1.

Jonathan Scott, “Before the White Race Was Invented” (1998)

2. Bob Wing, Crossing Race and Nationality: The Racial Formation

of Asian Americans 1852-1965 (2005)

3. Elizabeth Martinez and Enriqueta Longeaux y Vasquez, “Viva La

Raza, Raza, Raza...” (1974)

4. Arnoldo Garcia, “Toward a Left without Borders: The Story of the

Center for Autonomous Social Action-General Brotherhood of
Workers” (2002)

5. Mike Davis, “Buscando America” from Magical Urbanism: Latinos

Reinvent the US City (2000)

6. René Francisco Poitevin, “Latinos and David Roediger’s Working

Toward Whiteness” (2006)

Jonathan Scott, “Before the White Race Was

Invented”
THERE ARE FOUR main theses advanced by Theodore Allen in his two-
volume history of racial oppression, The Invention of the White Race.
The burden of his study is to show:

(1)that racial oppression is a “sociogenic” rather than a

“phylogenic” phenomenon;

(2)how the introduction of racial oppression was a deliberate ruling-

class decision;

(3)the way in which the propertyless classes in continental Anglo-

American and United States society have been recruited into the
“intermediate buffer control stratum” (the so-called “middle
class”) through anomalous white-skin privileges; and

(4)the nature of class society under the capitalist mode of

production.

As far as his first thesis, there is no item of American “common sense”

more popular than the idea that race is the same as “phenotype” or
skin color. From white racist conceptions of athleticism -- that African
Americans dominate certain sports because of distinctively “black”
features and attributes -- to the renewal of eugenics in American social
science to justify the lop-sided rate of incarceration for African
Americans, this bit of “racial” common sense -- Allen terms it “psycho-
culturalism” -- has insinuated itself into every aspect of life in the
Unites States.
One of the great contributions of Allen’s study is a complete debunking
of the myth that race and skin color are the same thing.

Conversely, one thing that has made the psycho-culturalist myth so

enduring is the idea that American slavery was a “peculiar” or
“paradoxical” or “exceptional” phenomenon -- terms deeply ingrained
in the mainline of American social science. The task for American
historians has been to explain away the fact that democratic
development in continental Anglo-American and United States history
coincided with centuries of racial slavery, racial oppression, and white
supremacy.

While the psycho-culturalists argue that racism is impossible to

eradicate because of the permanence of alleged skin color, the
paradox theorists contend that racial slavery and racial oppression
gave birth to American democracy, but that race today is nothing more
than a vestige of plantation economics.

Edmund Morgan, for instance, made this his departure point in

American Slavery, American Freedom, where his thesis is that racial
slavery and racial oppression were necessary flaws in the unfolding
telos of American democracy. Through racial slavery and racial
oppression, poor whites were shown by their rulers the difference
between enslavement and freedom, between labor bond-servitude and
wage labor.

Yet his “paradox” argument is actually the corollary of the skin color
obsession, since race for Morgan is a ephemeral -- it existed only as a
temporary measure designed to “separate dangerous free whites from
dangerous slave blacks,” and therefore once the numbers of
“dangerous free whites” went down, race withered away and class
became the dominant feature of American history.

For the psycho-culturalists everything is racial, from the clothes we

wear and the food we eat to the way we walk, talk, think, dream, and
desire. For the psycho-culturalists, anything not determined by race is
abnormal and peculiar.

Strange bedfellows these twin ways of thinking, and their many

combinations and encounters in U.S. history -- the march of democracy
and supraracialism --attest to how truly “peculiar” the ideology of
white supremacy really is: the absent center of Morgan’s work.

For example, the Eisenstein of the United States, D.W. Griffith, served
as a national advocate for the re-enslavement of African Americans;
many of the largest mass uprisings in U.S. history were pogroms
against African Americans; the first and most enduring U.S. national-
popular art form is blackface minstrelsy; and campaigns for the
presidency continue to be decided on “the race question,” whether it
be in the form of “getting the Southern vote,” or where the candidate
stands on national policies and programs such as integration and
affirmative action, and his record in either enforcing or opposing and
repealing them.

It is in this world of the surreal that historians of the “white race”

conduct their researches and publish their theses and documentation.

The experience of reading Allen is like leaving this dream room and
slamming the door shut on the way out. It is “white race” which is
“peculiar,” not racial slavery and racial oppression.

“White-skin privileges,” the basis of the “white race” form of

oppression, are peculiar precisely because they depend for their
persistence on the shakiest of assumptions and thus the wildest of
fantasies: that in America social mobility is guaranteed by the color of
your skin.

This was the slogan of the “white race” rioters and lynch mobs in July
1863, as they set about burning alive African Americans in New York
and destroying millions of dollars of their property (vol. 1, 188-192).
Comprised mainly of Irish Americans, the white lynch mobs of New
York are known in history texts euphemistically as the “New York Draft
Rioters.”

Colonialism As A Model
Examples such as this allow Allen to establish his definition of racial
oppression, and to cast out various lines of inquiry. For example, where
did the Catholic Irish immigrants get the idea that they would gain if
African Americans were made to lose? And how were Irish Americans
able to perform their function so well, with such precision and
expertise?

Allen’s research shows that all the major Irish American newspapers in
New York were clamoring for the repeal of laws entitling African
Americans to the same employment opportunities afforded laboring-
class Euro-Americans. They fought tirelessly to make white-skin
privilege a basic right of U.S. citizenship. Moreover, the Irish American
establishment was fervently pro-slavery.

For example, they threw their political influence behind the campaign
to renew the international slave trade; they argued that the rights and
privileges sanctified by the U.S. Constitution were white-only rights and
privileges -- that non-whites were non-persons and should be treated
that way by every court in the land -- and they mobilized thousands of
newly arrived Catholic Irish immigrants against their own national
leader, the Catholic Liberator Daniel O’Connell, who had come to the
United States from Ireland to aid the Abolitionist movement.

Here the Irish American establishment had recourse to two

constitutional principles, that of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act and the
1790 Rule of Naturalization. The latter provided that “any alien, being
a free white person... may be admitted to become a citizen” of the
United States, while the former involved the Catholic Irish directly in
white racial oppression by encouraging, in Allen’s words, “even the
most destitute of European-Americans... to exercise this racial
prerogative [the presumption white-only citizenship] by supporting the
enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act” (vol. 1, 185).

Furthermore, under the Jacksonian Democratic Party “spoils system,”

where “manhood suffrage” laws adopted between 1820 and 1830
recognized only “whites” as “men,” the Irish American political
machine converted Tammany Hall into a bulwark of white supremacy
in the Northern metropolises, a legacy still with us today (vol. 1, 186-
187). In 1826 and 1846, for instance, Tammany Democrats bitterly
fought every attempt to restore the rights that African Americans had
been robbed of during the 1820s and ‘30s (vol. 1, 187).

What, then, was the special significance of the Irish American case?
Allen argues that it was that

“(1) they were the largest immigrant group in the ante-bellum period;
(2) they explicitly rejected their own national heritage to become part
of the system of (white) racial oppression of African-Americans; and (3)
by virtue of their concentration in Northern cities -- above all, New
York, the locale of the most important Northern links with the
plantation bourgeoisie -- they became a key factor in national politics”
(vol. 1, 186).

But how did they know so well what to do to gain favor with the
oppressing class, the plantation bourgeoisie? Allen writes:

“Irish-Americans were not the originators of white supremacy; they

adapted to and were adopted into an already ‘white’ American social
order. A modern Irish historian puts it in terms of later-arriving Catholic
Irish imitating the example of earlier-arriving Ulster Protestants. The
Catholic Irish who chose to follow the ‘pre-existing presbyterian logic’
in seeking ‘popular rights,’ were met by the slaveholders’ Jacksonian
Democratic Party that ‘had to promote outsiders and small men.’
Those ‘popular rights’ of Irish-Americans were given the form of white-
skin privileges, the token of their membership in the American ‘white
race’” (vol. 1, 199).

The key to appreciating Allen’s definition of racial oppression is in the

formulation above. Irish Americans became instant white supremacists
because they already knew the system inside and out, since it had
been imposed on them for centuries by the English in Ireland. As Allen
puts it: “Irish history presents a case of racial oppression without
reference to alleged skin color or, as the jargon goes, ‘phenotype’”
(vol. 1, 22).

The heart of Volume One consists of empirical research into the history
of racial oppression in Ireland so that “the Irish Mirror,” as Allen nicely
terms it, can reflect back the true nature of racial oppression in history,
its origins and its social function in capitalist society. This approach,
which is new in American historiography, lays a conceptual groundwork
“free of the ‘White Blindspot’”(the myth that race and skin color are
one and the same (vol. 1, 23).

Racism As Social Control

Allen’s definition of racial oppression, which can be seen clearly in the
white race pogrom of 1863, is as follows:

“The assault upon the tribal affinities, customs, laws and institutions of
the Africans, the American Indians and the Irish by English/British and
Anglo-American colonialism reduced all members of the oppressed
group to one undifferentiated social status, a status beneath that of
any member of any class within the colonizing population. This is the
hallmark of racial oppression in its colonial origins, and it has persisted
in subsequent historical contexts” (vol. 1, 32).

Skin color has nothing to do with the social function of racial

oppression --what Allen terms “social control” -- since the system was
designed to maintain British colonial rule over the Irish masses, a
situation in which no differences in “phenotype” obtained.

The Protestant system of Penal Laws, for example, operated to exclude

the Catholic majority from all positions of authority in Ireland, from
parliament to the professions to the ownership of property. In this way,
the Penal Laws were no different than Jim Crow or South African
apartheid. “The essential elements of discrimination against the Irish in
Ireland,” writes Allen,

“and against the African-Americans, which gave these respective

regimes the character of racial oppression, were those that destroyed
the original forms of social identity, and excluded the oppressed
groups from admittance into the forms of social identity normal to the
colonizing power. Take away these elements, and racial oppression
would cease to exist” (vol. 1, 81 82).

The defining characteristics of racial oppression, which Allen analyzes

throughout Volumes One and Two, are:

(1)declassing legislation, directed at property-holding members of

the oppressing group;

(2)deprivation of civil rights;

(3)illegalization of literacy; and

(4)displacement of family rights and authorities (vol. 1, 82).

In addition to documenting the history of racial oppression against the

Irish in Ireland, Allen uses Volume One to show the compelling parallels
between the Irish, Americans Indians, and African Americans. Each of
the four characteristics of racial oppression is analyzed in the context
of these three peoples and their overlapping histories. This aspect of
Volume One is the book’s centerpiece.

Free of the “White Blindspot,” which denied the common links between
the Irish, American Indians, and African Americans -- Allen shows that
no definition of racism in American social science includes the parallels
between the Irish and African Americans -- Volume Two turns its
attention to the plantation colonies of Anglo-America during the period
from the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to the repeal of the original
ban on slavery in the colony of Georgia in 1750.

A Pivotal Event
The main events are Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 and the 1705 revision
of the Virginia laws, in particular, the “Act concerning Servants and
Slaves.” For brevity’s sake, this review will concentrate solely on
Allen’s original account of Bacon’s Rebellion, which is the pivotal event
of Allen’s second volume.

The subject of the eleventh chapter of Volume Two, “Rebellion and Its
Aftermath,” is the civil war phase of Bacon’s Rebellion, April 1676 to
January 1677. Rather than a narrative presentation, the chapter is an
analysis of “those elements of the rebellion that relate most
meaningfully to the origin of racial oppression in continental Anglo-
America” (vol. 2, 205).

Frustrated at being cut out of fundamental changes in Virginia land

policy, which allocated the best new tidewater land to wealthy
capitalist investors and developers, and agitated over laws prohibiting
them from trading with the Indians, the smallholders of colonial
Virginia began to organize in 1676 an opposition faction within the
ranks of the numerically tiny colony elite.

The opposition faction proposed a land-tax incentive to induce the

redistribution of the land. But it was at this very moment -- May 1676 --
that the whole structure of ruling-class social control collapsed in
Virginia, as the poor and propertyless took up arms against the
plantation bourgeoisie as a whole, seeing no future in a society based
on chattel bond-servitude.

There were close to fifteen thousand laboring people on the move. The
Governor and his military apparatus went into hiding, and the county
courts, where bond-laborers had their terms of servitude extended and
where lashes were laid on, were shut down by the rebel laborers.

Colony commissioners reported to England that only five hundred

laborers could be made to go to war against the rebels. The majority of
the rebels were chattel bond-laborers -- six thousand European
Americans and two thousand African Americans).
Moreover, the sole reason for the large plantation owners’ rejection of
the smallholders’ land-tax plan was to preserve chattel bond-servitude;
without it, they told them, Virginia’s tobacco monoculture could not
move forward, to use the language of today’s defenders of
multinational capital -- Clinton’s favorite saying when promoting free
trade arrangements that favor big capital, such as GATT and NAFTA
and lately “fast track.”

All of the essential elements of Bacon’s Rebellion had to do with the

social relations of production at the time, in specific, the relations
between workers -- Euro-American and African American bond-laborers
-- and the oligarchy of owners of large plantations, an imperial interest
that had total control of the land and fur monopolies.

In this way, Allen’s placement of the bond-laborers themselves, as well

as the social relations of production, at the center of the history of
Bacon’s Rebellion is a radical divergence from undialectical, bourgeois
accounts of the rebellion, and also a departure from the thesis of equal
rights and anti-racism which has regarded the rebellion an early event
in the “frontier” phenomenon, whereby the path of white imperialism
rolled over the rights of American Indians.

Three main points emerge from Allen’s treatment of the history of the
Virginia Colony.

First, rather than a “natural” outgrowth of English tradition, Allen

suggests that chattel bond-servitude in the Virginia Colony was “as
strange to the social order in England after the middle of the sixteenth
century as Nicotiniana tabacum was to the soil of England before that
time” (vol. 2, 103). Thus, the obsession with the so-called “paradox”
theory of American history and society -- that democratic development
in the United States has occurred simultaneously with the
establishment and continuous functioning of racial slavery and racial
oppression -- is, like most negative obsessions, based on a massive
form of self-deception, practiced by a whole class and perpetuated by
this class through all the organs of official culture.

