Top Quotes: “Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America” — Juan González

Introduction

“Even though nearly seven thousand Latinos held some kind of elected office in the country in 2020 (a record number), they still represented just about 1 percent of all officeholders, which is a tiny share when you consider that Hispanics composed 18 percent of the country’s population.”

“The growing ethnic, racial, and class diversity of the Latino migrant population, with Central Americans now outnumbering even Mexicans in apprehensions by the Border Patrol for illegal entry, with Salvadorans surpassing those of Cuban descent as the third largest Latino group in the country, and with a new wave of more middle-class migrants and refugees from coun tries such as Venezuela, Colombia, and Nicaragua reviving existing conservative trends long espoused largely by Cuban refugees:

The resurgence of right-wing neoliberal regimes in — Latin America, with the new leaders moving rapidly to reverse the economic and social gains achieved by pink tide populist governments that came to power during the previous decade. This conservative movement gained force with the 2009 coup against Honduran president Mel Zelaya and the reign of terror in Honduras that followed, events that the Obama White House sanctioned. The movement then spread to coups or “lawfare” investigations that ousted progressive presidents in Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay, and Chile. Only Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba managed to survive the new tide, with Mexico the sole nation to run counter to the trend when its people elected left-wing populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador as their president in 2018. Many of the new governments, however, were marked by per- sistent corruption, implicated in the rise of criminal gangs and drug trafficking in their countries, and the austerity programs they imposed only exacerbated economic inequality among their citizens to the point that in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, voters began returning leftist movements to power.”

“The new movement burst on the scene with such unexpected force that it quickly gave rise to several contending narratives in the commercial media. On the one hand, scores of mainstream newspapers and television stations started for the first time to produce poignant and sympathetic stories about the lives of the undocumented, a perspective the press had largely ignored until then, preferring instead the stereotype of the “illegal alien.” On the other hand, the fast-growing Spanish-language media offered a radically different narrative — one of solidarity, not of sympathy. From the scores of popular radio Djs around the country to the big television networks like Univision and Telemundo, from the hundreds of weekly Hispanic newspapers to the big-city dailies like La Opinión in Los Angeles and El Diario-La Prensa in New York City, the Spanish-language press openly extolled and promoted the movement. They depicted it as a heroic effort by Hispanic Americans to finally be recognized for their contributions to the nation.”

“Such was the force of their outcry that the Sensenbrenner bill died in the Senate. But so did a proposed bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform bill in 2007 that was backed by Massachusetts senator Edward Kennedy, Republican senator John McCain, and President Bush.”

“Six months after the immigration protests, Democrats swept control of both houses of Congress, and one of the chief reasons for that historic power shift was the mushrooming Latino vote. The number of Hispanics casting ballots that November jumped by nearly 1 million over the previous midterm election — from 4.7 million in 2002 to 5.6 million in 2006. And in so far as the Republican Party was most closely associated with the Sensenbrenner bill, the percentage of Latinos who cast ballots for Republican candidates in the House of Representatives sank from 38 percent to 30 percent.”

“The central argument of this book is that U.S. economic and political domination over Latin America has always been — and continues to be — the underlying reason for the massive Latino presence here. Quite simply, our vast Latino population is the unintended harvest of the U.S. empire.

Most of us are uncomfortable thinking of our nation as an empire, even if Wall Street speculators and investment banks have repeatedly shown their ability to wreck entire economies halfway around the globe in a matter of hours — a power far greater than the Roman or Ottoman Empires ever wielded. Our public schools have failed miserably in this regard, for they have taught us little about the machinations that accompanied our nation’s territorial expansion or that helped bring about U.S. domination of the modern world.”

“The Latino migrant flows were directly connected to the growth of the U.S. empire and responded closely to its needs, whether it was the political need to stabilize a neighboring country or to accept its refugees as a means of accomplishing a broader foreign policy objective (Cubans, Dominicans, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans), or an economic need, such as satisfying the labor demands of particular U.S. industries (Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Panamanians).”

Spanish vs. English Empires

“The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán was a bustling metropolis. Meticulously designed and ingeniously constructed in the middle of a lake, where it was accessible only by well-guarded causeways, it contained some 250,000 inhabitants when Hernán Cortés first entered it. (London’s population at the time was a mere 50,000 and that of Seville, the greatest city in Castile, barely 40,000.) The Spaniards were awestruck. One of Cortés’s captains, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, left a vivid description of what he and his fellow Spaniards beheld that first day from the top of the central Aztec temple:

We saw a great number of canoes, some coming with provisions and others returning with cargo and merchandise; and we saw too that one could not pass from one house to another of that great city and the other cities that were built on water except over wooden drawbridges or by canoe. We saw…shrines in these cities that looked like gleaming white towers and castles: a marvelous sight.”

“The textbooks most of us read in grammar school have long acknowledged that Spanish conquistadores criss-crossed and laid claim to much of the southern and western United States nearly a century before the first English colonies were founded at Jamestown and Massachusetts Bay. But most Anglo-American historians have promoted the notion that the early Spanish presence rapidly disappeared and left a minor impact on U.S. culture when compared with our dominant Anglo-Saxon heritage.

Those early expeditions, however, led to permanent Spanish outposts throughout North America, to the founding of our earliest cities, Saint Augustine and Santa Fe, and to the naming of hundreds of U.S. rivers, mountains, towns, and even several states. Moreover, they led to a Spanish-speaking population — more accurately, a Latino/mestizo population — that has existed continuously in certain regions of the United States since that time.”

“Nearly two decades after Ponce de León’s death, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado and Hernando de Soto, their imaginations fired by the treasures Cortés had seized in Mexico, each led major expeditions in search of the fabled cities of gold. Starting from central Mexico in 1539, Coronado and his men marched north into present-day Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, planting the Spanish flag wherever they went. By the time the expedition returned in 1542, the Spaniards had discovered the Grand Canyon, crossed and named many of the continent’s great rivers, but discovered no gold.”

“The most extraordinary exploit of all, however, was that of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, who arrived in Florida in 1527 — fifteen years before de Soto — as second-in-command to Pánfilo de Narvez, the bungling onetime governor of Cuba whom King Charles of Spain authorized to complete the colonization of Florida. After landing on the peninsula’s western coast, Narvez led a three-hundred-man expedition inland near present-day Tallahassee, then foolishly lost touch with his ships and was killed. His men, unable to withstand the constant Indian assaults, headed west along the Gulf Coast on makeshift barges.

Only four survived the ordeal, among them Cabeza de Vaca and a Spanish Moor named Estevanico. The four spent the next seven years wandering through the North American wilderness. Their six-thousand-mile trek, one of the great exploration odysseys of history, and the first crossing of North America by Europeans, is preserved in a report Cabeza de Vaca wrote for the king of Spain in 1542. At first, they were separated and enslaved by coastal tribes, where Cabeza de Vaca was beaten so often his life became unbearable. After a year in captivity, he managed to escape and took up the life of a trader between the tribes: “Wherever I went, the Indians treated me honorably and gave me food, because they liked my commodities. I became well known; those who did not know me personally knew me by reputation and sought my acquaintance.”

His rudimentary medical knowledge enabled him at one point to cure some sick Indians. From that point on, the tribes revered him as a medicine man. Once a year, when the various tribes gathered for the annual picking of prickly pears, he was reunited with his fellow Spaniards, who remained enslaved. At one such gathering in 1533, he engineered their escape and they all fled west through present-day Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. As they traveled, word spread of the wondrous white medicine man and his companions, and soon thousands of Indians started to follow in a caravan of worshippers. The four did not finally reconnect with Spanish civilization in northern Mexico until 1534. By then, Cabeza de Vaca had been transformed. He no longer regarded the Native American as a savage, for he now had an intimate understanding of their culture and outlook. Instead, the barbarity of his fellow Spaniards toward the Indians now filled him with despair.”

“Las Casas’s untiring efforts on behalf of the Amerindians led to Spain’s adoption of “New Laws” in 1542. The codes recognized Indians as free and equal subjects of the Spanish Crown, but landowners in many regions refused to observe the codes and kept Indians in virtual slavery for generations.”

“English kings, for instance, commanded their agents to “conquer, occupy and possess” the lands of the “heathens and infidels,” but said nothing of the people inhabiting them, while Spain, following the dictates of Pope Alexander VI, sought not only to grab the land but also to make any pagans found on it “embrace the Catholic faith and be trained in good morals.” In Spain, both Crown and church saw colonizing and conversion as a unified effort. Priests accompanied each military expedition for the purpose of Christianizing the natives.”

“As the Conquest proceeded, priests performed such baptisms by the thousands. Before the holy water could dry on their foreheads, the Indian women were routinely grabbed as concubines by Spanish soldiers and settlers. The priests even performed occasional marriages between Spaniards and Indians, especially among the elite of both groups, thus fostering and legitimizing a new mestizo race in America. For example, Peruvian historian Garcilaso de la Vega, called El Inca, was born in 1539 to a Spanish officer and an Incan princess, while the parish register of Saint Augustine, Florida, recorded twenty-six Spanish-Indian marriages in the early 1700s, at a time when only a few hundred natives resided near the town. Far more important than legal marriages, however, was the extraordinary number of consensual unions. Francisco de Aguirre, among the conquistadores of Chile, boasted that by fathering more than fifty mestizo children, his service to God had been “greater than the sin incurred in doing so.”

The first English colonies, by contrast, began as family settlements. They maintained strict separation from Indian communities, sometimes even bolstered by segregation laws. In North America, Indians rarely served as laborers for settlers or as household servants, and unmarried sexual unions between natives and whites were rare except for captives of war.

The English, furthermore, never saw proselytizing among the Indians as important.”

“The knowledge the missionaries imparted to the Indians, whether in agriculture, language, customs, or technology, did not disappear when the last monk departed. Rather, it remained part of Indian experience so that by the time Anglos began settling in the Southeast, they discovered the “civilized tribes,” among them the Creek, the Cherokee, and the Choctaw. Even some of the most nomadic and fierce of the Southwest nations, the Apache, Comanche, and Kiowa, partially assimilated into Spanish society. In one unusual case, Apache Manuel González became mayor of San Jose, California.”

“Beyond their religious practices, the English and Spanish colonial worlds diverged substantially in their attitudes toward slavery and race. The long period of Arab domination left an indelible legacy of racial and cultural mixing that the Spanish immigrants carried to the New World. Moorish occupiers of the Iberian Peninsula had invariably taken Spanish wives, setting off an era of miscegenation so extensive that “by the fifteenth century there were dark-skinned Christians, light-haired Moors, hybrids of every shape and complexion in Castile,” according to one historian. Some Muslims, called Mudejares, continued to live under Christian rule, while some Christians, called Mozarabs, learned to speak Arabic and adopted Muslim habits. The dress, foods, and traditions of Moors and Spaniards permeated each other’s societies. In architecture, for instance, the horseshoe arches, tiled floors and walls, and open interior courtyards so commonly associated with Spanish design in America, all drew from Arabic inspiration.

This tradition of racial mixing made it more acceptable for Spanish settlers to engage in sexual unions with both Amerindians and Africans. This was especially true for settlers from Andalusia in southern Spain, the province that endured the longest period of Moorish occupation, and which supplied nearly 40 percent of the early settlers.”

“The prevalence of both consensual unions and miscegenation, along with the strong influence of the Catholic Church, led to major differences between how the English and Spanish regarded the rights of slaves, especially toward the end of the eighteenth century. Until then, all colonial powers had allowed masters to free their slaves. But after the Haitian revolution, the British, French, and Dutch started to restrict manumission, while the Portuguese and Spanish colonies promoted and codified the practice.

As a result, only in the Portuguese and Spanish colonies did giant classes of free Blacks develop, and with them the mulato group (in some countries they were called pardos or morenos) that so distinguished Latin America’s rainbow racial spectrum from North America’s stark Black-white system of racial classification. In the United States, for instance, the first federal census in 1790 reported that “free coloreds” were less than 2 percent of the population, while enslaved Blacks were 18 percent. The same proportion of free Blacks to slaves was roughly true in the British, Dutch, and French Caribbean colonies. But the opposite trend prevailed in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, where free Blacks or coloreds outnumbered slaves, with perhaps 40 to 60 percent of free Blacks able to purchase their emancipation outright. The viceroyalty of New Granada, which included Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador, had 80,000 slaves and 420,000 free coloreds in 1789. Cuba had 199,000 slaves and 114,000 free coloreds in 1817. By 1872, free coloreds composed 43 percent of Brazil’s population, outnumbering both pure whites and enslaved Blacks.”

“More than half the population of the thirteen colonies before 1776 was composed of indentured servants. Among these were fifty thousand convicts who were released from English jails during the seventeenth century to populate the Maryland and Virginia colonies, and a considerable number of children who had been kidnapped and sold into servitude.

Land speculators who worked in tandem with merchants orchestrated and engineered much of the exodus. Labor agents scoured the British Isles and the Rhineland for recruits to work the huge tracts of American land the speculators owned, enticing farm families to sell their property and seek instant wealth in the New World.”

“No matter how many treaties the Indian nations may have signed to appease white settlers, they invariably saw themselves as ceding use of the land, not perpetual ownership.”

Independence

“At the beginning of the 1800s, few Latin Americans could have foretold how the United States would treat them. The U.S. War of Independence, after all, was an enormous inspiration to intellectuals throughout the Spanish colonies. Some Latin Americans even fought alongside George Washington’s rebel army. Bernardo de Gálvez, the Spanish governor of Louisiana, opened a second front. against the English when he invaded British-controlled West Florida, defeated the garrison there, and reclaimed the peninsula as a Spanish colony. Merchants in Havana, meanwhile, supplied critical loans and supplies to Washington.”

“In the end, the spark for Latin America’s revolution came not from within the colonies but from Europe. In 1808, Napoleon invaded Spain and installed his brother Joseph as king, setting off a chain of events that would lead to the breakup of the entire Spanish colonial empire. The Spanish people rejected the French invaders, formed local resistance juntas throughout the country, and initiated a guerrilla war to return their imprisoned king to the throne. When they heard of the events in Europe, criollo leaders in the colonies followed the lead of the Spanish resistance. They formed juntas of their own in all the major American cities and assumed control of their local affairs in the name of the king.

The rebel juntas in Spain soon convened a new Cortes (Spanish parliament), and that Cortes promulgated a liberal constitution, one that granted full citizenship to colonial subjects in the American colonies for the first time. But the Cortes stopped short of full equality when it refused to permit the colonies, whose population far outnumbered Spain’s, a proportionate share of delegates. That refusal angered the most radical criollo leaders, who decided to break with the new Spanish government and declare their independence.

From then on, the Latin American revolution charted its own course. Even Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo and the ousting of the French from Spain failed to bring the shattered empire back together. King Ferdinand, who was restored to the throne after Napoleon’s defeat, refused to accept the loss of his colonies and sent his army to subdue the upstart Latin Americans. A series of wars ensued throughout the continent between loyalists and rebels, and in several regions between the patriotic leaders themselves. The conflicts differed from country to country, yet everywhere the human toll was immense.”

“Our slave owners were well aware that after Bolívar’s second defeat by the Spanish army, Haiti’s president, Alexandre Pétion, had helped finance his return to South America in 1815, outfitting seven ships and six thousand men with weapons and ammunition on condition that Bolívar emancipate Venezuela’s enslaved population.”

“Disregarded by the U.S. government from their inception, reviled by the conservative monarchies of Europe, the Latin American republics concluded that their only reliable ally was England. Some six thousand English, Scotch, and Irish, most of them unemployed veterans from the British wars against Napoleon, signed up for Bolívar’s army in 1817–1819. Among those volunteers was Daniel O’Leary, who went on to serve as Bolívar’s top secretary. That British aid, together with the daring battlefield strategies of Bolívar, José de San Martín, Bernardo O’Higgins, Francisco de Paula Santander, and the other great generals, succeeded by 1826 in routing the last of the Spanish armies on the continent.

All of Spain’s vast empire except Cuba and Puerto Rico was now free.”

The Southwest

“It underscores an unresolved contradiction of U.S. history — between our ideals of freedom and our predilection for conquest.

The earliest example of that contradiction came during the next phase of borderlands expansion, the repeated annexations of Mexican territory between 1836 and 1853. Prior to those annexations, the United States of Mexico, as the new country called itself, and the United States of America were eerily similar in territory and population. In 1824, Mexico comprised 1.7 million square miles and contained 6 million people, while the United States stretched for 1.8 million square miles and had 9.6 million people. That equivalence was radically transformed over the next three decades as Anglo settlers poured onto Mexican land.”

“Also included in the 1848 treaty was the crucial 150-mile-wide Nueces Strip, between the Rio Grande and Nueces Rivers. The U.S. negotiators demanded its inclusion as part of Texas despite the fact that Spain, and later Mexico, considered the strip part of Coahuila Province. The Nueces, which is equal in size to present-day Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Jersey combined, was especially important because it included the fertile Lower Rio Grande valley and because the plains north of that valley were teeming with wild horses and cattle. The herds, introduced by Spanish settlers in the early 1700s, numbered more than three million head by 1830. Securing control of those herds, and of the original Spanish land grants in the region, soon produced vast fortunes for early Anglo settlers like Charles Stillman, Richard King, and Mifflin Kenedy.

Out of those Mexican lands, the U.S. cattle industry was born, even though the majority of ranch hands in the industry’s early decades were anything but Anglo. The vaqueros, or cowboys, were generally mestizos or mulatos, sometimes even Blacks or Indians. Certainly this was true on the famous King Ranch below Corpus Christi, which eventually grew to nearly one million acres. So dominant was the Mexican vaquero in the industry that Anglo cowboys copied virtually all the culture of the range from them. As historian Carey McWilliams has noted, the cowboy got from the vaquero:

his lasso or lariat, cinch, halter, mecate or horsehair rope, “chaps” or chaparejos, “taps” or stirrup tips (lapaderas), the chin strap for his hat (barboquejo), the feedbag for his horse (morral) and his rope halter or bosal. Even his famous “ten gallon hat” comes from a mistranslation of a phrase in a Spanish-Mexican corrido “su sombrero gallonado,” which referred to a festooned or “gallooned” sombrero.

