Читать книгу Latino Politics - Lisa García Bedolla - Страница 15

The fact that this book focuses on the experiences of Latinos in the United States implies that Latinos constitute a social group, one that should be the focus of the present study. But what does it mean for a group of people to be a social group? Political theorist Iris Young described a social group as “a collective of persons differentiated from others by cultural forms, practices, special needs or capacities, structure of power, or privilege.”¹² According to Young, what makes a collection of people into a group is “less some set of attributes its members share than the relation in which they stand to others.” In other words, defining Latinos as a social group does not mean that we need to assume that all Latinos are the same, share the same experiences, identify in the same ways, or have the same goals or aspirations. We will see in the next chapters that this is not the case. Latino national-origin groups have had very different experiences in the United States. They arrived at different points in American history, migrated for very different reasons, settled in different geographic settings, and have been treated in disparate ways by the US government. There are important experiential and demographic differences within Latino national-origin groups as well; these are due to geographic location, class status, nativity, generation, gender identity, sexual orientation, and other factors. Despite this heterogeneity, what is similar about the experiences of all US Latinos is where they were placed in the US racial hierarchy and how that placement has affected their social, political, and economic opportunities.

Given their differences of experience and background, if Latinos are a social group, are they a racial group or an ethnic one? The distinction between these two characterizations has been the source of ongoing debates among scholars – debates which will not be resolved here. The term “race” presupposes a common biological or genealogical ancestry among people. “Ethnicity” places more of an emphasis on culture than on common genetic traits. In an attempt to bring together both concepts, Michael Omi and Howard Winant define race as “a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies.”¹³ They emphasize social conflicts in order to get us away from biological understandings of what race is. There is no biological foundation for separate “races” of humans. As recent DNA tests have proven, many individuals whom we see as “Black” are in fact more European than African in terms of their DNA. For example, Henry Louis Gates, a prominent African American intellectual, found he has as much European DNA as West African DNA (most African Americans are about 20 percent European). This kind of testing forces us to reconsider what “race” means and to see how these categorizations have more to do with society than with biology.

Feminist philosopher Linda Alcoff suggests using the term “ethnorace” to describe the Latino experience in the United States. For her, “ethnorace” is a concept which combines the experiences of both ethnicity and race. She argues that “using only ethnicity belies the reality of most Latinos’ everyday experiences, as well as obscures our own awareness about how ethnic identifications often do the work of race while seeming to be theoretically correct and politically advanced. Race dogs our steps; let us not run from it else we cause it to increase its determination.”¹⁴ The term “ethnorace” is meant to describe the ways in which factors often attributed to culture, such as language, can be racialized. In other words, ascriptive attributions can be based on linguistic or cultural practices that are not “racial” (or biological), but still can have racialized consequences. Because we believe the lived experiences of Latinos in the United States include both racialized and ethnic/cultural traits, we describe them as an ethnoracial group. Scholars like Omi, Winant, and Alcoff are attempting to find ways to define a social phenomenon which has historical roots and important material consequences, but which is nevertheless artificial in that its underlying reality is fluid and changes over time.

In order to describe race in a way that recognizes this fluidity, scholars explain ethnoracial processes as social constructions. Social construction means that the values attached to particular external attributes, such as skin color, are defined, or constructed, by society. Put another way, the problem is not that of the recognition of ethnoracial differences among people, but rather that of the values, or hierarchies, attached to those differences. For the bulk of United States history, being defined as “white” gave members of that group access to social, legal, economic, and political privileges which were closed to those not defined as “white.” For example, one of the first laws passed by the United States Congress in 1790 was a citizenship law which stipulated that no non-white person could become a naturalized citizen of the United States. This restriction remained in force until 1943, when individuals of Chinese origin were allowed to be naturalized for the very first time. This racial restriction on naturalization was finally removed completely for all groups in 1952, with the McCarran Walter Act. In addition, many states made it illegal for a non-white to testify in court against a white, to serve on juries, to live where they wanted to live, or to work in the most skilled jobs. These restrictions limited non-whites’ access to the protection of the legal system and their possibilities for social, political, and economic mobility. Thus, racial constructs have been directly related to access to fundamental items such as resources, citizenship rights, and the protection of the state (that is, to having a criminal justice system that actually defends your person and/or your property). Therefore, race may be constructed, but which category an individual belongs to has had, and continues to have, significant material and political implications for their life chances.