As is the case today, laboring-class men and women back then were
supposed to believe that the super-exploitation of their labor power by
big capitalists was necessary if they -- big capitalists -- were to
compete successfully with their European (today Asian) economic
rivals. Thus, all social relations not based on the pursuit of immediate
profit, such as the New England system of equitably distributed small
landholdings, would have to be eradicated. How this was carried out is
thoroughly documented by Allen in chapter five, “The Massacre of the
Tenantry.”
While reaping enormous profits from the tobacco crop of 1622, the
plantation bourgeoisie (through the colony authorities) ordered severe
restrictions on the planting of corn, a ban on hunting for food in the
forests, and the abandonment of half the population and the
withdrawal of the colony into a restricted perimeter. These policies
starved the peasantry to death. One-third of the surviving tenants,
laborers and apprentices in the entire colony were left without
employers or means of employing themselves (vol. 2, 93).

Reversing Gains
But the only “paradox” of this epochal starting point of U.S.
“democracy” is the fact that the “democratic” developers of American
society reversed the gains of democratic development in England, such
as the laws against treating English workers as chattel -- that is,
transferring them without their prior consent from one employer to
another -- as well as the restrictions imposed on employers in
punishing runaway laborers -- e.g. they couldn’t add years to their
servitude (vol. 2, 96).

In Anglo-America, punishing runaway laborers by adding years to their

servitude became a standard punishment, and chattel bond-servitude
the most basic form of labor. Not really a “paradox,” then, the
chattelization of labor in Anglo-America is more accurately described,
in Allen’s words, as “a monstrous social mutation in English class
relations” (vol. 2, 101).

Second, freedom for the eight thousand bond-laborers would have

revolutionized colonial Virginia from a plantation monoculture to a
diversified smallholder economy (vol. 2, 211). As Allen shows in his
research, there was no distinction drawn by the insurrectionary bond-
laborers between “black” and “white.” In fact, the words didn’t yet
exist.

They fought side by side, “the English and Negroes in Armes” as they
were then known to the panicked ruling class, providing “the supreme
proof,” as Allen has it, that “the white race did not then exist” (vol. 2,
215). This is precisely why Bacon’s Rebellion is such a critical turning
point in the American class struggle: it revealed the ruling class’
weakest link and the fulcrum on which every equalitarian upsurge in
U.S. history would depart, from the Abolitionists down to the civil rights
movement.

Bacon’s Rebellion showed a clear and bold awareness on the part of

the oppressed that the only thing standing between them and their
oppressors was the bourgeois state apparatus itself. To paraphrase
Langston Hughes in his poem “White Man,” the rebel bond laborers
saw that their oppressor’s name “ain’t really White Man... it’s
something Marx wrote down fifty years ago that rich people don’t like
to read... C-A-P-I-T-A-L-I-S-T.”(1)

Third, just as the massacre of the tenantry in the 1620s had prepared
the ground for the institution of chattel bond-servitude, so the defeat
of Bacon’s Rebellion “cleared the way for the establishment of the
system of lifetime hereditary bond-servitude,” since this clear and bold
awareness on the part of the poor and landless had to be twisted and
denuded for the capitalist class to reproduce itself (vol. 2, 239).

Necessary for completing the task was the invention of the “white
race”: the imposition by the Anglo-American continental plantation
bourgeoisie of a system of lifetime bond-servitude only on persons of
African descent, and the establishment of white racial oppression “by
denying recognition of, refusing to acknowledge, delegitimizing so far
as African Americans were concerned, the normal social distinctions
characteristic of capitalist society” (vol. 2, 242).

Essential to this ruling-class project “is the insistence on the social

distinction between the poorest member of the oppressor group and
any member, however propertied, of the oppressed group (vol. 2, 243).
Beginning from this principle of ruling-class social control, the Anglo-
American bourgeoisie opted for white racial oppression and established
its defining characteristics, continuing down to the present, to prevent
Bacon(s Rebellion from happening again.

If one is looking for a short answer to the question, “Why?” -- Why did
the Anglo-American bourgeoisie single out African Americans from
among the many poor and propertyless in opting for racial oppression,
given that skin-color has nothing to do with the system itself? -- it is
that, whilst in the British West Indies where there was no “white race”
form of oppression because there were too few laboring-class
Europeans to fill the social control stratum (the petty bourgeoisie), in
the continental colonies there were too many (vol. 2, 244). There were
too many European laboring people with no place to go -- with no
social mobility -- which made them a constant threat to the ruling
class, the best example of a ticking time bomb that there ever was,
and that still is.

As DuBois put it in Black Reconstruction (pace Marx), “The black man

enslaved was an even more formidable and fatal competitor than the
black man free.” Allen articulates it this way:

“It was in the interest of the slave-labor system to maintain the white-
skin privilege differential in favor of the European American workers. At
the same time, however, it was equally in the interest of the employers
of wage-labor, as well as of bond-labor, that the differential be kept to
no more than a minimum necessary for the purpose of keeping the
European-American workers in the white race( corral... The chains that
bound the African-American thus also held down the living standards of
the Irish-American slum-dweller and canal digger as well (vol. 1, 198).”

Thus, the “white race” was invented as a means of defusing this bomb.
With white racial oppression in place, the ruling class could promote
poor and propertyless European-Americans into the “middle class,” the
same way the British promoted “mulattos” in the Caribbean, but they
would have to do so strictly in token-name only, saving them countless
billions of dollars, since the fantasy of social mobility was made
conditional not on acquiring their own property, their own means of
employment, or their own education, but on keeping African Americans
poor and oppressed.

In this way the ruling class would save a tremendous amount of money
also, since they were relieved of having to employ a full-time army to
do it. The legacy of the Anglo-American ruling class’ decision to impose
white racial oppression is a real living legacy, for as the economist
Doug Henwood has recently documented in Left Business Observer,
the U.S. middle class is the smallest in the First World, the poverty rate
for whites is nearly forty percent, and sixty percent of whites start
employment at the minimum wage.(2)

Yet this short answer (the ticking time bomb) depends on a thorough
knowledge of what Bacon’s Rebellion meant to the ruling class: the
prospect of laboring-class African Americans and laboring-class Euro-
Americans “confederating,” to use the word that the ruling class had
on their lips in the aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion, in class struggle
against their capitalist oppressors. Still the order of the day, and the
fulcrum on which all fundamental social change in U.S. society finally
rests.
Bob Wing, “Crossing Race and Nationality: The
Racial Formation of Asian Americans 1852-
1965”
The U.S. immigration reform of 1965 produced a tremendous influx of
immigrants and refugees from Asia and Latin America that has
dramatically altered U.S. race relations. Latinos now outnumber African
Americans. It is clearer than ever that race relations in the United
States are not limited to the central black/white axis. In fact this has
always been true: Indian wars were central to the history of this
country since its origins and race relations in the West have always
centered on the interactions between whites and natives, Mexicans,
and Asians. The “new thinking” about race relations as multipolar is
overdue.

However, one cannot simply replace the black/white model with one
that merely adds other groups. The reason is that other groups of color
have faced discrimination that is quite different both in form and
content than that which has characterized black/white relations. The
history of many peoples and regions, as well as distinct issues of
nationality oppression—U.S. settler colonialism, Indian wars, U.S.
foreign relations and foreign policy, immigration, citizenship, the U.S.-
Mexico War, language, reservations, treaties, sovereignty issues, etc.—
must be analyzed and woven into a considerably more complicated
new framework.

In this light, Asian-American history is important because it was

precedent-setting in the racialization of nationality and the
incorporation of nationality into U.S. race relations. The racial
formation of Asian Americans was a key moment in defining the color
line among immigrants, extending whiteness to European immigrants,
and targeting non-white immigrants for racial oppression. Thus
nativism was largely overshadowed by white nativism, and it became
an important new form of racism.

This development resonates powerfully today in the discrimination

faced by the millions of immigrants from the global South over the past
forty years, while white European immigrants face virtually none. And
lately the Bush administration has formed a new link between war,
racism, and attacks on immigrants in his “permanent war on terrorism
at home and abroad.” While Asian Americans were this country’s first
“aliens ineligible to citizenship,” today Arab Americans are its most
prominent racialized enemy aliens.

Background
By the time the first Asians began to come to these shores in any
numbers (the Chinese in 1852), basic patterns of U.S. race relations
had been set by more than two centuries of Negro slavery and Indian
wars. However, those patterns were under attack, and the soon to be
fought Civil War would mark a new departure that would
fundamentally affect the plight of Chinese in the United States as the
century progressed.

Reduced to its fundamental dynamics, what had emerged was an

entrenched system of white supremacy and black oppression centered
on, but not limited to, slavery. The African slave trade was a product of
European colonialism of African nationalities, but within each
slaveholding country, different racial formations were developed,
according to particular conditions.
In recent years it has become a progressive mantra that racial
categories are “socially constructed,” but it is often forgotten that they
only achieve full structural and systemic power when they are legally
defined and enforced by state power. In what became the United
States, the plethora of both European and African nationalities very
early on was subsumed by a legally defined and state sanctioned
system of racial categories.

In this unprecedented new system, famously hostile European

nationalities (e.g., English, Irish, Germans, and French) were united as
whites, and the numerous African nationalities, together with all those
who seemed to exhibit the slightest perceptible trace of African
ancestry, were categorized as Negro, thus with “no rights that the
white man is bound to respect.” This hypodescent (or “one drop”) rule,
firmly codified in statute by 1705, was meant to provide crystal clarity
to the social status of the numerous racially mixed offspring sired by
white planters. This was crucial since unlike other slave societies, the
Southern planters depended primarily upon slave reproduction (rather
than the African slave trade) to fill its slave supply and were also
bound and determined to prevent a substantial free group of mulattos
to blur the color line.

Such a state enforced, polarized system of racial categories and race

relations was and is unique to the United States. Also unique to the
United States (as compared to other slaveholding countries) was the
exclusion of anti-slavery (and slaves) from the independence struggle.
Instead slaveholding Founding Fathers like George Washington,
Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison ensured that the new country
limited U.S. citizenship to whites only. The system of white supremacy
was thus extended to an exclusion of people of color from the
nationality and polity. Ripped from Africa and excluded from U.S.
citizenship, African Americans were rendered strangers in their own
homeland.

The pattern regarding Native Americans was much different. Native

Americans were only marginally incorporated into the emerging U.S.
society and racial system. Rather, they fought to retain what territorial
and political autonomy they could in their own nations/tribes/territories
in the face of recurrent Indian wars. While they were defeated in most
of those wars, they successfully resisted incorporation into colonial or
U.S. society proper. Thus, it was oppressive relations between
nations (specifically settler colonialism), not racial
oppressionwithin U.S. society, that predominated: wars, treaties,
territorial fights, military/colonial rule, tribal governments, a
reservation system, redrawing of boundaries, etc.

Until the 1840s or so, European immigrants to the United States or

what became the United States had an inviting situation, although not
without discrimination arising from distinct languages, citizenship,
religions, and newcomer status. The Irish and other European
immigrants became white the day they landed on these shores, but
some were treated as “second class whites” for varying periods of
time. The often neglected dialectical opposite of black oppression is
white supremacy and white privilege: the obverse of the enslavement
of blacks was the monopolization of political power, land, skilled
trades, and all other forms of rights, property, and privilege by whites,
including immigrants. Combined with the ready availability of land
opened up by the devastating Indian wars, until the end of the
nineteenth century the majority of whites avoided proletarianization
and instead became bourgeois or petit bourgeois property holders of
one kind or another.

Although in the colonial days many European immigrants started out

as indentured servants, the vast majority, or at least their offspring,
eventually settled into independent farming, independent trades, small
businesses, or better. It was not until the 1840s that an industrial
proletariat of any size began to develop. And virtually all of this small
proletariat was constituted by European immigrants who, in turn, came
to play a key role in the developing trade unions and urban political
machines, thus developing certain levers of power to defend and
expand their rights. By the time of Chinese immigration in the 1850s,
the United States was just beginning to deal with massive immigration
from Europe and sharp ethnic/national conflict. Nativism had just been
born.

Finally by way of background, the United States grabbed almost half of

Mexican territory through the U.S.–Mexico War of 1848 and thereby
expanded its own boundaries to the Pacific Ocean. The war highlighted
the harsh dynamic of settler colonialism that dominated relations
between whites and Mexicans in the Southwest in the nineteenth
century. Although the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the war
guaranteed “all the rights of citizenship of the United States” to
Mexicans who chose to remain in the Southwest, in practice it was
routinely violated as white settlers used everything from legal
maneuvers to lynching to dispossess Mexicans of land and power
throughout the area.

Phase 1: From Racially Coerced Labor Force to Exclusion

It was into the above situation that the early Chinese immigrants
unwittingly thrust themselves. The Gold Mountain had a racial cordon
and a developing ethnic/nationality one as well. The experience of the
Chinese in California in the nineteenth century was to break new
ground.

Contrary to the myth that the early Chinese were part of the odious
coolie labor trade that flourished between 1847 and 1874, most of the
early Chinese immigrants bought their tickets to the United States on
credit and were not contract laborers per se. Once they paid off their
debts, they were more or less free. And, owing to the rather free-
flowing, frontier character of Gold Rush-era California, as well as the
crying shortage of labor, racial constraints were not nearly so
entrenched or immediate as in the more settled parts of the country.

However, the shortage of labor and the grab for land and gold of this
period in California were also prime conditions for the reproduction of
racism. The white people of California, although themselves new
colonists to the area only recently conquered by war from Mexico and
many of them recent immigrants to the United States, immediately
asserted their presumed white right to these and all other resources
and/or positions of privilege over and above the Native Americans,
Californios, Mexicanos, Chinese, and other Latin Americans who made
up the California population at the time. And in this, the full force of
existing U.S. racial law and custom not surprisingly backed them.

The Making of ‘Aliens Ineligible to Citizenship’

Although California was an antislavery territory dominated by “free
soilers,” attempts to subordinate the Chinese came forthwith. But
determining the precise social status of the Chinese and their place in
U.S. society was neither automatic nor unanimous. Whites were
divided among themselves between those (mainly capitalists) who
desired easy access to cheap Chinese labor and those (mainly labor,
that is whitelabor) who wished them excluded from the country. They
were stymied by the fact that existing law covered only Negroes,
whites, and American Indians, not Asians of any sort, by the unusual
combination of foreignness and non-whiteness that the Chinese
seemed to present, and by the fact that white California’s racial
conditions and concerns did not completely match those of the federal
government. These were conditions they had to sort through, by
means of political and ideological struggle, with tremendous, though
often overlooked, opposition from the Chinese themselves.