The Nueces Strip and the northern part of New Mexico were the only regions where the original Mexican inhabitants remained a palpable majority over the Anglos even after annexation. As a result, the language of the range, even that used by Anglo-Americans, is derived mostly from Spanish words, among them bronco, buckaroo, burro, mesa, canyon, rodeo, corral, loco, lariat. Yet the cowboy myth in popular folklore, the one Hollywood has propagated around the world, is of a lone white Anglo sitting tall in the saddle, with Mexicans of the Old West invariably portrayed either as bandits or doltish peasants riding donkeys.

Texas, however, was not the richest prize of the war with Mexico — California was. From the early 1800s, New England sea captains who reached the Pacific sent back glowing reports of that far-off Spanish colony. Despite those reports, few Anglos had settled in the far West before the Mexican War because of the long and grueling overland passage through Indian country necessary to get there. Then, two weeks before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill on the American River. The news touched off an overnight stampede. Prospectors streamed into the territory from the East, Mexico, and South America, even from Hawaii and Australia. Within a year, Californias non-Indian population rocketed from twenty thousand to one hundred thousand, overwhelming the original Mexican inhabitants, who numbered only about thirteen thousand, and the territory’s several hundred thousand Indians.”

Central America, Pt. 1

“The California Gold Rush, however, created an instant demand for a faster route to the Pacific coast. The only sea route at the time, from New York to San Francisco around Cape Horn, took four months, and the narrow Central American isthmus offered the best bet for cutting that time dramatically.

Two competing New York merchant groups had recently secured contracts from Congress to carry mail between California and the East Coast by steamship lines and then overland through Panama. The U.S. Mail Steamship Company, operated by George Law and Marshall O. Roberts, had the Atlantic portion of the route, while William H. Aspinwall’s Pacific Mail Steamship Company had the western portion. Using a generous $900,000 annual subsidy Congress allotted them for the mail, the companies decided to transport people as well. Unfortunately, the part of the trip that involved an arduous fifty-mile trek by mule train across Panama’s jungle was too forbidding for the average person heading for California. So Aspinwall negotiated a deal with the Colombian government to build a railroad across the isthmus. His Panama Railroad took six years and $2 million to build, and it claimed four thousand lives, most of them West Indian and Chinese laborers whom Aspinwall imported. Once completed, however, the line paid for itself three times over within the first few years of operation.

While Aspinwall was building his line in Panama, Cornelius Vanderbilt, perhaps the most ruthless tycoon of his age, moved to carve out a quicker competing route through Nicaragua. Vanderbilt and Joseph L. White, a former congressman, founded the Nicaragua Accessory Transit Company, a combination steamship and railroad line that began operation sooner than Aspinwall’s railroad. The Nicaragua company grossed $5 million the first year, with profits of between 20 and 40 percent.

Aspinwall’s railroad and Vanderbilt’s steamship line, however, were inadequate for U.S. merchants who wanted a canal through which their goods could travel on ships. Most engineers and politicians in the country favored a canal route through Nicaragua. While a Panama route was shorter, Nicaragua’s was easier to build, they argued, since it could incorporate the natural waterways of the San Juan River and giant Lake Managua.

As a result, Nicaragua started to draw increasing attention from both Washington politicians and Anglo fortune hunters. In 1853, U.S. sailors went ashore to defend Vanderbilt’s company in a dispute with the local government, and in 1854, the navy bombarded and destroyed the town of San Juan/Greytown over another financial dispute between a U.S. company and local authorities.

Colonel Henry L. Kinney, a land speculator and founder of the Texas Rangers, arrived in 1854. Kinney immediately purchased twenty-two million acres of Nicaraguan land from trader Samuel H. Shepherd, who claimed he had been “granted” the land in 1839 by the Miskito king. The Nicaraguan government, as might be expected, refused to recognize Kinney’s claim to 70 percent of its territory. Shareholders in Kinney’s Central American Land and Mint Company included U.S. attorney general Caleb Cushing and Warren Faben, President Pierce’s commercial agent in San Juan/Greytown.”

“To enforce his dubious claim, Kinney armed some followers and declared a revolt against the government, but he was forced to flee after Vanderbilt, anxious that the land dispute not affect his own investments, pressured the British and U.S. governments to oppose his claims.

Despite Kinney’s setback, Yankee influence in Nicaragua kept growing. More than six hundred North Americans were living in the country by 1855. By then, England, still the most powerful nation in the world, made clear that it would challenge any U.S. plans to dominate a transoceanic canal project. That year, the two nations negotiated the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, in which they agreed to jointly guarantee the neutrality of any future canal, and to refrain from occupying or controlling any of the Central American countries. Neither nation, of course, bothered to consult any of the governments in the region affected by the treaty.

But politicians and merchants weren’t the only ones suddenly eyeing Nicaragua. Walker, undaunted by his Mexican fiasco, set sail from San Francisco in 1855 with a band of fifty-six mercenaries he had recruited, supposedly to fight for a faction in Nicaraguas continuing civil war. Shortly after arriving, Walker rebelled against the faction that employed him, seized control of the country, and in one of the most bizarre episodes of Latin American history, declared himself president.

During his time in office, Walker reinstituted slavery, declared English a coequal language with Spanish, and required all lands to be registered. The latter decree facilitated passing many land titles into the hands of Anglo-American settlers. Both Walker and the Nicaraguans, however, were actually pawns in a nefarious high-stakes contest for control of the region’s commerce by competing groups of U.S. investors. A group of Transit Company officials who had temporarily wrested control of the shipping line from Vanderbilt helped finance Walker’s army, while George Law, owner of the U.S. steamship line in Panama and Vanderbilt’s chief competitor, supplied Walker with guns. In order to defeat his economic rivals, Vanderbilt bankrolled the allied armies of Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Honduras, which defeated and routed Walker in 1857.

Some have attempted to dismiss the Walker adventure as a minor footnote of American history. But during his two years of psychotic and racist rule, more than eleven thousand North Americans settled in Nicaragua, equal to one-third of the total white population in that country at the time. Most of those immigrants were Walker supporters and anywhere from three thousand to five thousand joined his occupying army. In this country, thousands rallied in the major cities to cheer Walker as a hero. A Broadway musical based on his exploits became an overnight hit; the Pierce administration sanctioned his outright aggression by recognizing his government; and the Democratic Party convention of 1856, influenced by Walker’s actions, nominated James Buchanan, a more rabid proponent of Manifest Destiny, over his opponent Pierce. As president, Buchanan proceeded to welcome Walker to the White House after his expulsion from Nicaragua. By then, a thousand U.S. citizens had been killed in Walker’s war — a death toll greater than that of the Persian Gulf wars. Walker made two more unsuccessful attempts to return to power in Nicaragua. On his final try in 1860, he landed in Honduras, where a British naval force captured him and handed him over to local Honduran soldiers, who promptly executed him.”

The Mexico, Pt. 1

“The reign of dictator Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911) turned Mexico into a foreign investors’ paradise. After Juárez died in 1872, Díaz, who had attempted previous unsuccessful uprisings, plunged into yet another revolt against Juárez’s legally chosen successor, Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada. The latter was moving to cancel many concessions granted by the Juárez administration to foreign capitalists. Díaz, in contrast, was regarded as friendly to U.S. business interests, so much so that when he crossed from Texas into Mexico in 1876 with his initial rebel army of 1,600, half of his soldiers were Americans, and the financing and weapons for his rebel force came from the same circle of railroad magnates and bondholders from New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, as well as cattle barons from South Texas who were unhappy over Lerdo de Tejadas policies.

Once he occupied Mexico City and seized power, Diaz insisted that his nation could only modernize by welcoming foreign capital. He systematically privatized the cooperative and communal pueblos of the country’s indigenous and poor peasants — a policy that, in fairness, had started slowly under Juárez and the Liberal Party — and he fostered instead the amassing of colossal estates by foreigners and the Mexican elite. At the same time, his government doled out lucrative railroad, mining, smelting, oil, and agribusiness concessions to European and American entrepreneurs. Over the next few decades, the vast Mexican countryside evolved into an unprecedented laboratory for the spread of U.S. economic control over a foreign country. Mexico became, in effect, the incubator of the future American colonial empire. By the time a revolution erupted against the Díaz regime in 1910, U.S. investment in Mexico had surpassed $1.5 billion. By then, as one study would later note, “American capital owned 78 percent of the country’s mines, 72 percent of the smelters, 58 percent of the oil, and 68 percent of the rubber business. American interests not only owned more holdings than all other foreign capitalists combined, they owned more than the Mexicans themselves.”

And it was not just a handful of industrial titans who were involved in extracting Mexico’s wealth: the Rockefellers, the Guggenheims, E. H. Harriman, J. P. Morgan, Cyrus McCormick, Peter W. Grace, and Joseph Headley Dulles (the great-grandfather of John Foster Dulles). As historian John Mason Hart has meticulously documented, by 1910 there were more than 40,000 Americans living in Mexico. Of those, 15,000 had acquired land, and their holdings amounted to more that 130 million acres, or 27 percent of the country’s entire surface area. The biggest of those owners, some 160 individuals and companies, each controlled 100,000 acres or more.”

The Caribbean, Pt. 1

“After Haiti’s independence in 1804, Haitian armies invaded the eastern end of Hispaniola and freed the enslaved Blacks there, but they also oppressed the local elite. The occupation eventually sparked a popular rebellion that drove out the Haitians and led to the founding of the Dominican Republic in 1844. The first emissary from Washington, John Hogan, arrived the following year. Hogan immediately fixed his sights on the military potential of spectacular Samaná Bay in the northeast. Samaná, he reported back home, is “capable of providing protection to all the navies of the world.”Dominican president Pedro Santana negotiated an initial deal to provide the bay as a coal refueling station to the U.S. Navy. Santana even broached the idea of the United States annexing his country, but opposition in both nations quickly scuttled the scheme.

Next to arrive was William L. Cazneau, who had been involved in Texas secession and later backed Walker in Nicaragua. Cazneau, a fervent expansionist, resurrected the annexation scheme. He won over William Seward, the secretary of state for both Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant. At Seward’s suggestion, Grant publicly announced he favored it, and the white Dominican elite, who were desperate to safeguard against another Haitian invasion, welcomed his offer. The rest of the Caribbean, however, was too alive with revolutionary ferment to accept annexation quietly. Puerto Rican and Cuban patriots were locked in battle against Spanish rule, while popular movements were in open rebellion against conservative oligarchies in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. When the Haitian rebels triumphed in 1869, they offered their capital of Port-au-Prince as a safe haven to all Caribbean democrats. Among those who accepted the offer were Puerto Rico’s Ramón Emeterio Betances and Dominican generals Gregorio Luperón and José Cabral.

In the midst of all this ferment, Grant signed his annexation treaty with Dominican dictator Buenaventura Báez. Grant’s idea was to turn the Caribbean country into a colonizing venture for any American Blacks who were dissatisfied with the post-Civil War South. The treaty outraged patriots throughout the Antilles, who saw it as the beginning of direct American control of their islands. When he learned of it, Luperón prepared to invade his homeland from Haiti to overthrow Báez. The dictator appealed for U.S. help, and Grant instructed the navy to “to resist any effort to invade Dominican territory by land or sea.” Grant’s navy may have been all-powerful in the Caribbean, but the president had overestimated his strength at home. The Senate, still dominated by post-Civil War Reconstruction radicals, did not share his dreams for a Caribbean empire. Led by Massachusetts abolitionist Charles Sumner, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, it defeated Grant’s treaty in 1870.”

“Whenever a politician such as Sam Houston or Davy Crockett found his rise barred by opponents at home, he simply packed his bags, conquered some new territory, and created a state where he and his allies could dominate. The frontier thus became an outlet for violence and corruption, for those within American society who wanted the fewest rules and least control.”

“Beginning with World War II, which shut down the supply of European labor, North American industrialists initiated massive contracting of Latin Americans for the domestic labor front.”

“Between 1900 and 1901, more than five thousand Puerto Ricans were transported to Hawaii in a dozen shiploads under contract to the Hawaii Sugar Planters Association. It was a traumatic odyssey, first by ship to New Orleans, then by train to San Francisco, then by ship again to Honolulu, and scores escaped along the way from the harsh treatment they received. The bulk of the migrants eventually settled on Oahu, where they founded the first major Puerto Rican community outside their homeland.

Back in Washington, Congress repeatedly turned down petitions by Puerto Rican leaders for full self-rule and eventual statehood for the island, angering even the most avidly proannexation leaders, like Dr. Julio Henna and José Celso Barbosa. By 1914, the full Puerto Rican House of Delegates, frustrated by this intransigence, asked Washington to cede the island its independence. Congress responded instead with the Jones-Shafroth Act in 1917, imposing U.S. citizenship on all Puerto Ricans over the unanimous objection of their House of Delegates.”

“For the next thirty years, the island remained a direct colony, its Anglo governors appointed by the president, its population virtually ignored by Congress, and U.S. policy toward it controlled by a handful of American sugar companies. The companies so exploited their workers that in the 1930s and 1940s, Puerto Rico became notorious as the poorhouse of the Caribbean and as a hotbed for strikes and anti-American violence. Not until 1948, in response to a growing nationalist movement and to pressure from the United Nations to end colonialism, did Congress allow Puerto Ricans to elect their own governor. Four years later, the United States approved a form of limited self-rule, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, which exists to this day.”

“The Panama Canal [was] a project so ambitious, so grandiose, and so critical to the U.S. quest for economic power in the world that President Teddy Roosevelt devised a whole new nation just to house it.”

“Nicaragua had the widest initial support among most engineers who had studied the project. But Ohio senator Mark Hanna, the powerful chairman of the national Republican Party, had other ideas. Hanna’s close friend, New York lawyer William Nelson Cromwell, was an investor in the Panama route. A $60,000 donation by Cromwell to the Republicans in the midst of the debate seems to have strengthened Hanna’s resolve and enabled him to secure a congressional majority for the Panama route.

Colombia’s president at the time was José Manuel Marroquín. As luck would have it, Marroquin had just come through a costly three-year civil war and was seeking a quick infusion of cash to bolster his exhausted treasury. So he offered President Teddy Roosevelt precisely what Nicaragua’s president at the time, José Santos Zelaya, was refusing to give the United States — sovereignty over a ten-kilometer zone on both sides of the canal route. The result was the Hay-Herrán Treaty of 1903. But the treaty hit a snag at the last moment when Marroquín’s opponents in the Colombian congress rejected the ten-kilometer provision as a violation of national sovereignty.

Their rejection enraged Roosevelt, who was not about to permit some petty feud among inferior Latin Americans — he even referred to the Colombian leaders as “foolish and homicidal corruptionists” — to stop the greatest engineering project in U.S. history. Roosevelt countered by backing a revolt aimed at the province’s armed secession. Cromwell, along with Frenchman Philippe Bunau-Varilla and Panamanian Manuel Amador, both investors in the Panama project, prepared a blueprint for the uprising during a series of meetings in September and October 1903, at Bunau-Varillas room in New York’s Waldorf-Astoria. During his stay there, Bunau-Varilla traveled to Washington, where he met on separate occasions with both Roosevelt and Secretary of State Hay, and came away from those meetings convinced that the White House was already dispatching troops to the Panamanian isthmus and would back an independence revolt. On November 3, 1903, Amador led a rebel band that captured the port towns of Panama City and Colón. While U.S. sailors dispatched by Roosevelt assured the revolt’s success by blocking the entry of Colombian troops into Colón’s harbor, Amador proclaimed Panama’s independence. The new Panamanian government promptly named Bunau-Varilla its new ambassador to the United States, and he lost no time in signing the now renamed Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty.”

The Dominican Republic

“Only after Heureaux’s assassination in 1896 did the new Dominican government discover that the former president had racked up $34 million in debt, the bulk of it to foreign creditors. The country’s annual customs revenue, its main source of income at the time, was a mere $2 million. A good portion of the debt, it turned out, had been fraudulently marketed by the Improvement Company to unsuspecting Catholic farmers in Europe who thought they were lending money to the Dominican religious order, not the Dominican Republic!

When a financial crisis hit in 1905, and customs revenues tumbled, the new government suspended debt payments, prompting several European powers to threaten intervention. President Roosevelt, worried that sea lanes to his unfinished Panama Canal might be imperiled by a European occupation, stepped in and offered to consolidate the Dominican debt with a new loan from a New York bank. Roosevelt insisted, however, that the Dominicans turn over all customs revenues to a U.S.-appointed agent and earmark the lion’s share of it for debt service. No longer would they be able to raise government spending or increase taxes without U.S. consent.

From that point on, the country was effectively a financial protectorate. Once Roosevelt’s overseers arrived, they jumpstarted additional legal reforms to benefit foreign investors. In 1906, for instance, they pressured the government to grant tax exemptions to all sugar produced for export. In 1911, they persuaded it to permit the division of communally owned lands, making it easier for sugar growers to enlarge their holdings. Each time Dominican officials balked at some new demand from Washington, Yankee warships appeared offshore to force their submission.

Defenders of the protectorate justified it by pointing to the country’s history of political violence and instability — in the first seventy-two years of independence, Dominicans had experienced twenty-nine coups and forty-eight presidents. Some of the very people who ridiculed Dominican instability, however, conveniently overlooked that foreigners had financed much of the fighting. By 1915, a decade after Washington’s protectorate commenced, political violence had not diminished. Rather than reassess its methods, Washington chose to tighten its hold on the country’s purse strings.

By then, war was looming in Europe, and President Woodrow Wilson had a new worry, that a major faction in Dominican politics might try to ally their country with Germany. To avert that possibility, he demanded from the president, Juan Isido Jiménez, the right to appoint U.S. citizens to key posts in the Dominican government and to replace the country’s army with a new U.S.-trained National Guard. For a nation that had fought so long against Spanish, Haitian, and French occupation, these new conditions were unacceptable. Even Jiménez, who had been installed by the United States, rejected them. Wilson retaliated by freezing the government’s customs revenues. Still, the population refused to back down; thousands of government employees rallied behind their leaders and worked for months without pay.

