1987; Ngai, 1999). The Border Patrol's selective enforcement of the law—coordinated with seasonal labor demand by U.S. employers (as well as the occasional exigencies of electoral politics)—has long maintained a “revolving door” policy, whereby mass deportations are concurrent with an overall, large-scale importation of Mexican migrant labor (Cockroft, 1986; cf. Samora, 1971). Prior to the enactment of the 1965 amendments to the Immigration and Nationalities Act, however, the regulatory and disciplinary role of deportation operated in a context in which there were no statutory restrictions imposing numerical quotas on “legal” Mexican migration. Although there were no quantitative restrictions on their legal migration, Mexican migrants could nonetheless be conveniently denied entry into the U.S. on the basis of a selective enforcement of qualitative features of immigration law; in addition to a required $8 immigrant head tax and a $10 fee for the visa itself, entry was typically refused on the grounds of “illiteracy,” or a perceived liability to become a “public charge” (due to having no prearranged employment), or, on the other hand, for violation of prohibitions against contracted labor (due to having prearranged employment through labor recruitment). Likewise, Mexican workers could be deported if they could not verify that they held valid work visas, or if they could be found to have become “public charges,” or violated U.S. laws, or engaged in acts that could be construed as “anarchist” or “seditionist”—all of which rendered deportation a crucial mechanism of labor discipline and subjugation, and was intended to counteract union organizing among Mexican/migrant workers (cf. Acuña, 1981/1988/2000; Cockcroft, 1986; Dinwoodie, 1977; Gómez-Quiñones, 1994). During the Great Depression of the 1930s, however, the more plainly racist character of Mexican criminalization and deportation became abundantly manifest, culminating in the systematic exclusion of Mexicans from employment and economic relief, followed by the forcible deportation of at least 415,000 migrants as well as U.S.-citizen Mexicans (born in the U.S. to migrant parents), and the “voluntary” repatriation of 85,000 more (Balderrama and Rodríguez, 1995; Guerin-Gonzáles, 1994; Hoffman, 1974).⁴ People were expelled with no regard to legal residence or U.S. citizenship or even birth in the U.S.—simply for being “Mexicans.”

In the face of the renewed labor shortages caused by U.S. involvement in World War II, the United States federal government initiated what came to be known as the Bracero Program as an administrative measure to institutionalize and regiment the supply of Mexican migrant labor for U.S. capitalism (principally for agriculture in the Southwest, but also for the railroads).⁵ This legalized importation of Mexican labor meant that migrant workers, once contracted, were essentially a captive workforce under the jurisdiction of the state. In this way, the U.S. government provided a federal guarantee to employers of unlimited “cheap” labor. In addition to this protracted legal contract-labor migration, however, the Bracero Program facilitated undocumented migration at levels that far surpassed the numbers of “legal” (contracted) braceros—both through the development of a migration infrastructure and through employers' invitations of braceros to overstay the limited tenure of their contracts. Employers came to prefer the undocumented workers because they could evade the bond and contracting fees, minimum employment periods, fixed wages, and other safeguards required in employing braceros (Galarza, 1964; cf. Calavita, 1992; Samora, 1971). Some have estimated that four undocumented migrants entered the U.S. from Mexico for every documented bracero (Cockcroft, 1986:69).⁶ Early in 1954, in an affront to Mexican negotiators' pleas for a fixed minimum wage for braceros, the U.S. Congress authorized the Department of Labor to unilaterally recruit Mexican workers, and the Border Patrol itself opened the border and actively recruited undocumented migrants (Cockcroft, 1986; Galarza, 1964). This period of official “open border” soon culminated, predictably in accord with the “revolving door” strategy, in the 1954–55 expulsion of at least 2.9 million “illegal” Mexican/migrant workers under the militarized dragnet and nativist hysteria of “Operation Wetback” (J. García, 1980; cf. Cockcroft, 1986). Thus, the Bracero years (1943–64) were distinguished not only by expanded legal migration through contract labor, but also the federal facilitation of undocumented migration and the provision of ample opportunities for legalization (what was called the “drying out” of “wetbacks”), simultaneously coupled with considerable repression and mass deportations.

