The Columbia History of Latinos in the United States Since 1960

David Gutiérrez

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9780231508414
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi sull'etnia

Latinos are now the largest so-called minority group in the United States—the result of a growth trend that began in the mid-twentieth century—and the influence of Latin cultures on American life is reflected in everything from politics to education to mass cultural forms such as music and television. Yet very few volumes have attempted to analyze or provide a context for this dramatic historical development. The Columbia History of Latinos in the United States Since 1960 is among the few comprehensive histories of Latinos in America. This collaborative, interdisciplinary volume provides not only cutting-edge interpretations of recent Latino history, including essays on the six major immigrant groups (Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Central Americans, and South Americans), but also insight into the major areas of contention and debate that characterize Latino scholarship in the early twenty-first century.

This much-needed book offers a broad overview of this era of explosive demographic and cultural change by exploring the recent histories of all the major national and regional Latino subpopulations and reflecting on what these historical trends might mean for the future of both the United States and the other increasingly connected nations of the Western Hemisphere. While at one point it may have been considered feasible to explore the histories of national populations in isolation from one another, all of the contributors to this volume highlight the deep transnational ties and interconnections that bind different peoples across national and regional lines. Thus, each chapter on Latino national subpopulations explores the ambiguous and shifting boundaries that so loosely define them both in the United States and in their countries of origin. A multinational perspective on important political and cultural themes—such as Latino gender systems, religion, politics, expressive and artistic cultures, and interactions with the law—helps shape a realistic interpretation of the Latino experience in the United States.

ONE

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GLOBALIZATION, LABOR MIGRATION, AND THE DEMOGRAPHIC REVOLUTION: ETHNIC MEXICANS IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY

DAVID G. GUTIÉRREZ

IN SEPTEMBER 1999, in the small town of Dalton, Georgia, local citizens were treated to an unusual sight as hundreds, and eventually more than two thousand, Latinos lined the city’s streets for a parade commemorating el dieciseis de septiembre—Mexican Independence Day. Like most other towns in the deep South, Dalton had until recently a population demarcated by the old racial divide between blacks and whites. On this day in September, however, with street merchants peddling tacos, pan dulce (sweet bread), raspadas (snow cones), and other Mexican delicacies, and other vendors hawking miniature Mexican flags, T-shirts, and bumper stickers proclaiming love for Zacatecas, Jalisco, and Guanajuato, the celebration provided dramatic proof of just how much Latin American immigration has transformed American society over the past twenty years. The Mexican presence in Dalton also presents powerful evidence of the extent to which the ethnic Mexican and Latino populations¹ have dispersed from their traditional concentrations along the United States–Mexico border to new places of settlement in every state in the union—including Hawaii and Alaska.² Although the case of Dalton, Georgia, and other locales in the American South represent some of the more dramatic and interesting recent developments in a Mexican and greater Latino diaspora that has been intensifying since the 1960s, the drama being played out here—and in hundreds of other towns and cities across the United States—is part of a sweeping social trend that is clearly one of the most important in recent continental history. This essay is an attempt to contextualize and analyze the major features of the development of the ethnic Mexican population—the largest of the Latino subpopulations in the United States—as it has contributed to an ongoing social and cultural revolution that shows every sign of defining the future of American society well into the twenty-first century and beyond.

LEGACIES OF CONQUEST

This essay is primarily concerned with the period since 1960, but it is important to address, at least in passing, the larger context of the historical presence of ethnic Mexicans in the United States. This history extends back for more than four centuries, beginning with the Spanish settlements in St. Augustine, Florida, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the late sixteenth century. Between this initial period of settlement and the late eighteenth century, small groups of Spanish-speaking colonists established footholds in a series of outposts extending in a wide arc from Mexico City to Florida in the northeast; north to the Gulf Coast of Texas; northwest to Paso del Norte (present-day El Paso), the upper Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico, and the Gila River valley of Arizona; and, in the far northwest, to the coastal plain of California from San Diego to Sonoma. These northern territories, which became part of the Mexican Republic after Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821, included all or part of the present states of California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Kansas, and Texas. Mexico lost Texas in 1836 after the Texas Revolution, and the rest of the northern territories were annexed by the United States in the aftermath of the United States–Mexican War of 1846–1848, part of the United States’ long campaign of westward imperial expansion. Included in this territorial annexation was a mestizo (mixed-race) Spanish-speaking population of approximately 75,000–100,000, concentrated in four major fingers of settlement: southern Texas along the lower Rio Grande and the San Antonio area; the upper Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico; southern Arizona around present-day Tucson; and coastal California. The population living in these areas represented the first group of Mexican Americans.