In May 1916, Wilson sent in the marines, dissolved the legislature, imposed martial law and press censorship, and jailed hundreds of opponents. The occupation would last eight long years. It prompted widespread protests against the United States throughout Latin America, created deep bitterness in the Dominican population, and radically altered every sphere of Dominican society.

Supporters of the occupation point to the many improvements the marines brought about — supervising construction of the Caribbean’s most modern highway system, reforming government financing, building hundreds of public schools, and carrying out successful public health campaigns against malaria and venereal and intestinal diseases. But the building program was financed with more foreign borrowing and by new taxes on property, alcohol, and other domestic manufacturing. And much of the early prosperity the country enjoyed was due to the war in Europe, which drove up the demand for sugar, tobacco, and other Dominican agricultural products. And no matter how the economy fared, Dominicans chafed under successive martial law governors who ruled them arrogantly in their own country. Even the elite in the cities refused to cooperate with the occupation army.”

“The marines decreed the immediate registration, surveying, and division of all communal lands and created a new land court to arbitrate disputes and administer the law.

As might be expected, the sugar companies hired the best lawyers and quickly bamboozled or bested thousands of illiterate peasants in the new land courts. Take the case of the New York-based Barahona Company, which was organized in 1916, the year of the invasion. By 1925, it had amassed 49,400 acres, largely from buying communal holdings, and was the second-largest plantation in the country. The Central Romana mushroomed in size from 3,000 acres in 1912 to 155,000 acres in 1925. By 1924, twenty-one sugar companies controlled 438,000 acres — a quarter of the country’s arable land. More than 80 percent of it belonged to twelve U.S. companies. As land for subsistence farming diminished, staples had to be imported from the United States and the prices of food skyrocketed.”

“For the next thirty years, either as president or through handpicked successors, Trujillo perfected the most notorious dictatorship in the hemisphere, running the country as a private fiefdom for his family and friends. Known throughout the country as El Jefe, or The Boss, his atrocities became legendary. He routinely kidnapped and raped Dominican women, even the wives and daughters of his subordinates. He tortured, jailed, or executed thousands, including eighteen thousand Haitians massacred by his army in October 1937. His spies even tracked down and murdered his opponents in exile. Only when he tried to assassinate the president of Venezuela in 1960 did the U.S. government, hoping to foil any repeat of Batista’s overthrow in Cuba, begin to work for El Jefe’s ouster. In May 1961, a group of his own officers assassinated him with the support of the CIA.”

Puerto Ricans

“The Santa Fe and Southern Pacific, for instance, enlisted sixteen thousand Mexicans in 1908 for their lines. Henry Ford brought several hundred Mexicans in 1918 as student workers to Detroit, so that by 1928, there were fifteen thousand Mexicans living in the Motor City. In 1923, Bethlehem Steel contracted a thousand Mexicans to work in its Pennsylvania mill. That same year, National Tube Company brought thirteen hundred migrants from Texas to work in its plant at Lorain, Ohio. Great Western Sugar Beet Company brought more than thirty thousand Mexicans to the Colorado beet fields in the 1920s and 1930s. The Minnesota Sugar Company offered transportation, housing, and credit to Mexicans to migrate to that state. By 1912, there was a Mexican colonia in Saint Paul. Similar contracting occurred in Michigan and Kansas.”

“The 1930s were the most turbulent in Puerto Rico’s modern history, and Ponce, where my family had settled, was the center of the storm. The Depression turned the island into a social inferno even more wretched than Haiti today. As one visitor described it:

Slow, and sometimes rapid, starvation was found everywhere. If one drove a car over the country roads, one was delayed again and again by sorrowing funeral processions carrying the caskets of dead infants.

Most of the cities were infested with “wolf gangs” of children ranging in ages from six to sixteen, many of whom had no idea who their parents were. They pilfered and robbed; they “protected” parked automobiles, and if the drivers didn’t want to pay for such protection, they siphoned gasoline out of tanks, stole hub caps, slashed tires. They slept where they could — in parks, in hallways, in alleys.”

“Ethnic tensions stayed under control as long as Vito Marcantonio was the local congressman. Marcantonio, an old-style socialist, managed to fashion a unique coalition of East Harlem’s ethnic and racial groups, one that had kept him in the House of Representatives from 1934 to 1950. Marcantonio could always be found advocating for the poor, whether it was unemployed workers being evicted from their homes or families with no food to eat. For years, he was the lone critic in Washington of U.S. rule in Puerto Rico. In 1937, he helped elect this country’s first Puerto Rican to political office. His protégé, Oscar García Rivera, won an assembly seat that year as the candidate of both the Republican and American Labor parties. The city’s political establishment, on the other hand, abhorred Marcantonio and his radical notions. In 1950, his enemies finally beat him in an election and ousted him from Congress, but even then it took an unprecedented alliance of the Republican, Democratic, and Liberal Party bosses to unite behind one candidate.

With Marcantonio gone, East Harlem lost its main voice for working-class unity. Racial tensions flared up immediately, with some Italians blaming Puerto Ricans for his defeat.”

“To keep from being run out of the neighborhood by the racist attacks, Puerto Ricans started organizing their own street gangs, groups like the Viceroys and Dragons, and soon the city’s major newspapers were depicting a city terrorized by Puerto Rican and Black gangs. As the years passed, however, the new migrants became too numerous to frighten off, and the street gangs had faded in importance by the 1970s, at least in Puerto Rican communities.”

“Both the U.S. and Puerto Rican governments encouraged emigration as a safety valve to impede further social unrest on the island. Labor recruiters wound through the poorest neighborhoods, loudspeakers mounted atop their cars, offering jobs in the United States and the travel fare to get there.”

“In many cities, our communities emerged as buffer zones between Blacks and whites. In Philadelphia, for instance, the Puerto Rican community evolved into a narrow north-south corridor on either side of Fifth Street, which ran almost the entire length of the city, separating the white eastern neighborhoods of town from the Black western ones.”

“A slew of new nationalist and left-wing organizations sprang up among Puerto Ricans. Some were inspired by the old Nationalist Party in Puerto Rico or by the Black Panther Party here. The most influential was the Young Lords, an organization I helped to found in 1969. During its apogee (1969–1972), the Lords galvanized thousands of young Latinos into radical politics, and an amazing portion of the group’s members later became influential leaders of the community.”

“Cesar Chavez’s family, for instance, moved to Arizona in 1880, long before it was a state. The family owned land there until the Great Depression bankrupted them and forced them to move to California as migrant laborers.”

Cubans

“During the summer of 1994, thousands of Cubans appeared off the Florida coast in a flotilla of wooden rowboats, makeshift rafts, and automobile tires lashed together with rope. Each day that summer, the U.S. Coast Guard reported staggering jumps in the number of Cuban balseros trying to reach our shores. The exodus quickly overwhelmed Florida’s immigration centers, which were already straining to cope with a stream of desperate Haitian boat people, and it fueled a growing national debate over immigration.

President Clinton reacted by doing what no U.S. president had ever done — he ordered a halt to the special treatment of Cuban refugees. For more than thirty years, a succession of presidents had dispensed unprecedented financial aid to those fleeing Cuba. During that time, Congress had financed numerous efforts by the refugees to topple Fidel Castro’s Communist regime, and the CIA had employed many of them as trusty Cold War foot soldiers. Neither Dominicans fleeing the civil war of 1965 nor Haitians fleeing the terror of Papa Doc Duvalier and a string of Haitian military juntas got comparable treatment. Washington routinely rejected asylum requests from Haitians picked up at sea while it invariably granted asylum to the far smaller numbers of Cuban balseros. Under Clinton, many Haitians were even forcibly returned to their country.

But in 1994, the Cuban red carpet was pulled. By then, American fixation with the Cold War was over. Fear of immigrant hordes was replacing dread of Communist guerrillas. Henceforth, Clinton said, Cubans trying to reach the United States illegally would be detained and denied automatic entry just like any other immigrants.”

“Metropolitan Miami’s Hispanic population skyrocketed from a mere 50,000 in 1960 to more than 580,000 in 1980.

“Few immigrant groups have commenced their economic adaptation to American life from a position of such relative advantage,” wrote sociologist Alejandro Portes in a study of Cubans and Miami. The U.S. government provided a shelf full of government assistance programs under the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, programs that Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and other Latinos never received. The refugees became instantly eligible for public assistance, Medicaid, food stamps, free English courses, scholarships, and low-interest college loans. They could secure immediate business credit and start-up loans. The state of Florida went even further — it provided direct cash allotments for Cuban families. Dade County opened civil service lists to noncitizens. The University of Miami Medical School even started special programs to help Cubans meet licensing requirements.”

Dominicans

“The Dominican exodus, unlike that of Puerto Ricans and Mexicans, began largely as a refugee flight in the mid-1960s. Much of it followed a popular uprising in April 1965 that sought to restore to power the country’s first democratically elected president, Juan Bosch. President Lyndon Johnson, fearing the revolt would lead to a Castro-style revolution, dispatched twenty-six thousand troops to invade the country, and those soldiers sided with the Dominican army in its efforts to crush the revolt. The U.S. occupation then paved the way for Joaquín Balaguer, a longtime aide of assassinated dictator Trujillo, to capture power during elections that followed in 1966. Those elections, despite supervision by U.S. and international observers, were plagued by right-wing violence against Bosch supporters. To diffuse the postelection crisis, U.S. officials hastily facilitated the mass exodus to the United States of the very revolutionaries our government had helped crush.

For the next thirty years, Dominican political life was dominated by the same personalities and unresolved conflicts of the April 1965 revolution. Bloody political repression against Bosch’s followers lasted for more than a decade. More than three thousand were killed between 1966 and 1974 alone. Thousands of others suffered imprisonment and torture. Due to that right-wing repression, those who fled the country in the late 1960s and the 1970s were typically from the political left. Washington, however, refused to classify the Dominicans as refugees, as it did the Cubans who were fleeing Fidel Castro at the same time, so Dominicans received no federal assistance on arrival. Not until the 1980s, after the reign of terror ended back home, did Dominican immigration assume more an economic than a political character.

Those Dominicans who came here, whether in the early or later waves, were generally better educated, more urbanized, and more politically active than the average Mexican or Puerto Rican migrant. They also proved more adept at business enterprise, starting thousands of bodegas, supermarkets, and consumer goods stores in New York City, just as Cubans were doing in Miami. Manhattan’s Washington Heights became their El Barrio and their Little Havana. The newcomers, though, were largely mulato and Black, and they quickly encountered racial discrimination even from other Hispanics.”

“In 1990 alone, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) deported more than 13,200 Dominicans who entered Puerto Rico illegally. Every night, smugglers launched yolas filled with Dominicans from eastern coastal towns and set sail across the Mona Passage to Puerto Rico. No one knows how many have drowned after paying coyotes to take them across the treacherous passage, but Puerto Rico newspapers are still periodically filled with stories of dead Dominicans washing up onshore.

Those who make it land near the western towns of Aguadilla, Mayagüez, and Arecibo, then travel to the San Juan area and on to New York or Miami. In as much as Puerto Rico is U.S. territory, it has no mandatory immigration or customs checkpoints for the scores of U.S.-bound flights that leave each day. But Dominicans, lured by the island’s climate, common language, and culture, and by its greater prosperity, often decide to stay. The island’s Dominican population is still hotly debated. Some estimate it as high as 200,000, though officials peg it much lower.”

Central Americans

“The U.S. census counted 94,000 Salvadoran-born inhabitants in the entire country in 1980. That figure had skyrocketed to 701,000 ten years later — an eightfold increase. By 2017, there were more than 2.3 million people of Salvadoran descent residing in this country, equal to nearly 40 percent of their homeland’s population that year. Similar astonishing jumps occurred during the 1980s for Guatemalans from 71,642 to 226,000) and Nicaraguans (from 25,000 to 125,000).”

“As it had done with earlier Cuban and Dominican arrivals, Washington pursued a dual and discriminatory policy toward the new immigrants: the Immigration and Naturalization Service welcomed the Nicaraguans but intercepted and interned the Guatemalans and Salvadorans.”

“The vast majority of Central Americans today live in persistent misery alongside tiny elites that enjoy unparalled prosperity. By the 1990s, the average cat in our country ate more beef than the average Central American. In Nicaragua, 42 percent of the people had no access to safe drinking water as recently as 2015, while in Guatemala it was 39 percent. More than six in ten Hondurans lived in poverty in 2017, and nearly as many did in Guatemala. Nearly three in ten rural residents of Honduras had no access to electricity, while in both Nicaragua and Guatemala, some 40 percent still did not have access to safe drinking water. Guatemala has sharply reduced illiteracy since the late 1980s, when more than half of the country’s adults could not read, down to 10 percent. But a 2011 study found that that country’s illiteracy rate was much higher among adult women (24 percent) and most especially among indigenous women (51 percent). Moreover, it reported that only one-fifth of Guatemalas population had been able to acquire any secondary school education.

The region’s plight was made worse by the “lost decade” of the 1980s, when the Latin American debt crisis and the periodic devaluations of the region’s currencies against the U.S. dollar drove down the real value of wages while driving up the cost of American imports. In every Central American country except Costa Rica, the per capita domestic product shrank between 1980 to 1996.”

“Central America’s victims perished mostly at the hands of their own soldiers or from right-wing death squads, and invariably from weapons made in the U.S.A., given that in each country our government provided massive military aid to the side doing most of the killing. Even though international human rights groups repeatedly documented government-sponsored terror in the region, including several infamous assassinations of U.S. citizens and Catholic clergy, the Reagan and Bush administrations, obsessed with stopping Communism in the region, refused to assist the thousands streaming across the Mexican border to escape that terror. Between 1983 and 1990, the INS granted only 2.6 percent of political asylum requests from Salvadorans, 1.8 percent from Guatemalans, and 2.0 percent from Hondurans, yet it granted 25.2 percent of those from Nicaraguans, whose Sandinista government Washington was seeking to overthrow. Even when the INS denied asylum to a Nicaraguan, the agency rarely sent that person home — of 31,000 denied between 1981 and 1989, only 750 were actually deported.

Unfortunately, public knowledge about the wars in Central America was so scant that most Americans, when asked, could not even tell what side our government was backing in which country.”

“In Nicaragua, Washington backed the Somoza family’s dictatorial rule and tolerated its pillaging of the country for more than forty years. During that time, more Nicaraguan military officers received training at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas in Panama than from any other country in Latin America.

Most Nicaraguans had had enough of the Somozas by the mid-1970s. The turning point came with the massive earthquake that razed much of the capital of Managua in 1972 and left thousands dead. While their countrymen were digging out of the rubble, the ruling Liberal-Conservative junta led by President Anastasio Somoza Debayle and his cronies stole millions of dollars’ worth of desperately needed international relief supplies, sparking an outcry from the public. From then on, even the Catholic hierarchy and the members of the elite, many of whom had benefited from the Somoza era, turned against the regime.

A new generation of revolutionaries arose. They called themselves the Sandinista National Liberation Front, after the country’s legendary martyred leader, Augusto Sandino, and the guerrilla army they formed spread rapidly through the countryside. But even as the guerrillas advanced, and public sentiment turned heavily against the Somozas, the White House and Congress continued to back the regime. By the time the Carter administration finally decided to arrange a peaceful removal of Somoza in 1979, it was too late. A nationwide popular uprising toppled the clan and brought the Sandinistas to power.

At first, the Carter White House tried to work with the Sandinista revolutionaries, but that all changed when Ronald Reagan was elected president the following year. Reagan immediately authorized the CIA to arm, train, and finance many of the former Somoza soldiers and henchmen into the infamous Contra army. For the rest of the 1980s, the Contras and their CIA directors pursued a hit-and-run war of sabotage and terror aimed at destabilizing the new government. The covert war was overseen from the Reagan White House.”

“A similar pattern emerged in the Salvadoran civil war, whose origins go back to another almost-forgotten North American henchman, General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez. In 1932, shortly after seizing power in a military coup, Hernández masterminded the slaughter of as many as 30,000 Pipil Indians. The Pipil, impoverished peasants from the country’s Izalco region, had rebelled against the local landlords and had sought help in organizing the revolt from the country’s small Communist Party. Party leader Augustín Farabundo Martí was executed during the fighting, and the army’s bloodletting against the peasants, known in Salvadoran history as La Matanza, was so widespread that it succeeded in stamping out popular opposition for the next forty years and suppressed all traces of Indian culture from El Salvador.

With U.S. approval, Hernández banned all unions and ruled the country with an iron fist from 1932 to 1944, until disgruntled army subordinates engineered his ouster. From then on, members of the tiny Salvadoran oligarchy, known as the fourteen families, alternated control of the government with the generals, while intermittent coups between factions of the elite became a way of life.

In the Salvadoran countryside, the coffee oligarchy gobbled up so many farms that the number of landless peasants quadrupled between 1961 and 1975, and more than 300,000 Salvadorans were forced to migrate to thinly populated Honduras to work in that country’s banana plantations. The Honduran government, overwhelmed by the migrants, responded with mass deportations, a policy that only exacerbated tensions along the border, and those tensions soon escalated into a shooting war in 1969 between the two countries. The outside world derisively labeled it the Soccer War, and while the conflict lasted only one week, it destabilized the entire region by effectively terminating Honduras’ role as a safety valve for Salvador’s unemployed. By the time the war ended, more than 130,000 Salvadoran migrants had been forced back home, the rest fleeing to Mexico and the United States. Those who arrived in this country eventually found their way to San Francisco and Los Angeles, where they created the first Salvadoran colonias in the United States.

Those migrants repatriated to El Salvador posed an immediate social problem for the government. Unable to find jobs or land to till, they resorted to mass demonstrations; many started squatting on properties controlled by the oligarchy. The government responded, as it had in Hernández’s time, by calling out the army and allowing right-wing death squads to butcher the protesters.”

“There was one important force in Central America, however, that had changed substantially since the days of Sandino and Farabundo Martí — the Catholic Church. The church historically had been a bulwark of Latin America’s oligarchies, but by the late 1960s it was assuming a new role. Scores of parish priests, nuns, and missionaries, responding to the social call of the Second Vatican Council, threw themselves into social action among the region’s poor. They organized a raft of new civic groups, turning their churches and missions into centers for democratic dissent.