It is this process that constitutes what is here referred to as the

“racing,” “racialization,” or “racial formation” of the Chinese into Asian
Americans. This process eventually produced a social category of a
new type, one that was neither simply national/ethnic nor strictly
racial, but a combination of the two: by the end of the nineteenth
century, the Chinese were racialized as “aliens (hence national)
ineligible to citizenship (based on race).”
At key junctures the U.S. state has defined racial groups and dictated
the race relations of which they are part. But it has done so not in a
vacuum, but in accordance with racialized socio-economic and political
struggles. The culmination of the process of developing the racial
category appropriate to the Chinese, not surprisingly, paralleled and
eventually settled the fight over whether or not to exclude Chinese
from entering the country and/or attaining U.S. citizenship.

As the vast majority of the early Chinese headed for the gold mines,
California’s first assertion of white supremacy against the Chinese
focused on control of the mines. In 1850, California passed the Foreign
Miners Tax. The letter of this tax was nativist and applied to all
foreigners. In practice it was mainly collected from the Chinese in an
attempt to drive them from the mines. This contradiction undermined
its usefulness as social policy or law. Still, once the Hall case (more on
this below) and common practice made clear that the Chinese had no
protection of any sort, they were regularly victimized by white miners
and extorted by tax collectors.

Another attempt to define the legal status of Chinese took racial, not
nativist, form. In late 1853, a “free white citizen” named George Hall
was convicted of murdering a Chinese man, but the next year the
California Supreme Court reversed the conviction on the grounds that
Hall had been “convicted upon the testimony of a Chinese person.”

The chief justice ruled that Indians had originated from Asia before
crossing the Bering Strait and that therefore the laws barring
testimony by Indians applied to the “whole of the Mongolian race,” that
Chinese were covered by the generic term “Black” and that the court
should not turn “loose upon the community” the Chinese “whose
mendacity is proverbial; a race of people whom nature has marked as
inferior, and who are incapable of progress or intellectual
development...” (People v. Hall). Here was convoluted American racial
logic attempting to grapple with the “racing” of a set of people seen as
entirely foreign. No concern whatsoever was evinced for the Chinese
murder victim. Again, the Chinese were stripped of crucial
constitutional rights, but the means for doing so were inadequate and
inconsistent.

Soon the revolutionary Reconstruction Congress passed the Fourteenth

Amendment followed by the Civil Rights Act of 1870. The act expressly
gave Chinese the right to testify in court and forbade the imposition
upon them of discriminatory “penalties, taxes, licenses and exactions
of every kind.” In addition, the Burlingame Treaty of 1868 between the
United States and China guaranteed the right of emigration between
the two countries. Together, these hindered white California’s ability to
institutionalize racially the social position of the Chinese.
The original U.S. Constitution defined naturalization as available only to
“free, white persons,” but the Civil Rights Act of 1870 finally extended
the right of naturalization to “persons of African nativity or descent.”
Congress debated Chinese naturalization in the course of the
Reconstruction era civil rights debates, but that august body of white
men declined to extend citizenship rights to Asians. Asians were
defined as “aliens ineligible to citizenship,” which became the new
racial-national legal category to exclude Asians from entering the
United States, owning land, etc.

By 1880, Reconstruction was defeated and the federal government

joined the anti-Chinese movement. It legalized Jim Crow, reversed the
Civil Rights Act, and negotiated a new treaty with China that paved the
way for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

In the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Alien Land Laws of the 1910s
(which deprived Asians of the right to own land), the U.S. racial system
also settled on its basic racial categorization of Chinese and other
Asians: that of being “aliens ineligible to U.S. citizenship.” This
definition applied only to Asians and became the perfect legal grounds
systematically to identify and discriminate against them, a racial
category of a distinctive type. This category was new in that it
incorporated a non-indigenous, non-white, non-black group into the
U.S. racial system. It was also new in that the terms “aliens” and
“naturalization rights” explicitly incorporated nationality as well as
“race” into it.

Racially Coerced Labor and Class Struggles

This racialization process was crucial to what I see as the first phase of
the Asian-American experience, that of a racially coerced labor force.
Asian Americans were systematically stripped of their political,
economic, cultural, and citizenship rights and thereby condemned to
be a vulnerable labor force that was made available to white capital at
a price much cheaper than white labor.

Although the lower wages and substandard living conditions the

Chinese were forced to accept certainly increased the profits of white
capitalists, there was much more significance to the racially coerced
labor force than short-term “superprofits.” In fact, turning the Chinese
into a racially coerced labor force was a fundamental condition for the
development of capitalism in California. At that time, labor was so
scarce and land so plentiful that free people had better alternatives
than to become wage slaves. As with slavery and sharecropping in the
U.S. South, coercing people of color into serving as labor was central to
the primitive accumulation and the early accumulation of capital in
California; they were barred from owning land and forced to become
the labor counterpart to (white) capital in mining, railroads, agriculture,
and factories, which propelled California’s booming economy and
helped forge the first continent-wide national economy.

But it wasn’t only the white capitalists who benefited. The racial
cordoning of Asians also enabled non-capitalist whites to monopolize
small businesses, independent trades and farms, and privileged
positions within the workforce, not to speak of land, education, and
political power. This is what Harry Chang called the racially
differentiated process of proletarianization.

Unfortunately, even this was not good enough for white labor. Through
their trade unions and political organizations, they were actually the
loudest and most organized voices demanding the complete expulsion
and exclusion of the Chinese from the United States. However, a
careful look at the “white workers” who led the anti-Chinese
movement reveals that the most organized and vocal section were
actually independent craftsmen or highly paid skilled workers, not
regular wage workers, who in the nineteenth and early twentieth
century commonly joined the same skilled craft unions and indeed
dominated the U.S. trade union movement until the 1930s.

These white independent producers and craftsmen did not compete

with the Chinese for factory or field jobs. What they feared was that
factory based capitalist industry or agribusiness, basing itself on semi-
free Chinese labor, would successfully displace their small businesses
or farms, independent trades, or highly paid skilled labor jobs: in short,
that their small-scale petit bourgeois production and trades would be
undermined by capitalist enterprises and they themselves might be
proletarianized. Thus the status of Chinese labor became a significant
issue in the class struggle between small, independent producers
(miners, artisans, and farmers) and large-scale capitalist enterprises.

At the same time most unskilled white workers also joined the crusade
to exclude the Chinese in order to increase their own employment
opportunities and to fulfill their own concepts of white supremacy. The
widespread participation, indeed leadership, of white workers in the
movement to exclude the Chinese points to the folly of theories that
would constrict racism to the oppression of workers of color by white
capitalists. It shows that, to the contrary, white labor is often not just a
simple description of the color of some workers, but a social category
reflecting the fact that white workers and their unions have all too
often expressly fought for the interests of white workers as against
both white capitalists (some of whom may have preferred having
cheap, exploitable Chinese labor ready-to-hand) and against workers of
color.
Rather than fight white capital for equality and build solidarity among
all workers, white labor demanded the exclusion of Chinese labor from
the country to advance the condition of white workers at their
expense. Here we had a classical racist trade union tradition: white
workers (skilled and unskilled) banding together in unions and political
organizations in the name of “Americanism” and “free (white) labor” to
defend their privileges over non-white workers.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was a culmination of the attempt to

create a cross-class, nationwide white consensus to define legally the
Chinese place in U.S. life, thereby forcing the country to come to grips
with how to handle the intersection of race and nationality. For the first
time in U.S. history, a group was excluded from immigrating by (white)
immigrants and former immigrants themselves. On one hand, the act
was clearly based on nationality, as it excluded a group from
immigrating to this country. On the other hand, it was clearly racial: it
excluded the Chinese specifically because they were not white. Once
verging on 20 percent of California’s population, the ensuing anti-
Chinese riots and Exclusion Act drove most Chinese laborers out of the
country and prevented their reentry.

In the fifty years to follow, the U.S. forced every Asian nationality to
follow virtually the same pattern as the Chinese, albeit in truncated
form. At first, a significant wave would be allowed entry to serve as
racially coerced, cheap labor, especially for California agriculture, then
the group would be excluded. The 1917 Immigration Act denied Asian
Indians entry. Despite the rising power of the Japanese in the Pacific,
Japanese nationals were excluded from the United States by the
Immigration Act of 1924 which barred the entry of “aliens ineligible to
citizenship.” By extension, this act also served to exclude Koreans, as
the Japanese colonial administration in Korea applied it to them.
At first, the Filipinos could not be excluded due to the fact that the
Philippines was a U.S. “territory” (read colony) and its people were
thereby “wards,” sometimes called “nationals” of the United States.
Consequently, they were legally neither “citizens” nor “aliens.”
Ironically, this was resolved by the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1935,
which simultaneously granted “Commonwealth” status with promises
of eventual independence in 1946 to the Philippines and immediately
cut Filipino immigration to the United States to fifty persons per year.

Thus the Chinese experience in the nineteenth century produced a

new racial category—“aliens ineligible to citizenship”—and a new form
of racism—exclusion—which would be applied to virtually all of the
Asian nationalities that were to immigrate to the United States until
after the Second World War. It fundamentally structured the social and
political rights of peoples of Asian descent once here until the 1960s. It
was this common history of being considered racially inferior and not
assimilable that forged the distinct (and often mutually hostile) Asian
nationalities into a new panethnic racial group: Asian Americans.

Phase 2: Exclusion and the Racial/Ethnic Enclaves

However, exclusion was not only an immigration restriction. It became
a unique form of racism that also socially defined the situation of the
remaining Asians inside the country, as well as those who managed to
slip through after exclusion until 1965. Unlike blacks who were
economically integrated into the center of the U.S. economy (albeit in
extremely oppressive ways) and the Native Americans who mainly
remained outside U.S. society as a whole, the Chinese, and then the
other Asian groups in somewhat different degrees, were excluded from
the mainstreams of U.S. society and instead confined to ethnic
enclaves. The Asian ethnic enclaves thus were also products of both
racial and nationality discrimination.

The Structure of Dual Domination

One of the prime results of Asian exclusion was the development of
what L. Ling-chi Wang calls “the structure of dual domination.” What
this extremely useful concept refers to is that the ruling circles of not
only the United States but also of China, Japan, Korea, and the
Philippines developed fairly elaborate political, economic, and social
institutions to dominate and control their respective emigrants in the
United States; Asians in the United States were oppressed both by U.S.
and homeland elites.

To varying degrees, the home countries of many European immigrants

to the United States also tried to influence their emigrants. But the
special conditions of exclusion facing Asians produced a unique racist
isolation within the U.S. structure and simultaneously rendered these
isolated communities subject to customs, laws, organizations, and
institutions from the home countries.

In fact, the two structures were mutually reinforcing. The home

countries’ main aim was to retain the political, economic, and cultural
loyalty of their overseas communities, while the principal interest of
the United States was to retain its racially oppressive, especially
exclusionary, policies and occasional access to cheap Asian labor,
predominately in agriculture. Thus, the United States was usually
happy to stay out of the internal workings of the Asian communities so
long as they stayed within bounds of its broader dictates.

Home-country elites also took advantage of the racist isolation of

Asians in America to extend their influence and control over these
communities. For example, excluded from participation in almost all
American institutions, traditions, and organizations, the Chinese
community was rife with district, family, and clan associations, as well
as secret societies, schools, public festivals and rituals, and China-
based political organizations. At the apex of this pyramid, the Chinese
Benevolent Association (in some places known as the Six Companies)
ruled over the Chinese-American communities. The Six Companies, in
turn, was an instrument of the Kuomintang (China’s Nationalist Party)
which, as an ally of the United States against the Chinese Communists,
was given almost free reign over the overseas Chinese up to and
including regular violations of the Constitutional rights of those who it
perceived opposed them.

To one degree or another, all the Asian communities in the United

States were faced with a “dual structure of domination” in which a
homeland government or political party was allowed by the United
States to be its junior partner and overseer with a great range of
powers to develop and enforce the interests both of U.S. racism and
overseas loyalty. These dual structures were especially strong during
the exclusion/enclave period, and only in the current phase of Asian-
American history are they being broken down. Dual domination, like
exclusion, is a unique combination of racial and national oppression.

Exclusion, Enclaves, and the Class Composition of Asians

Exclusion also had a major impact on the gender and class
compositions of the Asian communities, which continues to resonate
today.

First of all, since the vast majority of the first immigrants of each of the
Asian nationalities were male laborers who left their families behind,
exclusion tended to freeze in place the overwhelming male
composition of these communities and stunted the growth of a U.S.-
born Asian population.

Second, anti-Asian hostility and riots, combined with exclusion, forced

the Asian peoples to band together into Japantowns, Chinatowns, and
Manilatowns where the prevailing conditions promoted a large class of
small entrepreneurs (merchants, farmers, labor contractors,
restaurateurs, etc.) and the political and social power of that class over
the workers. As regards the Chinese, for example, prior to exclusion
the majority lived in agricultural areas where, by Sucheng Chan’s
calculations, the business and labor-contracting elite seldom exceeded
15 percent of the community. Exclusion virtually eliminated Chinese
laborers in small western towns and left only a smattering of Chinese
restaurant or laundry owners. And it drove the majority together into
Chinese enclaves within the cities where entrepreneurs and
professionals constituted some 40 percent.

Third, the exclusion acts banned Asian laborers, but allowed

merchants, students, and their wives or families to enter the United
States, thus further distorting the class composition of the
communities.

Thus, the Chinatowns, Manilatowns, and Japantowns that emerged

were not so much the products of “natural” social forces as the
distorted outgrowth of immigration and naturalization policies that
discriminated against Chinese as a people in general and against
specific classes among them in particular.

For reasons that no one has satisfactorily explained, Filipinos were

neither enclaved nor did they develop an entrepreneurial class on the
scale of the Chinese or Japanese. Instead, many Filipinos remained
migrant farm workers for agribusiness on the West Coast. Their
enclaves tended to be in agricultural areas and their urban
communities tended to be adjuncts to or merged with Chinatowns. The
situation of the Filipinos thus remained that of the first phase: racially
coerced labor for agricultural capital.

The Japanese also remained a disproportionately agricultural folk until

their racist internment during the Second World War, but they were
only briefly forced into the role of cheap labor. Japanese in California
were soon able to carve out niches as farmers and shopkeepers. The
Japanese also formed sizable urban Japantowns in Los Angeles and San
Francisco with class characteristics similar to the Chinatowns.

