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ОглавлениеThe History of Spanish and Spanish-speakers in the US
To examine the history of Spanish in the US, including Spanish exploration and conquest in North America and the Caribbean, US territorial expansion and the annexation of lands inhabited by Spanish-speakers, and the migration of Spanish-speakers to the US, and to analyze how history and the ways in which it has been represented shape the current status of Spanish and Spanish-speakers, as well to consider symbolic implications of the representation of that history.
In Chapter 2 we challenged the myth that people in the US who speak Spanish are primarily immigrants by pointing out that the majority of people who report speaking Spanish at home were born in the US are US-born. Further, while there is no denying that immigration to the US has played (and continues to play) a key role in the presence of Spanish in the US, it would be a mistake to classify Spanish exclusively as an immigrant language. Although conventional accounts of US history typically start with the English colonies at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607 and Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620, the Spanish government had established a settlement in Virginia 80 years earlier (Taylor, 2002; Weber, 2000).1 Thus, Spanish was spoken in what is now the US before English was, and it has been spoken continuously since that time (Gonzalez, 2011). Advocating for the study of Spanish, Thomas Jefferson referenced the long presence of Spanish in North America, as well as Spanish-speakers’ arrival prior to English-speakers, and observed that ‘the antient [sic] part of American history is written chiefly in Spanish’ (Jefferson, 1787, cited in Boyd, 1955). Jefferson’s remark is even more accurate today than at the time he wrote it because in the following century the US annexed thousands of acres of land that were under Spanish rule in Jefferson’s time. Like Jefferson, we believe that knowing the history of Spanish and Spanish-speakers is crucial for a full understanding of US history. Even more relevant for this book, we argue that it is crucial for the understanding of Spanish in the US, as the sociolinguistics and sociopolitics of Spanish (as well as its linguistic characteristics) are rooted in this history.
The version of history typically taught in US schools frames the development of the US as a westward expansion of English colonial settlers and their descendants, largely downplaying the role, and in some cases even the existence, of Native peoples, enslaved Africans and other European colonists (Taylor, 2002). As a result, many people in the US are unaware that large swaths of North America were claimed by the Spanish long before they became part of the US. For this reason, this chapter gives a brief history of the Spanish colonial possessions that were eventually incorporated into the US. These possessions include essentially all of the present territory of the US west of the Mississippi River, as well as Florida and Puerto Rico (see Figure 3.1). This colonial history is reflected in the names of hundreds of US rivers, mountains, towns and even several states (including Arizona and Colorado), although the Spanish origin of these names is not always recognized by present-day inhabitants (Gonzalez, 2011). The US’ annexation of these lands via military force, as well as the broader intervention in the Caribbean and Central America, are what transformed the US from ‘an isolated yeoman’s democracy into a major world empire’ (Gonzalez, 2011: 28). In this chapter, we explain the Spanish conquest in North America and the subsequent annexation of lands by the US; key moments in this history are shown on the timeline in Figure 3.2.
Figure 3.1 A 1765 map of North America showing British and Spanish colonial possessions
Source: Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.
Figure 3.2 Timeline of Spanish conquest and US annexation
In the past few decades, historians and other scholars have sought to correct the Eurocentric and Anglocentric triumphalist versions of US history by paying more attention to all that they leave out or downplay. In particular, researchers, educators and activists have forcefully dispelled the myth that European colonists encountered ‘virgin’ lands by pointing to the many millions of Native peoples that lived in North America prior to European arrival. While the exact size of the pre-contact population is a matter of some debate, the prevailing academic view puts it somewhere between 7 and 18 million people (Daniels, 1992; Gonzalez, 2011; Taylor, 2013). The war, slavery, torture, disease, starvation and murder that resulted from European colonization caused the death of 100 million Indigenous people in the Western hemisphere over the next 400 years, which has been called the biggest genocide in the history of the world (Stannard, 1993). Scholars have also brought new attention to the centrality of slavery in the English colonial project and ultimately in the development of US wealth and power (e.g. Baptist, 2016; Beckert & Rockman, 2016). In addition, historians have also sought to include other European colonies in North America, including those of the Dutch, French and Spanish, within accounts of the history of the US (e.g. Taylor, 2002).
Efforts to offer a more complete picture of US history represent a welcome correction to the more traditional whitewashed accounts. However, attention to the Spanish colonial history of the US is not exclusively a recent phenomenon. In fact, since the early 20th century, various social actors have sought to highlight the Spanish history particularly of the Southwest but also of Florida. Later in the chapter we explore this celebration of Spanish colonization, its connection to specific economic and political interests and the ways in which it also glosses over the brutality of European conquest and the subjugation and decimation of Native peoples and cultures. We will also look at protests against the romanticized portrayal of Spanish conquistadors and colonists, drawing parallels to recent challenges to the racist glorification of Confederate leaders. Our discussion emphasizes the continued relevance of history, and of historical representation, to current debates about national identity and belonging.
US intervention in Latin America did not end with the annexation of the lands that now comprise the Southwestern US and Puerto Rico. Instead, the US continued to exert economic, political and military power in the Caribbean as well as Central and South America. Whereas 19th and early 20th century intervention was focused on allowing US businesses to maximize profit, primarily by supporting repressive governments that kept workers in line, in the second half of the 20th century Cold War concerns (i.e. stopping communist movements) also played a crucial role. US policies and involvement have contributed to economic and political instability, as well as social unrest, which in turn have led to increased migration to the US. The need for workers in the US has also attracted immigrants, sometimes as the result of active recruiting efforts by businesses. Thus, despite the long history of Spanish in the US, immigration has been a key factor in its continued presence and strength, given the pattern of language shift that results in the third generation being likely to be predominantly or exclusively English-speaking. For this reason, in the second half of chapter we look at the history of Latin American migration to the US, and we briefly consider current immigration policy.
Spanish Colonization in North America and the Caribbean
With the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Bahamas in 1492, the Spanish began a centuries-long period of exploration, conquest and colonization in the Caribbean and throughout the Americas. Columbus and his men claimed the islands of Cuba and Hispaniola (shared by the present-day countries of Haiti and the Dominican Republic). After returning to Spain and impressing the Spanish monarchs Isabelle and Ferdinand with tales of gold and riches, Columbus again sailed to the Caribbean, bringing more ships, men, and livestock, as well as plans to create a Spanish empire in the Americas.
In the Caribbean the Spanish colonists enslaved the Indigenous Taíno population, forcing them to work on sugar plantations and ranches as well as in the mines. As a result of the brutal treatment and exploitation they suffered at the hand of the conquerors, together with the devastating effects of exposure to European diseases, hundreds of thousands of Taínos died. According to Taylor (2002), the number of Taínos on Hispaniola dropped from at least 300,000 in 1492 to just 500 in 1548, a 98% reduction in just over 50 years. Others put the original number higher and the speed of the devastation even faster (Gonzalez, 2011). With the decline of the Taínos, their Arawak language was lost. A few Arawak borrowings into Spanish (and English via Spanish) have endured, including huracán, tabaco and guayaba (‘hurricane, tobacco, guava’). And many Puerto Ricans of all ethnoracial backgrounds refer to the island as Boríquen or Borínquen, and to themselves as Boricuas, all of which derive from Arawak terms. In recent years there has been a growing movement to reclaim and reconstruct Taíno identity, and to recognize the endurance of some aspects of Taíno and other Native Caribbean cultures (González, 2018).
Spanish explorers used their Caribbean settlements as the point of departure for expeditions northward up the Atlantic Coast, through the Gulf of Mexico, up the Mississippi River and westward to Central America. In 1513 Ponce de León led the first European expedition to the Florida Peninsula, which was inhabited by the Apalachee, Calusa and Timuca, among other Native groups. In the same year, Vasco Núnez de Balboa crossed Panama and became the first European to see the Pacific Ocean, which he claimed, together with all the lands touching it, for Spain. On their expeditions, Spanish explorers ravaged villages and captured Native peoples to replace the Taínos in the Caribbean colonies. These newer captives also proved susceptible to European diseases such as measles, smallpox and influenza, and the Spanish slavers took captives from increasingly distant villages all around the Gulf of Mexico (Taylor, 2013). In 1501 they had also begun to bring enslaved Africans to toil in the Caribbean.
The Native peoples of North America included a multitude of different groups with tremendous cultural and linguistic diversity. They spoke at least 375 distinct languages and differed in their rituals, beliefs and social organization (Mithun, 2001; Taylor, 2002). For example, in the Southwest, the Acoma, Hopi, Zuni, and other groups collectively known as the ‘Pueblo Indians,’ lived in sedentary agriculture-based societies. In contrast, the diverse Native groups along the Northern Pacific coast relied on hunting, fishing and gathering (Taylor, 2002). Native peoples did not think of themselves as belonging to ‘a common category until named and treated so by the colonial invaders’ (Taylor, 2002: 12). Enslaved Africans were also culturally and linguistically diverse; they included Ashanti, Fulani, Ibo, Malagasy, Mandingo and Yoruba people, among other groups (Taylor, 2002). In Chapter 5 we discuss racialization, the sociopolitical and ideological process in which people are lumped together within a single category, assigned a shared racial identity and treated as inherently different and inferior to dominant groups.