The grassroots awakening proved an unexpected challenge to the Salvadoran oligarchy, as it aroused thousands of peasants, urban slum dwellers, and trade union members to use the country’s ballot box for the first time. So strong did the new movement become that its opposition candidates were on the verge of winning national elections twice in the 1970s. To head off those victories, the National Guard instituted coups in both 1972 and 1977. The stronger the popular movement grew, the more blatantly the oligarchy rigged election results, so that after a while many Salvadorans started losing hope of any peaceful reform.

In 1979, another army coup aborted the results of a democratic election, but this time the country erupted into civil war. Over the next two years, with right-wing death squads hunting down dissidents, more than eight thousand trade union leaders were murdered, wounded, abducted, or disappeared. The ferocious repression prompted many young Salvadorans to respond in kind. By 1980, five separate opposition guerrilla groups were operating in the countryside, and they soon banded together to form the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, named after the martyred leader of the 1932 uprising.

That same year, a right-wing death squad assassinated San Salvador’s archbishop Oscar Romero, a fierce critic of the Salvadoran junta, and several months later, four American Catholic nuns and lay workers were raped and killed by government soldiers. Those killings signaled to the outside world that the violence in El Salvador had spiraled out of control. Instead of denouncing a government that would permit such atrocities, the Bush and Reagan administrations, believing that the country’s oligarchy was the only reliable anti-Communist force, rewarded that government. Washington quickly turned El Salvador into the biggest recipient of American military aid in Latin America. Seventy percent of the record $3.7 billion the United States pumped into El Salvador from 1981 to 1989 went for weapons and war assistance.”

“Throughout the early part of the century, Guatemalan presidents faithfully protected the interests of one landowner above all others, the United Fruit Company (UFCO). President Jorge Ubico, who ruled the country from 1931 to 1944, surpassed all his predecessors in the favors he bestowed on UFCO. By the time Ubico left office, the company owned more than a million acres of banana fields in Central America; it had a bigger annual budget than any nation in the region; its fleet of eighty-five ships carried most of the region’s outside trade; it owned fourteen hundred miles of rail, including the largest line between Mexico and Panama.”

“In a country whose coffee-growing elite was largely German descended, President Ubico was somewhat of a fascist sympathizer. Nonetheless, he curried favor with Washington during World War II by interning German nationals, confiscating their plantations, and opening his economy further to U.S. investors. Those policies brought Guatemala considerable prosperity while the war lasted and enabled Ubico to finance an ambitious public works program, including the best highway system in Central America. The progress came at a cost, however. Ubico forced Guatemala’s huge population of landless Maya to work on government projects in lieu of paying taxes. He made all Indians carry passbooks and used vagrancy laws to compel them to work for the big landowners. As for Ubico’s penchant for jailing opponents and stamping out dissent, Washington simply ignored it so long as U.S. investment in the country flourished.

Like all the region’s dictators, Ubico eventually aroused the population against him. In 1944, a coalition of middle-class professionals, teachers, and junior officers, many of them inspired by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal liberalism, initiated a democracy movement. The movement won the backing of the country’s growing trade unions and rapidly turned into a popular uprising that forced Ubico to resign.”

“The first democratic election in Guatemalan history followed in 1945, and voters chose as president Juan José Arévalo, a university philosophy professor and author who had been living in exile in Argentina. Tall, handsome, and heavily built, Arévalo was a spellbinding orator. From the moment he returned home to commence his campaign, he became an almost messianic figure to Guatemala’s impoverished masses.

Arévalo promised his countrymen a peaceful revolution, one that would take as its inspiration neither the mechanical materialism of the Communists nor the rapacious capitalism of Ubico and the old guard. He called it spiritual socialism, and once in office, he pressed forward with an ambitious program of reform. He abolished Ubico’s hated vagrancy laws, recognized labor rights, established the country’s first social security and rural education programs, and offered government loans to small farmers. Quite predictably, his reforms sparked resistance from United Fruit and from the Guatemalan upper classes. In an effort to counterbalance that resistance, Arévalo, even though he was personally opposed to Communism, ended up depending on the country’s small but well-organized group of Communists and the trade unions they controlled to marshal public support for his program.

After six years in office, Arévalo was succeeded by Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, a young military officer and Arévalo disciple. Arbenz swept to victory in the 1951 elections and vowed to take Arévalo’s peaceful revolution a step further by redistributing all idle lands to the peasants. Arbenz knew that in a country with no industry to speak of, with more than 70 percent of the population illiterate, and with 80 percent barely eking out survival in the countryside, ownership and control of land was Guatemala’s fundamental economic issue. The country’s soil was immensely fertile, but only 2 percent of the landholders owned 72 percent of the arable land, and only a tiny part of those holdings were under cultivation.

The following year, Arbenz got the Guatemalan Congress to pass Decree 900. The new law required the expropriation of all property that was larger than six hundred acres and not in cultivation. The confiscated lands were to be divided among the landless. The owners were to receive compensation based on the land’s assessed tax value, and they were to be paid with twenty-five-year government bonds, while the peasants would get low-interest loans from the government to buy their plots. As land reform programs go, it was by no means a radical one when you consider it affected only large estates. Of 341,000 landowners, only 1,700 holdings came under its provisions. But those holdings represented half the private land in the country. Most important, it covered the vast holdings of the United Fruit Company, which owned some six hundred thousand acres – most of it unused.

Arbenz shocked UFCO officials even more when he actually confiscated a huge chunk of the company’s land and offered $1.2 million as compensation, a figure that was based on the tax value the company’s own accountants had declared before Decree 900 was passed. United Fruit and the U.S. State Department countered with a demand for $16 million. When Arbenz refused, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA director Allen Dulles convinced President Eisenhower that Arbenz had to go. The Dulles brothers, of course, were hardly neutral parties. Both were former partners of United Fruit’s main law firm in Washington. On their advice, Eisenhower authorized the CIA to organize Operation Success, a plan for the armed overthrow of Arbenz, which took place in June 1954. The agency selected Guatemalan colonel Carlos Castillo Armas to lead the coup, it financed and trained Castillo’s rebels in Somoza’s Nicaragua, and it backed up the invasion with CIA-piloted planes. During and after the coup, more than nine thousand Guatemalan supporters of Arbenz were arrested.

Despite the violent and illegal manner by which Castillo’s government came to power, Washington promptly recognized it and showered it with foreign aid. Castillo lost no time in repaying his sponsors. He quickly outlawed more than five hundred trade unions and returned more than 1.5 million acres to United Fruit and the country’s other big landowners. Guatemala’s brief experiment with democracy was over. For the next four decades, its people suffered from government terror without equal in the modern history of Latin America. As one American observer described it, “In Guatemala City, unlicensed vans full of heavily armed men pull to a stop and in broad daylight kidnap another death squad victim. Mutilated bodies are dropped from helicopters on crowded stadiums to keep the population terrified… those who dare ask about ‘disappeared’ loved ones have their tongues cut out.”

Within a few years of the Arbenz overthrow, most Guatemalans lost hope that peaceful change and democratic elections would return. Inspired by Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolution, radical students and intellectuals took to the hills in 1960, where they formed several guerrilla groups to resist the dictatorship. To hunt them down, the government responded with scorched-earth campaigns, pacification programs, and paramilitary death squads, often with assistance from U.S. Special Forces advisers. By 1976, more than twenty thousand people had been killed. While the slaughter expanded in the countryside, a series of army strongmen wielded power in the government, and sham elections alternated with military coups as the elite disputed among themselves the best way to crush the guerrillas. One of those strongmen was Carlos Arana Osorio, a colonel who rose to head of state in 1970. Arana had earned the name Butcher of Zacapa for all the massacres that took place while he directed the counterinsurgency campaign in the late 1960s. “If it is necessary to turn the country into a cemetery in order to pacify it,” Arana once boasted, “I will not hesitate to do so.”

The dead and disappeared reached 75,000 by 1985; another 150,000, most of them Indians, had fled by then into Mexico. But Guatemala’s dirty war barely raised eyebrows in Washington. Lawmakers and the press were far more concerned with El Salvador, where the murders of priests and nuns had sparked outrage among U.S. Catholics, and with Nicaragua, where the Reagan administration had drawn its line in the sand against Communism.”

“By the early 1980s, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua were all engulfed in wars for which our own government bore much responsibility. In El Salvador alone, human rights groups estimated that five hundred people a month were being massacred by the death squads. The carnage caused so many refugees to stream across the Mexican border that five hundred thousand Salvadorans had arrived in the United States by 1984. Their presence raised an unsettling question: Why were so many people fleeing a government our country supported?

For nearly thirty years, U.S. law, as expressed in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, had granted refugee status only to people escaping Communist regimes. But the Central American exodus — and the public outcry that resulted — changed all that. In the final year of the Carter administration, Congress enacted Public Law 96–212, the 1980 Refugee Act. The new law declared anyone eligible for political asylum who had suffered persecution or who had a “well-founded fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, etc.””

“So many Salvadorans settled in a series of apartment complexes in Alexandria, Virginia – all of them from the same hometown of Chirilagua – that the immigrants eventually pooled their resources together, purchased the complex, and changed its name to Chirilandria.”

“The Guatemalans carved out similar new communities in Los Angeles, northwest Chicago, and Houston, but they differed from the Salvadorans in several respects. For the most part, the Guatemalans were Indian peasants from that nation’s underdeveloped highlands, whereas the Salvadorans were largely mestizos from the cities and towns of a country that was far more densely populated and much more cosmopolitan. Many of the Salvadorans even had previous experience as migrant workers in Honduras and thus were quicker to adapt to a new country than the Guatemalans. The Salvadorans who settled in the Washington area went to work in the local hotel and restaurant industry, and, perhaps because of their country’s extensive tradition of trade unionism, they soon became mainstays of the city’s organized labor movement. A good number of Guatemalans, on the other hand, chose to settle outside the major cities, gravitating instead to the farm belts and small industrial towns of California, Florida, and North Carolina.”

“As more of their countrymen arrived in the 1980s, the Guatemalan colonia in that city began to take shape. At first, fearing deportation back home, most of the early migrants avoided any kind of civic involvement and sought to lose themselves among other Latinos. “Those who lived in the Puerto Rican neighborhoods started acting and talking like Puerto Ricans, even claiming they were Puerto Rican,” González recalls. “And those who lived in the Mexican neighborhoods swore they were Mexican.””

“Unflagging advocacy for the region’s refugees by a combination of groups--from the Catholic Church and the Sanctuary movement, to civil rights lawyers, to left-wing political organizations like the Committee in Support of the People of El Salvador (CISPES) — finally culminated in two historic breakthroughs toward the end of 1990. That November, Congress yielded to public pressure and granted Salvadorans a suspension of deportation — temporary protected status (TPS) — and subsequently extended it to Guatemalans and Nicaraguans as well.

Then, in December, a U.S. district court judge approved a consent decree in a pivotal class-action suit, American Baptist Churches v. Thornburgh (the ABC decision), which struck down as discriminatory the INS policy of deporting Salvadorans and Guatemalans. The decree overturned one hundred thousand cases in which the INS had denied asylum requests, the largest number of federal judicial decisions ever negated by a single court case. Both the ABC decision and the TPS law proved to be stunning victories for human rights.”

Panama

“The canal also led to profound fissures in the lives of the Panamanian people. West Indian migrants, as we have noted, provided the bulk of the canal workers and suffered the greatest casualties during its construction. Canal administrators preferred the West Indians because they spoke English and because it was believed they could better withstand the tropical heat. Yet those same West Indians were virtually forgotten when it came to chronicling the almost mythical saga of the canal.”

“Blacks were the canal’s overwhelming labor force, more than three-fourths of the forty-five thousand to fifty thousand employees in the last years of construction.”

“The separate Black schools kept the West Indians isolated from their new Panamanian homeland, teaching the students only in English and the same subject matter taught in U.S. public schools.

By the time it opened in 1914, however, the canal had turned into a cauldron of labor unrest. West Indians, unhappy over their pay and working conditions, and offended by the racism of the U.S. soldiers and administrators, erupted in several militant strikes, each of which ended with massive evictions of strikers from the Zone. Periodic layoffs forced thousands of others to move into Panama’s cities in search of work, and as they did so, their relations with native Panamanians rapidly deteriorated.

“The Panamanians were prejudiced against the West Indians,” Monica White recalled. “They were determined to get us out of their country, back where we came from. It was like there were two countries, one was Panama and the other was the Canal Zone.” Actually there were three, because the Zone itself contained separate and unequal white and Black worlds.

Panamanians, meanwhile, felt discriminated against in their own country. They resented how canal authorities employed only West Indians on construction and maintenance, jobs that invariably paid higher wages than most others in Panama. In response, a succession of Panamanian governments attempted to ban further West Indian immigration, or at least to prevent the immigrants’ children from attaining Panamanian citizenship. After 1928, West Indian children born in Panama had to wait until age twenty-one to be naturalized. Even then, the government required them to pass a test demonstrating their competency in Spanish and in Panamanian history.”

“Ironically, it was a key victory by the U.S. Civil Rights Movement that ended up forcing many Black Panamanians to emigrate. In 1954, after the Supreme Court’s uling in Brown v. Board of Education outlawed separate but equal public schools throughout the nation, the federal government instructed Canal Zone authorities to integrate their schools as well. To avoid that, the canal’s governor changed the language of instruction in the Black schools to Spanish and forcibly relocated many Blacks out of the Zone, thus shifting the onerous of housing and educating their children onto the Panamanian government. A new canal treaty in 1955 made maters even worse for the West Indians — it required them or the first time to pay Panamanian taxes.”

“He was still stationed in January 1964, when he heard the news that protests had broken out again over Panamanians hoisting their national flag in the Canal Zone. This time, though, U.S. soldiers fired on the young demonstrators, killing twenty-four and wounding hundreds. The killings sparked an uproar in Panama and throughout Latin America.

“I thought right away that the riot was just,” White recalled. “There was too much abuse by Americans in the Canal Zone. But being in the service, I kept to myself and said nothing.”

In the aftermath of the riot, President Johnson concluded that unless he granted Panamanians a voice in the running of the canal, he would risk another Cuban-style revolution, so he authorized negotiations that culminated in the Carter-Torrijos Treaty of 1977. As a result of that treaty, U.S. troops were gradually withdrawn, Panama regained sovereignty over the Zone, and nearly a century after Roosevelt’s machinations, Panamanians regained complete control over the vital waterway.”

Colombians

“The mountainous region around Tolima and neighboring Antiquía — of which Medellín is the capital — was a veritable “democracy of small farmers,” according to one account.

That tranquility ruptured on April 9, 1948, with the assassination of the charismatic Liberal Party leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. The murder so enraged his supporters that mobs ransacked and burned Bogota in the worst urban riot in Latin American history, leaving 2,000 dead and millions of dollars in property damage. That touched off ten years of brutal civil war between Liberals and Conservatives, a bloodletting so horrific that all Colombians simply refer to it as La Violencia. No one knows how many died. Estimates range from 180,000 to more than 200,000, making it far more devastating, given Colombias size, than the U.S. Civil War. Death squads, called pájaros, roamed the countryside on orders of the landed oligarchy, butchering any farmer suspected of being a Liberal, while guerrilla bands of Liberal Party supporters targeted the biggest landowners. Every family was torn apart by the conflict, but those living in Tolima and Antiquía suffered the brunt of the killing. Lázaro Méndez’s relatives were all Liberals, those of his wife Conservatives. Once the conflict erupted, the Méndez children were never again permitted to see their mother’s family. “To this day, we’ve never known what happened to them,” Héctor Méndez acknowledged in 1995.

The civil war destroyed agricultural production and emptied the countryside as millions fled to the cities. Ibagué, Bogotá, and Cali, which had been sleepy towns until La Violencia began, turned into sprawling metropolises overnight, brimming with dislocated farmers and landless peasants.”

“La Violencia ended in 1957 after Liberal and Conservative leaders reached an agreement to alternate power.”

“Their greatest fear was being caught and deported by INS agents. “That was the panic in everyone,” Beatrice recalled. “You never went to the movies because of rumors immigration was waiting there. We never took the subways since we heard agents might check your papers— only the buses.”

By the late 1970s, smugglers were moving as many as five hundred Colombians a week illegally into the United States by way of Bimini and the Bahamas, charging their clients as much as $6,000 apiece. Typically, the coyote would take off from a South Florida airport in a small private plane on a purported domestic flight, then scamper over to one of the Caribbean islands by flying under U.S. radar, where he would pick up the Colombians. Once he was back in Florida, he would land on a deserted road in the Everglades where a van would be waiting to take the clients to Miami or straight to New York City. Many of the smugglers later realized that bringing in kilos of cocaine instead of people was far more lucrative, so they graduated to drug trafficking.

Eventually, as a way to obtain legal residency, each of the Uribe sisters paid for so-called marriages of convenience to strangers who were U.S. citizens. In 1984, for instance, Beatrice married a Puerto Rican she barely knew.”

“As for the political violence and civil war back home, it was not until June 2016 that the Colombian government and the FARC, the main guerilla group, finally signed a ceasefire that brought an end to the fighting.”

Political Evolution

“Several new factors have fueled the spread of this peaceful revolution:

1. A rush to citizenship. Legal Hispanic immigrants, fearing threats from federal and local initiatives that targeted all immigrants or denied them social services and other legal protections, moved in record numbers over the past thirty years to acquire full citizenship. Among the most controversial measures that fueled this rush to naturalize were California’s Proposition 187 in 1994; the 1996 Immigration and Terrorism Act; the proposed Sensenbrenner bill in 2006; state and municipal laws empowering local law enforcement to arrest the undocumented, such as Arizona’s “show me your papers” law that was passed in 2010; and the targeting of Latino migrants for stepped up deportations during both the Obama and Trump administrations.”

“John F. Kennedy’s nomination as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate in 1960 was the watershed moment of the Integration Period. Until then, Mexican Americans had backed liberal candidates in state elections but had made no visible impact on a national election. In Texas, for instance, Mexicans were loyal backers of populist Democratic senators Ralph Yarborough and Lyndon B. Johnson. But the campaign of Kennedy, a charismatic, liberal Catholic, gave Roybal, González, and the other World War II veterans the opportunity to show the growing clout of Latinos. They formed Viva Kennedy clubs throughout the Southwest to back the young Massachusetts senator against Vice President Richard Nixon.