While this Japanese economic advance is often attributed to the

strategy of ethnic enterprise and ethnic solidarity, the Japanese were
also the lucky recipients of a major piece of historical happenstance.
Just as the Japanese were arriving in the United States, the
development of irrigation in California opened the way for intensive
agriculture and a shift from grain to fruit and vegetable production.
Between 1879 and 1909, the value of crops from intensive agriculture
skyrocketed from just 4 percent to 50 percent of all crops grown in
California. This transformation occurred under a market stimulus
created by two key technological achievements of the period—the
completion of the national railroad lines and the invention of the
refrigerated car. Consequently, for the first time perishable fruit and
vegetables from California could be sold almost anywhere in the United
States.

Japanese farmers were able to capitalize on these developments. As

early as 1910 they produced 70 percent of California’s strawberries,
and by 1940 they grew 95 percent of fresh snap beans, 67 percent of
fresh tomatoes, and 95 percent of the celery. In 1900, California’s
Japanese farmers owned or leased twenty-nine farms totaling 4,698
acres; five years later the acreage jumped to 61,858; and by 1910 it
reached 194,742 acres. Even the California Alien Land Law of 1913,
which prohibited “aliens ineligible to citizenship” from owning land or
leasing it for more than three years failed to stem this trend. By 1920
Japanese farmers owned or leased 458,056 acres. Despite protests
from Japan, a U.S. ally in the First World War, a California initiative
passed in 1920 closed the loopholes in the 1913 act, and Japanese
landholdings dropped dramatically.

Small entrepreneurs (and later, their often college-educated children)

were only one side of the coin. On the other side were the majority of
Asians who were workers, but workers in extremely oppressive
conditions. They were largely excluded from jobs with mainstream
white employers and the government by racist laws and practices, and
by the lack of English-speaking skills. Thus, they had little choice but to
work for Asian employers as menial laborers in restaurants, garment
factories and other sweatshops, laundries, farms, and grocery and dry
goods stores. These employers were not only non-union, they paid
extremely poor wages and provided awful working conditions based
not on the standard of American business, but on a standard unique to
their captive ethnic labor force.

In short, the period of exclusion which lasted until the change in

immigration laws in 1965 produced ethnic Asian enclaves. These were
stratified between an unusually large merchant/business class tied to
conservative or reactionary home governments and backed by the
“dual structure of domination” and workers who were isolated in these
enclaves or agricultural areas, stripped of their rights by the combined
power of U.S. racism and home-country dictatorships. The latter were
forced to work almost exclusively for compatriot businessmen under
working and pay conditions that bore no resemblance to that of the
mainstream of the U.S. working class.

The Consciousness of Asian Americans

From their first days on these shores, Asian Americans fought against
the discrimination they faced. Strikes, slowdowns, and legal actions
were common. It is little known, for example, that Filipino farm workers
actually initiated the famous grape boycott of the 1960s, which was
then joined by Mexican workers and tremendously amplified under the
leadership of Cesar Chavez. Most of these struggles were fought on a
nationality or class basis.

It was not until the late 1960s that a common racial/panethnic identity
took hold among Asian Americans. Several facts contributed to this
delay: different Asian nationalities immigrated in different historical
periods, they rarely lived or worked in the same geographical areas,
most were immigrants until the 1960s, and their native languages
were unintelligible to each other. Thus there was no amalgamation of
the Asian nationalities as their had been, say, among the different
African ethnicities under slavery (and that took many generations).
Although Asians in the United States fell victim to the same racial laws
and customs and followed the same racialized patterns, the
predominant consciousness remained ethnic/national, not panethnic or
racial.

The development of Asian-American consciousness took place in the

1960s when, for the first time, the majority of Asians in this country
were U.S. born. It was an explicitly political consciousness influenced
by the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of that era. And it was
cemented for many by the murderous racist dehumanization of Asians
exhibited by the U.S. government, press, and armed forces during the
Vietnam War. To be Asian American was not a simple recognition that
one had roots in Asia; it meant to reject the passive racist stereotype
embodied in the white-imposed term “Oriental” and to embrace an
active stance against war and racism. The people of color movements
of the 1960s led to the rejection of the term “Negro” in favor of “Black”
or “Afro-American” it produced the new concepts of “La Raza” and
“Chicano” and it gave rise to “Asian American.”

Unbeknownst to many people, including many movement people, the

Asian-American movement of the late 1960s and 1970s was of mass
proportions and dramatically transformed the political (and personal)
consciousness and institutional infrastructure of the different Asian-
American communities. In addition, influenced by the powerful
Vietnamese, Chinese, and Korean communist parties of the time, many
Asian-American activists turned to Marxism and became a major
presence in the U.S. communist and socialist movements of the period.

However, neither racism nor racial consciousness among Asians has

ever supplanted either the consciousness or the reality of nationality.
Indeed, the tremendous increase in immigration since 1965 has
reproduced an overriding foreign-born majority among Asians residing
in the United States and has further strengthened national/ethnic
consciousness. Still, Asian-American consciousness is far from
extinguished; it retains both ideological power and institutional
expression in the many Asian-American progressive organizations that
thrive today and will undoubtedly increase and find new expressions as
the nativity of Asian Americans changes in the decades to come. The
intersection of race and nationality among Asians is an ongoing
formation, subjectively and objectively.

Afterword
The racialization of nationality was a critical event in U.S. history that
has shaped today’s social formation and even impacted its foreign
policy. It was extended, with different particularities, to millions of
Latino and Caribbean immigrants, and now Arabs, South Asians, and
Africans, in addition to East Asians—all of whom are in its throes. And
as the United States acceded to superpower status in the course of the
twentieth century, this racialization also took on a potent international
dimension in the innumerable racist U.S. interventions in the third
world. Today’s “war on terrorism” is, among other things, also a war on
racialized immigrants as the Patriot Act and other new laws treat them
as suspected enemy combatants simply because of their race and
nationality.

Of course the intersection of race and nationality is not static. The

racial formation of Asian Americans (not to speak of many others)
since the Immigration Reform of 1965 has been very different than the
pre-1965 period. The civil rights achievements of the 1960s and 1970s,
the structural change of U.S. capitalism to what is sometimes called
“post-industrial society,” the immigration reform of 1965, and
globalization have reshaped the Asian-American communities and their
status in U.S. society. Just as the system of legalized discrimination,
disenfranchisement, and segregation of blacks has been overthrown,
so the categories of “aliens ineligible to citizenship” and “exclusion”
have been cast aside. Because of their educational level, Asian
Americans, along with white women, were probably the main
beneficiaries of affirmative action.

Immigration reform has enabled the Asian-American population to

explode from only about one million in 1965—mostly Chinese,
Japanese, and Filipinos—to something like 13 million, emanating from
numerous Asian countries today. Consequently, the majority of Asian
Americans today have no family connection to Asian-American history
prior to 1980.

Still, the provisions of the 1965 immigration act and subsequent

legislation have reinforced the class trends set in motion by exclusion.
These laws allow Asian immigrants to enter this country primarily
based on their family connections to the disproportionately
merchant/professional population already here (family reunification) or
based on their unique technical or professional skills. Consequently the
highly educated and middle-class section of the Asian-American
population has been reproduced on a bigger scale. At the same time,
many of those entering based on family reunification are workers with
few resources and limited English-speaking skills, so the numbers of
isolated sweatshop workers in Asian enclaves have also grown.
The working-class section of Asian Americans has been expanded by
Southeast Asians who entered the United States not under immigration
law, but under refugee law after the failed U.S. wars of aggression in
Indochina. Although some of these refugees were from the defeated
elites, most of them were poor. The socio-economic profiles of
Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, and Hmong in the United States
are very similar to those of Native Americans, blacks, and Latinos.

Thus Asian Americans today have the highest median education and
household income levels but at the same time unusually high
percentages of Asians live in poverty and have minimal education. The
irony is that those Asian Americans who are said to make up the so-
called “model minority” achieved this status primarily due to the class
impacts of racist immigration laws and the civil rights victories, not
simply by “pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps.” Asian
Americans have worked hard, but who hasn’t? What is more important
is that immigration law and other forms of racism have had the ironic
effect of creating a community with an unusual number of middle-class
people.

Among the hard working are the millions of extremely poor Asian-
American workers who are often rendered invisible in the mythical
Asian success story. The many vibrant left and progressive Asian-
American organizations today tend to concentrate their organizing
efforts precisely among these immigrant workers, many of whom are
women. Class looms large in Asian-American politics.

After more than 400 years of racism sanctioned and enforced by the
state, the victories of the Civil Rights movement erased racial
categories from the official law of the land. This was a tremendous
victory. But many of the oppressive patterns and disparities set in
place by those centuries of official racism continue as major forces in
U.S. life, reproduced by enduring racialized cultural and economic
structures unless actively interrupted. Overtly racist laws have been
replaced by a plethora of covertly racial laws and legislation, from the
Patriot Act to mandatory sentencing to the strict limits on
desegregation and affirmative action, and discriminatory immigration
and refugee law. We have come a long way, but there is a harsh road
ahead. Unraveling the distinct dynamics of race, nationality, class, and
gender, as well as their complicated intersections, will be critical to
advancing racial justice in the decades to come.
Elizabeth Martinez and Enriqueta Longeaux y
Vasquez, “Viva La Raza, Raza, Raza...”
People once said that the Mexican-American was one of the United
States’ best-kept secrets. We, the second largest minority group in
this country, were almost unknown people outside our own
communities and we were hardly to be seen in the history books. No
one even knew how many of us lived here. But today we are
becoming aware as a people, we are finding ourselves as a people, we
are uncovering our history. And as we do so, we are arising to be
heard. We want to be heard by all but we especially want our own
people to hear-and to rise in united pride, united action.

Across the country we see the stirring of our people everywhere. From
Denver to Delano, from the fields of Texas to the big city barrios of Los
Angeles, from Oregon to Florida and in the middle states of Wisconsin,
Indiana, Kansas, everywhere the Raza lives and works, there is
movement. With the rousing Chicano handclap and cheers of “Raza,
Raza, Raza, Raza,” and the stamping of feet, we can feel that a new
era has begun for the Chicano. We feel it in the air, it is written in the
wind, it is on people’s faces everywhere. Like a volcano we stir, and in
the rumble we hear “Chicano Power,” “Brown Is Beautiful,” “Somas
Hijos del Sol,” (We are Children of the Sun), “Viva La Raza,” “Viva
Zapata,” and the rumble and the echoes grow louder with more
harmony and unison each day.

Our people are on the march in all levels of life, awakening and
demanding justice in the schools, in employment, civil rights, housing,
the welfare program, the churches, on the land, in the military, and
even behind prison walls. After decades of being lynched and
displaced; after decades of being herded into migrant camps for mere
survival; after decades of being pushed off our land and being forced
into the cities where we end up on welfare; after decades of being
punished and shamed for speaking our own language and living our
own culture; after decades of giving our bodies for dying in wars that
are not ours, our people are saying BASTA YA! ENOUGH!

We want to determine our own destiny. We do demand justice and

equality within this country, but we want to decide that equality on
our own terms. In all the stirring and movement that can be seen
today, there is something more than a drive for “first-class
citizenship.” There is a deep probing-a deep search for self. We move
to be ourselves: to be brown, to assert our Mexican roots. We say that
we have millions of brothers and sisters to the south of us and our
strength lies in the fact that we are a majority and not a minority in
America-the continent. We seek to be something other than white,
Anglo, gringo, something other than what the majority of this country
imposes upon us and would like us to be. To the Chicano of today,
equality does not mean becoming a carbon copy of white middle-class
America. It means “to be” in the deepest sense.

As archaeologists dig up the cities of old Mexico and of the

southwestern United States, we are bringing up our true past from its
long burial and listening to old voices. We marvel as the hidden
treasures of our farsighted forefathers come to light again. We learn
more and more that our cultural roots have long been here, and that
the border between Mexico and the United States is but an imaginary
line-a line which does not break up culture and kinship ties. We are
rediscovering our Indian roots and heritage that date back twenty-five
thousand years. We see the common elements that unite us and
refuse to be divided any longer as the white man has tried to keep us
divided for centuries. With these discoveries, we know that we do not
need to try to be something we are not. We do not need to live in
conflict with ourselves.

We call ourselves by various names today but most of them suggest

the new affirmation of who and what we are. “La Raza” means in
Spanish “the race” and stands for the blending of predominantly Indian
and Spanish peoples who were our ancestors-the blend that we are
today. The essence of La Raza is that we are a mestizo people, a mixed
people, a blend of races and culture.

Today among many young men and women, the most popular name
is Chicano (or Chicana). We are not sure about the origin of this
word. Some say Chicano is derived from a word used by the Aztecs
which they pronounced “Meshicano.” Since the Spaniards had no
“sh” sound in their language, they tended to write the word as
Mexicano. However, the last part of the word as pronounced by the
Aztecs survived— “shicano” or Chicano.

It isn’t clear, in this theory, whether “Meshicano” referred to the Aztecs

themselves-our indigenous ancestors-or to the children of mixed Indian
and Spanish parentage, which is what we are. But there does seem to
be good reason to think the word is old. Then, some thirty years ago,
“Chicano” became common again in the slang of the streets-especially
in California. Because of that “lower-class” association, many
conservative Raza have not liked the term. The young people like it
and have adopted it, “because it is something that I choose to be
called, not something Mexico chose to call me or, even more
important, not something the gringo has named me.”
There are Raza who call themselves “Mexican-Americans.” This is a
term most often used by the white society, along with “Spanish-
surnamed” or “Spanish-speaking Americans.” The problem with
Mexican-American is that it suggests Mexicans are something
different from Americans, when in fact we were “Americans” long
before the pilgrims or anybody else from Europe landed. Of course,
“America” is a European term itself. But if we use the word, and we
don’t have much choice, then we should remember that America is a
continent-not a country. We must realize that the United States has
assumed the name of the whole continent for itself, much to the
disgust of many Latin Americans. The “America Love It or Leave It”
slogan is laughed at by Chicanos and Indians, who say: “I buy that.
When are they going to leave?”

And there are still more terms used by our people to describe
themselves: Indo-Hispanos, Latinos, Hispanos. It depends on what
village, town, city, or state, what age group, what social class, the
person belongs to. In many mountain villages, where families date
back for several hundred years, some of our people call themselves
“Hispanos” or even “Spanish.” The term Spanish-American is preferred
by many middle-class Raza who have “made it” and wish to relive the
gentlemanly patron of the era of Spanish colonization. Among our
people the most widely used word is probably Mexicano-not the
English “Mexican” but our Spanish word, Mexicano, which has a
brotherly feeling of warmth and acceptance.