In 1521, Hernán Cortés, accompanied by thousands of Indigenous troops who were enemies of the Aztecs, took Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City), the center of the Aztec empire. Amazed by the incredible riches of the Aztecs, and having heard rumors of gold farther north, Spain sent Hernando de Soto to explore Florida and the Southeast, while Francisco Vázquez de Coronado headed north from Mexico into the Southwest and the Great Plains. Everywhere they went, death and destruction went with them in the form of massacres, exploitation and/or disease. By the mid-16th century, the Spanish empire encompassed lands and peoples deep into North America, as well as in the Caribbean and South America. However, Spain did not settle all their newly claimed possessions to an equal degree. For example, although they explored the Mississippi River basin and claimed Louisiana for Spain, no permanent settlements were established. And despite Spain’s early 16th century claim to all lands touching the Pacific, Spanish settlement of the coast of present-day California didn’t begin until much later, in the 18th century.
Both in Spain and in its colonies, the monarchy and the Catholic Church were closely intertwined, and the conversion of Native peoples to Catholicism went hand in hand with their subjugation to the Spanish Crown. As such, and in light of the perceived need for loyal Spanish subjects, Spanish missions also played a key role in the Spanish colonial project. Spanish authorities hoped that Franciscan friars could help consolidate Spanish power as effectively, and less expensively, than could be done through military force (Taylor, 2002). The Franciscans established missions in Florida, California and the Southwest, in many cases close to existing Native villages. Present-day US cities that were founded by Catholic missionaries include San Antonio, El Paso, San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco, among others (Gonzalez, 2011). Many missions are still standing today (see Figure 3.3, and visit the California State Parks’ webpage for information about the 21 Franciscan missions in the state, at https://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=22722).
Figure 3.3 San Xavier Mission outside Tucson, Arizona; the mission was founded in 1692 and the current structure was completed in 1797
Source: ©Jennifer Leeman (2012).
In some cases, Spanish and Native peoples formed alliances, but it was not a relationship of equals. Instead, Spaniards tried, often successfully, to subordinate Native Americans through a variety of forced labor systems and tribute arrangements, and colonists and missionaries vied for control of Native labor and souls (Taylor, 2002). Yet Native peoples resisted in a variety of ways, including outright revolt. For example, in what is commonly referred to as The Pueblo Revolt, almost 17,000 Native people participated in a well-coordinated uprising against the continued exploitation and abuse by the Spanish. This late 17th century act of resistance was the ‘greatest setback that natives ever inflicted on European expansion in North America’ and it forced the Spanish to show somewhat greater restraint in their exercise of power and domination (Taylor, 2002: 89).
In contrast with England’s North American colonies, which were made up largely of family units that segregated themselves from Native communities, most Spanish colonists were single men (Gonzalez, 2011). Sexual unions between colonists and Native women were common, and mestizos (their ‘mixed’ offspring) became a new social category, as did mulatos (‘mulattos’), the Spanish-language term that was used for the offspring of Europeans and Africans. In the Caribbean, racial ‘mixture’ was typically the result of Spanish colonists fathering children with the enslaved Africans who had replaced Indigenous slaves. In Mexico, Central America and the Southwest, Mestizos and Native people were more common than people with African heritage, but all groups are attested in the historical record (Bristol, 2007; Nieto-Phillips, 2000). In contrast with the more rigid racial categories of New England, ‘the increasing racial and cultural complexity of New Spain challenged the stark and simple dualities of the conquest: Spaniard and Indian, Christian and pagan, conqueror and conquered’ (Taylor, 2002: 61), as well as the Black/White binary. Spanish colonial society incorporated the notion of racial mixture into social and political hierarchies via the castas, the ranked racial classifications that determined everything from perceived social worth to legal and political privileges (see Chapter 5).
The encounters among peoples from Africa, the Americas and Europe obviously had, and continue to have, tremendous cultural, demographic, economic and political impact in all three places and around the world. In North America, despite the gross inequality among them, all three groups influenced the cultures of the others. For Taylor (2002: xii), ‘in such exchanges and composites, we find the true measure of American distinctiveness, the true foundation for the diverse America of our time.’ Because this is a book focused on language, we want to mention that some of these influences are also manifested linguistically. Numerous borrowings from various Native and African languages were incorporated into the Spanish spoken in North America and/or the Caribbean and, in some cases, around the world. Many of these are related to food, flora and fauna, or cultural expressions. African origin words include banana and chango (‘monkey’) (Megenney, 1983). In addition to the Taíno (Arawak) origin words mentioned earlier, others include aguacate, cacao, chocolate and elote (‘avocado, cacao, chocolate, corn’) of Nahuatl origin, as well as cancha, choclo and puma (‘field/court, corn, puma’) from Quechua. Scholars have also investigated the influence of Indigenous and African languages on the grammar and sound system of Spanish and the development of Spanish-based creole languages among African descendant populations in the Americas, as well as the impact of Spanish on Native languages (e.g. Lipski, 2005; Stolz et al., 2008).
The brief history of Spanish exploration and conquest in the Caribbean and North America that we have presented in this section is, of course, also the history of the Spanish language in these same places. We want to point out that under Spanish colonial rule Spanish was the language of power, wielded by those who spoke it as another way to maintain their social and political privilege. Further, post-independence governments throughout Latin America continued to privilege Spanish and Spanish-speakers at the expense of Indigenous, African and African-descendant languages and peoples. In Chapter 5 we will focus more specifically on questions of ethnoracial identity and racialization. Here, we call attention to the elevated position of Spanish in order to highlight the broader principle that a language’s status is not a characteristic of the language itself but is instead tied to the status and power of its speakers. Further, the ongoing discrimination against Indigenous peoples and their languages in Latin America shapes the experiences of Indigenous Latin American immigrants in the US. In the next section we will explain how the formerly Spanish lands, together with the Spanish-speakers who inhabited them, came to be part of the US. This annexation also marks a shift in Spanish’s status in North America from a colonizing to a colonized language. Of course, the impact of that new status endures in the present-day subordination of Spanish in the US.
US Expansionism and Spanish in the US
During the 17th and 18th centuries, European powers competed for control of North American colonies while Native peoples struggled for sovereignty, resulting in various shifting alliances and armed conflicts. Following US independence from England, these conflicts continued to play out, but the new nation eventually achieved dominance over much of North America. In the 19th century, US expansionism led to tremendous territorial growth and the incorporation within the US of large swaths of land that were previously ruled by Spain, as well as territories controlled by other European powers (see Figure 3.4).
Figure 3.4 Map of US territorial expansion
US expansionist policy was rooted in both material and ideological concerns. It reflected the geopolitical and economic ambitions of the US as a nation as well as the financial interests of bankers, merchants and speculators (Acuña, 2015; Duany, 2017; Gonzalez, 2011). There was money to be made by the US acquiring more territory and expanding the frontier, and expansion would enrich individuals while also solidifying US power. In addition, the doctrine of Manifest Destiny framed it as inevitable, desirable and even divinely ordained that the US would expand across North America, a view that was tied to racist notions about Whites’ supposed political and cultural superiority to Indigenous and ‘mixed race’ people (Horsman, 1981).
Incorporation of lands previously held by the Spanish happened in three phases: Florida and the Southeast were annexed at the beginning of the 19th century; Texas, the Southwest and California in the mid-century; and Puerto Rico at the century’s end (Gonzalez, 2011). These three phases, and the ways in which lands and peoples were incorporated, not only provide the historical backdrop for the current status of Spanish and Spanish-speakers in the US but they also shape that status; the roots of the racialization of Spanish can be traced back to this period. We include key dates in the following discussion; more details are presented on the timeline in Figure 3.2 as well as on the map in Figure 3.4.
Phase 1: Florida and the Southeast
As we have seen, the Spanish were the first Europeans to explore and/or claim much of what is now the Southeastern US. However, the French and the British also had designs on the region and the control of various areas switched hands several times among the three of them. Here, we focus on how these lands were incorporated by the US.
The French laid claim to the Louisiana territory, which in addition to the present-day state of Louisiana, also comprised all or part of what is now Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Wyoming. At the start of the 18th century, French outposts reached all the way from the Gulf of Mexico to Hudson Bay, in present-day Canada. These lands were inhabited by numerous Indigenous peoples including the Caddo, Choctaw, Crow, Lakota, Natchez and Osage, among others.
France ceded Louisiana to Spain in the second half of the 18th century, took it back again roughly 40 years later, and ultimately sold it to the US in 1803 in what is commonly known as the Louisiana Purchase. During the period of Spanish colonial rule, Spain had recruited thousands of settlers to Louisiana; thus, the Louisiana Purchase ‘brought the first group of Spanish-speaking people under the U.S. flag’ (Gonzalez, 2011: 35). People from the Canary Islands were predominant among the Spanish settlers and their language variety shaped the isleño Spanish that was spoken in several isolated Louisiana communities well into the 20th century (Lipski, 2008).