Although a significant portion of the contemporary Mexican American population can trace its roots to this first group, the overwhelming majority of persons of Mexican descent or heritage now living in the United States trace their roots to people who entered the United States from Mexico in one of several waves of migration over the course of the twentieth century. Most of the Mexican migrants who entered the United States in the first decades of the century came seeking economic opportunity. This first large group of labor migrants was recruited by employers after earlier groups of immigrant workers like the Chinese, Japanese, and Sikhs were barred entry to the United States by a series of restrictive immigration laws passed between the 1880s and the early 1900s. Beginning in the 1890s, regional employers, who sought to replace the unskilled or semiskilled Asian laborers that were so vital to regional economic development, began to employ increasing numbers of Mexican migrant workers in a broad range of jobs in agriculture and food processing, and in the mining, transportation, and construction industries.

Labor recruitment of this type contributed to a rapid increase in the population of ethnic Mexicans in the United States between 1900 and 1929, especially after the eruption of the Mexican Revolution in 1910. Although the bulk of this population tended to stay concentrated in the border states (especially Texas and California), the demand for labor in the agricultural, transportation, construction, and meat-packing industries and in heavy industries like steel and auto manufacturing also contributed to the establishment of new pockets of urban settlement in places like the agricultural areas of the Great Plains and Midwest and in industrial cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Gary, Indiana.³ Shifting racial categorizations and census techniques make it impossible to know the precise dimensions of population growth during this period, but demographic historians believe that the total ethnic Mexican population grew from somewhere between 350,000 and 500,000 in 1900 to between 1 and 1.5 million in 1929.⁴

The onset of the Great Depression briefly reversed this upward demographic trend. As millions of American workers lost their jobs after 1929, local, state, and federal government officials began a concerted set of campaigns to “encourage,” or compel, hundreds of thousands of Mexican nationals (along with an unknown but surely significant number of their U.S.-born children) to return to Mexico. Concerned with the well-being of its citizens and embarrassed by the pervasive negative stereotyping of Mexicans in the United States, the government of Mexico often cooperated in these repatriation efforts. Again, repatriation statistics are sketchy, but these mass campaigns led to a reverse migration into Mexico of at least 350,000 people—and probably many more—between 1929 and 1937. This reversal of the migrant flow proved to be short-lived, however, reflecting just how dependent the U.S. economy had become on Mexican workers. Indeed, once the United States mobilized for world war in the early 1940s, the demand for labor very quickly helped to reestablish the Mexican migration trends first seen thirty years earlier. However, whereas much of the first period of Mexican migration could be attributed to the more or less informal workings of the regional labor market (that is, largely outside the formal regulation of the government), in this new phase of mass migration after 1942, much of the labor migration from Mexico occurred by official contract under the auspices of a series of bilateral agreements that collectively became known as the Bracero Program (in Spanish, a bracero is one who works with one’s arms, or brazos).

The Bracero Program was originally designed to meet the increased wartime demand for agricultural and railroad workers, but after the war the program was extended several times in different versions. Over the next quarter-century, this “temporary” foreign labor importation program was responsible for recruiting more than 5 million workers to the United States. The terms of the various labor agreements prohibited contract workers from settling permanently in the United States unless they first returned to Mexico and went through ordinary immigration application procedures, but the constant circulation of this volume of workers inevitably led to a steady increase of the number of Mexicans who settled in the United States. The Bracero Program also stimulated a dramatic parallel increase in the circulation of similar numbers of undocumented workers who were drawn into the U.S. labor market outside of the official labor-recruitment channels. As braceros became familiar with life in the United States, they encouraged friends and relatives to try their luck in the north, again, often outside of the formal labor-recruitment mechanisms. Of course, U.S. employers who sought to avoid both the red tape and the contract guarantees of the program welcomed the renewed flow of unsanctioned Mexican workers. Thus, after the war, a number of interlocking factors contributed to a continuing increase in the ethnic Mexican population. The volatile combination of the constant circulation of a large number of temporary, legally sanctioned workers, a similar transnational circulation of even larger numbers of unsanctioned, “illegal” laborers, and the smaller, but still significant entry of thousands of Mexican immigrants through regular immigration channels all led to the steady growth of the ethnic Mexican population. Combined with a high birth rate in the resident population, these factors contributed to a population increase of at least 73 percent between 1940 and 1950, and another 54 percent increase between 1950 and 1960.⁵ By 1960, the ethnic Mexican population of the United States had reached approximately 3.5 million.⁶

THE AMBIGUOUS LEGACY OF THE 1960S

Although Mexicans had begun to disperse to different areas of the United States by this time, the majority of Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants—upwards of 80 percent—remained concentrated in their traditional cultural redoubt in the region along the United States–Mexico border: Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas. Enclaves previously established in the Midwest, especially those in the Chicago metropolitan area, also experienced significant growth. The demographic structure of the population also changed as the immigrant-to-native ratio, which some demographers estimate to have been at least two- or even three-to-one in 1929, gradually declined. By 1960, nearly 85 percent of Mexican Americans were American citizens by birth. Despite this structural shift toward the native-born, however, it is important to note that a great many Mexican Americans maintained strong ties to friends and relatives in Mexico—ties that by this time often extended over many generations.⁷ In addition, the presence in the United States in 1960 of at least half a million Mexican nationals, an even larger number of U.S.-born children with at least one immigrant parent, and an unknown but always significant number of undocumented people, make population demographics much more complicated than they appear. Thus, while the majority of all ethnic Mexicans in the country in 1960 may well have been born and raised in the United States, a large percentage (45.2) either had at least one immigrant parent (29.8) or had been born in Mexico (15.4).⁸

