Tom hayden on Immigrants

Who Are You Calling an Immigrant?

by Tom Hayden
Common Dreams
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0503-23.htm

I wore the multicolored Aymaran flag of Bolivia to the May Day march in Los
Angeles, the same day that Evo Morales, the first indigenous president of
Bolivia, nationalized the oil and gas fields. It seemed right to recognize
the reappearance of the indigenous in the Americas. I gazed at Marcos
Aguilar, one of the UCLA hunger strikers for Chicano studies in 1993. Now he
stood bare-skinned and feathered, leading a traditional dance below the
edifice of the Los Angeles Times. Rather than becoming assimilated into
gringotopia, he was forcing the reverse, the assimilation of the
Machiavellians into the new reality of L.A. Another hunger striker from
those days, Cindy Montanez, was chairing the state Assemblys rules
committee. Another UCLA student, a beneficiary of 60s outreach
programs, was mayor of the city.

Contrary to most mainstream commentary, these protests were part of a
continuous social movement going back many decades, even centuries. And yet
the commentators, especially on the national level, once again summoned the
stereotype of the lazy Mexican, the sleeping giant awakening. For years it
was convenient to blame apathy and low participation rates on the
Mexican-Americans and other Latinos, ignoring the racial exclusion that
prevailed east of the Los Angeles River. In 1994, the same sleeping giant
arose against Pete Wilsons Proposition 187. It previously awoke in the 1968
high school blowouts, the 1968-69 Chicano moratorium and the farmworker
boycotts, which were the largest in history, and, in an earlier generation,
the giant awoke in the Zoot Suit Riots and Ed Roybals winning campaign
for City Council. The giant never had time to sleep at all.

In the Great Depression, in the lifetimes of the parents and grandparents of
todays students, up to 600,000 Mexicans, one-third of the entire U.S.
Mexican population, many of them born in the United States, were deported
with their children back to Mexico, their labor no longer needed.

Out of nowhere?

There is a frightening gap between the white perception of this 50-year
trauma of deportation and the experience of Mexicans and other immigrants,
like the Salvadorans who were driven here by the U.S.-backed civil wars of
the 1970s. Somewhere between amnesia and a self-induced lobotomy, the gap
needs to be closed in the dialogue that may come of these historic protests.
The mere passage of time may erase white memories and guilt, and induce
acceptance among Mexicans, but it does not legitimize the occupation itself.
The wound will not disappear under American flags, searchlights and border
walls.

The fundamental issue still shaping attitudes down to the present is this:
Either the Mexicans (and other Latinos) are immigrants to a country called
the United States or the U.S. is a Machiavellian power that denies occupying
one-half of Mexico for 156 years. During the 1846-48 war against Mexico, at
least 50,000 Mexicans died. The fighting took place across many cities
considered pure-bred American today; in Los Angeles, a revolt temporarily
drove out the U.S. Army. Guerrilla resistance by Mexican fighters left a
mythic legacy of those like Joaquin Murrieta and Tiburcio Vasquez, names
still alive among Mexican-American students today. Meanwhile, The New York
Times was declaring in 1860: The Mexicans, ignorant and degraded as they
are, [should welcome a system] founded on free trade and the right of
colonization so that, after a few years of pupilege, the Mexican state would
be incorporated into the Union under the same conditions as the original
colonies.

After unilaterally annexing Texas in 1845, despite massive protests, the
U.S. president sent troops 100 miles into what previously was Mexican land.
When the Mexicans retaliated, the U.S. declared war on the pretext that
Americans had been attacked on American soil. When it ended, the U.S. took
51% of Mexicos land, including California, where the discovery of gold had
been kept secret from Mexican negotiators. At least 100,000 Mexicans and an
additional 200,000 indigenous people lived on those lands. Ever since, those
people and their descendants have lived in a split-consciousness similar to
that of African-Americans described in W.E.B. DuBois The Souls of Black
Folk. Each new generation of immigrants fuels that consciousness all over
again.

Under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the imposed settlement of the 1846-48
war, the inhabitants of the occupied territories were granted legal,
political, educational and cultural rights as citizens, not as immigrants.
Some of the earliest official documents of California were required under
the treaty to be printed in Spanish and English. This treaty, which was
unenforced, became the basis for later movements stretching into the 1960s,
movements that gave the Southwest an Aztec name (Aztlan) and demanded the
return of former land grants. It was not unlike Radical Reconstruction, the
period after the Civil War when Gen. Shermans official promise of forty
acres and a mule was withdrawn.

