"Who Are You Calling an Immigrant?"
by Tom Hayden
From www.truthdig.com - May 2, 2006
I wore the multicolored Aymaran flag of Bolivia to the
May Day march in Los Angeles, the same day that Evo
Morales, the first indigenous president of Bolivia,
nationalized the oil and gas fields. It seemed right to
recognize the reappearance of the indigenous in the
Americas. I gazed at Marcos Aguilar, one of the UCLA
hunger strikers for Chicano studies in 1993. Now he
stood bare-skinned and feathered, leading a traditional
dance below the edifice of the Los Angeles Times.
Rather than becoming assimilated into gringotopia, he
was forcing the reverse, the assimilation of the
Machiavellians into the new reality of L.A. Another
hunger striker from those days, Cindy Montanez, was
chairing the state Assembly’s rules committee. Another
UCLA student, a beneficiary of ’60s outreach programs,
was mayor of the city.
Contrary to most mainstream commentary, these protests
were part of a continuous social movement going back
many decades, even centuries. And yet the commentators,
especially on the national level, once again summoned
the stereotype of the lazy Mexican, the sleeping giant
awakening. For years it was convenient to blame apathy
and low participation rates on the Mexican-Americans
and other Latinos, ignoring the racial exclusion that
prevailed east of the Los Angeles River. In 1994, the
same "sleeping giant" arose against Pete Wilson’s
Proposition 187. It previously awoke in the 1968 high
school "blowouts," the 1968-69 Chicano moratorium and
the farmworker boycotts, which were the largest in
history, and, in an earlier generation, the giant awoke
in the "Zoot Suit Riots" and Ed Roybal’s winning
campaign for City Council. The giant never had time to
sleep at all.
In the Great Depression, in the lifetimes of the
parents and grandparents of today’s students, up to
600,000 Mexicans, one-third of the entire U.S. Mexican
population, many of them born in the United States,
were deported with their children back to Mexico, their
labor no longer needed.
Out of nowhere?
There is a frightening gap between the white perception
of this 50-year trauma of deportation and the
experience of Mexicans and other immigrants, like the
Salvadorans who were driven here by the U.S.-backed
civil wars of the 1970s. Somewhere between amnesia and
a self-induced lobotomy, the gap needs to be closed in
the dialogue that may come of these historic protests.
The mere passage of time may erase white memories and
guilt, and induce acceptance among Mexicans, but it
does not legitimize the occupation itself. The wound
will not disappear under American flags, searchlights
and border walls.
The fundamental issue still shaping attitudes down to
the present is this: Either the Mexicans (and other
Latinos) are immigrants to a country called the United
States or the U.S. is a Machiavellian power that denies
occupying one-half of Mexico for 156 years. During the
1846-48 war against Mexico, at least 50,000 Mexicans
died. The fighting took place across many cities
considered pure-bred American today; in Los Angeles, a
revolt temporarily drove out the U.S. Army. Guerrilla
resistance by Mexican fighters left a mythic legacy of
those like Joaquin Murrieta and Tiburcio Vasquez, names
still alive among Mexican-American students today.
Meanwhile, The New York Times was declaring in 1860:
"The Mexicans, ignorant and degraded as they are,
[should welcome a system] founded on free trade and the
right of colonization so that, after a few years of
pupilege, the Mexican state would be incorporated into
the Union under the same conditions as the original
colonies."
After unilaterally annexing Texas in 1845, despite
massive protests, the U.S. president sent troops 100
miles into what previously was Mexican land. When the
Mexicans retaliated, the U.S. declared war on the
pretext that Americans had been attacked on American
soil. When it ended, the U.S. took 51% of Mexico’s
land, including California, where the discovery of gold
had been kept secret from Mexican negotiators. At least
100,000 Mexicans and an additional 200,000 indigenous
people lived on those lands. Ever since, those people
and their descendants have lived in a split-
consciousness similar to that of African-Americans
described in W.E.B. DuBois’ "The Souls of Black Folk."
Each new generation of immigrants fuels that
consciousness all over again.
Under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the imposed
settlement of the 1846-48 war, the inhabitants of the
occupied territories were granted legal, political,
educational and cultural rights as citizens, not as
immigrants. Some of the earliest official documents of
California were required under the treaty to be printed
in Spanish and English. This treaty, which was
unenforced, became the basis for later movements
stretching into the 1960s, movements that gave the
Southwest an Aztec name (Aztlan) and demanded the
return of former land grants. It was not unlike Radical
Reconstruction, the period after the Civil War when
Gen. Sherman’s official promise of "forty acres and a
mule" was withdrawn.
Today’s demonstrations are not demanding implementation
of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Modern Mexican-
Americans have made the legalization of undocumented
workers as United States citizens their consensus
demand. But there remains an unspoken difference
between two states of mind regarding the meaning of the
border. In every generation, immigrant workers and
youth have claimed their American rights without
abandoning the memory of their deeper historical ones.