Because racial categorizations determined access to resources, US federal and state governments had to come up with schemes in order to determine the “race” to which individuals belonged. Often referred to as the “one-drop rule,” these schemes attempted to define who was white and who was not. The “one drop” refers to the fact that, in much of the country and particularly in the south, having as little as one drop of non-white blood made it impossible by law to claim “whiteness.” For example, in California, in 1849, having half or more of “Indian” blood would lead to one’s being considered not “white,” and half or more of Black blood made a person mulatto. In 1851, the law was changed so that only one quarter of Indian blood would make a person not “white.” Yet many of these laws were challenged, leading the courts to have to determine what constituted being “white.” An especially good example of this is that of the prerequisite cases. These were cases brought by individuals who wanted to contest the 1790 law barring non-whites from being naturalized in the United States.¹⁵ Looking at petitions by Asian Indians from 1909 to 1923, we see that in 1909 the court in Balsara ruled that Asian Indians were probably not white, because the people on the jury thought it unlikely that Congress intended for Asian Indians to be considered white under the 1790 law. Yet, in 1910, the court ruled in two cases that Asian Indians were white, on the basis of the petitioner’s skin color and of scientific evidence regarding the origins of the Caucasian race. This ruling was reaffirmed in 1913, with appeal to legal precedent. Yet, in 1917, the court ruled that Asian Indians were not white, on the basis of common knowledge and congressional intent. The same court reversed this position in 1919 and 1920, deciding again that the Asian Indians involved in those cases were white. Then, in 1923, the Supreme Court ruled again, on the basis of common knowledge, that Asian Indians were not white. From that point on, on the basis of the 1923 legal precedent, the court ruled that Asian Indians were not white and therefore ineligible for naturalization. The Asian Indian case shows how difficult it was for the courts to maintain these kinds of ethnoracial categorizations in the face of any sort of systematic scrutiny. Yet that is exactly what the US government did; and its actions had important consequences for those US groups which were considered non-white. Latinos were one of those groups.

When Latinos became part of the United States, either through immigration or through conquest (as in the case of Puerto Ricans, or of Mexican Americans in the nineteenth-century southwest), they were inserted into an established racial order. Even though many Latinos are recent immigrants, it is important to realize that this historical racial hierarchy continues to influence the playing field upon which their community sits today. For example, one complication for Latinos was that one-drop rules presupposed a strict, biological understanding of what race is. Under those regimes, a person was Black, white, or Indian, and there was no legal representation for intermediate categories like mulattos (people of combined Black and white ancestry). Latinos, on the other hand, come from a variety of ethnoracial backgrounds. When the Spaniards arrived in Latin America, that continent had an indigenous population which numbered millions of inhabitants. Although a large proportion of this native population perished through disease and wars of conquest, a significant part survived, particularly in Mexico, Central America, Colombia, Perú, and Bolívia. The Spanish mixed with these groups, as did enslaved Africans, creating what are called mestizos – individuals of mixed European, African, and indigenous descent. In the Caribbean, little of the indigenous population remained, which made it necessary for Spaniards to import enslaved Africans to use as the bulk of the labor force. Those Africans mixed with the Spaniards and with the indigenous groups who remained on the islands, creating a new racial admixture; this is often called mulatto. After the end of slavery, Caribbean plantation-owners imported hundreds of thousands of Chinese laborers to work in the fields. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, large numbers of Asians from other countries, including Japan, settled in other parts of Latin America, adding to its racial admixture. This is why, in the early twentieth century, José Vasconcelos called Latin Americans la raza cósmica (the cosmic race) – one made up of the blood of all the world’s races.