In a close election, Kennedy swept 91 percent of the 200,000 Mexican votes in Texas, which helped him carry the state. And while he managed only a minority of the white vote in neighboring New Mexico, he garnered 70 percent of the Mexican vote, enough for a razor-thin margin there. Nationwide, he amassed 85 percent of the Mexican vote. Kennedy, in turn, threw his support to González in his victorious run for Congress in a special election the following year; and he provided similar support to Roybal in 1962, enabling him to win a congressional seat from a district that was only 9 percent mexicano. Then, in the Democratic landslide that propelled Lyndon Johnson to victory over Barry Goldwater in 1964, Eligio “Kika” de la Garza won a second Texas congressional seat and Joseph Montoya, the congressman from New Mexico, secured a U.S. Senate seat.

That handful of victories during the early 1960s opened the gates for the modern Hispanic political movement. For decades afterward, it was common to find Mexican homes in the Southwest where a faded photo of John Kennedy was displayed prominently near one of the Virgin of Guadalupe — a testament to Kennedy’s role as the first U.S. president to address the concerns of Latinos.”

“When Jesse Jackson began his first campaign for the Democratic nomination for president in 1984 by calling for a new “Rainbow Coalition,” Washington experts dubbed his effort a meaningless protest. He promptly shocked all the experts by winning the majority of African American votes and a substantial minority of Latino and white votes. Jackson, who had witnessed the power of a Black-Latino liberal white coalition in both Chicago and Philadelphia, was determined to replicate it at the national level. Four years later, he harnessed widespread support from Black and Latino politicians who had not supported him in 1984, and garnered 7 million votes against the eventual Democratic presidential candidate, Michael Dukakis. In places like New York and Connecticut, Jackson won the majority of Latino votes, while in California, Texas, and elsewhere in the Southwest, he improved his showing but remained below 50 percent. The 1984 and 1988 Jackson campaigns brought millions of first-time voters to the polls in the South and the northern ghettos, and those same voters sent Blacks and Hispanics to Congress in record numbers. In some states, Blacks showed higher election turnouts than white voters for the first time, and candidates who identified themselves as part of Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition won isolated local elections.”

“This stampede to citizenship was caused by several factors. First and most important was the spate of restrictive immigration laws that began with Proposition 187 in California and then spread across the country. Until then, Mexicans had the lowest naturalization rates of any immigrant group. One study showed that only 3 percent of Mexicans admitted into the country in 1970 had become citizens by 1979. Similar trends prevailed in later years, though not as pronounced. By 2010, for instance, Mexicans still had the lowest naturalization rate (25.1 percent) of any migrant nationality in the United States, with Hondurans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans all exhibiting similar low rates. Many Mexicans who had lived and worked in this country for years invariably expected to return home someday, so they rarely sought citizenship. Likewise, the Central Americans who fled civil wars in the 1980s expected to return once those wars ended.

But the new immigration laws sparked a Latino backlash. Of the 3 million undocumented immigrants who became legal U.S. residents under the amnesty provisions of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), for instance, 2.6 million were from Latin America, and as soon as they were eligible for citizenship in 1992, most opted to apply for it. In addition, the Republican-sponsored ban in 1996 on federal benefits for legal permanent residents (later partially repealed) prompted hundreds of thousands who were here legally to seek naturalization. As soon as they were sworn in, those new citizens registered to vote.

The second factor in the rush to citizenship was the peace accords in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala, which ended the fighting but not the economic chaos in those countries. Once the wars ended, the Central American refugees suddenly turned into the main source of economic aid to their beleaguered countries through the billions of dollars in remittances they sent home each year. As a result, both the immigrants and their home governments resisted their repatriation, and many chose to become U.S. citizens.

A third factor was the transformation of citizenship laws in Latin America, with governments there increasingly adopting dual citizenship provisions.”

“Following Barack Obama’s 2008 victory, many Latinos harbored high expectations for major improvement in their lives, but those hopes were soon dashed, especially when Obama failed to adopt an immediate plan to assist the millions of homeowners who had defaulted on their mortgages. The catastrophic loss of wealth for people of color that accompanied the mortgage crisis cannot be overstated, and this was especially true for Latinos. In 2005, for instance, U.S. Latino households had a median net worth of just $18,359, largely as a result of home equity. That was far below the median net worth for white ($134,992) or Asian ($168,103) households, and it was slightly higher than that of Black households ($12,124). But by 2009, net worth for Latinos had slumped to just $6,325 – a drop of 66 percent, while African American and Asian households had registered slightly smaller declines of 53 percent and 54 percent, respectively, and white median wealth had dropped by just 16 percent.”

“As for Castro, he was tapped during President Obama’s second term to serve as secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and when the Democratic Party leaders elevated him to their national convention keynote speaker in 2012, his future as a national leader seemed bright. His only signature accomplishment while at HUD, however, was to finally implement a long-stalled provision of the Fair Housing Act of 1968-one which requires thousands of state and local governments that receive HUD funds to affirmatively determine whether their local planning and zoning regulations function as barriers against fair and affordable housing. Castro nonetheless faced relentless criticism from affordable housing advocates for overseeing a fire sale of millions of distressed homes whose mortgages had fallen in default. One 2014 study found that during the first two years of the program’s existence, 97 percent of HUD sales of foreclosed properties went to for-profit companies, including private equity firms like Blackstone, while only 3 percent resulted in the original owners keeping their homes.

“The extraordinary rise in Latino voter participation accelerated further in the 2020 presidential election, and it is almost certain to continue for decades. The 12.6 million who cast ballots in 2016, for example, represented barely a third of the 38.9 million Hispanics in the country who were over the age of eighteen at that point. Only about two-thirds of those 38.9 million were already U.S. citizens and thus eligible to cast a ballot. The rest were either legal residents or undocumented migrants. But most of the legal residents will become citizens someday and turn into eligible voters, and if Congress eventually approves some sort of path for legalizing the undocumented, so will many of those who are currently in the country unlawfully.

And no matter what happens with Latino adults, there is still a huge cohort of Latino children who will eventually reach voting age. In 2019, for instance, 30.8 percent of the country’s Hispanic population was under the age of eighteen, compared with only 18.6 percent of white Americans. Thus, the inescapable fact is that the Hispanic electorate will continue to mushroom.”

“After the Shelby decision, efforts soared to gerrymander election districts, to purge voter rolls, to reduce the number of polling places in minority neighborhoods, and to expand ID requirements for voting.”

“In early 2021, nearly seventy years after Ed Roybal pioneered modern Latino politics, there were more than 6,800 Latino elected officials in the nation.”

“Those 6,800 still represented slightly more than 1 percent of all elected officials, at a time when Latinos composed 18.7 percent of the total population.”

The Surprise Revolution

“On December 6, 2005, James Sensenbrenner, a conservative Republican from Milwaukee, introduced a new bill in the U.S. House of Representatives, the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act, which sought to make it a felony for any foreigner to reside in the country illegally or for others to hire or assist such undocumented immigrants. Historically, it has been a civil violation for any immigrant to be in the country unlawfully. Whenever immigration authorities apprehended such persons, they detained them and began deportation proceedings. The Sensenbrenner bill sought to change that by turning all illegal immigrants into felons, along with any citizen or legal immigrant who hired an undocumented worker, or any family member, social service worker, or religious minister who housed or provided assistance to one. In addition, the bill sought to step up the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border.”

“Sensenbrenner’s proposal flew through several committees in record time with virtually no hearing. On December 16, ten days after the bill was introduced, the House of Representatives passed it in a 239–182 vote. Its adoption hit immigrant rights advocates like a thunderbolt. With the Senate scheduled to take up its own version of the legislation in the spring of 2006, those advocates feverishly rushed to stop the bill’s final passage and began pressing Congress to overhaul immigration laws completely. They also decided to organize protests in the spring that would highlight the need to legalize millions of undocumented immigrants. Thus began perhaps the biggest protest movement in our nation’s history up til that point.”

“The first sign that something unprecedented was afoot came on Friday, March 10, 2006, in Chicago, when a crowd estimated by local police at more than one hundred thousand assembled at Union Park and paraded to Federal Plaza in the downtown Loop. These marchers were not the usual activists commonly seen at antiwar or labor protests. Although it included sizable contingents of Polish, Irish, and Chinese immigrants, the crowd was largely composed of young Latinos, a sector of Chicago’s population that had been almost invisible to the city’s elite until then.

The Chicago event was followed by a March 23 rally of more than ten thousand people at Zeidler Park in Sensenbrenner’s own city of Milwaukee. The next day, an estimated twenty-five thousand Latinos gathered in front of the Phoenix office of Republican U.S. senator John Kyle, a supporter of the bill, in one of the largest protests ever seen in Arizona.

Then on March 25, the streets of downtown Los Angeles were jammed by yet another protest, one that stretched for miles. Its size far exceeded the most optimistic expectations of its leaders. One of the chief organizers, Victor Narro of the UCLA Labor Center, originally secured a police permit for five thousand people to trudge from Olympic Boulevard and Broadway to Los Angeles City Hall. In the week before the event, Narro revised that number to fifty thousand. On the day of the rally at least half a million people showed up, according to official police estimates; organizers claimed the turnout was closer to one million. Both sides agreed, however; that the event was historic even by California standards.”

“Part of the reason the huge rallies caught establishment leaders and even protest organizers by surprise was the powerful impact of the Spanish-language press and radio DJs. In Los Angeles, for instance, many demonstrators were inspired to act by Spanish-language public-affairs shows such as Here We Are with Alfredo Gutierrez, on Radio Campesina, KNAI-FM (88.3), and Elias Bermudez’s Let’s Talk, on KIDR-AM (740). Others had learned of the protests by tuning in to Piolín por la Mañana, a popular syndicated Spanish-language morning show broadcast locally on KHOT-FM (105.9). The show’s host, Eddie “Piolín” Sotelo, urged his listeners to participate, to wear white to symbolize peace, and to march peacefully.

The same day of the Los Angeles event, more than fifty thousand Latinos gathered in Denver’s Civic Center Park, while five thousand rallied in Charlotte, North Carolina. Over the following days, a dizzying string of similar actions occurred in Detroit (fifty thousand), Nashville (eight thousand), and Columbus, Ohio (seven thousand). Increasingly, the rallies were accompanied by spontaneous walkouts of hundreds and even thousands of Latino students from high schools and colleges throughout the Southwest.

But March was only the prelude to a second and more widespread wave of protests the following month. On April 9 and 10, between 1.3 and 1.7 million people joined rallies in more than one hundred towns and cities. In Dallas, more than 350,000 participated on Sunday, April 9, in perhaps the largest social protest in the history of Texas. The following day, Phoenix, New York, and Washington, D.C., all drew crowds of more than 100,000 each. The sheer number of rallies over those two days was astounding, especially on April 10, which was a weekday. Among the most striking of the smaller events was in Albertville, Alabama, where a crowd of Latinos estimated at between 2,000 and 5,000 paraded through town. The turnout represented from a tenth to a quarter of Albertville’s entire population.

More protests continued intermittently throughout April. But by then many of the movement’s key organizers had started to focus their attention on a third wave of nationwide actions that were scheduled for May 1, International Workers’ Day.

This final wave would become the new movement’s most controversial and most startling effort. May Day immigrant rights rallies had been organized for years in a handful of U.S. cities by radical migrant worker groups from Central and South America, where International Workers’ Day is a traditional holiday and day of protest. But such events in the United States had typically attracted only tiny followings. All of that changed in the aftermath of the March and April events. The new coalition’s more radical community-based organizations insisted that the only way to achieve comprehensive immigration reform in Congress was through a vivid demonstration of the importance of Latinos and other immigrants to the U.S. economy. It was time to go beyond simple rallies, they said, and May Day was the perfect time to mount a one-day national boycott and work stoppage by immigrant workers. They called it the Great American Boycott, while others dubbed it A Day Without Immigrants.”

“The tactic of a work stoppage/boycott proved more effective than anyone had imagined. In California, 90 percent of the truckers at the Port of Los Angeles stayed home on May 1. Attendance in the city’s public schools that day dropped by 27 percent. Farms came to a halt throughout the fertile Central and Imperial valleys in the biggest agricultural work stoppage in California history.

In other parts of the country, major corporations like Tyson Foods, Perdue, and Swift gave their workers the day off rather than risk widespread disruption of their production. In New York City, major immigrant neighborhoods such as Washington Heights and Brooklyn’s Sunset Park turned into virtual ghost towns as thousands of Latino- and Korean-owned businesses shuttered their doors for the day.”

“The movement so stunned the nation that our leaders in Washington quickly shelved the Sensenbrenner bill. But the angry backlash from conservative Americans grew so strong that in 2007 it derailed any efforts to achieve the immigration advocates’ main goal — comprehensive immigration reform. Meanwhile, the movement itself soon fractured in disputes between the big national organizations and the grassroots groups. The Washington groups urged compromise with Republicans: tougher new penalties for the undocumented, a new guest worker program, and militarization of the border in exchange for some form of drawn-out legalization program. The more grassroots organizations insisted on a less restrictive path toward citizenship and opposed further militarization of the border.”

“The more pervasive aspect of the extraordinary federal crackdown were predawn raids conducted by teams of heavily armed federal agents. Acting under two little-known Homeland Security initiatives, Operation Community Shield and the National Fugitive Operations Program, ICE agents cordoned off entire streets in scores of residential Latino communities throughout the country, often forcing their way into private homes without displaying warrants. The ostensible aim of these raids was to arrest criminal aliens, either dangerous felons, gang members, or sex offenders.

Under the Fugitive Operations Program, for example, more than ninety-six thousand people were apprehended between 2003 and 2008. But a study by the Migration Policy Institute found that 73 percent of those people had no criminal conviction. In 2007, 40 percent of those seized under the program were merely “ordinary status violators,” the study concluded. In other words, a program designed by Congress to go after dangerous fugitives had turned, in large part, into a way for ICE agents to raid individual homes and seize undocumented immigrants.”

The Border

“Perhaps least understood is the impact of natural disasters and climate change. Few Americans even recall that the deadliest Atlantic storm of the twentieth century struck Central America on October 26, 1998. Hurricane Mitch, a Category 5 storm, killed more than ten thousand people, displaced another 1.5 million from their homes, and destroyed 70 percent of the agricultural infrastructure of Honduras. One of every five inhabitants of Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala was affected. Less than three years later, a series of earthquakes ravaged El Salvador, the most powerful of which erupted on January 13, 2001, and registered 7.6 on the Richter scale. Over the next month, three thousand aftershocks and another large quake followed. By the time the tremors had subsided, more than 1,200 people were dead, nearly 9,000 injured, and some three hundred thousand homes had been damaged or destroyed, along with 75 percent of the country’s potable water system.

More recently, extreme weather has brought unprecedented drought conditions to Central America’s “dry corridor,” which stretches through 58 percent of El Salvador, 38 percent of Guatemala, and 21 percent of Honduras. Years with little rainfall since 2014 have brought “levels of food insecurity [that] have not been previously seen in the region,” noted a United Nations World Food Program report — this in an area already among the most vulnerable on the planet for natural disasters.”

“Central America is literally awash in firearms, with an estimated 2.2 million registered weapons and another 2.8 million unregistered, enough to arm one of every three men in the region. Most of those weapons were manufactured in the United States. Enormous caches remain from military aid supplied to the region by Washington and its allies during the civil wars of the 1980s. In El Salvador alone, an estimated 360,000 military-style weapons were never recovered after that country’s armed conflict ended, and most remain in private hands. In addition, U.S. arms exports to Mexico and the Northern Triangle have more than doubled over the past decade. Existing stocks are steadily augmented by tens of thousands of handguns that are purchased each year in the United States and smuggled into Mexico and Central America.”

“By early 2018, 760 counties (24 percent of the nation’s total number) were declining to hold migrants in their county jails following a detainer request from ICE, and that number has been steadily growing. Such detainers, several federal district courts have ruled, are not legal warrants, and cities that execute them are violating the Fourth Amendment. A smaller, but significant number of counties prohibit other forms of cooperation with ICE, while only 4 percent of them actually had signed contracts with ICE to detain immigrants or enforce immigration law, as did Arizona’s Maricopa County under Joe Arpaio. The areas with the biggest number of rebellious counties include virtually all of California, Oregon, Vermont, much of New Mexico, and most of the country’s largest cities.”

“Not only are Latino immigrants more prone to work than native-born Americans, but a California study found that half of all immigrants from western Mexico, whether they are in the United States legally or illegally, return home within two years, and fewer than one-third stay for ten years. Mexicans, remember, constitute nearly 60 percent of all Hispanic immigrants.

Myth #2: Immigrants bring more crime to this country.

According to a 2019 Gallup Poll, 42 percent of Americans believed migrants worsened the crime situation.

Reality: Crime rates are lower among immigrants, both those who are naturalized U.S. citizens as well as those who are either legal residents or undocumented.”

“Myth #3: Latino immigrants drain public resources such as education and government services.

Reality: Numerous studies demonstrate that immigrants in this country make enormous contributions to U.S. society in taxes and Social Security. The major problem is that those contributions are unevenly distributed between federal and local governments.

In New York State, for instance, immigrants, the bulk of them Latinos, made up 17.7 percent of the population in 1995, earned 17.3 percent of total state personal income, and paid 16.4 percent of total taxes. The problem was that 69 percent of those taxes went to the federal government (in Social Security and income taxes), while only 31 percent remained in local coffers, where municipal and state governments incurred the biggest expenses for services to immigrant residents. A similar study in 1990–1991 of undocumented immigrants in Los Angeles County overwhelmingly showed that they contributed $3 billion in taxes, but 56 percent of the money went to. Washington, while the local costs of dispensing health care, education, law enforcement, and social services to the county’s undocumented population far surpassed the immigrants’ contributions.