A significant number of white Americans, especially
among the elites, still hold to nativist definitions of
American identity, in contrast to those multinational
corporations that tend to be more interested in cheap
foreign labor than in keeping American white.
Conservative journals like the American Outlook publish
articles glorifying "the Anglosphere" as the standard
of globalization (March-April 2001). Kevin Phillips is
quoted in the article as still longing for an American
culture whose "core thought is a kind of English
revivalism." Regarding this month’s demonstrations, the
black neoconservative Thomas Sowell has criticized the
"demanding" and "threatening" tone of "people who want
their own turf on American soil..." (L.A. Daily News,
April 29, 2006).
No one lends an Ivy League luster to the Minuteman
Mentality more than Harvard University professor Samuel
Huntington. A proud "Anglo-Protestant," Huntington
previously advocated the "forced urbanization" of the
Vietnamese peasantry into a "Honda culture" as a
formula for ending the nationalist uprising. In
the ’70s, he complained that an "excess of
democracy" threatened Western authorities. More
recently, he formulated the strident doctrine of "the
clash of civilizations," decreeing that Islamic culture
is incompatible with democratic civilization. Finally,
he has weighed in on "The Hispanic Challenge," arguing
that Latino immigration is "a major potential threat to
the cultural and possibly political integrity of the
United States" (in Foreign Policy, March-April 2006).
Huntington argues that Mexican-Americans are too close
to their traditional culture to become assimilated as
patriotic Americans. By this he means, of course, that
they cannot become imitation WASPs, whose identity he
sees as basic to the American nation. For Huntington,
assimilation seems to mean submission and disappearance
into the master culture, a viewpoint still held by
many. We defeated you, and now you should become like
us.
Largely forgotten in the current debate, too, are those
among the elites who still consider Mexico itself a
strategic long-term threat. The late Caspar Weinberger,
a secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan, wrote in
1998 of planning for a theoretical "next war" against
Mexico, opting for the military option in case "it
becomes necessary to go down in and try to catch [a]
rebel leader in Mexico and restore democratic rule to
Mexico" (interview with "Chuck Baldwin Live," Feb. 17,
1998). The Harvard historian of Chiapas, John Womack,
has written that in the 1990s "the US government, in
particular the Defense Department ... wanted ‘low-
intensity’ warfare in Mexico" ("Rebellion in Chiapas,"
Harvard, 1999).
But the U.S. has historically been the destabilizing
force in Mexico, most recently with the North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which has flooded the
country with corn and other products and replaced
indigenous manufacturing with the maquiladora economy,
thus displacing at least hundreds of thousands of
Mexicans, many of whom seek survival in el norte.
Perpetuating the cycle is absolutely crucial to neo-
liberal economics. But it also perpetually stimulates
rebelliousness, in fact and memory, among those who
take to U.S. streets today, and who shortly will be the
urban majority in a new America.
As people of color, mainly immigrants, edge closer to
majority status in key states, their relatives to the
south are becoming nationalist, populist majorities in
country after country, with interests that sharply
conflict with the disintegrating U.S. Monroe Doctrine
of 1823. If the populist mayor of Mexico City is
elected president of Mexico this fall, NAFTA itself
will die or be re-negotiated. This is the first time in
many decades that the interests of Latinos in the U.S.
are closely converging with the governments and people
of the nations of the south. As seen even in the recent
international baseball championships, the willingness
of America’s major league Latino players to join the
lineups of their homelands shows the fluid nature of
borders and solidarity. A policy beyond the Monroe
Doctrine will have to be crafted for the United States,
with Latinos in the lead. As Evo Morales of Bolivia is
suggesting, "another annexation is possible," the
annexation of the United States into peaceful
coexistence with Latin America.
Some would argue that America must simply follow the
path of previous immigrant generations, like my Famine
Irish ancestors. It is true that the slum-dwelling
Irish, Jews and Italians rose in time to the middle
class, and the same future may lie ahead for the new
immigrants. We can see signs of the past in the growing
ranks of Latino trade unionists and mayors and other
politicians. But the difference in the histories is
race and class. If neo-liberalism has failed to widen
the American middle class since 1973, how will it
expand to provide decent jobs for the aspiring
immigrants in today’s underclass? Is there another New
Deal just over the horizon, or a hardening defense of
the status quo?
Huntington’s Anglosphere is dying, if only through
demographics. It is a matter of time--of when, not
whether. The newcomers have neither the need nor the
capacity to assimilate into a declining Anglosphere.
They will remain multicultural of necessity, the hybrid
multitude arising from the depths of empire and its
resistance. The real question is how the rest of
America, the rest of us, can assimilate and find
belonging within all the Americas, where so many flags
are fluttering in the gusts of self-determination.