This discussion of names is not just a matter of arguing over words. It

reflects our whole struggle for what some people call “identity” -the
affirmation of who and what we really are; and learning to be proud of
it instead of ashamed. This new pride has come to us from the feeling
we today call Chicanismo. It is often a difficult thing for the Anglo to
understand. The concept and understanding that if you do not know
your roots, your past culture, you are nothing.

White America might understand our demands for civil rights or decent
pay, because that is demanding what is ours under their rules. But it
cannot comprehend the idea that we may not want to be part of the
so-called “mainstream of society.” It does not occur to them that we
may frown upon the non-culture imposed on us. That we may not
totally believe that life consists of working for money to buy things.
That we may not want to sell ourselves to “get ahead in the world,”
because in the United States that means forgetting other human
beings for the sake of a new color TV. That we have joy in being what
we are, in discovering ourselves. That we are a very strong people.

We have found sanity in being Chicano, for it is in our Chicanismo that

we have come to see all of the cancer in the dominant white society
and we know that we don’t want to be that sick. We want a society
that will function for human beings, we have solutions and we refuse
to become robots that walk in death.

One of the best ways to judge the values of a society is by looking at

how it defines freedom. The Anglo society, like other Western societies,
thinks mostly in terms of freedom from something. The heritage of La
Raza talks in terms of freedom to be something-to be productive, to be
loving and participate in care for others, to be alive as a fun human
being. It is like the difference between being free from responsibilities,
and being free to have responsibilities. We thrive on human
involvement and devoting time to others, be they our family or close
friends. The majority society may think that when they put their old
people in “rest homes,” they are freed from a burden. For us, caring
and learning from our elders is a part of living. After an, if one does not
love and care for one’s family and others, what else is there worth
doing?

These are but a few of the beliefs and reasons for our new pride in
being Raza. Our new sense of identity is not just a matter of taking
pride in talking our own language or eating our own food and loving
our own music. Chicanismo is carnalismo-blood brotherhood and
sisterhood, a feeling of unity among our people. And this goes beyond,
to a feeling for all people. “Mi casa es tu casa” or “Esta es tu casa” –
my house is your house, this is your house-the phrase expresses a
basic openness toward people as fellow creatures on this planet.
Today we often hear the Mexicano or the Indian described as
“passive,” “humble,” or “meek” when in fact the person is simply open
and honest and not playing the role game of the Western world. Many
times words such as these show us the conflict between cultures. In
English, “humble” means low in station, unimportant, like a servant. In
Spanish, humilde describes a person with a deep feeling for others, a
respect and a kind of human concern. It is a good thing to be called. It
helps explain the endurance of La Raza and the Indians-an endurance
far beyond anything the white society understands or is capable of
feeling.

An these values we assert as we cease to be the nation’s “best-kept

secret.” And as we stand up to speak, to be heard, the world has
begun to listen. For although we may be looked upon as a minority
here, we are a minority with an ancient geography and history on our
side. A minority with a history of our own, that was here long before
the “majority.” A minority that, like the Indians, has specific legal
treaties with the United States to protect our rights as a people.
We are, above all, a “minority” with indestructible deep roots in the
land. The relationship of Raza to the land is one of the most important
facts of history. Raza relates strongly to the land, not only in terms of
written treaties and in terms of ownership but also in terms of the land
being an ever-existing power; a spiritual link; a source of life and a
hope that never ceases.

La Raza has drawn a deep strength from many of these basic feelings
and we find them contained in the concept of Aztlan-the name of the
Chicano nation the homeland which many of us are committed to
rebuilding. The homeland of Aztlan lies not only in the countryside but
also in the cities, everywhere that Raza may be. Rebuilding it means
not only claiming our rights, but restoring our unity as a people,
affirming our historic values, our culture, our spirit-the source of our
enduring strength.

As La Raza becomes more alive, more awake, more intense, the

dominant society with all its power looks on in puzzlement, wonder and
fear. Sometimes it tries to crush us with brute force, and sometimes it
tries to buy us off. And all the time, it is making more and more
“studies” of us, more evaluations more investigations. Today we are
being studied, surveyed, observed, and studied again. Colleges have
made studies agencies have made studies, everybody is studying us.
And what is our answer to all this studying and surveying? All around,
La Raza is saying BASTA YA!

We are learning more and more that the ones who need to be studied
are the majority society and its freak mentality that guides this
country. We have learned that it is not we who are the problem, but
the gringo mind. We have understood his system and his misguided
attitudes, we know well how he operates and thinks. We have learned
what he stands for. We are tired of listening to him talk about us. We
are going to be the ones to talk about us. We are going to make our
own studies, tell our own stories, write our own books. We are going
to speak for ourselves-and in a language that La Raza understands,
with concepts and ideas that existed long before English was used in
the Southwest.

As we affirm our worth as a people, as we become more and more

conscious that we have a noble past, a rich culture, and beautiful
human values, we begin to wonder why they built a bad image of us,
why they tried to destroy something that is ours-something that is
beautiful. And as we find some answers, we question even more and
more and more. WHY? WHY? WHY? The more we look, the more
answers we find.
It becomes clear that in the search for the truth about ourselves, we
must recognize and throw off the BIG LIES of the Anglo society and its
institutions. We must question the actions and teachings of every
branch of that society. By institutions we mean the political,
educational, spiritual, judicial, all of them, large and small. We must
tear away the shroud of distortion, hypocrisy, and just plain falsity that
has been wrapped around us-and all other oppressed peoples—for
centuries.

The biggest lie, the root of all the other lies, is that the Anglo belongs
here and we are the immigrants—that this country with all its wealth
should be the property of the gringo, and we are foreigners in his land.
The gringo has called Mexicans “wetbacks” because there is a river
that draws a so-called border between Mexico and the U.S.A., and
people have often crossed it by swimming or just walking. The gringo
forgets about his own great swim across the Atlantic Ocean, when our
ancestors had already been here for centuries. Among Raza, we know
who the real “wetback” is.

From the first lie comes still another: that only the Anglo society’s
values-competition, “getting ahead,” consuming-are good values, and
that this is a way of life that everybody should accept. White makes
right, so get with it, they say. But what about our ancestors and their
way of life? Is it possible that these so-called savages could teach the
white man some basic lessons? Is it possible that they have much to
tell Raza today, as we struggle to create a new society?

A vital part of the present Raza movement is uprooting those lies and
putting the truth back into history. The real history of our Raza is one
of the most important issues of the day for us. All other issues, all the
oppression we face, arise from the past. We cannot draw sharp lines
between past, present, and future, as many Western cultures do. We
have a different sense of time. We see that the occurrences of today
are the result of past history, and we need to reveal all that history in
order to build for the future. Because our roots and part of our ancestry
lie in America, we have a strong base on which to build our own
destiny.

To us, history is not just an abstract study of facts, but a study of

human beings-their societies and their ideas. Our history must be
treated as a history of peoples, cultures, and a land. This means
looking at history without the borderline between the United States
and Mexico, it means recognizing that the Southwest was once the
northern part of Mexico, it means seeing that there are links between
us and Mexico that have not, and cannot, be destroyed. So when we
speak of Mexico, we are speaking of a land before there were borders,
before there were the concepts of property and land ownership as the
Europeans know them. We cannot think of our history merely in terms
of the United States. Our history is largely a history of the natives of
this continent, a history of the very roots of civilization in America.

This brings us to another of the big lies: that American history began
with the arrival of the white man on this continent, and nothing really
important or worthwhile existed before that. Columbus “discovered”
America, Cortes “discovered” Peru-all the history books talk that way,
as if the Indians who lived here never existed or never had any kind of
civilization. They were labeled superstitious “savages” by ignorant
Europeans, who say that the Indians’ life style and values have no use
or meaning in today’s modern world. This is, of course, the way white
society looks at all of us-brown, black, red, yellow. The only history
worth talking about began with the white man, according to him.
Let us take a look at life in America before Columbus, for it is through
this that we will learn who the “savage” really is, and we will take pride
in realizing that we come from a very “civilized” people. Let us not look
just at the monuments people built or the wars they fought, but also at
the kind of human beings they were-how they related to the universe,
the land, and to each other; how they thought of life and death, how
the young and old related. Let us begin by learning and writing our
kind of history.
Arnoldo Garcia, “Toward a Left without
Borders: The Story of the Center for
Autonomous Social Action-General Brotherhood
of Workers”
A unique left organization of Mexican and Mexican-American workers
emerged in the 1960s whose story still waits to be told. Meanwhile, these
brief notes on its history by a former member should at least help to show
why it was such an important, pioneering project.

Over a brief ten-year period (1968-1978), Centro de Accion Social Autonomo-

Hermandad General de Trabajadores (CASA-HGT), the Center for Autonomous
Social Action-General Brotherhood of Workers, went from a traditional
mutualista or self-help center providing legal and other services as part of
organizing undocumented Mexican workers in California, to a national
organization rooting itself in broad working-class politics. Those politics were
based on Marxism-Leninism, third world revolutionary theories, international
solidarity, civil rights, and antiracism in the United States. CASA focused on
an issue that remains decisive to progressive social change: organizing with
and by the undocumented for equal rights. CASA-HGT was one of a few
socialist-led groups that took head-on one of the unforeseen impacts of
capitalist development: the creation of multinational communities and
migrant workers living at the crossroads of changing nation-states and
international working classes.

The number of people subject to different types of involuntary migration

across the world has been growing dramatically in recent decades, now
numbering 150 million-more than twice the number of people displaced by
the Second World War. This includes internally displaced persons, people
forced to flee their homes due to socially and politically generated strife and
ecological ruin within their country, refugees fleeing repression, and migrant
workers crossing international borders in search of work to survive. The roots
of involuntary displacement and labor migration lie in capitalist restructuring
and the creation of multinational labor pools, the draining of resources, and
the frayed social fabric left behind in the aftermath of colonialism and
imperialist “underdevelopment.”

The communist movements and parties have always prided themselves on

internationalism. However, when it came to workers crossing international
borders, the political and theoretical underpinnings of internationalism did
not keep pace or generate leadership with a shifting working class. This is a
general problem of Marxism and Leninism, which lacks a theory and analysis
of internationalism and working-class organization adequate to a situation
where capital’s national borders have become porous; and which is therefore
not well-equipped to struggle on behalf of a working class which is
multinational, multilingual, multicolored, and multi-legal, that is, holding the
varying statuses of recognized citizenship, legal residency, guest worker
status, and the undocumented.
U.S. working-class movements have especially excluded nonwhite lower-
strata workers from their organizing purview and from membership in their
institutions, organizations, and agenda. The demands of working-class
organizations and left formations of color have never been perceived as
representing the interests of the whole class. These theoretical exclusions by
the left flowed from the political marginalization of workers of color. Instead
of trying to analyze and understand the national, racial, ethnic, and economic
stratification of the U.S. working class as a result of the globalized nature or
imperialist roots of U.S. capital, the left most often tried to minimize the
significance of this segmentation for the goals and leadership of the working
class.

Demands that served people of color were labeled “minority” demands and
we could hear such theoretical formulations from left and communist sources
as “the working class and its minority allies,” as if “minorities” were
something other than a majority sector of the working class. It took a long
time for the left to understand this and even today many of its segments still
do not understand the theoretical dimensions or political ramifications of the
intersection of class, race, gender, nationality, ethnicity, and nation.

During the period between 1950 and 1965, the Mexican and Mexican-
American community in the United States underwent dramatic changes in its
composition. This signaled the start of the demographic revolution that has
transformed the United States in the last thirty years. Overwhelmingly
working class in composition, the Mexican and Mexican-American community
included foreign- and native-born U.S. citizens, legal residents, and the
undocumented. During the Second World War, the United States began the
Bracero Program to fill the labor shortage caused by the military mobilization.
This had a direct impact on the Mexican and Mexican-American community in
the United States and also contributed to new forms of racial and labor
stratification in general. In fact, migration of undocumented workers into the
United States was at an all time high during the Bracero Program,
underscoring the centrality this sector of the working class played and
continues to play in the U.S. economy. After the Second World War, the
United States institutionalized the importation of temporary guest workers,
even as a permanent part of the labor force in certain industries.

Responding to this changing climate, in 1951 the Hermandad Mexicana

Nacional was founded in California with the aim of organizing Mexican
workers-a precursor to CASA-HGT. There were other various failed attempts
to do this and they included Japanese and Filipino as well as Mexican farm
workers. The 1950s were also marked by the rise of the African-American civil
rights movement, the Chicano and indigenous peoples’ land rights struggles,
and other social movements.

The period 1960-1968 was crucial to the formation of the idea of CASA. The
black civil rights movement was in high gear and Mexican-American
organizing was reaching new levels in urban, labor, student, farm worker,
land, and civil rights issues. Chicano student organizations, such as the
Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO), the United Farm Workers
(UFW), the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA), and others began
gestating by the early 1960s. Amidst this political upheaval, the “newest”
political subject in the United States was the immigrant of color, especially
the undocumented immigrant. How were the different social and nationality
movements to address this far-reaching development, whose significance
was unperceived by the majority of people-of-color movements?

The left continued suffering deep-rooted color, racial, and nationality

blindness. It failed, as it often does today, to see how U.S. capitalist
socioeconomic development has depended on immigrant labor. The
importation of labor is a permanent aspect of U.S. capitalism. Its exploitation
was indispensable to the U.S.’s original accumulation of capital. From
indentured labor and racial slavery to contemporary migrant workers, the
integration of imported labor has been consistently framed by nationality and
racial stratification.

This deep-seated theoretical and political problem and complexity arises in a

different and more intense way when the left faces so-called illegal or
undocumented workers, especially migrants. Few working-class and left
organizations, if any, understood the issue or addressed it in substantive
ways during this period. Neither the UFW, which led the farm-worker
organizing movement, nor other Chicano movement organizations and
institutions wanted to take up the issue. The undocumented were seen as
potential or actual strikebreakers by the UFW at the time and its members
would often call the INS on the undocumented during their organizing work in
the fields. (The UFW adopted a policy at an early 1970s convention, which
Bert Corona addressed, recognizing the importance of organizing all farm
workers regardless of their immigration status.) As for some Chicano
movement groups, their tendency toward narrow nationalism belittled or
totally ignored the mojados mexicanos (wetbacks).