The general socioeconomic profile of Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants in the early 1960s mirrored these complex demographics. In many ways, the poverty that had characterized the population at the turn of the century continued to beleaguer both Mexican immigrants and U.S.-born Mexican Americans. This persistent poverty stemmed from a combination of factors. The constant entry of immigrants with low levels of formal education and similarly low job skills obviously contributed to the depressed socioeconomic conditions, but deeply rooted historical patterns of discrimination against ethnic Mexicans (regardless of citizenship status) also strongly influenced the situation.

Ethnic Mexicans’ structural position in American society starkly illustrated the complex ways in which historical patterns of discrimination interacted with the continual circulation of poor migrants and immigrants into the United States to keep both groups down. In 1960, ethnic Mexicans in aggregate lagged behind non-Hispanic whites in educational attainment by at least 5 years (7.1 years versus 12.1 years), and the gap was much worse in rural areas and among recently arrived immigrants. In turn, wage and occupational data reflected these low levels of education. Ethnic Mexicans of both nationalities, like other American minority populations, had partly closed the earnings gap separating them from non-Hispanic whites in the postwar economic boom between 1945 and 1960, but the average annual earnings of ethnic Mexican families remained nearly $4,000 lower than that of non-Hispanic whites ($7,120 versus $10,750) as late as 1969. The occupational structure of the Mexican and Mexican American work force reveals why this was so. By 1960, a small number of ethnic Mexicans (again, particularly U.S.-born males) had experienced some upward movement within the U.S. occupational hierarchy, but nearly a third of all male workers continued to toil either as unskilled laborers or as farm workers. Another 24 percent worked in semiskilled occupations, and less than 10 percent held professional or managerial positions. The female workforce showed a similar clustering at the bottom. In 1960, fully 26 percent of ethnic Mexican women employees worked in the service sector (primarily in domestic occupations); another 25 percent worked as semiskilled operatives.⁹

The general socioeconomic profile of the ethnic Mexican population, for both nationalities and both genders, remained grim, but because aspiring middle-class Mexican Americans played key roles in various kinds of political mobilizations in the postwar United States, it is also important to note that there were signs that at least a small segment of the population had begun to make some halting socioeconomic strides in this period. A number of factors helped loosen the opportunity structure for ethnic Mexicans, women, and other minority groups in the years after 1945. Active service and civilian employment in the U.S. military, new opportunities for employment in civil service and other government jobs, and especially veterans’ access to the educational, job-training, and mortgage benefits that came with the newly passed G.I. Bill opened new windows of economic opportunity for some Mexican Americans. As a consequence, by the late 1960s, a small but steadily increasing number of Mexican Americans and an even smaller number of Mexican immigrants began to gain entry into professional and managerial positions. Whereas less than one percent of ethnic Mexicans had been employed in the professions in 1930, the proportion of the labor force employed in professional occupations crept up to 2.2 percent in 1950, 4.1 percent in 1960, and 6.4 percent in 1970. The proportion of workers employed as managers increased at a comparable rate. The 1930 census indicated that just 2.8 percent of ethnic Mexicans were employed as managers, but the number in this important niche inched up to 4.4 percent in 1950, 4.6 percent in 1960, and an estimated 6.4 percent in 1970.¹⁰

SOCIAL AND CULTURAL CHANGE

The social and cultural life of ethnic Mexicans during this period mirrored both the tenuousness of their material circumstances in American society and the strong ties that continued to bind the resident population to communities throughout Mexico. As was true historically of other minority populations with significant immigrant and first-generation components, most ethnic Mexicans, particularly those in the working classes, lived in dynamic tension within the complex class and cultural milieu ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction. Demography and the Shifting Boundaries of “Community”: Reflections on “U.S. Latinos” and the Evolution of Latino Studies
• 1. Globalization, Labor Migration, and the Demographic Revolution: Ethnic Mexicans in the Late Twentieth Century
• 2. Social Polarization and Colonized Labor: Puerto Ricans in the United States, 1945–2000
• 3. Exiles, Immigrants, and Transnationals: The Cuban Communities of the United States
• 4. Central American Immigrants: Diverse Populations, Changing Communities
• 5. Transnational Ties and Incorporation: The Case of Dominicans in the United States
• 6. The Other “Other Hispanics”: South American–Origin Latinos in the United States
• 7. Gender and the Latino Experience in Late-Twentieth-Century America
• 8. From Barrios to Barricades: Religion and Religiosity in Latino Life
• 9. U.S. Latino Expressive Cultures
• 10. The Continuing Latino Quest for Full Membership and Equal Citizenship: Legal Progress, Social Setbacks, and Political Promise
• 11. The Pressures of Perpetual Promise: Latinos and Politics, 1960–2003
• List of Contributors
• Index