In contrast with Louisiana, the Spanish not only explored Florida but also established various settlements and missions there fairly early on. For example, St. Augustine, the oldest city in what is now the continental US, was founded in 1565. Colonial control of Florida shifted hands several times between the Spanish and the British, and it was returned to the Spanish in the late 18th century. Following US independence, tensions with Spain mounted as a result of US expansionist designs and of Spanish colonies’ provision of refuge to African Americans escaping from slavery and Native peoples fighting the US (Gonzalez, 2011).
The US annexed Florida via a type of rebellion called a filibuster, which was used or attempted throughout the borderlands. The way in which filibusters worked was that large numbers of Anglo settlers and speculators moved from the US into sparsely populated areas held by the Spanish. Next, the settlers declared independence from Spain; US troops were sent in and Congress eventually approved incorporation of the newly Anglo-settled lands. Under the pressure of repeated filibusters, Spain transferred ownership of Florida to the US in exchange for just 5 million dollars (equivalent to about 100 million dollars in 2019), in the hopes that this might quench the US thirst for more and more land and allow Spain to retain its empire (Gonzalez, 2011). It did not.
Phase 2: Texas, the Southwest and California
In the same year that the US took Florida from Spain (1821), the end of the Mexican War of Independence brought the close of Spanish colonialism in continental North America. As a result, Texas, the Southwest and California were now all part of an independent Mexico.
The Spanish had not established many settlements in Texas and thus the population remained predominantly Apache, Caddo and Comanche. Following independence from Spain, Mexico sought to attract White settlers who would provide a ‘counterweight’ to Texas’s Native population (Massey, 2016: 161). Once in Texas, the settlers who poured in from the US, many of them adventurers and land speculators, became increasingly rebellious toward the Mexican government (Gonzalez, 2011). They were unhappy with various aspects of Mexican law and religious culture, but Mexico’s 1829 abolition of slavery was the biggest point of contention (Gómez, 2007; Massey, 2016). When Mexican authorities sought to enforce the ban, Anglo settlers declared Texas’s independence, and war broke out. While the Army of Texas lost the mythologized Battle of the Alamo in 1836, they went on to defeat the Mexican army and establish the independent Republic of Texas later that same year. Texas’s admission to the US was delayed as Congress debated the balance of slave and free states, but it was eventually admitted (as a slave state). As Ramos (2019) explains, despite the still common portrayal of the Texas Revolution as ‘an organic uprising’ and of the Battle of the Alamo as a heroic stand for freedom, ‘the Alamo was in Mexico – its seizure [and Texas’s] was precisely an act of American expansion.’ Further, the role of slavery in Texas’s independence and its eventual admission to the US, as well as the references to race in arguments both in favor of and against annexation (Gómez, 2007), illustrate that ‘race was at the core of the earliest attempt to define a clear symbolic boundary between Anglo-America and Latino lands to the south’ (Massey, 2016: 162).
Following the incorporation of Texas, the US sought to continue its territorial expansion. It sent troops into Mexican territory, initiating what is generally known in the US as The Mexican-American War (1847–1848). What is frequently referred to in Mexico as La Guerra de la Intervención Estadounidense (‘The War of US Intervention’) was brutal, with tremendous losses on both sides. US troops advanced far into Mexico, eventually capturing and occupying Mexico City. (The alternate names for the war underscore the role of language in historical representation.)
The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo officially ended the war and established the Rio Grande as the border between the two nations. Under the terms of the treaty, Mexico ceded over half of its pre-war territory to the US and gave up all claims to Texas. The roughly 525,000 square miles of land transferred from Mexico to the US included all or part of present-day Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. While some US politicians had argued for annexing more Mexican territory, opponents, who objected to adding so many non-White or racially mixed people to the US, ultimately prevailed (Gómez, 2007; Gonzalez, 2011). A few years later, the US paid Mexico 10 million dollars for roughly 30,000 additional square miles of land in present-day Arizona and New Mexico in what is known as the Gadsden Purchase.
Post-annexation, Anglo migrants from the eastern US quickly outnumbered the former Mexican citizens who remained north of the new border (Massey, 2016). The influx was especially rapid in California following the 1848 discovery of gold, with devastating effects for Native peoples, who were driven out and, in many cases, slaughtered. The linguistic and racial make-up of the population played a role in debates about whether territories should be admitted as states (Gómez, 2007; Nieto-Phillips, 2000). For example, one Cincinnati newspaper editorial opposed statehood for New Mexico by characterizing the residents as ‘aliens to us in blood and language’ (Gomez, 2007: 72). As the influx of Anglo migrants Whitened the population, statehood gained more support, especially in territories that had received more immigration, such as California (Baron, 1990; Crawford, 1992).
On paper the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo granted full citizenship to the residents of the formerly Mexican territories, but in practice the treaty citizens (i.e. people who became US citizens as a result of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo) were racialized and treated as second-class citizens. They were subjected to segregated and inferior schools, housing and public facilities, and were often denied the right to vote (Gómez, 2007; Gross, 2008; Lozano, 2018; Olivas, 2006). In addition, under Mexican rule Indigenous groups such as the Pueblos had been citizens, but under US rule their rights were severely restricted. Further, promises to respect Spanish and Mexican land grants were often broken, and land was routinely appropriated by speculators or awarded to Anglo homesteaders arriving from the East (Acuña, 2015; Gonzalez, 2011).
In addition to the denial of rights and the seizing of property, Mexicans and Mexican Americans were also the target of mob violence, and thousands were lynched in the period from 1848 to 1928 (Carrigan & Webb, 2013). Lynchings were a tool of subjugation as well as a reflection of racism. They occurred throughout the Southwestern states as well as far from the border such as in Nebraska and Wyoming, but they were ‘greater in scope and longer in duration’ in Texas (Carrigan & Webb, 2013: 56). The early 20th century was a period of particularly brutal violence against Mexicans and Mexican Americans, some of it carried out by the Texas Rangers, an official law enforcement agency. (See the website Refusing to Forget at https://refusingtoforget.org, for more information on this racial violence, its lasting impact, and efforts to increase public awareness.) Some see parallels between the early 20th century anti-Mexican violence and recent anti-Latinx attacks, including the 2019 mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas in which the shooter is believed to be have been motivated by anti-immigrant, anti-Mexican and White supremacist racism (Beckett, 2019).
Phase 3: Puerto Rico
In the 19th century, and coinciding with independence movements throughout Latin America, Puerto Ricans seeking greater self-determination carried out a series of revolts against Spanish colonial power. At the end of the century, Spain did concede some autonomy and local control (but not full independence) to Puerto Rico, but the new status was short-lived. In 1898, the Spanish-American War broke out, with US troops battling the Spanish in Cuba and the Philippines. At the war’s end that same year, Spain was forced to cede Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, as well as temporary control of Cuba, to the US. At first, many Puerto Ricans celebrated, optimistic that US control would bring democratic values and improved labor conditions (Duany, 2017). However, that optimism didn’t last long; the US granted Puerto Ricans even less autonomy and political rights than they’d had under Spanish colonial rule.
As it did in westward expansion, Manifest Destiny and the treatment of the inhabitants of the Southwestern territories, racism also played a crucial role in decisions about Puerto Rico’s political status (Gelpí, 2011; Gonzalez, 2011; Rivera Ramos, 1996; Torruella, 2007). In particular, opposition to extending citizenship to Puerto Ricans centered on notions regarding their supposed unsuitability for representative democracy and self-government. For example, Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana (who also opposed statehood for the Southwestern territories) argued that God had ‘been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years’ to be ‘the master organizers of the world’ and to ‘administer government among the savage and servile peoples’ (Gelpí, 2011: 22). So too, President Theodore Roosevelt described US democracy as ‘unsuitable’ for the people of Puerto Rico (Gelpí, 2011: 22).
In the midst of World War I, the Jones Act (1917) extended US citizenship to Puerto Ricans, which granted them some additional rights but also made them eligible for the military draft. Even with citizenship, however, Puerto Ricans were not granted full political representation or legal rights. For example, Congress retained the ultimate say over bills passed by Puerto Rico’s legislature, most appointed officials were from the continental US, and Puerto Ricans did not have the right to trial by jury (Ayala & Bernabe, 2009; Cruz, 2017; Duany, 2017). Further, in a series of early 20th century cases, the Supreme Court ruled that inhabitants of Puerto Rico were not entitled to the same constitutional protections as other citizens. The official decisions, which still stand, include references to ‘alien races’ presumed to be so different from (White) Americans in ‘religion, customs, laws, methods of taxation, and modes of thought’ that ‘Anglo-Saxon principles’ could not be applied (Cruz, 2017: 46).
Eventually, in the mid-20th century, Puerto Ricans did gain the right to elect their own governor and to draft their own constitution, but to this day residents of the island, despite being US citizens, do not have representation in Congress and are not allowed to vote in presidential elections. Puerto Rico’s status as a Commonwealth (Estado Libre Asociado) with limited rights in comparison to US states stands in stark contrast to the earlier pattern of US territorial expansion, in which annexed lands were incorporated and set on a path to eventual statehood. The ongoing status of Puerto Rico as an unincorporated territory, and of Puerto Ricans as second-class citizens, as well as the notion that Puerto Rico’s current economic crisis results from cultural or political inadequacies rather than structural issues or federal policies, are all rooted in this racist past.