Due to the critical function of deportation in the maintenance of a “revolving door” policy, the tenuous distinction between “legal” and “illegal” migration has been deployed to stigmatize and regulate Mexican/migrant workers for much of the twentieth century. This reflects something of the special character of Mexican migration to the U.S.: it has provided U.S. capitalism with the only “foreign” migrant labor reserve so sufficiently flexible and tractable that it can neither be fully replaced nor completely excluded under any circumstances (cf. Cockcroft, 1986). Since 1965, however, the ongoing history of U.S. immigration law has been central in structuring the inequalities that have shaped Mexican/migrant experiences. The historical specificity of the “migrant” status of Mexicans is inextricable from the fact that all of the prominent changes in U.S. immigration law since 1965 have been restrictive in unprecedented ways, weighing disproportionately upon migrants from Mexico, in particular, through a legal production of Mexican/migrant “illegality” (De Genova, 1999; in press). According to estimates based on the 2000 Census, Mexico has furnished 7.5–8.4 million (so-called “legal” as well as undocumented) migrants who currently reside in the United States, and approximately half of them (49.3%) are estimated to have arrived during the decade of the 1990s.⁷ No other country has supplied even comparable numbers; indeed, by 2000, Mexican migrants alone constituted nearly 28% of the total “foreign-born” population in the U.S. (Camarota, 2001:14). The INS projected in October 1996 that 2.7 million of these are undocumented, but by May 2002, based on estimates calculated from the 2000 Census, researchers have suggested that the more accurate figure is 4.7 million, of whom as many as 85% had arrived in the U.S. during the 1990s.⁸ Mexicans have continued to migrate, but an increasingly restrictive immigration regime has ensured that ever greater numbers have been relegated to an indefinite condition of “illegality.”

The category “illegal alien” has long been a profoundly useful and profitable one that effectively serves to create and sustain a legally vulnerable—and hence, relatively tractable and thus “cheap”—reserve of labor (cf. De Genova, 2002). Undocumented Mexican/migrant labor in particular has been increasingly criminalized, subjected to excessive and extraordinary forms of policing, denied fundamental human rights and many rudimentary social entitlements, and thus is consigned to an uncertain sociopolitical predicament, always subject to deportation, often with little or no recourse to any semblance of protection from the law. The coupling of “Mexican”-ness and migrant “illegality,” therefore, has rendered Mexicans in the U.S. as permanent “outsiders,” and has ensured that the politics of citizenship is always a thoroughly racialized matter. The total number of Mexicans in the U.S. (including both migrants and those born in the U. S) is approximately 21–23 million, and comprises over 65% of all U.S. Latinos. While the overall majority are, in fact, U.S. citizens, then, approximately 22% of the Mexican population may be currently undocumented, and a considerably greater percentage will have been previously undocumented. Likewise, among those who are U.S. citizens, a significant proportion are the U.S.-born children of Mexican migrants. Thus, it is impossible to underestimate the extent to which the disproportionate and unprecedented legal production of migrant “illegality” for Mexicans in particular has directly or indirectly affected all Mexicans in the U.S., regardless of nativity or citizenship, and supplies a defining feature in their racialization as “Mexicans.”

Puerto Rican Migration and U.S. Citizenship

Puerto Ricans, along with African Americans, are commonly implicated in journalistic and mass-media representations of welfare “abuse,” and are figured as prominent “exceptions” to hegemonic narratives of social mobility in the U.S. Not unlike the stereotype of the African American “welfare queen,” the figure of the “welfare dependent” Puerto Rican is a persistent racialized stigma that distinguishes Puerto Ricans from other Latino groups. The fact that, unlike other migrants to the U.S., all Puerto Ricans inherit the seeming advantage of being born into U.S. citizenship further accentuates the insinuation that endemic poverty and “welfare dependency” can ultimately be attributed to Puerto Ricans' own “failings.” In this sense, the image of “welfare dependency” marks Puerto Ricans as a culturally “deficient” group who apparently lack the work ethic and concern for family that are celebrated as good “immigrant values.” In spite of their U.S. citizenship, then, Puerto Ricans have been largely treated as a public liability, implicitly signaling that they are incorrigibly in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Introduction: Latino Crossings
• Chapter 2 “Latino” Locations: The Politics of Space in Chicago
• Chapter 3 Economies of Dignity: Ideologies of Work and Worth
• Chapter 4 Performing Deservingness: “Civility” and “Modernity” in Conflict
• Chapter 5 Familiar Apparitions: Gender and Ideologies of the Family
• Chapter 6 Latino Languages, Mixed Signals
• Chapter 7 Latino Rehearsals: Divergent Articulations of Latinidad
• Chapter 8 Conclusion: Latino Futures?
• Notes
• References
• Index