The formation of CASA-HGT was the result of the years of political,

community, and labor organizing experience of its founders, Bert Corona and
Soledad “Chole” Alatorre along with others, and reflected concern about the
undocumented sector of the working class. Alatorre had been a founder of
the Hermandad Mexicana Nacional. Corona was a political and organizational
innovator with deep roots in the labor movement and with ties to the U.S.
left. Before CASA, Corona helped found MAPA, which focused on education,
civil rights, and voting rights issues, including political empowerment. It was
a pioneering effort that gave political voice and direction to Mexican-
American community activists during the 1950s and 1960s. But it did not
prioritize workers’ rights, especially those of the undocumented.

An organizational and political vacuum existed. No organization was

addressing the rights of undocumented Mexican immigrants, and the
implications for organizing or for politics generally of this growing
phenomenon. The issue of Mexican workers in the United States brought to
the fore questions of nationality and class in unprecedented ways.
Immigrants, especially the undocumented, were not finding a place or voice
in the broader left, Chicano organizations, labor unions, and in farm worker
organizing. Building on the experience of the Hermandad Mexicana Nacional,
Corona and Alatorre brilliantly identified a strategic grassroots organizing
opportunity and moved on it. CASA-HGT emerged to fill this vacuum.

Launched in 1968, CASA-HGT was originally a mutualista organization, a self-

help social service agency that was also utilized as an organizing strategy
targeting undocumented Mexican workers and their families. During the first
five years, it included the merger of various Chicano and Mexicano groups
and provided legal services to undocumented workers assisting them in
regularizing their immigration status. CASA also provided politically oriented
rights education. Taking place in the ferment of the 1960s, different radical
and left tendencies, including nationalists, were attracted by CASA’s
conjugation of a class base with social justice and liberation aspirations.
CASA’s original program reflected the distinct challenges and obstacles that
Mexican immigrants, especially the undocumented, faced. CASA began
growing, chapters, local committees, and nucleos (or units) were formed in
different parts of the country. It provided a venue for protecting the rights of
the undocumented and also organized them as workers.

CASA’s development helped forge political organizing that reflected the

multinational nature of the U.S. working class and focused on the
undocumented. In many ways, CASA resembled the contradictory nature of
this period: workers, students, leftists, political exiles, trade unionists, and
veterans like Corona, identifying and converging on a critical problem
impacting primarily the Chicano community and its social movements. All
agreed that this had broad ramifications that could not be resolved by
various political initiatives addressing either working class or nationality
rights separately. CASA combined these two issues in a new way.

In the early 1970s, CASA-HGT began participating in the immigration

legislation debates of those years. A national immigration coalition was
formed and a part of its leadership eventually joined CASA. Many of the new
members joining CASA were activists who saw in third world revolutionary
movements, especially Cuba, and Marxism-Leninism, models and strategies
that could be emulated in the United States to transform our world.

The CASA-HGT bilingual newspaper, Sin Fronteras “Without Borders,” (its

masthead also proclaimed, “We are One because America [the continent] is
One”) had national distribution and printed thousands of copies at its peak.
Originally published in San Antonio, Texas, Sin Fronteras had been the
newspaper of the National Coalition for Fair Immigration Laws and Practices,
promoting its work and focusing primarily on immigration issues. Sin
Fronteras was later moved to Los Angeles as part of CASA-HGT’s transition
into a left-wing national organization. By 1973, CASA-HGT as a result of some
its newer members’ work on national immigration reform issues, began
engaging the left, developing notions of the “national question,” and posing
broader questions of political power and organization. By 1974, Bert Corona
and Chole Alatorre resigned mainly over differences in political organizing
strategies. The founders insisted on solely continuing the local organizing of
undocumented workers; while the emerging new leadership, headed up by
Antonio Rodriguez and others in Los Angeles, saw in CASA the kernel of a
movement-building process that was part-national liberation, part-Marxist-
Leninist, and part Magonista Mexican working-class organization (after the
Flores Magan brothers, anarcho-syndicalists leaders of the 1910--1920
Mexican Revolution). Corona and others re-adopted the name Hermandad
Mexicana Nacional for their organization and allowed the new leadership to
retain not only the name CASA but to accept responsibility for the legacy of
legal work it had embodied. The full name, CASA-HGT, was retained, signaling
the dual nature of the vision that guided the organization’s further
development until its demise less than four years later.

After Corona and Alatorre left, membership shifted, in part due to the
separation between CASA and the new HGT offshoot. The Hermandad
continued with CASA’s original mission of organizing locally and serving the
needs of immigrant communities and workers, with Corona as its head.
Meanwhile, the new CASA began developing radical political perspectives on
a broad range of issues-international solidarity, the nature of the Mexican
nationality in the United States, and a redefinition of the U.S. Mexico border
as a politically enforced division imposed on the Mexican people especially
impacting working class sectors in the United States. CASA defined its base
as “Mexicans in the United States” (which included Chicanos/Chicanas,
Mexicans, and Mexican Americans) and identified the undocumented worker
as strategic to fighting for democracy, equal rights, labor rights, and
liberation. The new CASA leadership particularly developed close relations
with the Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP), including organization-to-
organization exchanges and trainings. Some CASA members spent time in
Puerto Rico, while PSP members worked with CASA members in their locales.
Others had ties with leaders and parties in Mexico’s communist and left
movements. These influences helped CASA further develop its orientation
towards Marxism-Leninism, pushing it towards a party-building model of
organization and a different and maybe even more mature internationalist
approach to the U.S. working class anchored by its view of the centrality of
the undocumented, not only in the United States but in the entire
hemisphere.

The period 1976-1978 was one of decline for CASA and the Chicano
movement as a whole. CASA lost membership and unity of purpose. Various
estimates put CASA’s membership between 10,000 to 15,000 members at its
peak. CASA finally died before 1979 set in. The reasons for the various
divisions, splits, and declining membership call for an in-depth analysis by
those directly involved. Here we can just suggest a few. There were, first,
growing differences over the politics of the organization. Questions arose: Are
we a socialist organization or just committed to defending and promoting the
rights of the undocumented? Do we just organize Mexican workers or are we
a multinational organization? How do we develop organic Marxist-Leninist
positions on various issues facing the left and the Chicano movement? A
major split in the movement developed in the wake of the 1977 national
conference on immigration held in San Antonio, Texas; its roots certainly
preceded this period but flowered in the aftermath of this important
gathering. Maybe the conference was the last opportunity of the ebbing
Chicano movement and for various left and socialist forces attempting to
influence it for their own purposes--just like previous radical elements saw in
CASA the kernel of working-class political organization. Many questions have
to be asked as to why CASA almost came to a halt during the summer and
fall of 1977, when it launched into internal assessments that affected its
external work. By December 1977, the national leadership was divided along
at least three lines. Then key members, some responsible for the Sin
Fronteras newspaper-also representing key ideological and political
leadership as well-resigned at one of the final national coordinating
committee meetings.

Some of those differences hid other deep questions: what were the roles,
direct and indirect, of the Mexican and U.S. Communist Parties, Trotskyists,
and other U.S. left formations within CASA? I believed at the time that Carlos
Vasquez, who was editor of Sin Fronteras and in the leadership of CASA’s
National and Political commissions, represented a nondogmatic position that
said we should not become a Marxist-Leninist formation. He along with
Antonio Rodriguez and others in the divided leadership had very developed
theories of nationality and international solidarity, and they expressed a class
analysis of the history of Mexicans in the United States, the Chicano
movement, and other questions before the movements. Vasquez resigned
from his positions. CASA members continued struggling with organizational,
political and ideological issues rising from its turn to Marxism- Leninism and
new issues such as party building and the “national question.” I remember
that our regional organization disagreed so strongly with some of the last
issues of Sin Fronteras (after Vasquez left) that instead of selling it we paid
for our assigned copies ourselves.

The period 1979-1985 saw these three trends emerge out of CASA and
develop in various directions. Carlos Vasquez restarted his publishing house,
Prensa Sembradora (with, I believe, a newspaper of the same name). Other
leaders that split from CASA, Jose “Pepe” Medina, Felipe Aguirre, and Juan
Jose Gutierrez, and others, continued working on the international organizing
of migrant workers. They had previously focused on building the HGT, and
continued on this project after leaving, organizing Mexican migrant workers
at their point of origin. The HGT offshoot developed a “Bill of Rights of the
Undocumented” around 1982 that was quite progressive and farsighted. In
the Midwest, ex-CASA members led in the formation of a coalition to develop
a national movement in support of the undocumented.

Rudy Lozano, a prominent CASA leader in Chicago, also played a leading role
in electing Harold Washington mayor of Chicago by forging the black-brown
unity crucial to Washington’s victory. (Later, Lozano was assassinated,
possibly by drug dealers who resented his work to end that traffic.) Antonio
Rodgriguez and other CASA members in different regions of the country
played key roles in organizing coalitions and support for legislation that would
protect the rights of the undocumented.

The question remains: Why did CASA fall apart? A major reason was certainly
disagreement at the center over party building vs. building a national
organization focused on the undocumented. This problem intensified a
general lack of clarity and purpose, combined with a lack of political
experience with Marxism-Leninism, the left, international solidarity, and other
areas. It was significant that this CASA emerged, taking on these issues, at
the same time that broader social and left movements were also entering
into a serious decline and we saw less movement, less interest in continuing
the political struggles, and widespread exhaustion. The outcome might have
been different if CASA-HGT had defined itself as a primarily political and
Marxist-Leninist organization back in 1968 but it hadn’t.

The rise and decline of CASA in the 1970s also paralleled the rise and decline
of many other revolutionary organizations of color with strong left, antiracist,
and internationalist orientations. By the early 1970s, this included the PSP,
the Black Panther Party, the Congress of African Peoples, the League of
Revolutionary Black Workers, many sectors of the Asian-American movement
and the American Indian Movement which, like many of its counterparts,
suffered fierce repression and persecution. Some ex-CASA members also
documented the impact of police infiltration that contributed to its demise.

When CASA-HGT transitioned into an aspiring left formation, it left behind the
majority of its supporters and base. Bert Corona and Chole Alatorre continued
the original work that had characterized CASA-HGT’s unique contribution at
its inception: local community-based organizing and defending the rights of
the undocumented. Although the new CASA continued this work, too, its new
socialist orientation did not help reconnect it to its original base. This was
another example of political concepts without a social base. Again, that
important lesson: social bases are not transferable.

To give an extreme example of the effects of these errors, there were cases
of CASA nucleos expelling workers because the socialists in them thought the
workers were backward. So not only did CASA in the last few years have a
dwindling base but it was also expelling members who represented its natural
social base: working-class people. In a parallel development, the content of
Sin Fronteras at least in the last year became increasingly inaccessible and
politically incoherent for CASA’s base.

CASA also had a positive side to the second half of its history. Its Marxist
Leninist study circles were exemplary and studied a mixture of third world
revolutionary theory (Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, Amilcar Cabral, Cuban
revolutionaries, the Mexican Revolution, and other Latin American, Asian, and
African revolutionary movements). This grounding came from CASA’s
theoretical and political leadership which included Antonio Rodriguez, Nativo
Lopez, Felipe Aguirre, Pepe Medina, Carlos Vasquez, Ruben Solis, and a few
CASA women including Evelina Fernandez, Evalina Marquez, Isabel Rodriguez
(Antonio’s sister) and the brilliant, unforgettable Magdalena Mora, who died
at age twenty-nine. This group of individuals, including others in different
parts of the country and at different times in CASA’s short history, provided
the theoretical and intellectual grounding that guided CASA during more than
half of its existence.

CASA’s worldview was also advanced by such exposure as Carlos Vasquez’s

report back from a Middle East conference in the mid-1970s, when he came
back blown away by the Palestinian struggle and their uncompromising
militancy, which led him to write an “internal” document with very original
thinking on the “national question.” Another writer close to CASA was the
noted scholar Juan Gomez Quinones. In those final years, CASA also
developed organizationally in some positive ways including a more precise
division of labor, and greater accountability.

Some Conclusions
CASA struggled to build a national organization for “Mexicans in the United
States” with left leanings, driven by a politics grounded ostensibly in
Marxism-Leninism, the antiracist struggle, and third world revolutionary
liberation theories and movements. Non-Mexicans were also members.

As a national organization CASA was present in Arizona, California, Colorado,

Illinois, Oregon, Texas, Washington State, New York, Mexico, and possibly
other regions. Its total membership, peaking at about 12,000-15,000 in 1968-
1973, declined considerably once Corona and his compas left, and still further
to less than 2000 by the end of 1977, when CASA split into at least three
factions or trends.

Unlike other left formations of color, for example, the August Twenty-Ninth
Movement (ATM), CASA did not join with other left and Marxist-Leninist
formations in the next and final generation of party building that developed
between 1976 and 1989. Individual CASA members went in several
directions: into the U.S. Communist Party, Mexican parties and left unity
movements; and regional immigrant rights coalitions and other civil rights
and electoral coalitions at the local, state, and even national levels. Others
successfully continued organizing projects begun under CASA. A fair number
of ex-CASA members went into the immigrant rights movement that began
coalescing in the late 1970s.

In 1977-1979, there was a short-lived attempt at doing a critical assessment

of CASA with a view to a possible regrouping, but it did not go anywhere
nationally. The most important work of this closing period included Prensa
Sembradora, which lasted until about 1982, seeking to continue the legacy of
Sin Fronteras before CASA declined; the group around the Hermandad, and
the contributions made by the other top CASA leaders and members that
added significantly to the political maturation of Mexican-American and
Latino working-class and left politics generally and helped give birth to the
contemporary immigrant rights movement.