In this section we have examined the three phases of the Spanish conquest of North American and Caribbean lands, as well as the subsequent annexation of these territories by the US. In the 16th century, Spanish arrived in what is now the US as a language of colonizers, but over the course of the 19th century it increasingly became a colonized language. As such, Spanish became subordinated to English in language ideologies (discussed in the next chapter) as well as language policies (discussed in Chapter 8). Of course, these ideologies and policies were not just about language per se; rather, they were part of a broader subordination of Spanish-speakers in which language was a tool for the exercise of power. Just as the racialization of African and Native peoples can be traced to colonial encounters and the slave trade, the Othering of Spanish-speakers and Latinxs is rooted in the period leading up to and following US territorial expansion (Vélez-Ibáñez, 2017).
Black and White Legends, Hispanophilia and Oñate’s Foot
At the outset of this chapter we noted that the historical presence of Spanish in the US is often overlooked. But while the periods of Spanish and Mexican rule are often omitted or downplayed in traditional accounts of US history, this does not mean that they are universally ignored. In this section we discuss the portrayal of the Spanish history of the Southwest, and of New Mexico in particular. History is never just a neutral description of the past, and historical accounts of the US’ Spanish colonial past are no exception. As we’ll show, these accounts are tied up with various political, economic and social interests, as well as with debates over the construction and representation of ethnoracial and national identities.
The 16th and 17th centuries were a period of intense competition among European imperial powers and religious institutions for dominion in the Americas and around the globe. In addition to military force, imperial rivals also used political and religious propaganda to convince their subjects of the righteousness of their efforts. One such effort is known as the Black Legend, the inaccurate portrayal of Spanish colonialism as more brutal than that of other European powers (Taylor, 2002). The Black Legend was popularized by the British, who sought to justify their own imperialism by claiming moral superiority over the Spanish (Nieto-Phillips, 2004). While there is no question that Spanish colonizers committed horrible atrocities, such atrocities were also carried out by the British in equal measure. Nonetheless, the Black Legend endured, and in the years following US independence many Americans held negative views of Spaniards, who they saw as authoritarian, bloodthirsty, corrupt and fanatical (Weber, 2000).
In contrast with this negative view of the Spanish represented by the Black Legend, a new literary and cultural movement, sometimes referred to as Hispanophilia, emerged toward the end of the 19th century (Nieto Phillips, 2004). Hispanophilia celebrated Spain’s colonial presence in the Southwest, with novels, magazines and films of the era portraying the Spanish conquistadors not as cruel fanatics but as romantic, noble adventurers and missionaries (see Chapter 7 for a discussion of such representations in film). This new glorified account of the Spanish conquest, which Nieto-Phillips (2004) calls ‘the White Legend,’ framed Spaniards as ‘civilizing’ the ‘primitive’ Native peoples, thus minimizing genocide, enslavement and oppression. Not only were the Spanish portrayed as heroes, but mestizaje (i.e. racial ‘mixture’ between Spanish and Native peoples) was downplayed or denied. In this way, Spanish-speakers were represented as the ‘racially pure’ descendants of Europeans.
According to Nieto-Phillips (2004), the White Legend and the downplaying of mestizaje served various ideological and discursive purposes for both New Mexicans and Anglos. In particular, the narrative that framed the Spanish colonizers as courageous and chivalrous gentlemen didn’t just represent resistance to the Black Legend; it was also a counterpoint to the racist portrayals of Mexicans (including New Mexicans) as members of a ‘mongrel race’ (Gómez, 2007; Nieto-Phillips, 2000, 2004). According to the dominant racist views of the time, Whiteness was the ideal and interracial unions were degrading. Further, these views had political implications; as we noted earlier, anti-Mexican and anti-Indigenous racism was central to arguments against New Mexican statehood. Representing New Mexicans as the descendants of Europeans, rather than Native people and Mestizos, was a way to ‘Whiten’ the state’s population and thus make a claim about fitness for self-government, even without the huge influx of Anglos which had altered ethnoracial and linguistic demographics in California and Texas (Gómez, 2007; Nieto-Phillips, 2004).
Language and linguistics – in particular the existence of a unique New Mexican variety of Spanish – also played a supporting role in discourse about New Mexicans’ purported Spanish origins. Multiple factors contributed to the development of New Mexican Spanish, but some researchers focused primarily on the linguistic and social isolation of New Mexican communities (Lipski, 2008). For example, New Mexican linguist Aurelio Espinosa’s early 20th century research emphasized similarities of New Mexican varieties of Spanish, as well as popular sayings and folksongs, to those found in Spain. Just as New Mexicans’ language supposedly showed little African or Indigenous linguistic influence, the implication was that New Mexicans themselves were also racially ‘pure’ (Nieto-Phillips, 2004; Wilson, 1997).
During subsequent periods of immigration from Mexico, some treaty citizens sought to distinguish themselves from new arrivals by virtue of their proficiency in English and/or their assertions of European ancestry (Gonzales-Berry & Maciel, 2000; Lozano, 2018). Whiteness claims were a way to resist racial discrimination, segregation and disenfranchisement. However, rather than challenging anti-Mestizo and anti-Indigenous racism, many such claims focused on improving the status of the individuals who were able to successfully make them and thus they have been sharply criticized.
New Mexico’s Bureau of Immigration also deployed a romanticized depiction of the Spanish colonial past in its efforts to attract tourists and potential migrants from the East (Nieto-Phillips, 2004). In contrast with earlier images of hostile ‘savages’ and ‘cruel, swarthy Mexicans,’ the Bureau’s marketing materials painted a picture of New Mexico as a an ‘enchanting’ landscape where ‘peace-loving Pueblo Indians and noble Spaniards had co-existed for nearly three centuries’ (Nieto-Phillips, 2004: 119–120). While on the surface this might seem like a positive portrayal of the Spanish and Pueblo peoples, it relied on exotification, as well as the implication that these cultures were less developed or sophisticated than the supposedly more modern and industrious Anglo Americans. As such, it sought to attract Eastern tourists by offering them a nostalgic escape from industrialized urban centers (Nieto-Phillips, 2004).
As early as the late 19th century, the recognition of the tremendous economic potential of tourism and the commodification of ethnicity and culture played a role in the promotion of a sanitized colonial past and, in turn, of an emerging Spanish-American identity. In addition to tourist brochures, travelogues, movies and the like, Hispanophilia and the celebration of ‘Old Spain’ could be found in architectural motifs, as well as New Mexican souvenirs and cultural artifacts (Nieto-Phillips, 2004; Wilson, 1997). Language was another way to construct an exotic, romantic Spanish ambience; the same period saw an increased use of Spanish in business names and real estate, such as hotels named El Conquistador and La Hacienda, as well as housing developments with plazas and streets named Alameda and Camino. In many cases, Spanish was both used by Anglos and directed toward Anglos (often with little regard to Spanish grammar rules) (Hill, 2008: 131). As we discuss in Chapter 7, Spanish is still sometimes used by businesses to create a particular sense of place or to convey exotic flavor or cultural authenticity.
The celebration and commodification of an imagined Spanish colonial past has endured through the 20th century and into the 21st. As was the case earlier, the symbolic meaning and discursive implications of the emphasis of Spain’s role in the history of the area are multifaceted. The existence of multiple, competing and contradictory meanings is evident, for example, in the controversies surrounding several statues of Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate, who became the first governor of colonial New Mexico at the end of the 16th century. Oñate led a brutal massacre of approximately 800 Acoma men, women and children as punishment for having violently resisted demands that they turn over their food to Spanish soldiers. Following the massacre, Oñate sentenced the survivors to forced servitude and ordered the amputation of the right foot of all men over the age of 25.
Despite this brutal history, in New Mexico there are numerous businesses, schools and streets named for Oñate and other conquistadors, as well as a variety of Spanish-themed celebrations and pageants. For example, a reenactment of the Entrada, the Spanish reoccupation of Santa Fe after the Pueblo Revolt, was a central part of the city’s annual festival until very recently. The reenactment was created in the early 20th century as a tourist attraction designed to capitalize on the region’s cultural history (Rael-Galvéz, 2017). Similar motivations shaped late 20th century plans for official commemorations of the 400th anniversary of Oñate’s arrival in New Mexico. A larger-than-life bronze equestrian statue of Oñate was built for the new visitors’ center in Alcalde, New Mexico, and others were planned for Albuquerque and El Paso (Texas), which Oñate founded.