In essence, young immigrant workers today are helping to fund the federal budget and Social Security benefits of native workers while local governments are being saddled with paying the social costs of services to those immigrants, and in the case of those who are undocumented, the states rarely receive the proportionate share of federal aid to pay those expenses, because many of the immigrants do not qualify for such aid or are not even officially counted.

Two areas where both unauthorized and legal immigrants do utilize government services extensively are public schools and the health care system, and these areas have become the focus of the allegations that immigrants drain the nation’s resources. Proponents of this theory rarely mention that most of the twenty million foreign-born residents of the United States in 1990 came here during the prime working years of their lives. The cost of their education was thus borne by the governments of their homelands, yet the sending countries lost the benefits of that investment in human capital when many of their brightest, most ambitious, and resourceful citizens immigrated to the United States. Meanwhile, the United States gained young workers in whose education it did not have to invest any money. As for the children of those immigrants, all children, whether from immigrant families or native ones, are a drain on the resources of a country. Only when those children grow up and become productive citizens is the investment made by that society then repaid. So, logically, any calculation of the cost of educating immigrant children should include calculations of their future productivity to the general society.

Myth #4: Latino immigrants take jobs away from U.S. citizens. •

Reality: While some studies do indicate that skilled Asian or West Indian immigrants have had a negative impact on white and Black employment in some industries, Latino immigrants, especially those in the country illegally, have actually improved local economies for whites, according to several studies, given that their willingness to work for lower wages has rejuvenated the profitability of ailing industries and thus prevented further job losses. How many big-city restaurants and service establishments, how many construction and landscaping businesses, for instance, could afford to stay in operation if they had to pay their immigrant workers wages comparable to those of native-born Americans?”

“As recently as 1950, the populations of the United States and Latin America were roughly equal. Since then, Latin America’s has multiplied at nearly three times our rate, while a substantial portion of the U.S. increase has been of Latin Americans who migrated here.”

“They are, with the exception of indigenous migrants from Mexico, Guatemala, and Peru, largely city dwellers, a reflection of the fact that since World War II, Latin America has been transformed into the planet’s largest urban ghetto. While in 1930 more than two-thirds of its people lived in the countryside, now more than eight in ten inhabit its cities.”

Language

“On August 28, 1995, during a child-custody hearing in a divorce case in Amarillo, Texas, state district judge Samuel Kiser directed Martha Laureano, a U.S. citizen of Mexican descent, to speak English at home to her five-year-old daughter. “[You are] abusing that child and relegating her to the position of a housemaid,” the judge told Laureano after she acknowledged that she spoke only Spanish to the girl. “It’s not in her best interest to be ignorant,” Kiser said, threatening to end Laureano’s custody unless she changed her method of communicating. Newspaper reports of the courtroom exchange rocked Latino households around the country and sparked an outcry from community leaders. While the judge toned down his order and issued a partial apology a few days later, he was only echoing what many white Americans have believed for years.”

“Before independence, German was virtually the only tongue spoken throughout fifteen thousand square miles of eastern Pennsylva-nia, while Dutch was widely used in the Hudson River Valley. Between 1732 and 1800, at least thirty-eight German-language newspapers were published in the Pennsylvania colony, and the University of Pennsylvania established a program in German bilingual education as early as 1780. So widespread was the use of German that the first U.S. census reported that 8.7 percent of Americans spoke it as their first language, almost identical to the proportion of Hispanics in our country in 1990.

The prevalence of a German linguistic minority continued into the twentieth century. By 1900, as many as six hundred thousand children in American public and parochial schools were being taught in German, nearly 4 percent of the country’s school population. Only with the Americanization policy that accompanied World War I was German finally eliminated as a language of instruction.

The experience of European immigrants, however, is not as relevant to the modern-day language debate as that of the annexed nationalities. When Louisiana became a state in 1812, for instance, the majority of its residents spoke French. As a result, until the 1920s, all laws and public documents in the state were published in French and English. The courts, the public schools, even the state legislature operated in two languages. Louisiana’s second governor, Jacques Villeré, spoke no English and always addressed the legislature in French. As more settlers moved in, and English speakers became the majority during the 1840s, the use of French diminished, but it did so through the evolution of the population, not through government fiat, and the rights of French-speaking children continued to be recognized in the public schools.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo imposed U.S. citizenship on the Mexicans inhabiting the annexed territories, with those who chose to retain their Mexican citizenship required to register their refusal to U.S. authorities. Congress did not, however, require its new subjects to swear allegiance to their new nation or adopt a new language, and most mexicanos continued their lives pretty much as before. Native Americans within the territories, however, were excluded from citizenship, even though Spain had recognized them as such since 1812. As late as the 1870s, more than a quarter century after annexation, New Mexico’s legislature operated mostly in Spanish. By then, only two of fourteen counties had switched to jury trials in English, thirty-three of thirty-nine school commissioners were mexicanos, and two-thirds of the public schools conducted their instruction solely in Spanish. Even as late as 1890, 65 percent of Mexicans over the age of ten could not speak English. This did not mean they resisted learning the language, only that their opportunities to be exposed to it were minimal in isolated rural communities where they composed the overwhelming majority. Due to that, New Mexico was one of the last territories to become a state, in 1912, but only after European and Anglo-American settlers composed a majority of its population. A similar dynamic over language evolved in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, only there mexicanos have remained the overwhelming majority for more than 250 years, with most residents still retaining the use of Spanish while also being fluent in English.

Then there is the language experience of some Native Americans. Oklahoma’s Cherokee built a public school system in the 1850s in which 90 percent of the children were taught in their native language while also learning English. So successful was the effort that Cherokee children of that era registered higher levels of English literacy than white children in the neighboring states of Texas and Arkansas. But in the late 1800s, the federal government initiated a policy of Americanization. It forcibly removed thousands of Indian children from their families and shipped them to boarding schools to learn English. The disastrous result, as documented by repeated studies during the second half of the twentieth century, was that 40 percent of Cherokee children became illiterate in any language and 75 percent dropped out of school.

Finally, there is Puerto Rico’s forgotten language saga. Shortly after the U.S. occupation of the island in 1898, Congress declared the territory officially bilingual, even though its population had spoken Spanish for four hundred years and almost no one spoke English. Military governor Guy Henry promptly required all public school teachers to become fluent in the language of their new country, even instituting an English-proficiency test for high school graduation. Despite widespread resistance from island politicians, educators, and students, the territory’s Anglo administrators declared English the language of instruction in all island schools. The result was a near-total collapse of the education system as thousands of students stopped attending classes, and those who stayed struggled to learn academic subjects in a language they did not understand.

Efforts to force Puerto Ricans to learn English persisted unsuccessfully for nearly half a century, with only a brief reversion to Spanish instruction in the 1930s when José Padin, the island’s education commissioner, tried to reintroduce Spanish. But President Roosevelt promptly fired Padin on the advice of Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes and brought back the English-only policy. A few years later, after Governor Rexford Tugwell and then President Truman vetoed a bill that had passed overwhelmingly in Puerto Rico’s legislature to bring back Spanish as the language of instruction, massive island protests erupted and more than one hundred thousand university and high school students went out on strike in November 1946. Several scholars have argued, in fact, that popular resistance to the imposition of English during the 1940s became a pivotal means for Puerto Ricans to preserve their national identity under colonial rule. Not until 1949 did the island’s first elected governor, Luis Muñoz Marín, finally end the hated policy of language suppression. Even though Muñoz and the local legislature reinstituted Spanish as the language of instruction, they nonetheless required pupils to learn English as a second language. The Popular Democrats took their reforms one step further in 1965: they brought back Spanish as the official language of the island’s local courts. Congress, however, insisted that English remain as the language of the federal courts on the island.

The mere existence of an entire U.S. territory whose residents speak Spanish has created enormous problems for theorists of a monolingual U.S. nation. In 1917, the same year Congress established a literacy test for all foreigners applying for citizenship, it declared Puerto Ricans citizens without requiring them to demonstrate any English proficiency!”

“The EEOC, however, has continued to pursue language discrimination issues with occasional success. The manufacturer Wisconsin Plastics, for instance, acceded in 2017 to paying $475,000 in a federal court consent decree to settle an EEOC complaint that the company had committed national origin discrimination when it fired twenty-two Hispanic and Hmong immigrant workers at its plant in Green Bay, claiming they lacked sufficient English-language skills, even though they did not need English to do their jobs.

Given the conflicts between federal court decisions in various parts of the country, the Supreme Court will eventually be forced to tackle the issue of language discrimination. This is especially true with the spread of English-only laws at the state level (twenty-nine states currently have English-only provisions for local government, with some states, such as Tennessee and Illinois, adopting contradictory laws on whether private firms may prohibit employees from speaking a particular language). Until the high court acts, however, our nation will remain one of the few advanced countries that does not fully recognize the rights of linguistic minorities.”

Media

“In Hollywood films, Latinos actually received more prominent leading roles and a wider variety of parts during the 1940s and 1950s than later in the century. Part of that was due to the fact that during and after World War II, Latin Americans were regarded as “Good Neighbors,” as important allies against Fascism, so there was pressure to portray them more sympathetically than in the past. In addition, the war cut off the European market for the United States, so studios scrambled to make up for lost revenues by boosting their sales in Latin America.”

“Only 5.8 percent of some eleven thousand speaking roles in major Hollywood movies, cable, and television series during 2014–2015 went to Latinx actors, according to one recent study, even though Hispanics composed 17.6 percent of the nation’s population by then. In comparison, African Americans, who composed 13.2 percent of the population, were also underrepresented but to a far less extent, garnering 12.5 percent of speaking roles. A subsequent study found Latino actors held a mere 2.7 percent of Hollywood film roles in 2016 — a smaller percentage than in the 1950s — even though Hispanic consumers today purchase more than 24 percent of all U.S. movie tickets. Yet even those appalling figures mask how wide the chasm in media representation has actually become when it comes to U.S. Latinos. As Los Angeles movie critic Carlos Aguilar noted, many of today’s most celebrated Hispanic figures in American film and television are foreign nationals from Latin America or Spain whose formative years were not part of the U.S. Latino experience, including such figures as Oscar-winning directors Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo del Toro, and actors Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek, Javier Bardem, and Penelope Cruz.”

Free Trade

“As quickly as industrial plants were shuttered in the Northeast and Midwest, scores of shiny new industrial parks and factory towns, usually called free trade zones (FTZs) or export processing zones (EPZs), sprang up south of the border. By 1992, there were more than two hundred of these zones in Mexico and the Caribbean Basin. They housed more than three thousand assembly plants, employed 735,000 workers, and produced $14 billion in annual exports to the United States.

These FTZs were allowed to operate as virtual sovereign enclaves within the host countries, routinely exempted from the few local labor and environmental laws that existed. Inside the zones, child labor was reborn and the most basic rights of workers trampled. As agricultural production in many Latin American countries fell under the sway of foreign agribusiness, millions of Latin America’s young people fled the countryside to find work in or near the zones. But the cities to which the migrants flocked lacked sufficient infrastructure of roads, sewage systems, housing, and schools to sustain the sudden surge in population. Giant shantytowns sprang up almost overnight. The makeshift slums and the new factories around which they developed led to a public health nightmare of industrial pollution, untreated human waste, and disease.

Thus, FTZs, which were meant to stabilize the economies of the countries that established them, only led to more drastic and unexpected problems. While the new factories they spawned did provide a certain number of low-wage jobs for the host nations, they also fueled even more massive Latin American immigration to the United States.”

“The term free trade seems innocuous at first glance. Who could be against the idea that nations should seek the maximum freedom to trade with one another? Or that increased trade will bring with it greater prosperity? Unfortunately, the history of most major industrialized nations is just the opposite. None of them practiced free trade during their early period of economic growth. Instead, they used high tariffs to protect their domestic industries from foreign competition, often engaging in tariff wars against rivals.

“In the early days, when British industry was still at a disadvantage, an English man caught exporting raw wool was sentenced to lose his right hand, and if he repeated the sin he was hanged,” Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano reminds us.

Only when England gained a decided advantage over all other countries in world commerce did its government begin advocating free trade in the nineteenth century.”

“In our own country, Congress pursued protectionist policies throughout the post-Civil War period, an era of extraordinary industrial growth for the nation. “In every year from 1862 to 1911, the average [U.S.] duty on all imports exceeded 20 percent… [and] in forty-six of those fifty years … [it] exceeded 40 percent,” notes economist Alfred Eckes, who served on the International Trade Commission under President Reagan. Germany pursued a similar protectionist policy during its nineteenth-century industrial expansion. Not surprisingly, both the German and the U.S. economies experienced higher growth rates during that century than did England, the era’s main proponent of free trade.”

“Before the 1980s, Latin Americans generally protected their domestic industries through heavy government ownership, high tariffs, and import substitution. Mexico pursued that policy from 1940 to 1980, and during that time it averaged annual growth rates of more than 6 percent, with both manufacturing output and real wages for industrial workers growing consistently. But then came the debt crisis of the 1980s. Along with other Latin American countries, Mexico was gradually pressured by U.S.-controlled international financial institutions to adopt neoliberal free trade policies. Those policies included selling public assets and increasing exports to pay down its debt. Between 1982 and 1992, the Mexican government sold off 1,100 of 1,500 state-owned companies and privatized more than eighteen banks. This fire sale, instead of bringing prosperity, only deepened the chasm between rich and poor, as a new crop of Mexican billionaires emerged, real wages crashed, and two hundred thousand Mexicans lost their jobs.”

“In the late 1940s in the Panama Canal Zone and Puerto Rico, pliant local governments cooperated in setting up corporate oases that had no tariffs or local taxes but included super-low wages; minimal enforcement of environmental and labor laws; financial incentives from Washington for companies to relocate there; and federal tax exemption for the repatriated income of those companies. By the 1980s, six hundred firms had factories operating in the Colón Free Zone on the Atlantic coast, where they could take advantage of Panama’s seventy-five-cents-an-hour wages.

Puerto Rico’s experiment was even more extensive. The whole island was turned into a virtual free trade zone, thanks to a little-known loophole in the Internal Revenue Service Code — called Section 936 in its last incarnation — which exempted from federal taxes the income of U.S. subsidiaries.

First to arrive was Textron, which relocated to the island in 1947 after shutting six of its U.S. mills and laying off 3,500 workers. By the early 1950s, more than one new factory a week was being inaugurated. But the boom proved ephemeral. As more U.S. companies opened up, Puerto Rican-owned factories, unable to compete, were driven out of business. During the first ten years of the program, new U.S. factories created 37,300 island jobs, but the job losses among Puerto Rican manufacturers totaled 16,600.

The new jobs the factories created were not sufficient to dent the soaring unemployment in the countryside caused by the rapid mechanization of agriculture and the flight of people to the cities. As a result, both the U.S. and Puerto Rican governments actively encouraged migration to the mainland as a safety valve to hinder social unrest. They offered cheap airfares and facilitated large-scale labor contracting by American companies through a network of offices of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, which were established in several U.S. cities. The result was that at the height of the new U.S. investment, the greatest number of Puerto Ricans in history migrated to the United States.

Puerto Rico set the mold for a trend that then repeated itself throughout the Caribbean region for two generations: American corporations moved in and set up low-wage factories, the factories drew laborers to the cities from the impoverished countryside, the migrants came in greater numbers than the jobs available, and the surplus workers began leaving for the United States, either as contract laborers or as unauthorized immigrants.

Puerto Rico had one wrinkle that set it apart, however — it was still a U.S. territory. That meant federal labor and environmental laws protected factory workers’ health and safety and their right to unionize. By the 1960s, as the island’s labor movement became increasingly militant, it began demanding wages and working conditions closer to U.S. levels, prompting many U.S. firms to sour on the “Puerto Rican miracle.” The firms started moving to other Caribbean countries willing to offer lower labor costs and more lax environmental and safety laws. The shift away from Puerto Rican production, however, failed initially to address one important cost area — tariffs. Once they left U.S. territory, manufacturers could not count on duty-free entry to the American market. To replicate their Puerto Rican oasis, therefore, American industrialists needed steep tariff reductions wherever they were going next.”

“Beginning in 1965, the manufacturing scene shifted to Mexico. That country’s new border industrialization program (BIP) spawned the “miracle” of the maquiladoras, a swath of industrial parks all along the U.S. border.”

“The first maquilas were supposed to be “twin plants,” each with a partner factory on the U.S. side. The Mexican plant would assemble a product from components imported from its twin plant in the United States, then ship the finished product back across the border for sale in the American market; and when the product crossed the border, only the value added by the Mexican labor would be subject to a tariff.

Given that this was a very specific and limited form of tariff reduction, the Mexican government initially permitted it only in areas near the border. That way, supporters argued, jobs would be created on both sides of the border, and the maquilas would reduce immigration because Mexicans would choose to stay and work in their own country with the new North American subsidiaries.

But the BIP turned instead into a way for corporations to evade U.S. labor and environmental laws while manufacturing hundreds of yards from our own country. From Tijuana on the Pacific coast to Matamoros near the Texas Gulf, the maquiladora zone emerged as a giant industrial strip all along that border.

Too often, the twin plant on this side of the border became nothing more than a warehouse, providing jobs to only a few people. The General Electric Company, which opened its first maquiladora in 1971, had eight Mexican plants within a decade, where 8,500 workers made circuit breakers, motors, coils, and pumps. In one year alone, General Motors opened twelve new maquilas while closing eleven factories in the United States and laying off 29,000 people. By the early 1990s, GM was the biggest private employer in Mexico, with fifty maquila plants and 50,000 workers. On the eve of Congress’s approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement in late 1993, more than two thousand maquila factories were employing 550,000 Mexicans. At the time, the total number of manufacturing jobs in the United States stood at 16.7 million, but it would plummet by 5 million that were lost between 2000 and 2014.”

“Unlike the old U.S. factories that largely employed men, the maquilas took to recruiting young Mexican women, who traditionally had not been part of Mexico’s labor force. Their U.S. managers considered Mexican men tougher to control and hired as few as possible. Thus, Mexico’s unemployment problem, which had always been more severe for its men, was barely dented by the maquila program. Drawing so many young women from the countryside to the border factories disrupted social organization in rural villages, where women historically provided critical unpaid labor. Even though young men had no job prospects, they ended up following the women to the cities, and once they arrived at the border towns, many decided to head for the United States. As sociologist Saskia Sassen notes: “People first uprooted from traditional ways of life, then left unemployed and unemployable as export firms hire younger workers or move production to other countries, may see few options but emigration — especially if export-led strategies have sapped the country’s domestic economy.”