During the colonial period, the Spaniards developed a complex casta system, which laid out the racial hierarchy according to how much European, Black, or indigenous blood a particular individual had. Like the American system, the Spanish system placed the white Europeans on top; but the remainder included many more racial options than were available in the United States at that time. Most Latin American countries abolished the Spanish casta system after independence. But they still maintained the racial hierarchies. The difference was that their understanding of race included mixed race as a possibility, which was not true in most parts of the United States after the late nineteenth century.¹⁶ Thus, when Latinos arrived in the United States, they had to fit into a relatively rigid racial hierarchy, where it was very important whether a person was defined as “Black” or “white.” Yet many Latinos are of mixed race. Those of Mexican or Central American origin tend to be of mixed indigenous background, and those from the Caribbean are more likely to have African origins. But are they “Indian”? Or are they “Black”? Or something else? The problem with people of mixed race is that often there can be significant differences in skin color even within the same family. One sibling can be quite dark-skinned, another one quite light-skinned. Since the US racial structure did not allow for the possibility of admixture, what often happened was that the lighter-skinned sibling would be treated as “white,” the darker as “Black.” At the height of segregation, this meant that they could go to separate schools, get to use separate bathroom facilities, and in general would have a very different set of opportunities, simply because one was seen as white and the other was not. Latinos, then, complicated the US racial structure and did not fit neatly into any of its racial categories. This racial ambiguity meant that the location they chose to settle in, and the particular racial history in that place, had an important impact on the kinds of opportunities open to them. There was no one uniform response to, or treatment of, Latinos as a “race.”

For example, there were large numbers of Latinos, mostly of Mexican origin, living in the state of Texas during the nineteenth century. Many had been there originally when Texas was part of Mexico. Texas turned into a slave state once it became part of the United States, and after emancipation it developed and enforced strict Jim Crow laws, requiring racial segregation in neighborhoods, schools, and public facilities. Like the rest of the south, Texas also passed laws to keep Blacks from voting. Yet, in Texas, African Americans were not the only large minority group; there were Mexican Americans as well. Jim Crow laws were applied to the Mexican population because they too were seen as non-white, despite their legal categorization as white under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. This was not true in New Mexico, however, where Latinos of Mexican origin remained in the majority until the twentieth century: in New Mexico, segregation was not as extreme as in Texas. Mexican Americans were allowed voting rights there. Moreover, they held public-office positions and much of the political power until the mid twentieth century. Thus, local context had an important impact on racial definitions and racial restrictions, even in the case of the same national-origin group. These differences were possible because of Latino racial ambiguity.

Thus, race is not “real” in a biological sense, but racial categories still have important implications for the opportunities which various groups have in our society. Without an understanding of the historical legacy of race, it is difficult to understand the current distribution of resources and opportunities within American society. Being white gave individuals access to citizenship; access to land under the Homestead Act in the nineteenth century (which was restricted to whites); access to legal protection and the right to organize unions, which significantly increased unionized workers’ wages and benefits (many unions prohibited non-white membership, and many people of color worked in industries not covered under the National Labor Relations Act); access to subsidized federal home loans (the Federal Housing Administration [FHA] program redlined and excluded African American, Mexican American, and mixed-race neighborhoods); and access to public education of adequate quality.¹⁷ Recent studies have shown that whites and African Americans with similar levels of income and education still have very different levels of total wealth because whites are much more likely to inherit real estate and other funds from their parents.¹⁸ That inheritance is the fruit of a highly exclusionary racial history. Because of this history, “color-blindness” will not erase the inequality which has accumulated from racial categorizations. It is only by looking at race that we can begin to address its negative legacy.