Although the promotion of tourism was a key impetus, there were also non-economic motivations to commemorate the Spanish conquest. Indeed, some advocates of Oñate monuments saw them as ‘an opportunity to help correct a deficiency of Spanish history in New Mexico public education’ (June-Friesen, 2005). In other words, the monuments and the visitors’ center were a way to provide what they believed was a long overdue recognition of the presence and cultural contributions of the Spanish and their descendants, as well as to challenge to the traditional teaching of US history as having progressed from east to west. Interest in Oñate may also have been related to New Mexicans’ ‘insecurities over losing their language, culture and political and demographic dominance’ as a result of intergenerational language shift to English and the influx of Anglos from the East (Brooke, 1998). Thus, for some, recognition of Oñate and Spanish colonial history was a way to reclaim a non-Anglo past, more than a celebration of the Spanish conquest itself.
However, for many people, the Oñate monuments and conquistador-themed commemorations of the quadracentennial did not simply represent the recognition of a long-overlooked history. Instead, the celebrations of Spanish colonial history replaced one historical erasure and whitewashing with another, by focusing exclusively on Europeans and their descendants, and failing to acknowledge and address the atrocities that the Spanish committed against the Acoma and other Native peoples. For this reason, activists demonstrated and spoke out against the statues. In one high-profile act of protest, a group calling themselves ‘Friends of Acoma’ cut off the right foot of the Oñate statue at the Alcalde visitors’ center. They sent a letter to the local newspaper explaining their motivation by stating: ‘We see no glory in celebrating Onate’s fourth centennial, and we do not want our faces rubbed in it’ (Alcorn, 2018).
In the years since, opposition to Oñate monuments and conquistador-themed celebrations has grown, much like the growing objections to statues of Confederate generals. Regarding the previously mentioned plans for new Oñate monuments in Albuquerque and at the El Paso airport, numerous public discussions were held, newspaper editorials were published and letters to the editor were written. Ultimately, the El Paso airport statue was installed, but it was renamed ‘The Equestrian’ in an effort to allay opposition. In Albuquerque, planners modified the original design by adding a second monument depicting the land before European arrival (Alcorn, 2018). In the wake of the White supremacist violence at rallies defending Charlottesville, Virginia’s statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in 2017, protests and opposition intensified. In 2018, the city of Santa Fe suspended the Entrada reenactment, and held the Fiesta de Santa Fe without it (you can read some reactions to the change in the New York Times article, ‘New Mexico grapples with its version of Confederate tributes: A celebration of Spanish conquest’ at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/08/us/new-mexico-la-entrada.html, accessed 1 February 2018).
(Im)migration and Spanish in the US
As we have seen, the earliest historical presence of Spanish in the US was due to colonization and conquest, rather than immigration. However, while some descendants of treaty citizens may have managed to retain or reacquire Spanish, the overwhelming force of linguistic shift to English means that migration has been a key factor in Spanish’s continued presence in the US. Spanish-speaking migrants hail from a variety of countries, and they have myriad personal, professional and political reasons for coming to the US. Some come as refugees escaping violence or persecution, whereas others come to pursue educational, economic or professional opportunities. They also encompass people from a wide range of socio-economic statuses and educational backgrounds.
Scholars emphasize that migration patterns are shaped by both push factors and pull factors. Push factors are conditions in migrants’ countries of origin that contribute to migration, such as natural disasters, political violence, gangs or high unemployment. Pull factors, on the other hand, are rooted in the receiving country and include political or religious freedom, labor demand (and recruitment of migrant workers) and educational opportunities. These societal and structural factors condition overall patterns, but of course people’s individual circumstances also play a role in their decisions regarding migration.
The demographics of immigration
In the last chapter, we noted that many people in the US erroneously think that all Latinxs as well as all speakers of Spanish are immigrants, but the actual percentages are just 38% and 47%, respectively (ACS 2017 Five-year estimates). Similarly, and similarly inaccurately, public discourse often equates immigration with Mexican immigration. In reality, while Mexico is the most common country of origin among immigrants, the rate of new immigration from Mexico has slowed. In fact, more Mexicans now leave the US than come to it, resulting in a net decrease in the number of Mexican immigrants living in the US (Zong & Batalova, 2018). Moreover, in most years since 2010, more Asians than Latinxs have migrated to the US and in 2017 the top country of origin of new arrivals was India (Radford, 2019).
So too, many people seem to assume that a majority of immigrants are in the US without authorization. In reality, it is less than a quarter – 23% (Radford, 2019). Further, almost half of all immigrants in the US are naturalized citizens and a little over a quarter are legal permanent residents (Radford, 2019). Moreover, the overall number of unauthorized immigrants has declined steadily since peaking in 2007, with the 2017 numbers representing a 14% reduction (Radford, 2019). In addition, the category of unauthorized immigrants includes people with Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). TPS allows migrants from certain countries to stay in the US when the government designates it too dangerous for them to return home because of armed conflict or natural disaster. DACA, a program created via Executive Order by President Obama in 2012, grants temporary status (without a path to citizenship) to certain individuals brought into the US as children before 2007. Essentially all the research has shown DACA to have had positive impacts on the overall economy as well as on participants and their families, and not to have negatively impacted job prospects or wages for the rest of the population (Kurtzleben, 2017).
In 2017, President Trump suspended DACA as part of a broader effort to reduce both authorized and unauthorized immigration. The Trump administration also terminated TPS protections for most countries and instituted a ban on migrants from certain Muslim-majority countries. These changes to immigration policy have faced numerous legal challenges based on claims that they are discriminatory, and the ongoing court battles are expected to take years to resolve. As this book goes to print, DACA is no longer accepting new applications but renewals are being processed for the 700,000 people already enrolled. However, the status of DACA and TPS are subject to further policy changes and judicial decisions; for up-to-date information, see the National Immigration Law Center website, https://www.nilc.org/issues/daca.
The terminology of immigration: Unauthorized immigrants and the i-word
Given that public discourse often makes reference to ‘illegal immigration’ and sometimes includes claims that one’s grandparents came to the US ‘the right way’ in contrast with today’s ‘illegal immigrants,’ we want to problematize this notion as well as the use of the word illegal. In so doing we will also highlight a few key moments in the history of US immigration policy.
For more than a hundred years following US independence, immigration was largely unrestricted. Thus, essentially anyone who wanted to come to the US could do so. This open immigration policy began to change in the late 19th century, as nativists expressed opposition to the growing number of immigrants, especially those they considered different from immigrants who had arrived earlier (much like contemporary nativists, although the ‘new immigrants’ of the early 20th century are the ‘old immigrants’ of today). Congress imposed various race-based restrictions on who was allowed to come to the US; Asians were excluded, and in the 1920s immigration from southern and eastern Europe was strictly limited. Thus, the possibility of immigrating legally was sharply curtailed.
The new immigration laws of the 1920s did not establish limits for Latin American countries, primarily in order to allow US businesses a continued supply of migrant labor from Mexico. However, people wishing to enter the US via Mexico were subject to literacy and health tests that were sometimes administered arbitrarily and they had to pay a fee, which was prohibitive for many (Hernandez, 2017; Ngai, 2004). Thus, many migrants continued to cross the border as they had done previously, without going through an official port of entry. In 1929, Congress passed a law designed specifically to impact Mexicans; for the first time, entering the country outside an official port of entry was made a crime, one that could be punished with fines and imprisonment as well as deportation (Hernandez, 2017). This change has had a dramatic impact not only how cross-border migrants are treated in the legal system but also on how they are portrayed in policy debates and broader public discourse; with ‘entering the country unlawfully’ constituted as a criminal act, migrants are framed as criminals.
Regardless of whether they entered the country unlawfully or they committed the civil infraction of overstaying their visa, we reject the use of the label ‘illegal’ to refer to people who are in the US without authorization, just as we would not apply this label to drivers who violate speed limits or even to convicted felons. In other words, we reject the idea that any person is ‘illegal.’ As we stress throughout this book, language is inseparable from the sociopolitical world, and the ways in which we talk about people have real-world consequences. Like a growing number of scholars, activists and journalists who want to ‘drop the i-word’ in media coverage and public debate (see Race Forward’s website at https://www.raceforward.org/practice/tools/drop-i-word or ABC New’s coverage at https://abcnews.go.com/ABC_Univision/linguists-york-times-illegal-neutral-accurate/story?id=17366512#.UGoRvhwsGiw), we believe that calling people ‘illegals’ is not only inaccurate, it is dehumanizing and part of a broader racializing discourse that portrays migrants as inherently unwelcome and detrimental to the country. We opt to use the more neutral term unauthorized to describe the migration status of people in the US (or any other country) without official permission.
As we discussed above, the overwhelming majority of Latinxs are either US citizens or immigrants who are authorized to be in the country. Nonetheless, like the false notions that all Latinxs are immigrants and all Latinxs speak Spanish, the myth that most immigrants are unauthorized endures, despite its inaccuracy. These three interrelated tropes, together with the discursive criminalization of unauthorized immigration discussed above, contribute both to the portrayal of Latinxs as ‘perpetual foreigners’ who are in the US illegally and to the representation of Spanish as an ‘illegal’ language (Leeman, 2012a, 2013).
National origin groups and (im)migration
In the previous chapter, we presented quantitative data on the national origins of the Latinx population, including the specific percentage comprised by each group (see Table 2.1). Based on the same data, we show the relative size of different Latinx national origin groups in Figure 3.5. In the following sections we look at the migration history of the five largest national origin groups: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Salvadorans and Dominicans (due to space limitations, we cannot cover all groups). Our discussion focuses on the time periods in which members of these groups migrated to the US and where they settled, as well as the push and pull factors that promoted migration.
