A Century of Chicano History

Empire, Nations and Migration

Raul E. Fernandez, Gilbert G. Gonzalez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136071706
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Norteamérica

This study argues for a radically new interpretation of the origins and evolution of the ethnic Mexican community across the US. This book offers a definitive account of the interdependent histories of the US and Mexico as well as the making of the Chicano population in America. The authors link history to contemporary issues, emphasizing the overlooked significance of late 19th and 20th century US economic expansionism to Europe in the formation of the Mexican community.

II

Empire and the Origins of Twentieth-Century Migration from Mexico to the United States

In this chapter we show how the twentieth-century appearance of a Chicano minority population originated from the subordination of the nation of Mexico to U.S. economic and political interests. We argue that, far from being marginal to the course of modern U.S. history, the Chicano minority, an immigrant people, stand both at the center of that history and of a process of imperial expansionism that originated in the last three decades of the nineteenth century and that continues today.

Several observations that challenge conventional interpretations of Mexican migration and of the Chicano experience derive from this approach. This century-long exodus of Mexicans to the United States has often been perceived as an “American” problem, affecting welfare, education, culture, crime, drugs, budgets, and so on, and solved through get-tough measures ranging from California’s Proposition 187 to softer views such as those taken by immigrant rights agencies. In contrast, we take the position that migration is a Mexican national crisis. We argue that migration reflects Mexico’s economic subordination in the face of U.S. hegemony and of the limitations placed on its national sovereignty by that domination. A century of mass border crossings signifies the breaking apart of the social fabric of the Mexican nation and its resettlement in enclaves across the United States as a national minority. Finally, the story of U.S. domination of Mexico dates to the last three decades of the nineteenth century.

The sociopolitical repercussions of this subordination were enormous. Domination of a new type by the United States increasingly undermined the social and political cohesion of Mexico, causing dislocation to its domestic agriculture and industry as well as migration to the United States– Mexico border and to the United States itself. In his 1911 classic exposé Barbarous Mexico, John Kenneth Turner addressed the dismantling of the Mexican nation. “The partnership of Diaz and American capital,” he argued, “has wrecked Mexico as a national entity. The United States government, as long as it represents American capital … will have a deciding voice in Mexican affairs.”¹ Washington preferred economic domination by U.S. corporations to the direct annexation of Mexico. As John Mason Hart has persuasively demonstrated, U.S. capital realized that policy objective and reigned supreme in the Mexican economy by the late nineteenth century.² Mexico became the first foreign country to fall under the incipient imperial umbrella of United States.

The practice of territorial conquest and expansion in pursuit of, or as a consequence of, commercial developments is very old; from the Romans to the Aztecs to nineteenth-century Britain, this characteristic is shared by nearly every imperial power in the history of the world. Over the past hundred-plus years, however, the United States, along with other global powers, developed an empire of a new type, a transnational mode of economic domination similar to yet different in important respects from previous imperial regimes.

While the United States has throughout its history engaged in numerous acts of territorial aggression and conquest—like other historical centers of power—its particular mode of empire building and maintenance emerged when the growth of large corporations and financial institutions included their direct involvement in alliance with local elites with the formally independent economies and politics of other countries. Simultaneously, these large conglomerates of finance and production had come to effectively dominate the government of the United States and freely used the power of the state to jockey for position with other world powers. The new twist in the practice of empire construction and management was aptly captured by the late U.S. secretary of state John Foster Dulles—who was directly involved in U.S. aggression against Guatemala and Iran in the 1950s—when he stated that “there [are] two ways of dominating a foreign nation: invading it militarily or controlling it financially.”³ In the case of Mexico, U.S. policy preferred financial control over military options.

Mexico and the U.S. Model of Empire Building

A transnational mode of imperial hegemony defined U.S. relations with the rest of the world throughout the twentieth century. Mexico provided the first testing ground. The United States first began to engage new mechanisms of empire in the late 1870s, when it became the senior partner in an alliance with the local Mexican elite personified in the figure of dictator Porfirio Díaz. Using a governmental threat of military intervention, large U.S. capital interests invested heavily in the construction of railroads in Mexico. The initial intrusions were quickly followed by massive investments in mining, especially copper, cattle farming, and cotton production. After Mexico, the United States would move swiftly to establish economic control and political influence over the rest of the continent, turning the landmass into its backyard. The United States launched the War of 1898 for a variety of motives: to make sure that no sovereign and independent nation appeared in Cuba upon the defeat of the Spanish empire; to establish a military presence guaranteeing the security of its investments while denying it to others; and to establish strategic outposts to secure and control commerce and investments in the Caribbean and in East Asia. U.S. political leaders defended the war with the rhetoric of providing support for the underdog—as in the case of recent interventions in Somalia, Bosnia, and Iraq—a rationale to allay public unease over war and to manipulate public opinion. The War of 1898 was followed quickly by the U.S.-supported secession of the province of Panama from Colombia, ensuring U.S. control of interoceanic trade. At the same time, large U.S. investments took place via the company town model in agriculture, railroad construction, and mining in Mexico and Cuba.⁴