Those who managed to find jobs in the maquilas soon discovered that their meager wages bought less and less each day. Real wages in the industry crashed when measured against the U.S. dollar. They dropped 68 percent between 1980 and 1992 even though maquila productivity rose by 41 percent. Most of the drop resulted from two successive devaluations of the Mexican peso in the 1980s — and all that was before the huge December 1994 devaluation, where the peso lost an additional 50 percent value.

Contrary to the glowing predictions of our government and business leaders, the explosion of maquiladoras has done nothing to slow Mexican emigration. Instead, emigration has escalated side by side with maquila growth — exactly as happened with Puerto Rico.”

“The biggest jump in Mexican migration to the United States, in fact, occurred during the years following passage of NAFTA, increasing from 430,000 annually in 1993 to 770,000 by 2000. The miracle prosperity that lower trade barriers were supposed to bring never reached the majority of Mexicans outside the maquilas either. Per capita domestic product for the whole country dropped from $2,421 annually in 1980 to $2,284 in 1994.”

“Sleepy border towns have been catapulted helter-skelter into the industrial age. Just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, for instance, is Ciudad Juárez, whose population, just 250,000 in 1960, jumped to 1.5 million by 2020. Reynosa, across the river from McAllen, Texas, zoomed from 4,800 inhabitants in 1930, to 280,000 in 1990, to 899,000 in 2020. So frenetic has been the pace of growth that by the 1990s, 60 percent of Reynosa’s maquila workers had lived in the city less than five years, and 20 percent less than a year.

The same population explosion has been replicated in the border cities of Tijuana, Mexicali, Nogales, Nuevo Laredo, and Matamoros. As thousands flocked to the farrago of maquiladoras in search of work, the border towns became overwhelmed by the lack of roads, housing, electrical power, schools, even clean drinking water for the new migrants. The result was urban anarchy on a scale almost unimaginable to Americans. In Reynosa, one researcher counted two hundred shantytowns in 1992, most without cement roads. More than a third of the city’s population had no indoor plumbing and 15 percent no electricity. Not until after the passage of NAFTA did any major city along the border boast a fully operational sewage treatment plant.”

“U.S. officials actually enticed U.S. companies to close down their U.S. factories and eliminate American jobs. The policy became public late in 1992 when a coalition of labor unions pulled off the first labor sting in American history. The sting, organized by the National Labor Committee, involved the creation of a fictitious firm, New Age Textiles. The “executives” of the fake firm attended textile industry trade shows, where they secretly filmed officials of the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S. Commerce Department urging their firm to locate production in the Caribbean region. The federal officials offered to arrange financing, feasibility studies, and site selection trips to the Caribbean free trade zones, and they even boasted how union activists were blacklisted and unions kept out of the zones.

When the sting was finally revealed on a network television news program, it turned out that the federal government had spent nearly $700 million since 1980 on projects aimed at promoting Caribbean maquiladoras.”

“Physical and sexual abuse against women in the zones is commonplace. In some factories, women are fired when they become pregnant, and there have been documented instances of factory owners requiring employees to take birth control pills each morning as they reported to work.”

“The treaty, which took effect on January 1, 1994, created a new common market whose aim was to remove all tariff barriers between Mexico, Canada, and the United States by 2010.

During the bitter fight in Congress over the treaty, NAFTA’s advocates promised a new era of prosperity for what they billed as the world’s biggest economic bloc. President Clinton predicted 170,000 new jobs would be created for Americans from increased exports to Mexico just in NAFTA’s first year. During the initial ten years, some experts claimed, Mexico would gain more than one million new industrial jobs. Clinton and Vice President Al Gore lobbied fiercely for the treaty and they were joined by several former Republican and Democratic presidents. They all assured the public, just as previous leaders had with the border industrialization program, that the economic boom from NAFTA would benefit Americans and that it would slow the tide of illegal immigration.

The same day NAFTA took effect, Maya peasants in Chiapas erupted in the Zapatista insurrection. One of the demands of the rebels was for protection against NAFTA’s expected impact on agriculture. The treaty’s provisions, the Zapatistas and some American critics insisted, had the potential to devastate close to two million Mexican peasants who produced corn, the country’s food staple, on small individual plots. By reducing agricultural tariffs, NAFTA would drive the farmers out of business because they would not be able to compete with the expected surge of American corn and wheat, crops whose harvests here are highly mechanized.”

“With government subsidies for sowing corn eliminated, small farmers simply could not compete with the mechanized output of U.S. agribusiness. Mexico’s grain imports from the United States tripled from 1994 levels and now represent 40 percent of that country’s food needs. Agricultural employment tumbled by nearly 20 percent between 1991 and 2007, from 10.6 million to 8.6 million. Many of those 2 million unemployed peasants were forced to either join the ranks of the country’s huge informal economy or migrate to the United States.

So instead of slowing down the exodus to the United States; NAFTA, with its extraordinary impact on Mexican agriculture, has sped it up. The Mexican-born population of the United States went from 4.5 million in 1990 to 9 million in 2000, and then to 12.7 million in 2008, with more than half of that population being undocumented. Rural dwellers represented 44 percent of those migrants even though only one-quarter of Mexico’s people reside in the countryside.”

“A little-noticed consequence of the flood of processed imported U.S. foods has been an epidemic of obesity. The convenience store giant Oxxo, for example, a branch of Coca-Cola’s Mexican subsidiary, operated fourteen thousand outlets throughout Mexico by 2015, making it the second-largest retail chain in the country after Walmart.

Thanks to the flood of sugary drinks available at Oxxo and other retailers, Mexico became the world’s second-largest consumer of sodas, and diabetes became the country’s leading cause of death, claiming nearly eighty-thousand lives per year. More than 70 percent of the adult population was overweight in 2017, with 32 percent classified as obese.

Only 10 percent of Mexican households have seen their incomes increase since 1994, while 90 percent have seen stagnation or a decline in incomes.”

“Half the new jobs created in Mexico do not offer basic benefits that are mandated by that country’s laws, such as social security and paid vacation time.”

“Mexico’s banking system has been even more affected by NAFTA than its industry. The trade agreement combined with the country’s financial crisis of 1994–1995 opened the floodgates for foreign banking operations. Citibank, for instance, had been the only non-Mexican company authorized to operate independently in Mexico, with all other outsiders limited to owning no more than a 30 percent share of major domestic banks. But between 1994 and 2004, a tsunami of foreign financial investment struck that was “unprecedented for an economy the size of Mexico,” according to one economist. U.S., Canadian, and European banks poured in more than $30 billion and ended up seizing near total control of the country’s financial sector. Whereas foreign firms had controlled just 16 percent of banking assets in 1997, that figure had soared to 82 percent by 2004. By then, eight of the country’s ten largest banks were in the hands of outsiders. Just two of those banks, BBVA Bancomer (owned by Spain’s Grupo BBVA) and Banamex owned by Citigroup), controlled 48 percent of all banking assets.

A public uproar ensued when the foreign banks started charging Mexican businesses and consumers service fees up to three times higher than they charged clients in other countries and when they made access to credit far more strenuous for ordinary Mexicans than had been the custom previously. In 2004, for instance, private sector lending by the country’s banks affected only 15 percent of the economy, compared with 70 percent in the United States. So pervasive did the exorbitant fees and lending restrictions become that President Vicente Fox and the Mexican legislature publicly rebuked the foreign banks and demanded a change in their policies. Nonetheless, the damage was done.”

“Some Mexican officials see a direct relation between drug trafficking, NAFTA, and the crisis in Mexican agriculture. They note that hundreds of thousands of the country’s peasants can no longer make a living from growing beans and corn because of the competition from cheap U.S. grain imports that began with NAFTA. Drug traffickers are increasingly luring many of those farmers to cultivate illicit crops instead. As much as 30 percent of Mexico’s farmland may currently be planted in part with marijuana and opium poppies, according to an estimate by Ricardo García Villalobos, head of one of the country’s federal courts that handles agrarian issues. And with more than two million farm laborers out of work since NAFTA began, the northern cities of Mexico are teeming with an army of desperate, unemployed men. Many of those unemployed become easy to recruit for the operations of drug gangs. Finally, the massive volume of truck traffic crossing the U.S.-Mexico border each day to transport NAFTA-generated imports and exports makes it even more unfeasible for U.S. border agents to find and isolate drug contraband without at the same time interrupting the legal trade.

Meanwhile, NAFTA’s impact on food quality in the United States rarely gets mentioned by proponents of export-based free trade. Nearly 96 percent of all strawberries and 52 percent of all other fruits and vegetables consumed in the United States in 2000 came from Mexico. At the same time, the rates of food inspections on both sides of the border have fallen precipitously.”

Conclusion

“The reason for the new resistance was simple: two decades of neoliberalism had failed. Economic policies promoted by the United States had produced not prosperity but deeper economic misery throughout Latin America. Between 1990 and 2004, the official unemployment rate in the region rose from 6.9 percent to 10 percent. Seven out of every ten new jobs created during the period were in the informal sector, where workers enjoyed little security, few fringe benefits, and virtually no health and safety protection. By 2006, the International Labor Organization reported that 23 million Latin Americans were unemployed and another 103 million were “precariously” employed —more than half of the region’s active workforce.”

“In Bolivia, tens of thousands of urban poor filled the streets of Cochabamba in 2000 in a successful rebellion against water privatization. Organized by the Coordinating Committee in Defense of Water and Life, the protesters were furious about huge price hikes instituted after the government sold the city’s water supply to a subsidiary of the U.S. multinational giant Bechtel.

In Costa Rica, thousands took to the streets in 2002 against the privatization of the nation’s electricity.

In El Salvador, doctors and public health workers went on strike for nine months in 2002 and 2003 and successfully stopped the privatization of that nation’s health system.”

“Such independent policies gradually began to show concrete benefits for ordinary Latin Americans. Between 2002 and 2008; the region experienced a dramatic decline in its overall poverty rate, from 44 percent to 33 percent. Some of the biggest improvements occurred in those nations that most rejected neoliberal policies: Venezuela (from 48.6 percent to 27.6 percent); Argentina (from 45.4 percent to 21.0 percent), Ecuador (49.0 percent to 38.8 percent), Bolivia (62.4 percent to 54.0 percent), and Brazil (37.5 percent to 30.0 percent). The U.S. poverty rate, by contrast, increased from 12.4 percent in 2002 to 13.2 percent in 2008.”

“A U.S.-backed coup in 2002 against Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez had ended in failure when thousands of his Venezuelan supporters poured into the streets to support Chávez, and key sections of the military remained loyal to him. The same would not be true in Honduras, however. There the military arrested and successfully ousted that country’s democratically elected president José Manuel “Mel” Zelaya on June 28, 2009, an action that, perhaps more than any other, signaled the start of a new counteroffensive by those elites.

Ironically, Zelaya was himself a member of the Honduran upper class. A rancher and longtime member of the Liberal Party — one of the two parties that had traditionally alternated control of the govemment — he had been elected president in 2006 on a center-right platform, but once in office, no doubt influenced by the region’s new populist wave, he moved to stop the privatization of public services, reestablished land rights for small farmers; and even instituted in January 2009 a 60 percent increase in the country’s minimum wage. As a result, income inequality in Honduras dropped throughout his time in office. Zelaya’s political transformation has been described as “the first case in Latin Americas post-democratization history of a candidate elected on a right-of-center platform switching to left-of-center policies after taking office,” though there have been numerous examples of leaders switching in the opposite direction. Zelaya further alarmed both the Honduran oligarchy and the U.S. government when he initiated the entry of Honduras into the Venezuelan-led ALBA in 2008, making his nation the sixth to join the anti-neoliberal trading bloc.

The coup, according to U.S. military and state department records that became public years later, had the advance knowledge and support of key Pentagon officers, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton working behind the scenes to thwart Zelaya’s reinstatement, and the Obama administration effectively endorsing the regime change. The right-wing governments of Porfirio Lobo Sosa and Juan Orlando Hernández that succeeded Zelaya, and which were propped up by the Honduran military, sought to stamp out all opposition social movements. In the first three years following the coup, progovernment death squads routinely assassinated dissidents, while ten thousand complaints of abuse by police or the military went unaddressed, according to human rights groups. Historian Dana Frank estimates that nearly one hundred peasant leaders and their family members were murdered just in the country’s Lower Aguán Valley between January 2010 and February 2013. The most prominent victim of the post-Zelaya repression was Berta Cáceres, an internationally known environmentalist and indigenous leader who was assassinated in her home in March 2016 by a death squad of former military officers. As for journalists, while only one had been killed during Zelaya’s term in office, thirty-three were murdered during the term of Porfirio Lobo. Despite their record of human rights violations, the post-Zelaya Honduran administrations continued to receive support from both the Obama and Trump White Houses.”

“In each country except El Salvador, the maquila minimums are less than half the national poverty line. In Honduras, for example, it was $297 per month in 2018, yet the income a Honduran family needed to stay out of poverty was $763 per month. One U.S. government study found that the monthly mean salary for factory workers in Guatemala in 2015 was just $161 monthly, less than half that country’s legal minimum at the time.”

“The victory of veteran leftist politician Andrés Manuel López Obrador (popularly known as AMLO) in Mexico’s July 2018 presidential race proved a stunning exception to the trend of conservative and neoliberal parties ousting Latin Americas pink tide leaders. It was especially important given that Mexico boasts the second-largest population in Latin America and is a major U.S. trading partner. In his inaugural address to the Mexican Con-gress, AMLO issued a fiery condemnation of the “failure of the neoliberal economic model” followed by Mexican governments since the 1980s.”

“The alliance led by López Obrador’s National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), having won an ample majority in both houses of the Mexican congress, was thus free to carry out the new president’s ambitious program, which he dubbed the Fourth Transformation of Mexico. Within days, AMLO stripped past presidents of lifetime pensions, lowered the salaries of top government officials, including his own, put the presidential plane and sixty other government-owned aircraft up for sale, and refused to live in the luxurious presidential palace, turning it instead into a public museum. At the same time, he increased the minimum wage by 16 percent nationwide — even doubling it to nine dollars per day along Mexico’s northern border, where most maquiladoras are located. He also increased government pensions for the elderly and disabled and instituted a new form of direct cash support for the poor.”

“Buoyed by López Obrador’s promise of a new era, tens of thousands of Mexican maquila workers in the border city of Tamaulipas, most of them women relegated to a dollar-an-hour wage, started a series of wildcat strikes in January 2019. The walkouts were not initially supported by their union leaders, who had extensive ties to prior governments. Nonetheless, the strikers persevered and galvanized the nation with their bold slogan of “20/32" (a 20 percent increase in wages, plus a 32,000-peso annual bonus ($1,578 U.S.), echoing the fifteen-dollar-an-hour movement that had already spread throughout the United States. By February, forty-eight factories had accepted their demands.

Then on April 29, 2019, came perhaps the most significant reform to grassroots democracy in Mexico of the past hundred years — a wholesale revision of the nation’s labor laws. The new reform required for the first time secret ballot elections by Mexico’s workers on more than seven hundred thousand labor contracts, a process aimed at verifying that they had freely approved those contracts. It further mandated that all union bylaws be amended to institute direct election of union leaders, and it established new labor courts and an independent oversight agency to resolve labor disputes, with the government eventually earmarking nearly $70 million from its annual budget to implement the changes. In one fell swoop, the AMLO majority in Congress thus set about dismantling decades of notorious collusion (commonly known as “protection” agreements) between government-controlled unions and both foreign and domestic employers, fostering instead a new, independent labor movement.

The new labor law achieved another purpose, however, when it came to President Trump’s demands on U.S.-Mexico trade policy. While campaigning for the White House, Trump had vowed to pull out of NAFTA unless key provisions of the nearly twenty-five-year-old pact were rewritten. But the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) his negotiators initially consented to in November 2018 — just weeks prior to AMLO’s inauguration — included only minor new safeguards to stem shipping of more manufacturing jobs to Mexico. Its fine print actually offered lucrative new intellectual property protections to the pharmaceutical and tech industries. Many progressives and U.S. labor union leaders were determined to derail the pact in Congress, especially after Democrats won a majority in the House in 2018. The López Obrador government responded to their concerns by touting Mexico’s labor law reforms as a key part of a renegotiated trade deal, and by agreeing to accept monitoring of how Mexico implemented those reforms. Lifting Mexico’s wages and worker protections would curtail the exporting of U.S. jobs south of the border. AMLO thus managed to win support for the pact from the AFL-CIO. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also secured additional concessions from the Trump administration on changes to pharmaceutical provisions of the pact, thus persuading a surprising number of Democrats to join Republicans in December 2019 to ratify the pact. Still, several environmental groups, auto unions, and progressives like Vermont senator Bernie Sanders continued to condemn NAFTA 2.0 as only marginally better than its predecessor pact.

But where López Obrador provoked most criticism was in his response to President Trump’s “no tolerance” immigration crackdown. Many had expected a major showdown between him and Trump over the issue. In January 2019, however, AMLO suddenly reversed his initial humanitarian stance on Central American migration to the United States and his promises to address the economic roots of the problem. He acquiesced instead to a new policy Trump announced that required asylum seekers at the border to remain in Mexico while their applications were processed, forcing thousands to remain in makeshift camps for months. A few months later, Trump threatened to impose new tariffs on imports from Mexico unless it curtailed the number of migrants reaching the U.S. border. AMLO immediately moved to placate Trump. Having already secured the creation of a new national guard, which was ostensibly meant to halt drug trafficking and the country’s epidemic of violence, he then directed that guard to seal off Mexico’s southern border and to conduct stepped up deportations of Central Americans. In other words, even as Trump struggled in the United States to win funding from Congress to build a wall at the southern border, AMLO, Mexico’s most left-wing president in nearly a century, was, ironically, turning Mexico itself into a wall against migrants and asylum seekers.”