Figure 3.5 National origin groups (ACS 2017 One-year estimates)
Mexicans
Mexicans are the largest Latinx national origin group by far, comprising roughly 62% of the Latinx population in the US (see Figure 3.5). People born in Mexico also make up the largest share (approximately 25%) of all immigrants currently in the US (Migration Policy Institute, n.d.). However, as we have discussed, in addition to immigrants and their children, Mexicans and Mexican Americans also include the descendants of treaty citizens (people living in Mexican lands that were annexed by the US) as well as the descendants of immigrants from long ago. In fact, less than one-third of people of Mexican origin are immigrants; more than two-thirds were born in the US.
Mexicans and Mexican Americans are most densely concentrated in the Southwest, where they have the longest history, which is closest to Mexico, and where they form a clear majority of the Latinx population (and in some places of the entire population). However, there are also longstanding Mexican and Mexican American communities in the Midwest (especially Chicago) and the Northwest, as well as newer communities in the Southeast. Indeed, there are Mexican communities all across the country, including the Northeast as well. It’s also worth noting that there are thousands of people living in Mexico who cross back and forth across the border every day, either to study or to work.
Immigration from Mexico has ebbed and flowed depending on political and labor conditions in the two countries. One significant period of migration occurred in the early 20th century, spurred in part by the repression and violence leading up to and during the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), as well as the devastation that followed. However, another key factor was recruitment by US employers after the prohibition on Japanese immigration resulted in labor shortages (Lozano, 2018; Massey, 2016). Immigrants arriving in the early 20th century far outnumbered the treaty citizens living in Mexican lands annexed by the US (Lozano, 2018).
Mexican immigration continued to increase in the 1920s but in 1929 the start of the Great Depression brought it largely to a halt. Together with the unemployment crisis, nativism and racism ‘pushed anti-Mexican sentiment to a fever pitch’ throughout the country (Lozano, 2018: 145). Not only were Mexicans stopped from crossing the border, but somewhere between 600,000 and a million US citizens of Mexican descent were deported to Mexico, together with almost as many Mexican citizens, most of whom had authorization to be in the US (Balderrama & Rodriguez, 2006; Hoffman, 1974). These so-called repatriations sought to, in the words of President Hoover, keep ‘American jobs for real Americans’ (Gonzalez, 2011; Malavé & Giordani, 2015), a discursive framing that has reappeared in subsequent calls for immigration restrictions and/or deportations. Such calls are more frequent during economic downturns and periods of high unemployment, but they can also occur in times of economic growth and near full employment, such as the present.
The US entry into World War II in 1940 precipitated a labor shortage which again led to the recruitment of Mexican workers, this time through the Bracero Program, a federal guest worker program that brought laborers from Mexico to the US for temporary jobs, primarily in agriculture. Originally envisioned as a wartime measure, the Bracero Program was expanded and renewed as the post-war boom created growing demand for labor among US employers. Even when the economic slowdown of the 1950s brought another round of deportations, this time under the derogatory official name ‘Operation Wetback,’ the Bracero Program was simultaneously expanded. This ensured a continued source of cheap labor from guest workers who were not allowed to settle in the US permanently, since Braceros were required to return to Mexico at the end of each 12-month contract. The specifics of the program, including the temporary nature of the visas, left participants vulnerable to abuse, and they were often subjected to harsh and inhumane conditions. Moreover, the failure of employers and government agencies to keep contractual promises regarding wages and retirement benefits has been well documented (Mize & Swords, 2010). As a result of activism by Mexicans and Mexican Americans, especially in the context of the Civil Rights movement, the Bracero Program was increasingly recognized as exploitative, leading Congress to end it in 1965 (Massey, 2016).
Another Civil Rights Era policy change was also hugely significant for immigrants from Mexico as well as other places. Specifically, in 1965 Congress carried out a major overhaul of immigration policy by eliminating race-based exclusions and national origin quotas, and instead established preferences for migrants with family members in the US or with needed skills. However, caps were put on the number of immigrants per country (including Latin American countries), as well as the overall number (see the American Immigration Council’s website for overviews of the immigration system at https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/topics/immigration-101). As a result of the changes, Mexicans went from having access to half a million permanent and temporary visas before the law to just 20,000 (permanent) visas in 1976, yet the push and pull factors of labor supply and labor demand continued as before (Massey, 2016). Thus, Mexicans continued to migrate to the US, but far more of them did so without authorization, leading to anxiety about border security and ultimately resulting in the US’ militarization of the border (Massey, 2016). In turn, this led to more and more apprehensions of migrants, a trend which both fed and was fed by increased anti-immigrant and anti-Mexican sentiment as well as the discourse of criminality and danger that increasingly surrounded immigration and especially Mexican immigration (Dick, 2011; Massey, 2016; Ngai, 2004). This discourse has become a driving force in US politics, reflected for example in President Trump’s racist portrayals of Mexicans as rapists and murderers, despite statistics that consistently show that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than are US-born citizens.
Since 2010, immigration from Mexico has been declining due to improvements in the Mexican economy and dropping birth rates (Zong & Batalova, 2018). In fact, more Mexicans return to Mexico than migrate to the US, the overall number of unauthorized Mexican immigrants has declined since 2007, and border apprehensions of Mexicans reached a 40-year low in 2017 (Gonzalez-Barrera & Krogstad, 2018; Zong & Batalova, 2018). There has also been a change in the demographic characteristics of Mexican immigrants: they are now more likely to be college graduates and they have greater English proficiency than was the case in the past. Most Mexican immigrants have been in the country for a long time: 60% arrived before 2000; another 29% between 2000 and 2009; and only 11% in 2010 or later (Zong & Batalova, 2018). Mexicans also make up the largest share of DACA participants – approximately 80% (US Citizenship and Immigration Services, 2018).
Puerto Ricans
Unlike Mexicans, Puerto Ricans are US citizens (as we discussed above), and thus they do not need visas to migrate to the US. This, together with the geographic proximity of Puerto Rico to the US, allows for the vaivén (‘back-and-forth’) cited by García et al. (2001). Not surprisingly, migration from Puerto Rico has been influenced by labor market forces in the US as well as conditions on the island. Push and pull factors converged at the turn of the 20th century when two hurricanes devastated Puerto Rico’s sugar industry; plantation owners recruited newly jobless Puerto Rican workers to Hawaii (then a US territory) as they sought to meet the new market demand for Hawaiian sugar (López, 2005). As a result, Puerto Ricans are the largest Latinx subgroup in Hawaii (ACS 2017 Five-year estimates).
According to Whalen (2005), Puerto Rican migration has followed a general pattern in which US occupation caused economic changes and displacement, Puerto Ricans were recruited as a cheap source of labor (but not always welcomed where they settled), and then the existence of Puerto Rican communities served to attract new migrants to those areas. For example, despite earning high profits, Puerto Rican sugar plantations cut wages, which together with high unemployment and the ensuing social and political unrest, pushed migrants to head for the US (Gonzalez, 2011). By the 1920s large Puerto Rican neighborhoods had been established in New York, and in the 1930s and 1940s communities were established elsewhere in the Northeast, including Philadelphia and Boston (Lipski, 2008). So too, Puerto Rican communities were established in Lorain, Ohio and Chicago, largely as a result of labor agencies recruiting workers in Puerto Rico and offering airfare and jobs on the mainland (Gonzalez, 2011). During the ‘Great Migration’ of the 1950s, approximately 470,000 Puerto Ricans (over one-fifth of the population) migrated to the US mainland (Culliton-Gonzalez, 2008). In the 1960s Puerto Ricans were recruited to work on farms in the Midwest, upstate New York and throughout the Northeast (Gonzalez, 2011), but New York has remained the cultural heart of mainland Puerto Ricans, with Nuyoricans maintaining a prominent symbolic position in the imaginary of the Puerto Rican diaspora (Lipski, 2008).
In the 21st century, long-standing economic problems were exacerbated by deindustrialization, austerity and changes to federal tax policy, as well as constraints on debt restructuring related to Puerto Rico’s status as a territory rather than a US state or an independent country. In Puerto Rico, 45% of the population live below the poverty line, more than twice the rate for Mississippi and almost three times the national average (ACS 2017 Five-year estimates). Given the difficult conditions, and an unemployment rate more than twice that of the mainland US, almost half a million people left Puerto Rico for the mainland between 2006 and 2014 (Mora et al., 2017). To make matters worse, in 2017 Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico and left much of the island without electricity for months. In Maria’s wake, over 400,000 Puerto Ricans (approximately 6% of the island’s population) departed (Echenique & Melgar, 2018). Many headed to established Puerto Rican communities in the Northeast and Chicago, but over half went to Florida, especially the Orlando area. Political prognosticators have debated the potential impact of Puerto Rican voters on Florida elections, and this remains to be determined. Further, in 2018 as many as three-quarters of those fleeing Hurricane Maria had returned, although the infrastructure problems and financial situation were far from resolved (Echenique & Melgar, 2018). Updated information (in Spanish and English) on the political situation in Puerto Rico can be found on the Centro de Periodsmo Investigativo’s website at http://periodismoinvestigativo.com.