The issue that ignited CASA’s rise, the undocumented, has become more
central than ever to working-class rights and to people of color. It raises
critical and yet to be resolved theoretical and political problems at
capitalism’s center: the nation-state, nationality, citizenship, race, and labor
and capital mobility. The undocumented need more CASAs to rise and
attempt to solve an issue that in hindsight has been at the heart of the
development of the U.S. peoples and the working class. A protracted struggle
and commitment will be required of all who enter into this realm where a left
without borders-internationalist, multicolored, and led by women and men of
all sexualities-is a key part of the solution.
Mike Davis, “Buscando America” from Magical
Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City
The Latino Metropolis is, in the first place, the crucible of far-reaching
transformations in urban culture and ethnic identity. For half a century
the designers of the US Census have struggled to create a category
that would successfully capture all the individuals, regardless of race
or household language, who share distinctive Latin American cultural
roots. After early vacillations over whether Mexicans were a “race”
(yes in 1930; no in 1940), several alternate statistical universes,
including the category of “Persons of Spanish Mother Tongue” (1950)
and “Spanish Surname” (1960), were tried and abandoned because of
heavy numerical leakage. In population sampling for the 1990 Census,
census workers simply asked people if they identified with any of
twelve national identities: Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban and so on.
Households with positive replies, independent of answers to other
identity questions, were enumerated as “Hispanic” - a category
adopted in the 1970s by the Nixon administration and first deployed in
the 1980 Census.
This is at best a bureaucratic expediency. In California and Texas, for
example, “Latino” is generally preferred to “Hispanic,” while in South
Florida it is considered bad etiquette; on the East Coast both labels are
common currency. Scholars, meanwhile, have tried to draw battlelines
between what they discern as different politics of usage. Juan Flores,
for example, condemns “the superficiality and invidiousness of the
term “Hispanic” in its current bureaucratic usage.” Agreeing with him,
Suzanne Oboler (who devotes an entire book to the subject) and
Rodolfo Acuña both claim that “Hispanic” is principally favored by
Eurocentric Spanish-surname elites in opposition to grassroots
identification with “Latino.” In the same vein, “to identify oneself today
as a ‘Hispanic,’” Neil Foley writes, “is partially to acknowledge one’s
ethnic heritage without surrendering one’s ‘whiteness.’ Hispanic
identity thus implies a kind of ‘separate but equal’ whiteness with a
twist of salsa, enough to make one ethnically flavorful and culturally
exotic without, however, compromising one’s racial privilege as a
White person.” Geoffrey Fox, on the other hand, argues that
“‘Hispanic,’” with its emphasis on Spanish-language heritage as the
foundation of meta-ethnicity, has no implied racial or class agendas
and is simply preferred by most immigrants from Latin America.”
The debate is unlikely to be resolved. Indeed, there is broad critical
awareness that both labels fail to acknowledge the decisive quotient of
indigenous genetic and cultural heritage in the populations they
describe. Both meta-categories, in fact, were originally nineteenth-
century ideological impositions from Europe: “Hispanicity” from Liberal
Spain and “Latinity” from the France of Napoleon III. Consanguinity
(expunged, as Paul Edison has emphasized, of any indigenous
component) was invoked to legitimize the reconquests attempted by
both powers in the 1860s: France in Mexico and Spain in Santo
Domingo. Bolivar’s and Marti’s encompassing Americanismo,
meanwhile, has been stolen and parochialized by los gringos. It goes to
the very heart of the history of the New World that there is no current,
consensual term that adequately reflects the fusion of Iberian, African
and “Indian” origins shared by so many tens of millions.
Moreover “Hispanic” and “Latino” can no longer be decoded as
synonyms for “Catholic.” Certainly syncretic New World Catholicism,
with a thousand-and-one Aztec and African gods masquerading as
santos, remains, together with the mother tongue, the most important
common heritage of Latino immigrant communities. And few cross-
cultural trends are as impressive as the recent flocking of other Latin
American Catholics and even Anglo New-Agers to the cult of Mexico’s
Virgin of Guadalupe (who also reincarnates the powers of the goddess
Tonantzin) as she has made her way al otro lado. (A digital laser
replica of her image recently completed a triumphal procession of the
Los Angeles archdiocese. “The 3·by-5-foot copy, blessed by the pope,
toured some 50 local parishes before a farewell appearance in front of
50,000 worshippers at the L.A. Coliseum.”) Yet if murals of La Morena,
radiant in her blue, star-studded shawl, sanctify the sides of tiendas
from San Diego to Atlanta, the adjoining storefront will most likely be a
Pentecostal church. Even in the city that the pobladores named
“Nuestra Señora” (La Reina de Los Angeles), Spanish-language
Protestant denominations (especially Pentecostals) are running neck-
to-neck with the Pope. Latinos equally reinvigorate US Catholicism
(supplying 71 percent of its growth since 1960) and energize its
evangelical competitors. In this new dispensation, the traditional
antinomy of Latino/Hispanic versus
Protestant collapses, and, as Carlos Monsivais wryly suggests, the
immigrant may now pray to the Virgin of Guadalupe: “Jefecita. I am still
faithful to you, who represents the Nation, even though I now may be
Pentecostal, Jehovah’s Witness, Adventist, Baptist or
Mormon.”

US Latinos as a Latin American Nation (Millions)

2000 2050
1. Brazil 170.0 1. Brazil 241.0
2. Mexico 98.9 2. Mexico 144.9
3. Colombia 42.3 3. US Latinos 96.5
4. Argentina 37.0 4. Colombia 71.6
5. US Latinos 32.0 5. Argentina 54.5
Source: CEPAL(UN). “America Latina: Proyecciones de poblacion,
1970--2050,” Boletin Demografico 62 (July 1998). Other estimates put
the us Latino population as high as 100 million by 2040.
Yet, if there is no reducible essence to latinidad - even in language or
religion - it does not necessarily follow that there is no substance. In
playing with the Rubik’s Cube of ethnicity, it is important to resist the
temptation of prematurely resolving its contradictions.
“Hispanic/Latino” is not merely an artificial, racialized box like “Asian-
American,” invented by the majority society to uncomfortably contain
individuals of the most emphatically disparate national origins who
may subsequently develop some loosely shared identity as a reaction-
formation to this labeling. Nor is it simply a marketing ploy - like the
right-wing Coors brewery’s opportunist promotion of the 1980, as the
“Decade of the Hispanic” - that exploits superficial national similarities
in language, cuisine and fashion. To be Latino in the United States is
rather to participate in a unique process of cultural syncretism that
may become a transformative template for the whole society.
Latinidad, Flores emphasizes, has nothing to do with “post-modern
aesthetic indeterminacy. ... It is practice rather than representation of
Latino identity. And it is on this terrain that Latinos wage their cultural
politics as a social movement.” As in Octavio Paz’s famous definition of
mexicanidad, to be Latino is “not an essence but a history.”

It is a history that will largely be made over the next generation. It has
geopolitical significance because US Latinos are already the fifth
largest “nation” in Latin America, and in a half-century they will be
third only to Brazil and Mexico. Alternately, they will become the
world’s second largest Spanish-language-origin nation. Because
contemporary US big cities contain the most diverse blendings of Latin
American cultures in the entire hemisphere, they seem destined to
play central roles in the reshaping of hemispheric as well as national
US identities. There is a parallel here, of course, with the role of
postwar London as a melting pot of anglophone Caribbean diasporas
that has simultaneously transformed the meanings of “Englishness”
and “Caribbeaness.”

The dialectics of identity in the US case, however, are more complex

because in each of the three cities that have made claims to be the
“capital of Latin America” - Los Angeles, New York and Miami - the
recipes fur latinidad involve strikingly different national ingredients.

National Composition of Latino Populations in the US, 1990

1. Los Angeles Mexican (80%) Salvadorean Guatemalan
(6%) (3%)
2. Miami Cuban (66%) Nicaraguan Puerto Rican
(11%) (6%)
3. New York Puerto Rican Dominican Colombian (5%)
(46%) (15%)
Mexican (4%) Ecuadorean
 (4%)
Source: US Census 1990. What is hidden in these figures as well as ignored in most
discussions of Latino identity is the rapidly growing population that identifies as
multiple nationalities or heritages, ranging from, say, Mexican-Salvadorean to Cuban-
Korean and Ecuadorean/Jewish. “’Other” is the spanner in the works of the US ethnic-
racial hierarchy.

Moreover, these national components themselves are not pregiven or

unchanging essences. As immigration researchers have been
reminding us since the days of Thomas and Znaniecki’s monumental
The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1919), identities brought to
the United States are reassembled into “ethnicities” within the
contemporary force-field of the majority culture and its “others.” The
complex and often conflicting elements of immigrants’ previous
identities, including fierce subnational allegiances to region and
locality, as well as deep ideological divisions between religious and
secular-radical subcultures, are strategically edited (and usually
simplified) into usable ethnicities in the face of competing claims and
pressures of other similarly constructed groups. Diasporic
“Mexieanness” in El Paso, for example, does not mean the same thing
as being Mexican en la patria just across the river in the twin city of
Ciudad Juarez, just as being “Dominicanyork” or “Nuyorican” is
significantly different from being Dominican in Santo Domingo or
Boriquen in San Juan. (These, of course, are not necessarily exclusive
identities, but situational identities between which individuals move
back and forth in daily or annual itineraries.)

Nor are ethnic identities necessarily stable over time. In Los Angeles,
for example, each major generation of Mexican-origin youth has
elaborated a different self-conception vis-a-vis Anglo society. Caught in
a no-man’s-land between ascriptive systems of race and ethnicity,
“Mexican-Americans” in the 1930s through the 1950s expressed the
pragmatic preference to be recognized as a hyphenated-ethnic
minority along the lines of Polish- or Italian-Americans rather than to
become a racialized caste like Blacks or Chinese. Mexican-Americans
during the 1940s and 1950s, Foley argues, signed a “Faustian pact
with whiteness ... in order to overcome the worst features of Jim Crow
segregation.” Failed mobility and reinforced barrioization, together
with the charismatic influence of militant Black nationalism, led
“Chicanos” in the 1960s and 1970s to discard Mexican-American
assimilationism in favor of separatist claims to an indigenous origin in
a southwestern Aztlan. (In privileging the myth of the Mexica, however,
the Chicano movement unfortunately simplified a cultural heritage of
magnificent diversity: Olmee, Tarascan, Zapotee, Mayan ... even
Morisco and Converso.) The striking reemergence of mexicanidad in
the 1980s and 1990s, on the other hand, is rooted in massive
immigration and the expansion of the Spanish-language public sphere.
(It is also, as we shall see later, an expression of the new structural
synchronicity and intensification of ties between most immigrants’ old
and new homes.) Recently, it has become popular in Southern
California for young people to hyphenate their identities as either
“Mexicana-Chicana” or “Chicana-Mexicana” depending on whether
their families are first-generation immigrants or not.

Some Chicana/o intellectuals and writers, moreover, have tried to shift

the debate about ethnicity beyond rhetorics of hyphenation. Like their
counterparts in the “Irish Studies” movement, they are exploring the
terrain that lies beyond the antinomies shaped by Anglo-Saxon
colonization or the cultural reifications that ground traditional
nationalism. Indeed, some of the most influential avantegardists, like
Ruben Martinez and Guillermo Gomez-Pena, have embraced the
“Border” – everything that represents the interpenetration of social
formations and stands between simple choices of national identity - as
a distinctively Latino and dialectical epistemology. (“We de-
Mexicanized ourselves to Mexi-understand ourselves, some without
wanting to, others on purpose. And one day, the border became our
house, laboratory, and ministry of culture.”) Aptly titled Frontera
Magazine - editorially committed to “poking around at the fringes, in
the dustpiles and under the heaps of what’s left over after all the
definitions have been established” - provides a regular stage for the
delirious subversion of reified ethnicity as well as reaching that larger
audience of young, hip Chicanos tuned into Culture Clash, Tijuana NO,
and Rage Against the Machine. Yet “post-nationalism” may have
acquired its current purchase among border literati precisely because
of the massive reassertion, over the last generation, of the physical
and cultural continuity of Mexico in the US Southwest. Complex
experiments in identity politics - unthinkable in the white-majority
1960s - are anchored in the confidence that Aztlan is no longer
nationalist myth but historical fact.

For Puerto Ricans, by contrast, the national question is agonizingly

unresolved and in some sense untranscendable, with a majority of the
island’s voters in a recent plebiscite endorsing “none of the above”
rather than the Hobson’s choice between culturally self-liquidating
statehood and economically unviable independence. The largest
remaining nineteenth-century colony has by narrow hut persistent
electoral pluralities preferred the limbo of “commonwealth” to any
definitive resolution of its status. As in the nearby French Antilles,
independistas contribute decisive leadership to every social, labor and
environmental struggle but, in the face of debilitating economic
dependency, cannot find a fulcrum to enlarge their stable but tiny 5
percent of the vote. This structural stalemate, together with the
declining fortunes of the mainland diaspora (discussed in Chapter 10),
gives Puerto Rican identity politics a traumatic urgency, sometimes
bordering on revolutionary desperation (for example, the Macheteros),
that is only reinforced by the US media’s virtual blackout of island life.
Indeed, as one boriqueña wryly suggests, the only thing visibly Puerto
Rican in mainstream culture is Jennifer Lopez’s voluptuous culo.

Furthermore, these split-level processes of identity formation - the

forging of ethnicity and meta-ethnicity - take place in regional contexts
of unequal ethnic control over media and symbol systems. The
programming of the 500 Spanish-language radio stations and two
Spanish-language television networks in the United States often fails to
reflect the true heterogeneity of Latino cultural and experiential
worlds. In Los Angeles, for example, Salvadoreans, Guatemalans and
Ecuadoreans - as well as indigenous immigrants like Zapotecs, Yaquis,
Kanjobals and Mixtecs - struggle to defend their distinctive identities
within a hegemonically Mexican/Chicano popular culture. In Chicago,
on the other hand, comparably sized Mexican and Puerto Rican
communities gingerly explore their cultural and political common
ground, using latinismo, as Felix Padilla has shown, to leverage their
clout within Cook County machine politics. (He usefully contrasts two
modes of constructing latinidad: the fundamentally “weak” mode of
passive, symbolic identification with a common language community;
and the “strong” mode of active mobilization as an ethnic political
bloc.)

In Miami’s Little Havana, meanwhile, the poorer Nicaraguan

community (estimated Dade County population: 200,000) chafes under
the cultural and economic dominance of Cuban elites. (With 5 percent
of the national Latino population, Miami has nearly half of all Spanish-
surname businesses.) Although the Cuban percentage of Dade
County’s Spanish-surname population fell from 83 percent in 1970 to
66 percent in 1990, the counterrevolutionary agenda of aging exile
leaders still exercises authoritarian censorship over Miami’s major
Latino cultural and media institutions, as well as influencing national
Spanish-language television programming, which is skewed toward
“white” Cuban-American talk shows and Venezuelan telenovelas.
There has been considerable local resentment, sometimes expressed
in public protest, against Miami’s “exploitation” of the huge captive
Spanish- language media markets in Los Angeles and New York.