“China was financing and building scores of breathtaking infrastructure projects — two hydroelectric dams on the Santa Cruz River in the Patagonia area of Argentina at a cost of $4.7 billion, a transcontinental railroad from Brazil to Peru, and a new interoceanic shipping canal across Nicaragua. Through such assistance, Chinese leaders provided the region’s governments a viable alternative to Washington’s demand that they return to neoliberal free trade policies. In short, China’s arrival on the scene ensured that Latin America would no longer remain the empire’s backyard.”

“In Honduras, the Obama White House also backed the suppression of Haiti’s most popular political party, Fanmi Lavalas, during that country’s 2010–2011 election, and it endorsed parliamentary coups in Paraguay against President Fernando Lugo in 2012 and against Brazil’s president Dilma Rousseff in 2016.”

“Nearly 46% of Puerto Rican households had an annual income below the poverty level in 2017, with median income just $19,775, a third of what it was for U.S. households. As a result, Puerto Ricans continue to receive ever-increasing amounts of assistance from Washington. Net federal transfer payments to island residents totaled about $30 billion in 2020, about triple what they were in 2000. Those costs are borne largely by U.S. taxpayers because Puerto Ricans, even though they are American citizens, have no voting representation in Congress and thus pay no federal individual income taxes, though they do contribute to Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes.”

“Puerto Rico has provided more wealth to the United States than perhaps any country in history.”

“Between 1960 and 1976, tiny Puerto Rico catapulted from sixth to first in Latin America for total direct U.S. investment. With island workers registering some of the highest productivity levels in the world, the results were profit levels unheard of at home. By 1976, Puerto Rico accounted for 40 percent of all U.S. profit in Latin America — more than the combined earnings of all U.S. subsidiaries in Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela. So great were the windfall returns that several major multinationals reported that more than a quarter of their worldwide profits were coming from the island.

In 1975, thirty-five pharmaceutical firms located on the island paid their employees an average of $10,000 in annual compensation while receiving $35,000 per worker in federal tax savings — three and a half times their labor cost. The biggest of those firms received $500,000 in tax benefits that year for every one of their Puerto Rico employees, according to one treasury department study.

The tax credit bonanza continued for years despite repeated attempts by Congress to curb it, and despite improved wages for pharmaceutical employees. In 1986, for example, drug companies paid an average of $30,300 in salary and benefits to their Puerto Rican workers but received $85,600 per employee in federal tax benefits. From its four thousand workers in Puerto Rico alone, pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson saved $1 billion in federal taxes between 1980 and 1990. SmithKline Beecham saved $987 million; Merck & Co., $749 million; Bristol-Myers Squibb, $627 million.

The cost in lost taxes to the federal treasury had mushroomed to more than $2 billion annually by 1992 as Puerto Rico rapidly turned into the number one source of profit in the world for U.S. companies. By 1986, the island’s profitability had surpassed even industrial giants such as Germany, Canada, Japan, and the United Kingdom. That year, U.S. companies earned $5.8 billion from their Puerto Rican investments.

A decade later, net income from direct investments of nonresidents in Puerto Rico (largely American corporations) had ballooned to $14.3 billion. This was greater than the income of all U.S. firms in the United Kingdom and nearly double that of any other country in the world.”

“President Clinton sought to calm the controversy by simply reducing the benefit, but a Republican majority in Congress, with the help of a considerable number of Democrats, pushed through legislation in 1996 to phase it out entirely within ten years. By the time Section 936 ended in 2005, many U.S. companies had moved to reduce or end production in Puerto Rico. Manufacturing jobs on the island slumped by 35 percent between 2006 and 2016 — from 112,000 to just 73,000.

Pharmaceutical companies, however, continued to enjoy enormous profits from their Puerto Rican subsidiaries, given that the drug and chemical industry, together with the government of Puerto Rico, managed to devise a substitute loophole that allowed U.S.-owned firms on the island to continue escaping federal taxes. Their main vehicle for the new loophole was the controlled foreign corporation (CFC). This is a multinational firm that is incorporated in a third country (including Puerto Rico) but is majority owned by U.S. shareholders. Such companies pay federal taxes only on income they bring back to the United States — and in today’s globalized economy multinational firms can easily divert funds to other foreign subsidiaries.”

“Despite high worker productivity and historic profit levels for U.S. companies on the island, 45 percent of Puerto Ricans still live below the poverty level. While this is a marked improvement over the 60 percent rate that was prevalent in the late 1990s, it is still double the poverty level of Mississippi, the poorest of the fifty states.”

“The colonial status of Puerto Rico turned the island, with its combination of duty-free trade, low wages, and tax loopholes, into a corporate oasis unlike any other in the world. At the same time, the federal government was forced to spend billions annually in federal welfare and transfer payments to alleviate the island-wide poverty these very corporations perpetuated.”

“As a Caribbean nation, Puerto Rico’s trade and commerce needs are vastly different from those of the United States, yet the island has always been subject to the same commercial treaties and import tariffs as the fifty states. Congress has repeatedly rejected requests by the Puerto Rican government to negotiate its own trade or commercial agreements with other countries, a right Puerto Rico had already enjoyed as a possession of Spain back in 1897. Take air travel as an example. San Juan’s Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport, which is regulated by the Federal Aviation Authority, was once a hub for international flights to the Caribbean. As recently as 2001, sixteen airlines from Asia, Europe, and Latin America had regular flights scheduled into and out of San Juan, often for passengers in transit to smaller Caribbean islands. But after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the federal government sharply restricted such transit flights. As a result, international traffic to Puerto Rico has dropped by 50 percent and the island has lost $30 million annually in hotel and airport spending by tourists.”

“Spanish is the language of the island’s local courts, but English is the language of the U.S. District Court for the District of Puerto Rico, in San Juan. This effectively excludes the majority of island residents who do not speak English from serving on federal juries. It also requires all litigants who file appeals of lower court decisions to the federal courts to switch language in midstream. Furthermore, all appeals from the U.S. District Court for Puerto Rico are handled thousands of miles away in Boston, instead of at a closer jurisdiction.”

“In recent decades, Congress has attempted to reduce federal spending by capping scores of entitlement programs, such as Medicaid, public assistance, and federal aid to education, at lower levels for Puerto Rico than for the fifty states, while it has completely excluded the island from federal highway construction funds, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), revenue sharing, the earned income tax credit, or the Affordable Care Act.”

“In 2000, Puerto Rican epidemiologist Carmen Ortiz Roque discovered high levels of lead, mercury, and cadmium in forty-four of forty-nine residents she tested. Meanwhile, biologists at the University of Puerto Rico detected high concentrations of heavy metals in vegetation on Vieques. According to one peer-reviewed study, island samples had “up to 10 times more lead and 3 times more cadmium than samples from Puerto Rico itself,” and the Vieques samples “exceeded safety standards.” Other studies revealed contamination of air, groundwater, fish — even hair and urine samples of residents — with heavy metals and other toxic compounds, including uranium.

Pentagon officials would later acknowledge that they had experimented with chemical weapons on the range and had dropped napalm, Agent Orange, and even some depleted uranium shells there. They conceded, as well, that the island was littered with more than eighteen thousand unexploded shells.

Within weeks of the bombing accident, scores of Puerto Rican activists invaded the restricted area of the range and demanded that the navy leave. They then set up more than a dozen makeshift protest encampments on the beaches in a standoff that lasted for thirteen months, impeding further target practice during that time. As top aides in the Clinton White House debated how to respond, Pentagon officials insisted that the Vieques training facility was unique, irreplaceable, and essential to U.S. national defense.

In January 2000, Clinton and Rosselló announced an agreement to hold a referendum in Vieques on the future presence of the navy. Clinton offered to provide $50 million in infrastructure and housing aid to the island if local residents accepted continued live-fire training. The plan was rejected by protesters in the camps and roundly criticized by most civic groups in Puerto Rico. Less than a month later, an estimated eighty thousand people filled the streets of San Juan to condemn both the navy and the Clinton-Rosselló plan.

Thirteen months after the crisis began, FBI agents and federal marshals swept through the protest camps and arrested more than two hundred people. A few days later, the navy resumed bombing practice with inert munitions. But bands of bombing opponents continued to trespass onto the range and disrupt those exercises before being caught by federal agents and jailed. As news of the Vieques conflict spread around the world, human rights activists, politicians, and celebrities flocked to the island to show their support. In April 2001, the Reverend Al Sharpton; Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; actor Edward James Olmos; famed Puerto Rican singer Danny Rivera; and Jackie Jackson, the wife of the Reverend Jesse Jackson, were all arrested in Vieques. So were two Puerto Rican members of Congress, New York’s Nydia Velázquez and Chicago’s Luis Gutiérrez, while the third, New York’s José Serrano, was similarly arrested in an antinavy protest in front of the White House. All told, federal agents arrested more than 1,400 people in Vieques between May 2000 and September 2001.

When a new governor, the Popular Democratic Party’s Sila Calderón, took office in January 2001, she immediately rejected the Clinton-Rosselló pact. In March, the navy notified Calderón that, as part of that agreement, it would soon resume inert bombing on Vieques. The governor promptly secured passage of a new Noise Prohibition Act, making such bombing illegal under Puerto Rican law. She then sued the navy unsuccessfully in federal court to hinder any further bombings, while also scheduling a November referendum on Vieques, one that included the option of immediate cessation of bombing. By then, the Bush administration was realizing that Puerto Rico’s opposition to the navy could not be turned around. On June 14, 2001, Bush shocked the military and his own Republican leaders in Congress by announcing that all navy exercises on Vieques would end within two years. Even that huge concession, however, did not completely quiet the furor. In the Vieques referendum held that November, 68 percent of voters backed an immediate cessation of training.”

“Shortly after Jimmy Carter became president in 1977, his Latin America experts privately counseled a reexamination of Puerto Rico. Not only was the island’s status creating repeated embarrassment before the United Nations Decolonization Committee but its intractable poverty was becoming a drain on the federal treasury. Some advisers urged steering the island toward a form of sovereignty, but one that would preserve U.S. influence and control. Before a new presidential commission could complete its work, however, Carter lost the 1980 presidential election, and his two immediate successors, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, both endorsed statehood for the island. The Reagan-Bush vision of statehood differed markedly, however, from that of annexationist leaders on the island. Those leaders, such as former governor Carlos Romero Barceló, advocated un estado criollo, “a Creole state.” For them, Spanish would remain the island’s language even after it joined the union, and this was something conservatives in Congress refused to accept. As a result, the 1980s passed without federal action when the White House and Congress couldn’t concur.”

“The Senate insisted that whatever choice Puerto Ricans eventually made must cost the federal government no additional funds. When a Congressional Budget Office study revealed that statehood would require an additional $18 billion over nine years to equalize Medicaid and other benefits to the island, the Senate’s reluctance to approve any bill increased. The most cost-effective alternative, the CBO concluded, was independence, since it would save the Treasury $1 billion annually. Two years of dogged negotiations and contentious public hearings followed, with the Senate’s Natural Resources Committee finally failing to approve the plebiscite bill by a 10–10 vote.”

“The prospect of financial chaos stemming from debt default eventually prompted the Republican-controlled Congress and the Obama administration to enact the PROMESA bill, creating a financial control board to restructure island finances. The law authorized the president to appoint the board’s seven voting members, four from lists provided by majority leaders of the Senate and the House, two from lists provided by minority leaders of those bodies, with only one being freely chosen by the president. That assured Republican control of the board.

In addition, only two appointees had to be residents or engaged in business primarily in Puerto Rico. This was a stark contrast from the District of Columbia oversight board that Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the Clinton White House had created in 1995. PROMESA, on the other hand, imposed control by non-Puerto Rican residents over the island; it required the government of Puerto Rico to pay all costs associated with the board; and it gave the new body sweeping powers over legislation and budgets — an overt return to early twentieth-century colonial rule.

Once the board began operating, in September 2016, it initiated a massive austerity program that included the closing of hundreds of public schools, the slashing of public employee benefits, cuts in government pensions of 10 percent, sharp reductions in spending for health care and police, a doubling of tuition at the public University of Puerto Rico while also ordering $550 million in cuts to the university’s budget, and the privatization of the government-owned electric utility.”

“The Kobre & Kim report confirmed that substantial portions of the debt appeared to have violated Puerto Rican law; nonetheless, it downplayed any potential criminal liability or fraud by government officials or private banks. Moreover, its investigators issued only a handful of subpoenas for records, none of them to U.S. firms such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JP-Morgan Chase, which had arranged much of the debt while collecting lucrative fees.”

“María’s direct hit proceeded to cripple the country’s entire electrical grid, half of its water supply, and nearly all cellphone service. The storm triggered more than forty thousand landslides, wrecked 160,000 homes, left 90 percent of Puerto Rico’s roads impassable, damaged thirty-one million trees, and ravaged 80 percent of agricultural production, with early estimates of the physical destruction calculated at more than $90 billion.

Even more shocking was the bungled and calamitous rescue and recovery effort from both Washington officials and Puerto Rico’s central government. The electrical blackout turned into the longest in U.S. history, with twenty-two thousand customers still without power nearly seven months after the storm. Moreover, the Trump administration provided far less disaster assistance to Puerto Rico than it did that same year to Texas residents after Hurricane Harvey or to Florida residents after Hurricane Irma, and it dispatched far fewer federal disaster personnel to the island, even though the damage and lives lost on the island were far greater. “Within the first 9 days after the hurricanes hit, both Harvey and Irma survivors had already each received nearly US $100 million in FEMA dollars awarded to individuals and families, whereas Maria survivors had only received slightly over US $6 million in recovery aid,” one study noted. Initial congressional appropriations to Puerto Rico came largely in loans and were highly restricted, whereas those to Texas and Florida were in grants and had fewer restrictions.”

“Federal funds for Puerto Rico’s rebuilding quickly turned into a cesspool of corruption and waste that enriched politically connected U.S, firms, Among the startling examples:

• The two-employee Whitefish Energy firm from Montana that somehow landed a $300 million no-bid contract from the Puerto Rico Electric Authority to help restore power. Despite being paid more than $300 per hour for each utility line worker, it failed to hire sufficient staff, and the ensuing public outcry prompted Governor Rosselló to oust the firm, whose CEO, it turned out, was a neighbor and acquaintance of Trump’s secretary of the interior, Ryan Zinke.
• Cobra Acquisitions LLC, a firm with no previous experience in electrical infrastructure, won a $200 million contract from PREPA to rebuild the island’s transmission lines with FEMA funds. Cobra had been incorporated only months before the storm by Oklahoma-based Mammoth Energy Services, and its contract soon ballooned to $1.4 billion. Federal prosecutors in Miami subsequently indicted Cobra’s chief executive, Donald Ellison, and Ahsha Tribble, a top FEMA administrator for Puerto Rico and a former Homeland Security official under President Obama, for bribery and fraud. Tribble was charged with accepting bribes from Ellison in exchange for steering contracts to Cobra.
• A one-woman company from Atlanta, Georgia, with no experience in disaster relief landed a $156 million contract from FEMA for emergency meals to Puerto Rico. Within a month, the company, Tribute Contracting LLC, had delivered only fifty thousand of the thirty million meals promised, and its contract was scrapped.”

“In the summer of 2019, a sudden and historic fifteen-day popular uprising swiftly toppled Governor Ricky Rosselló from power. Island residents called it El Verano Boricua — the Puerto Rican summer (a reference to the island’s original Taino name, Borikén).

The protests erupted following the leak of nearly nine hundred pages of Telegram app messages between the governor and his closest male advisers, chats that were laced with sexist, homophobic, and vulgar references to other political leaders, especially women, and in which they even mocked the victims of Hurricane María. The revelations from Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism, coming only days after the FBI arrested two former top Rosselló officials for corruption, stunned the island and provoked massive protests, even a general strike, and within days Ricky Rosselló was forced to resign.”

“Hawaii petitioned Congress for statehood for the first time in 1919. Its residents voted overwhelmingly for it in a plebiscite as early as 1940. Yet Congress denied that plea for nineteen more years because the territory had a substantial native and Asian population.”

“The inclusion of a “free association” option in the proposed Puerto Rico Democracy Act of 2010 was a recognition, at long last, that some members of Congress were willing to consider this other option.

The main elements of that new union would be:

• Puerto Rico conducts its own international affairs, including its own treaties, customs duties, and participation in the United Nations and other international organizations.
• Dual American and Puerto Rican citizenship for those born on the island.
• A common market, common currency, and common postal system between the two nations.
• No immigration barriers to citizens of either country.
• U.S. “authority and responsibility for international security and defense” of the island, but requiring the consent of the Puerto Rican legislature to involve the island in a war.
• Negotiated use and adequate rent for U.S. military installations.
• Foreign investment incentives to replace the Section 936 tax exemption.
• Elimination of the U.S. maritime monopoly on Puerto Rican shipping.
• Block grants of foreign aid to replace current federal transfer payments.”

“That expansion transformed the entire hemisphere into an economic satellite and sphere of influence of the United States. The empire that expansion created produced an unexpected harvest here at home toward the end of the twentieth century – massive Latin American immigration.”

“The following changes in national policy are the ones I consider essential for this new century:

1. End the predatory dual labor market in cheap Mexican labor. The only way to reduce the continued exploitation of millions of Mexicans, both in this country and across the Rio Grande, is with the complete mobility of labor between the two nations and the gradual equalizing of their respective environmental and labor laws. In 1994, NAFTA created a common market for goods but not a common market for people, and neither did its successor treaty in 2019, the USMCA. A common market for goods essentially benefits small elites in both countries, while one for people would be a boon to the majority of workers in both. A common labor market – perhaps even with cross-border labor unions or alliances such as the American-Canadian AFL-CIO unions already in existence – would reduce the gap between wages and labor standards in the United States and Mexico. As wages rise south of the border, Mexicans will consume more U.S. goods and fewer of them will seek to emigrate north.
2. Abolishing the concept of “illegality” among Mexicans, who are overwhelmingly the largest source of undocumented labor, would drive up wages at the bottom of our society. How? Because U.S. employers would find it harder to exploit those who can freely organize unions and petition the courts and government for their legal rights. It is just that kind of free movement of labor that exists as a basic right of all members of the European Union.”