Cubans
The first Cuban settlements in the US date to the early 19th century, not only prior to the Spanish-American War (1898) but also before Spain ceded Florida to the US. In other words, Cubans began settling in Florida when both Cuba and Florida were both still under Spanish control. Immigration accelerated in the period leading up to and following the war, with 100,000 people, almost 10% of Cuba’s population, leaving for the US (Gonzalez, 2011). As we discussed earlier, at the end of the Spanish-American war in 1898, Spain ceded Cuba to the US. Although the US granted independence to Cuba in 1902, it remained involved in Cuban affairs and imposed several conditions, including permission to build several naval stations (the one at Guantanamo Bay is still in operation) and a permanent right to intervene in Cuba. US forces occupied Cuba from 1906 to 1909.
In the early 20th century, at the same time as a romanticized version of the Southwest’s Spanish past was being marketed to tourists and newcomers (as we discussed earlier), Florida also promoted an exotic tropical version of its Spanish history and architecture (Lynch, 2018). US tourists saw Miami almost as an extension of Havana and they regularly visited both cities on the same trip (Lynch, 2018), while elite Cubans came to the US for vacations, medical treatment and to attend college (Gonzalez, 2011). But things were less sunny for regular Cubans, who endured inequality, corruption and increasingly repressive governments, such as the 1950s dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. Batista, who had earlier served as elected president, returned to power through a military coup with the support of the US. The corruption and violence of the Batista regime led another 63,000 Cubans to emigrate; like their predecessors they settled primarily in Florida (Lipski, 2008).
In 1959 the Cuban Revolution toppled the Batista regime and brought Fidel Castro and his communist party to power. This led to an even greater exodus, as the revolutionary government nationalized land, housing and businesses, and violently cracked down on dissent. Despite the restrictions on emigration imposed by Castro’s regime, in the 1960s almost half a million people left Cuba for the US, settling primarily in the Miami area. Miami’s Calle Ocho became the symbolic center of Cubans in the US and is still considered an obligatory stop for national as well as local politicians trying to garner their support. Roughly three-quarters of Cubans and Cuban Americans live in Florida, but there are also significant Cuban communities in New York and New Jersey (Batalova & Zong, 2017).
People who left Cuba in the wake of the revolution tended to be wealthier, Whiter, more educated and to have more technical skills than the general Cuban population as well as in comparison to other Latin American immigrants (Alfaraz, 2014; Gonzalez, 2011). Their affluence and ethnoracial identity gave them a leg up upon arrival in the US, as did the preferential treatment they received from the US government as a result of their status as refugees from communism. Specifically, until the mid-1990s, Cubans who reached US waters were allowed to stay in the US and were put through an expedited process that gave them permanent residency after just a year, as well as other kinds of assistance (Batalova & Zong, 2017). Thanks to the socio-economic advantages they brought with them from Cuba, combined with the support they received once in the US, as a group Cubans achieved greater prosperity than other Latinx groups (Gonzalez, 2011).
Like other communist regimes, the Castro government sharply restricted emigration. Nonetheless, in 1980 approximately 125,00 people seeking political freedom and economic opportunities were allowed to leave. Because they left Cuba in a boatlift from Mariel Harbor, they are commonly referred to as Marielitos. As a group, the Marielitos were poorer and darker skinned than earlier Cuban arrivals and as a result they faced class and race prejudice from both Cubans and Americans. In addition, whereas earlier Cuban migrants had arrived at the height of the Cold War and were warmly welcomed as political refugees, the Marielitos arrived at a time of increasing nativism, making their experience more like that of other Latinx immigrant groups (Gonzalez, 2011). This was also the case for the balseros (‘raft people’) who began arriving in large numbers in the 1990s. Under President Clinton, the US stopped allowing Cubans intercepted at sea to come to the US but continued giving those who reached US soil a chance to stay, a policy known as ‘Wet Foot, Dry Foot.’ As part of a move toward normalizing US–Cuba relations, President Obama ended the Wet Foot, Dry Foot policy in 2017. When President Trump took office that year, some restrictions on travel and investment in Cuba were reinstated.
Salvadorans
Although Cubans have long been the third largest Latinx national origin group in the US, since the 21st century there are almost as many Salvadorans. The almost 1.4 million immigrants from El Salvador are equivalent to one-fifth the population in El Salvador (Menjívar & Gómez Cervantes, 2018). Salvadorans are concentrated around Los Angeles and the Washington, DC metropolitan area (which includes Northern Virginia and suburban Maryland). Within the DC area’s diverse Latinx community, Salvadorans are the largest national origin group (approximately 33%), while in Los Angeles there are roughly five times as many Mexicans as Salvadorans (ACS 2015 Five-year estimates). Other areas of high concentration are in Texas, Nevada and New York.
Central American immigration to the US surged in the 1980s, the result of what Gonzalez (2011: 129) calls ‘intervention com[ing] home to roost.’ In other words, the large-scale exodus from Central America was precipitated by civil wars and social chaos, ‘and in each case, the origins and spiraling intensity of those wars were a direct result of military and economic intervention by [the US] government.’ Throughout Latin America, the US has a long history of supporting repressive governments that have engaged in political disenfranchisement as well as violence, torture and murder of their own citizens. Early US interventions and support for dictatorial regimes were meant to install or prop up governments that defended the economic interests of US investors, plantation owners and corporations, who were typically aligned with a local ruling class. In the mid-20th century, Cold War politics also played an important role. Specifically, US politicians framed popular uprisings against repressive US-backed regimes in places like Guatemala, Nicaragua, Chile and elsewhere as communist revolutions (whether or not they had support from Cuba or the Soviet Union), and thus suppressing them was seen as a broader containment of the Soviet interests in the region.
After gaining independence from Spain in 1821, El Salvador faced a growing reliance on coffee as the sole export, increasing the concentration of land in the hands of a small oligarchy, and escalating economic hardship among peasants (Menjívar & Gómez Cervantes, 2018). When Salvadorans called for political freedom, land redistribution and economic reforms, they were met with brutal repression, including La Matanza in 1932, a government-ordered massacre of thousands of mostly Indigenous peasants (Gonzalez, 2011; Menjívar & Gómez Cervantes, 2018). The pattern of popular protest and military repression continued for decades, with the military staging coups whenever it seemed like the leftists were on the verge of winning elections (Gonzalez, 2011).
In 1979 the Salvadoran military again sought to preempt a leftist electoral victory by staging another coup. Civil war broke out between US-supported government forces and various leftist guerilla groups, with right-wing death squads murdering thousands of union organizers and civilians. Approximately 75,000 people were killed during the war, around 85% of them by the government, according to a UN Truth Commission report (Menjívar & Gómez Cervantes, 2018). Particularly brazen was the murder of Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was gunned down by death squads as he was giving mass, in retaliation for having spoken out against poverty, social injustice and torture (the story is recounted in the movie Romero). Under President Reagan, the US continued to supply the Salvadoran government with military and financial aid, even after government soldiers raped and killed four American nuns in 1980. As the war became increasingly violent, more and more Salvadorans fled, many of them to the US.
Like the violence that contributed to them leaving, Salvadorans’ reception in the US was also colored by the Cold War; unlike Cuban migrants who were fleeing a communist regime, Salvadorans were fleeing from an anti-communist government that the US supported. Thus, they did not receive refugee status or benefits and they entered the US largely without authorization. In 1986, as part of a new US law that made it more difficult to hire unauthorized immigrants, Congress passed a limited amnesty to long-term residents with a clean record and knowledge of English, as long as they paid back taxes and a fine. This allowed many Salvadorans in the US to gain authorized status. However, new unauthorized immigrants continued to arrive.
In 1992 the civil war came to an end, but ‘El Salvador was left awash in weapons and […] psychosocial trauma’ (Menjívar & Gómez Cervantes, 2018). Further, the unequal social structure was not addressed and neoliberal austerity policies were imposed, and thus economic conditions worsened for most Salvadorans. As a result, gangs thrived, due to the post-war poverty, violence and lack of opportunity, as well as the arrival of deportees who had been in gangs in the US. In 2001 a series of catastrophic earthquakes and aftershocks brought further suffering and worsened conditions, leading the Bush administration to grant TPS to almost 200,000 Salvadorans. Although the Trump administration sought to end TPS protections for Salvadorans, this was overturned by the courts in 2018.
Levels of violence in El Salvador are worse now than during the civil war and migration has continued to increase (Menjívar & Gómez Cervantes, 2018). In 2014 there was surge in migration by unaccompanied minors not just from El Salvador but from all of Central America. In some cases minors travel to reunite with parents already in the US, and in others they are sent by their parents to escape the violence and lack of opportunities at home. On paper, US immigration law allows people to enter or stay in the country if they have been persecuted or have a reasonable fear of persecution on the basis of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion, but in practice a smaller and smaller percentage of applications is approved. Further, the law stipulates that people can apply for asylum at a point of entry or inside the US, but the Trump administration has refused to accept applications at the border, and has detained or deported asylum seekers who are already in the US. These actions, together with a family separation policy in which thousands of children have been taken from their parents and held in separate detention centers, have caused a humanitarian crisis. (Up-to-date investigative journalism on immigration policy can be found on ProPublica’s website at https://www.propublica.org/topics/immigration.)