The investment of U.S.-based corporations in Latin America, beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, in cooperation with archaic land-based elites and bolstered by the U.S. military and the threat of annexation, would transform the hemisphere into a series of neocolonial republics. Mexico became something of a laboratory for the imperial experiments; few events of significance in the history of twentieth-century Mexico were not decisively influenced by the power of United States economic, political, and, as a last recourse, military intrusion.⁵ A few examples will suffice: the United States played a determining role in the outcome of the 1910 Mexican Revolution; after World War II the United States provided the money, propaganda, and logistics to control the labor and social movements in which the ideas of socialism were taking root not only in Mexico but throughout Latin America.⁶ In the 1990s the United States established NAFTA to further secure its investments in Mexico and to restrict the use of that country for investments by its competitors. The freedom and security of U.S. capital remained a constant in U.S. policy toward Mexico in the twentieth century.

The establishment of U.S. imperial hegemony over Mexico and later Latin America at about the turn of the twentieth century has long been acknowledged in Latin America as central to local histories and identity. From the 1880s to the 1930s major Mexican and Latin American thinkers, including Vasconcelos, Martí, Rodó, de Hostos, and others, placed U.S. presence in Latin America as central to their essays on Latin America’s future. The profound public awareness of the United States that pervades the lives, history, politics, and economics of Latin American countries is not matched by a parallel knowledge in the United States of its southern neighbors. In the academy, official U.S. historiography dates national emergence into the global scene with World War I, privileging U.S. activity in Europe over the decades of investment, interference, and invasions into Mexico and other southern neighbors. As a subset of official U.S. history, the study of the Chicano national minority has largely been constructed in an atmosphere in which “race matters,” and culture, too, but empire does not. Insofar as the U.S. transnational mode of hegemony is acknowledged, it is not seen as essential, or even related, to understanding the origins and development of the Chicano national minority.⁷

The Push-Pull Thesis:
The “Official” Line on Mexican Migration

The academic wisdom on Mexican migration to the United States established—since the first decade of the twentieth century—one basic theoretical construct: the push-pull thesis modeled upon conventional supply and demand economics. The thesis reduced the causes to sets of conditions within the sending country and the host country, conditions that functioned independently of each other. In one country a push (supply), or too many people and too few resources, motivated people to consider a significant move; in the other country a pull (demand), usually a shortage of labor, operated to attract the disaffected. In tandem they synergistically led to transnational migration.

Following the political militancy and cultural nationalism of the late 1960s, numerous studies focused great attention on the origins of the Mexican population in the United States. The Chicano theme aroused the interest not only of the Chicano activists but also of academics attracted to the issues raised by the regional political rebellion. Inevitably, immigration struck a chord among nearly everyone involved and became a major topic of discussion in the burgeoning field of Chicano studies. As the Chicano studies, research agenda matured, immigration, particularly in the 1900– 1930 period, held a central place in many studies.⁸ The original push-pull thesis as enunciated by the U. S. Industrial Commission on Immigration in 1901, repeated by Victor S. Clark in 1908, and Manuel Gamio and Paul S. Taylor in the early 1930s, became an article of faith among the new generation of academics destined to dominate the field to the end of the century.⁹

Many, if not most, academics simply made the 1910 Revolution the principal push factor operating in the 1900–1930 era.¹⁰ Consequently, when in the late 1960s the UCLA Mexican-American Study Project engaged the question of immigration, the theoretical scenario had been set and the authors followed conventional wisdom: “The Mexican revolutionary period beginning in 1909–1910 spurred the first substantial and permanent migration to the United States…. By liberating masses of people from social as well as geographic immobility, [the Revolution] served to activate a latent migration potential of vast dimensions.”¹¹

To be sure, not every research study repeated previous ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I Chicano History
• II Empire and the Origins of Twentieth-Century Migration from Mexico to the United States
• III The Ideology and Practice of Empire
• IV Agency, Gender, and Migration
• V The Integration of Mexican Workers into the U.S. Economy
• VI Denying Empire
• Conclusion
• Subject Index
• Author Index