From www.truthdig.com - May 2, 2006
I wore the multicolored Aymaran flag of Bolivia to the
May Day march in Los Angeles, the same day that Evo
Morales, the first indigenous president of Bolivia,
nationalized the oil and gas fields. It seemed right to
recognize the reappearance of the indigenous in the
Americas. I gazed at Marcos Aguilar, one of the UCLA
hunger strikers for Chicano studies in 1993. Now he
stood bare-skinned and feathered, leading a traditional
dance below the edifice of the Los Angeles Times.
Rather than becoming assimilated into gringotopia, he
was forcing the reverse, the assimilation of the
Machiavellians into the new reality of L.A. Another
hunger striker from those days, Cindy Montanez, was
chairing the state Assembly’s rules committee. Another
UCLA student, a beneficiary of ’60s outreach programs,
was mayor of the city.
Contrary to most mainstream commentary, these protests
were part of a continuous social movement going back
many decades, even centuries. And yet the commentators,
especially on the national level, once again summoned
the stereotype of the lazy Mexican, the sleeping giant
awakening. For years it was convenient to blame apathy
and low participation rates on the Mexican-Americans
and other Latinos, ignoring the racial exclusion that
prevailed east of the Los Angeles River. In 1994, the
same "sleeping giant" arose against Pete Wilson’s
Proposition 187. It previously awoke in the 1968 high
school "blowouts," the 1968-69 Chicano moratorium and
the farmworker boycotts, which were the largest in
history, and, in an earlier generation, the giant awoke
in the "Zoot Suit Riots" and Ed Roybal’s winning
campaign for City Council. The giant never had time to
sleep at all.
In the Great Depression, in the lifetimes of the
parents and grandparents of today’s students, up to
600,000 Mexicans, one-third of the entire U.S. Mexican
population, many of them born in the United States,
were deported with their children back to Mexico, their
labor no longer needed.
Out of nowhere?
There is a frightening gap between the white perception
of this 50-year trauma of deportation and the
experience of Mexicans and other immigrants, like the
Salvadorans who were driven here by the U.S.-backed
civil wars of the 1970s. Somewhere between amnesia and
a self-induced lobotomy, the gap needs to be closed in
the dialogue that may come of these historic protests.
The mere passage of time may erase white memories and
guilt, and induce acceptance among Mexicans, but it
does not legitimize the occupation itself. The wound
will not disappear under American flags, searchlights
and border walls.
The fundamental issue still shaping attitudes down to
the present is this: Either the Mexicans (and other
Latinos) are immigrants to a country called the United
States or the U.S. is a Machiavellian power that denies
occupying one-half of Mexico for 156 years. During the
1846-48 war against Mexico, at least 50,000 Mexicans
died. The fighting took place across many cities
considered pure-bred American today; in Los Angeles, a
revolt temporarily drove out the U.S. Army. Guerrilla
resistance by Mexican fighters left a mythic legacy of
those like Joaquin Murrieta and Tiburcio Vasquez, names
still alive among Mexican-American students today.
Meanwhile, The New York Times was declaring in 1860:
"The Mexicans, ignorant and degraded as they are,
[should welcome a system] founded on free trade and the
right of colonization so that, after a few years of
pupilege, the Mexican state would be incorporated into
the Union under the same conditions as the original
colonies."
After unilaterally annexing Texas in 1845, despite
massive protests, the U.S. president sent troops 100
miles into what previously was Mexican land. When the
Mexicans retaliated, the U.S. declared war on the
pretext that Americans had been attacked on American
soil. When it ended, the U.S. took 51% of Mexico’s
land, including California, where the discovery of gold
had been kept secret from Mexican negotiators. At least
100,000 Mexicans and an additional 200,000 indigenous
people lived on those lands. Ever since, those people
and their descendants have lived in a split-
consciousness similar to that of African-Americans
described in W.E.B. DuBois’ "The Souls of Black Folk."
Each new generation of immigrants fuels that
consciousness all over again.
Under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the imposed
settlement of the 1846-48 war, the inhabitants of the
occupied territories were granted legal, political,
educational and cultural rights as citizens, not as
immigrants. Some of the earliest official documents of
California were required under the treaty to be printed
in Spanish and English. This treaty, which was
unenforced, became the basis for later movements
stretching into the 1960s, movements that gave the
Southwest an Aztec name (Aztlan) and demanded the
return of former land grants. It was not unlike Radical
Reconstruction, the period after the Civil War when
Gen. Sherman’s official promise of "forty acres and a
mule" was withdrawn.
Today’s demonstrations are not demanding implementation
of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Modern Mexican-
Americans have made the legalization of undocumented
workers as United States citizens their consensus
demand. But there remains an unspoken difference
between two states of mind regarding the meaning of the
border. In every generation, immigrant workers and
youth have claimed their American rights without
abandoning the memory of their deeper historical ones.