Largest Latino Markets, 1996

Market Annual Retail Sa1es
I. Los Angeles $28.9 billion
2. New York $17.6 billion
3. Miami $ 9.0 billion
4. San Francisco $ 6.0 billion
5. Chicago $ 6.0 billion
 Source: Website: www.hispanic.market (1999).

In New York, by contrast, the Puerto Rican community, hich in 1960

comprised four-fifths of the Latino population, now accounts less than
two-fifths in the wake of the great Dominican migration of the 1980s
and the new Mexican influx of the 1990s. (The Dominican population is
now projected to surpass the Puerto Rican by 2010.) The
disappearance of a single dominant group has spurred intercultural
exchange as well as competition between all the Spanish-speaking and
Caribbean-origin communities. Latinization, moreover, has been
intertwined warp and woof with New York’s Caribbeanization. The
racial diversity of New York Latinos, including so many black Puerto
Ricans, Cubans and Dominicans, promotes, as Flores points out, a
“more reciprocal and fluid relationship” to African-American culture.
Younger writers and artists in La Gran Manzana, like the stellar
Dominicanyorker Junot Diaz (Drown), openly advocate a radical politics
of color. And, again in contrast to Los Angeles (where only 14 percent
of married people of Mexican origin were married to someone from
another ethnicity) or Miami, fully half of the Spanish-surname
marriages in New York are intermarriages between different Latino
nationalities. The cosmopolitan result is a rich, constantly evolving
sabor tropical in food, music, fashion and language - always freshly
spiced by the latest arrivals from Latin America.

Some prominent Latino intellectuals. embracing a messianic neo-

Bolivarism, see in this New York-style cultural syncretism the seeds of
new creolized identities on national, even hemispheric scales.
“Ironically,” writes Silvio Torres-Saillant, “Simon Bolivar’s desideratum
of a unified Latin American nation and the ideal upheld by Eugenio
Marla de Hostos of an Antillean federation find in us a strange kind of
fulfillment. We have come to articulate a collective identity, not in our
native homelands, as Bolivar and Hostos had dreamed, but within the
insecure space of the diaspora.” Likewise for Flores. Latinos are the
new American counter-culture. “As each group and regional culture
manifest itself in the new setting, and as they increasingly coalesce
and interact in everyday life, New York is visibly becoming the source
of a forceful, variegated alternative to mainstream North American
culture.” Ilan Stavans, on the other hand. believes that the mainstream
culture itself is being inexorably Latinized within a complex dialectic of
transcultural exchange between old and new Americas. The rise of
“Latinos agringados” addicted to hamburgers and Friday night football,
he asserts, is tendentially balanced by the emergence of “gringos
hispanizados” infatuated with chiles and merengue. (He was writing
before the current “cross-over” celebrity-boom of Selena, Ricky Martin,
Christina Aguilera, Sammy Sosa and Jennifer Lopez.) Similarly, the
Brazilian futurist Alfredo Valladao, fascinated by the store signs in
Miami and Los Angeles that say “Se habla ingles” sees the new
Spanish-language “beachheads” in US cities as research laboratories
for the cross-fertilization of North and South American cultures. The
result, he confidently predicts. will be a new hegemonic global culture:
“a Pan-American twenty-first century.”
René Francisco Poitevin, “Latinos and David
Roediger’s Working Toward Whiteness”
A disturbing aftermath of the pro-immigrant demonstrations recently
held in dozens of cities across the United States, besides the obvious
anti-immigrant backlash, has been the increase in Black/Brown
tensions. Particularly alarming has been the way in which Latinos are
being accused, not only by conservatives but by Progressives as well,
of being the latest permutation of a long history of immigrant groups
arriving to this country and making it, to quote Toni Morrison, “on the
backs of Blacks.”

This argument is part of a broader narrative which claims that Latino

struggle for social equality is being waged at the expense of African
Americans. According to this argument, Latinos are bound to assimilate
and become the new whites, a situation that will put them
economically above, and in antagonistic relation to African Americans.
So goes the story. But is it true?

This essay takes a look at David Roediger’s Working Toward Whiteness

to make the case against the so-called Latinos-are-White thesis, and
against the apparently imminent Black/Brown debacle. Working
Toward Whiteness helps us understand how Latinos “throw a wrench”
into our traditional Black/White mode of looking at race relations —
and why they cannot be easily collapsed into a Black/White racial
binary.

I will make the case that so-called transformations in Latino racial

consciousness have to do less with actual shifts in Latino identity, and
more to do with a poverty of theory. By taking a closer look at the way
we theorize immigration and race relations in this country, this essay
hopes to contribute to the discussion on how we strategize for effective
anti-racist and anti-capitalist organizing, and how to think about new
theoretical interventions.

Racial Transformation
To be sure, Working Toward Whiteness is not about Latinos, but rather
the Southern and Eastern European migration that brought 13 million
people to the United States between 1886 and 1925 — and how this
population, which definitely arrived as “non White,” became White
within the span of few decades.

The book, which divides its seven chapters into three sections, tells the
story of this European racial transformation through a three-way
account of the specific contexts underlying the arrival of these “new
immigrant” groups, the nature of “Whiteness” as a form of racial
consciousness which developed after arrival, and the explicit
intervention of the State as a necessary condition for the
institutionalization of Whiteness.

But why use a book on early European migrants to talk about Latino
migration today? The short answer is that by putting race at the core
of how immigration and assimilation is socially embedded, and by
looking at assimilation as Whitening as well as Americanizing (9),
Working Toward Whiteness provides a very important framework for
understanding how Whiteness is socially constructed — and for sorting
out whether Latinos are in fact becoming ‘the new Italians.’

The punch line (I hope I’m not giving away too much of the plot here)
is that for early twentieth century European migrants to become White
— and let’s not forget that they came in as racially “in between,”
neither White nor Black — they had to first, embrace a racial identity
predicated on the discrimination of Blacks, and second, become the
direct beneficiaries of white-supremacist state policies aimed at
institutionalizing this newly acquired white identity.

The book argues that in a country where European immigrants and

others were judged on the basis of race, and in which citizenship was
commonly denied to those classified as non-White, the perks to be
gained by embracing Whiteness — together with the concrete
penalties that came with being associated with non-Whites — were too
tempting to be ignored.

Equally important for the development of Whiteness during this period

is the active role of the state as a necessary condition for “creating”
Whiteness. Simply put, individual choice alone was not enough to
congeal such a diverse European ethnic mix into a “monolithic
Whiteness.”(138)

Therefore one of the most important lessons from Roediger’s book is

that European assimilation into Whiteness had less to do with skin
color and more to do with power structures and state regulations.

Long Latino History

How many “second generation” Mexicans does it take to change a bulb
in the United States?

Roediger’s answer: lots and lots. In a context where academic research

seems to be obsessed with the “second generation” question as the
main way to determine whether or not Latinos are assimilating,
Roediger refreshingly reminds us that Latinos have actually been in
this country for hundreds of years now, and that they have not exactly
experienced upward mobility during that time. Quite the contrary.
Working Toward Whiteness documents the historical depictions of
Mexicans as “greasers,” the naming of lower-status jobs as “Mexican
jobs,” the implementation of restrictive covenants to keep Mexicans
out of decent housing — not to mention the couple of million Mexican
Americans who were deported during the 1930s and 1950s.

The point here is not to imply that there are no important lessons to be
learned from looking at the children of first-generation immigrants. It
is, rather, to show the limits of explanatory models of assimilation that
narrowly reduce incorporation into U.S. society in terms of whether or
not Latino kids are learning English or marrying outside their group —
all the while refusing to take into account the importance of race and
discrimination in constituting what it means to become “American” in
this country.

Messy Ethnicity
Another refreshing feature of Roediger’s book is the way it reminds us
that our current race/ethnicity divide is actually more “messy”
(Roediger’s term) than social science wants us to believe. For one, in
the early 1900s, there was no such thing as “ethnicity” as we
understand it today.

We can find debates on “nation-races” and “color-races” during this

period, but the idea that we could use “ethnicity” to differentiate
between Europeans and other racial groups was simply nonexistent.
For Roediger, the way we reinsert “ethnicity” back into the early 20th
century, as a way to explain why new European migrants became
White, has to do more with the politics of academia now than with
clarifying what was going on back then. (28)

That the race/ethnicity divide is very fragile indeed became clear in the
2000 Census. More than 10 million Latinos, or about a quarter of all the
Latino population in the United States, said that they belonged to the
“Latino race.” What makes these numbers even more dramatic is that
“Latino,” according to the U.S. government, is not a race but an
ethnicity.

But if Latinos are becoming “White” according to some critics, then

why are millions refusing to embrace the White (or Black) identity and
going out of their way to say that they are something else? What does
it mean for our dominant Black/White racial paradigm and the way we
account for race relations in this country?

Roediger’s book reminds us that these Latino numbers are not the
exception to the rule, but that they simply reflect, once again, the
messiness of racial categories — a messiness that cannot be taken
care of by simply invoking a Black/White racial divide.
Will Latinos Embrace Whiteness?
Even if we entertain the possibility that, contrary to “second
generation” theorists, Latinos might not be assimilating even if we are
willing to complicate our understanding of racial categories to allow for
such a thing as a Latino “race,” together with the possibility that the
Black/White racial paradigm might not quite work in the case of
Latinos, the question still remains: are Latinos going to turn their back
on African Americans and embrace Whiteness the way the new
European immigrants did?

Recall that in order for Southern and Eastern Europeans to become

White two things had to happen: European immigrant groups had to
embrace an anti-Black identity (see Roediger’s Section II), and this
newly embraced Whiteness had to be institutionalized through state
laws and government programs (see Section III).

The Federal government’s response to this need to institutionalize

Whiteness through state policies and subsidies was the New Deal. The
New Deal not only created and literally paid for a new generation of
segregated neighborhoods, it also became the sponsor and enforcer of
restrictive housing covenants.

The New Deal also strengthened the institution of “White unionism”

through legislation that excluded a large number of Black, Latino and
Asian workers (notably, agricultural labor) from the protection of the
1938 Fair Labor Standards Act — in effect, making the idea of fairness
and economic citizenship a matter of race.

Of course, the New Deal also brought us the 1935 Social Security Act,
which despite being “universal,” managed to leave out a great deal of
workers of color through exclusions based on low wages and episodic
employment. The end result of the Social Security legislation was that
Black and Mexican women, who not surprisingly were concentrated in
these low-wage sectors, were the most affected by these policies.

In short, the New Deal formalized a new White regime that was being
already implemented through everyday practices at home, in public
spaces, in houses of worship and at the workplace.

The relevant lesson is that Latinos — who are certainly not

beneficiaries of such state policies today — are a long way from
becoming the “new Whites.” Indeed it is clear from the last Census
that millions of Latinos are refusing to embrace Whiteness.

While it is also true many Latinos also see themselves as White — after
all, Latinos are not immune to anti-Black and anti-people of color
stereotypes — this situation would make Latinos “in-between people”
at best, certainly not White. And when you look at their long history of
solidarity and collaborations with Blacks, it makes sense to think of
Latinos’ racial consciousness shifting toward a “people of color”
identity — not Whiteness.

The strongest evidence against the claim that Latinos are becoming
White is the lack of current government policies designed to make
Latinos “White.” Simply put, there is no Latino “New Deal” channeling
hundreds of millions of dollars for new Latino housing (as happened
with European immigrants), or New Deal-type legislation geared
toward giving Latinos the upper hand against other groups on labor
issues or government assistance programs.

If anything the exact opposite is true: New government policies have

been aggressively criminalizing Latinos (as the money being spent in
building a wall across the border and HR4437 clearly confirmed earlier
this year); and Washington is either eliminating benefits or downsizing
those social programs that help Latinos the most.

Capitalism and Immigration

This is why Latinos are a long way from becoming the “new Irish” or
“new Italians.” The counter-claim, that it is just a matter of time before
some New Deal-type of arrangement on behalf of Latinos,
misunderstands a deep contradiction in the way U.S. society deals with
non-European immigrants.

Simply put, without immigrant cheap labor capitalism could not survive
— so the State must let them in so that they can be exploited. On the
other hand, constructions of American identity require the existence of
an “Other” to allow us to define “ourselves” in opposition to that which
we are not — namely “illegal” immigrants of color.

During the second half of the 19th and first half of the 20th century,
Asians were the “Other” of American national identity as demonstrated
by the long record of anti-Asian exclusion Acts. Since 1965 Latinos
have become the new “Other” in opposition to Americans, as
demonstrated by the way ‘Mexican’ has become synonymous with
“illegal” in public immigration discourse.

This is why the government will not, anytime soon, implement a New
Deal-type of program on behalf of Latinos. Claims that Southern and
Eastern European migrants went through an “otherness” similar to
what Latinos are undergoing now do not understand the way in which
European migrant discrimination has always been qualitatively
different from Blacks and Latinos — a point which is highlighted in
Roediger’s book.
Latinos’ Real Conditions
Last but not least, one more point needs to be acknowledged in our
discussion of Latino/Black relations and claims of Latino shifts toward
Whiteness. The latest economic indicators show that Latinos are
actually suffering as badly as African Americans in virtually every
category.

When you look at Latino and Black numbers for median income,
poverty, unemployment, health insurance rates, dropout rates,
graduation rates, incarceration rates and home ownership rates, the
fact is that these two groups are basically at the same level. The only
category in which Blacks are clearly doing worse than Latinos is
incarceration rates — and you can guess which group is quickly
catching up.

The real challenge confronting us, which still needs to be recognized

by organizers and academics, is not that Latinos might become the
new Whites, but that Latinos might actually become the ‘new Blacks,’ a
situation that, if true, would collapse our Black/White racial paradigm,
and pose profound political challenges for multi-racial coalition building
in this country.

This hardly means that African Americans are doing better now, or that
old-fashion racism is fading away. The majority of African Americans
are, if anything, doing worse now than before, as confirmed by the
criminal government response to Katrina victims, and as the right-wing
agenda committed to erasing race from public discourse and public
policy continues to succeed.

This essay is not meant to romanticize a Black/Latino alliance either —

whatever coalitions and partnerships emerge between these groups
must be created out of concrete material conditions and struggles.

The challenge confronting us is how to move forward in a way that

upgrades our theories of race relations while avoiding pitting groups
against each other. Hopefully you will agree with me that Roediger’s
book moves the discussion in the right direction.