Dominicans
As is to be expected, Dominicans have some similarities to, as well as some differences from, other Latinx groups. Dominicans began arriving in the US in the 1960s. Almost as numerous as Cubans and Salvadorans, Dominicans are concentrated in many of the same places as Puerto Ricans: New York, and the cities of the Northeast. There is also a large Dominican community in the Miami area. Rhode Island is the only state where Dominicans are the largest Latinx subgroup, but they also predominate in parts of eastern Massachusetts and Connecticut (ACS 2017 Five-year estimates).
Given the historical legacy of African slavery in the Caribbean, many Dominicans have African ancestry, as do many Puerto Ricans and Cuban migrants who arrived after 1980. According to Gonzalez (2011: 117), both Puerto Rican and Dominican migrants ‘went largely unnoticed at first [because] New Yorkers tended to mistake them for Blacks who happened to speak Spanish.’ Another similarity is that both Dominicans and Puerto Ricans tend to maintain close connections to their home societies, thanks to the geographic proximity to the eastern US and the availability of inexpensive transportation and telecommunications (Guarnizo, 1994; Roth, 2012). However, because Dominicans are not US citizens by birth, their ability to travel back and forth is far more restricted than Puerto Ricans’.
Like other Latin American countries, especially in the Caribbean, the Dominican Republic has been the object of US economic, political and military intervention. The US involvement in the Dominican Republic has been so continuous and intense that in the mid-19th century the Dominican president requested annexation by the US. Although annexation never happened, the US has been actively involved in Dominican political and internal affairs (Lowenthal, 1970). In the 20th century, US Marines occupied Santo Domingo three times, at least partially to protect US commercial interests in fruit and sugar production. The background for the most recent occupation, in 1965, was the assassination of dictator Rafael Trujillo, a brutal strongman who had ruled the Dominican Republic for 31 years. Trujillo’s democratically elected successor was overthrown by a military coup, which led to a popular uprising. Fearing that the Dominican Republic was on the brink of a Cuban-style revolution, the US sent troops to help the military crush the revolt. This allowed a former aide of Trujillo to come to power, and to continue the right-wing violence and repression of human and civil rights (Gonzalez, 2011).
During Trujillo’s reign, the Dominican government had made it extremely difficult to leave the country. His death, and the violence that surrounded it, led to a large-scale outmigration in the mid-1960s. That first group of Dominican migrants included members of the well-educated urban upper middle class, as well as people of lower socio-economic status from cities and rural areas (Guarnizo, 1994; Zong & Batalova, 2018). They were more likely to be political refugees rather than economic migrants (Gonzalez, 2011) but, like Central American migrants escaping civil wars, Dominican arrivals were fleeing a government backed by the US, and thus they did not receive the same assistance provided to refugees from communist Cuba. Subsequent Dominican migrants have been economically diverse and have included urban professionals as well as the rural poor (Zong & Batalova, 2018).
The history of the annexation of Mexican lands by the US is the basis for a saying common among Mexican Americans that ‘we didn’t cross the border; the border crossed us,’ which is typically given as a rejoinder to anti-Mexican commentary or the portrayal of Mexican Americans as out of place and unwelcome. Macías (2014) points out that most of the current US once belonged to nations that had Spanish as an official language, whereas English has never been the country’s official language (see Chapter 8). In addition, Macías (2014) argues that Spanish is different from so-called immigrant languages because, despite its history as a language of colonizers, most Spanish-speakers in the US today are descendants of colonized peoples (as a result of mestizaje, linguistic subordination of Indigenous languages and language shift to Spanish). The implication is that Spanish has more in common with Indigenous languages than it might first appear, and that this should be taken into account in the treatment of its speakers.
In our examination of the annexation of formerly Spanish territories, we saw that race and racism were key factors not just in US expansionism but also in the treatment of the people living in the annexed lands. Issues of race and racial identity as well as claims about racial purity and/or superiority also played a role in struggles for political representation and statehood, and in efforts to attract tourists. While we critiqued the downplaying of the historical presence of Spanish (an issue we return to next chapter, when we discuss the portrayal of the US as a monolingual English-speaking nation), we also showed that efforts to reclaim and celebrate the Spanish colonial past are not simply a straightforward attempt to counter Anglo-dominant narratives. Instead, they are intertwined with particular social, political and racial agendas and identity claims. Because representations of history have both symbolic implications and concrete, real-world consequences, they were – and still are – hotly contested. The claims to European heritage and Spanish identity we have discussed in this chapter will also be relevant for our discussion of race and racialization in Chapter 5. In that chapter we will examine the ways in which conquest and colonization, and the encounters among Europeans, Native peoples and Africans, have shaped understandings of race and racial identity in both Latin America and the US. These issues also come to the fore in our discussion of the history of US language policy in Chapter 8.
In our discussion of the most numerous Latinx national origin groups we hope to have given some sense of the diversity both of Latinxs and Spanish-speakers and of their reasons for coming to the US, while also emphasizing that the majority of Latinxs are not in fact immigrants. The diverse national origins of Spanish-speakers will be crucial in our discussion of the linguistic characteristics of Spanish in the US (Chapter 10). By looking at the unique histories of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican and Salvadoran migration, we showed how a combination of push and pull factors have led people to leave their homes in search of a better life in the US for themselves and their children. And while each place of origin is different, we saw that a common thread running through them all is the role of US political and economic policies and military involvement. In recent years, Latin American immigration has been at the center of political debate in the US. We hope to have given readers the background they need to be thoughtful participants in such debates, as well as the motivation to stay informed and engaged.
Discussion Questions and Activities for Chapter 3
(1)In his Lines and Lineage series (https://tomasvh.com/works/lines-and-lineage), photographer Tomas Van Houtryve combines 21st century landscapes and portraits to represent the Southwest prior to its 1848 annexation by the US. View the work (and possibly also listen to his 30-minute artist talk linked from that page). What are some of the themes that connect Van Houtryve’s work, the Hispanophilia of the early 20th century, and the controversies surrounding Oñate? How do representations of the past impact our understanding of the present? To what extent is our understanding of history shaped by popular culture and/or art, and to what extent can they be used to revise or ‘correct’ inaccurate understandings?
(2)Joshua Fishman (2001) identified three types of minority languages: Indigenous, colonial and immigrant. Consider how each of these labels might apply to the case of Spanish in the US. Next, discuss whether and/or how language type should impact a minority language’s status or the rights of its speakers.
(3)Review the history and migration patterns of the largest Latinx national origin groups in the US and identify similarities and differences among them. At a minimum, you should consider: the historical timing of migration; push and pull factors; citizenship and immigration status; the ethnoracial make-up of the groups; and location within the US. In addition to the information in this chapter, you may wish to consult the demographic profiles available on the Pew Research Center’s website (http://www.pewhispanic.org/2015/09/15/the-impact-of-slowing-immigration-foreign-born-share-falls-among-14-largest-us-hispanic-origin-groups) or Census Bureau data available online (https://data.census.gov)
(4)Read ProPublica’s reporting on the treatment of unauthorized immigrants recruited to work in chicken-processing plants in North Carolina and Ohio (https://www.propublica.org/article/case-farms-chicken-industry-immigrant-workers-and-american-labor-law) and on their home town in highlands Guatemala (https://www.propublica.org/article/photos-returning-to-guatemala-roots-of-case-farms-workers). What are some of the push and pull factors that have contributed to Guatemalan immigrants coming to the US? What role did US foreign policy play? In what ways are unauthorized immigrants especially vulnerable to unethical employers? How might language and language barriers play a role?
(5)Informally interview someone you know about their own or their family’s
(im)migration history, as well as their minority language maintenance/loss (or analyze your own). What were the individual and group factors that led them to migrate? How easy or difficult was it for them to get authorization to do so? Does the person have regular contact with people in their country of origin? If the person has maintained a minority language, what were the group factors and individual decisions that helped make that possible? If the person underwent language loss (or never learned their family’s heritage language), what were the contributing factors and how does the person feel about having lost (or never acquired) their heritage language?
(1)It is also important to remember that prior to the arrival of both the English and the Spanish, there were approximately 15,000 Native people living in the Tidewater area (Hedgpeth, 2019).
Acuña, R. (2015) Occupied America (8th edn). New York: Pearson Longman.
Alcorn, S. (2018) Oñate’s Foot. 99% Invisible Podcast, 4 December. See https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/onates-foot/.
Duany, J. (2017) Puerto Rico: What Everyone Needs to Know. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gonzalez, J. (2011) Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America (2nd edn). New York: Penguin.
Nieto-Phillips, J.M. (2004) The Language of Blood. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press.