A significant number of white Americans, especially
among the elites, still hold to nativist definitions of
American identity, in contrast to those multinational
corporations that tend to be more interested in cheap
foreign labor than in keeping American white.
Conservative journals like the American Outlook publish
articles glorifying "the Anglosphere" as the standard
of globalization (March-April 2001). Kevin Phillips is
quoted in the article as still longing for an American
culture whose "core thought is a kind of English
revivalism." Regarding this month’s demonstrations, the
black neoconservative Thomas Sowell has criticized the
"demanding" and "threatening" tone of "people who want
their own turf on American soil..." (L.A. Daily News,
April 29, 2006).
No one lends an Ivy League luster to the Minuteman
Mentality more than Harvard University professor Samuel
Huntington. A proud "Anglo-Protestant," Huntington
previously advocated the "forced urbanization" of the
Vietnamese peasantry into a "Honda culture" as a
formula for ending the nationalist uprising. In
the ’70s, he complained that an "excess of
democracy" threatened Western authorities. More
recently, he formulated the strident doctrine of "the
clash of civilizations," decreeing that Islamic culture
is incompatible with democratic civilization. Finally,
he has weighed in on "The Hispanic Challenge," arguing
that Latino immigration is "a major potential threat to
the cultural and possibly political integrity of the
United States" (in Foreign Policy, March-April 2006).
Huntington argues that Mexican-Americans are too close
to their traditional culture to become assimilated as
patriotic Americans. By this he means, of course, that
they cannot become imitation WASPs, whose identity he
sees as basic to the American nation. For Huntington,
assimilation seems to mean submission and disappearance
into the master culture, a viewpoint still held by
many. We defeated you, and now you should become like
us.
Largely forgotten in the current debate, too, are those
among the elites who still consider Mexico itself a
strategic long-term threat. The late Caspar Weinberger,
a secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan, wrote in
1998 of planning for a theoretical "next war" against
Mexico, opting for the military option in case "it
becomes necessary to go down in and try to catch [a]
rebel leader in Mexico and restore democratic rule to
Mexico" (interview with "Chuck Baldwin Live," Feb. 17,
1998). The Harvard historian of Chiapas, John Womack,
has written that in the 1990s "the US government, in
particular the Defense Department ... wanted ‘low-
intensity’ warfare in Mexico" ("Rebellion in Chiapas,"
Harvard, 1999).
But the U.S. has historically been the destabilizing
force in Mexico, most recently with the North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which has flooded the
country with corn and other products and replaced
indigenous manufacturing with the maquiladora economy,
thus displacing at least hundreds of thousands of
Mexicans, many of whom seek survival in el norte.
Perpetuating the cycle is absolutely crucial to neo-
liberal economics. But it also perpetually stimulates
rebelliousness, in fact and memory, among those who
take to U.S. streets today, and who shortly will be the
urban majority in a new America.
As people of color, mainly immigrants, edge closer to
majority status in key states, their relatives to the
south are becoming nationalist, populist majorities in
country after country, with interests that sharply
conflict with the disintegrating U.S. Monroe Doctrine
of 1823. If the populist mayor of Mexico City is
elected president of Mexico this fall, NAFTA itself
will die or be re-negotiated. This is the first time in
many decades that the interests of Latinos in the U.S.
are closely converging with the governments and people
of the nations of the south. As seen even in the recent
international baseball championships, the willingness
of America’s major league Latino players to join the
lineups of their homelands shows the fluid nature of
borders and solidarity. A policy beyond the Monroe
Doctrine will have to be crafted for the United States,
with Latinos in the lead. As Evo Morales of Bolivia is
suggesting, "another annexation is possible," the
annexation of the United States into peaceful
coexistence with Latin America.
Some would argue that America must simply follow the
path of previous immigrant generations, like my Famine
Irish ancestors. It is true that the slum-dwelling
Irish, Jews and Italians rose in time to the middle
class, and the same future may lie ahead for the new
immigrants. We can see signs of the past in the growing
ranks of Latino trade unionists and mayors and other
politicians. But the difference in the histories is
race and class. If neo-liberalism has failed to widen
the American middle class since 1973, how will it
expand to provide decent jobs for the aspiring
immigrants in today’s underclass? Is there another New
Deal just over the horizon, or a hardening defense of
the status quo?
Huntington’s Anglosphere is dying, if only through
demographics. It is a matter of time--of when, not
whether. The newcomers have neither the need nor the
capacity to assimilate into a declining Anglosphere.
They will remain multicultural of necessity, the hybrid
multitude arising from the depths of empire and its
resistance. The real question is how the rest of
America, the rest of us, can assimilate and find
belonging within all the Americas, where so many flags
are fluttering in the gusts of self-determination.
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