Todays demonstrations are not demanding implementation of the Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo. Modern Mexican-Americans have made the legalization of
undocumented workers as United States citizens their consensus demand. But
there remains an unspoken difference between two states of mind regarding
the meaning of the border. In every generation, immigrant workers and youth
have claimed their American rights without abandoning the memory of their
deeper historical ones.

A significant number of white Americans, especially among the elites, still
hold to nativist definitions of American identity, in contrast to those
multinational corporations that tend to be more interested in cheap foreign
labor than in keeping American white.

Conservative journals like the American Outlook publish articles glorifying
the Anglosphere as the standard of globalization (March-April 2001). Kevin
Phillips is quoted in the article as still longing for an American culture
whose core thought is a kind of English revivalism. Regarding this months
demonstrations, the black neoconservative Thomas Sowell has criticized the
demanding and threatening tone of people who want their own turf on
American soil… (L.A. Daily News, April 29, 2006).

No one lends an Ivy League luster to the Minuteman Mentality more than
Harvard University professor Samuel Huntington. A proud Anglo-Protestant,
Huntington previously advocated the forced urbanization of the Vietnamese
peasantry into a Honda culture as a formula for ending the nationalist
uprising. In the 70s, he complained that an excess of democracy
threatened Western authorities. More recently, he formulated the strident
doctrine of the clash of civilizations, decreeing that Islamic culture is
incompatible with democratic civilization. Finally, he has weighed in on
The Hispanic Challenge, arguing that Latino immigration is a major
potential threat to the cultural and possibly political integrity of the
United States (in Foreign Policy, March-April 2006). Huntington argues that
Mexican-Americans are too close to their traditional culture to become
assimilated as patriotic Americans. By this he means, of course, that they
cannot become imitation WASPs, whose identity he sees as basic to the
American nation. For Huntington, assimilation seems to mean submission and
disappearance into the master culture, a viewpoint still held by many. We
defeated you, and now you should become like us.

Largely forgotten in the current debate, too, are those among the elites who
still consider Mexico itself a strategic long-term threat. The late Caspar
Weinberger, a secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan, wrote in 1998 of
planning for a theoretical next war against Mexico, opting for the
military option in case it becomes necessary to go down in and try to catch
[a] rebel leader in Mexico and restore democratic rule to Mexico (interview
with Chuck Baldwin Live, Feb. 17, 1998). The Harvard historian of Chiapas,
John Womack, has written that in the 1990s the US government, in particular
the Defense Department … wanted low-intensity warfare in Mexico
(Rebellion in Chiapas, Harvard, 1999).

But the U.S. has historically been the destabilizing force in Mexico, most
recently with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which has
flooded the country with corn and other products and replaced indigenous
manufacturing with the maquiladora economy, thus displacing at least
hundreds of thousands of Mexicans, many of whom seek survival in el norte.
Perpetuating the cycle is absolutely crucial to neo-liberal economics. But
it also perpetually stimulates rebelliousness, in fact and memory, among
those who take to U.S. streets today, and who shortly will be the urban
majority in a new America.

As people of color, mainly immigrants, edge closer to majority status in key
states, their relatives to the south are becoming nationalist, populist
majorities in country after country, with interests that sharply conflict
with the disintegrating U.S. Monroe Doctrine of 1823. If the populist mayor
of Mexico City is elected president of Mexico this fall, NAFTA itself will
die or be re-negotiated. This is the first time in many decades that the
interests of Latinos in the U.S. are closely converging with the governments
and people of the nations of the south. As seen even in the recent
international baseball championships, the willingness of Americas major
league Latino players to join the lineups of their homelands shows the fluid
nature of borders and solidarity. A policy beyond the Monroe Doctrine will
have to be crafted for the United States, with Latinos in the lead. As Evo
Morales of Bolivia is suggesting, another annexation is possible, the
annexation of the United States into peaceful coexistence with Latin
America.

Some would argue that America must simply follow the path of previous
immigrant generations, like my Famine Irish ancestors. It is true that the
slum-dwelling Irish, Jews and Italians rose in time to the middle class, and
the same future may lie ahead for the new immigrants. We can see signs of
the past in the growing ranks of Latino trade unionists and mayors and other
politicians. But the difference in the histories is race and class. If
neo-liberalism has failed to widen the American middle class since 1973, how
will it expand to provide decent jobs for the aspiring immigrants in todays
underclass? Is there another New Deal just over the horizon, or a hardening
defense of the status quo?

Huntingtons Anglosphere is dying, if only through demographics. It is a
matter of time--of when, not whether. The newcomers have neither the need
nor the capacity to assimilate into a declining Anglosphere. They will
remain multicultural of necessity, the hybrid multitude arising from the
depths of empire and its resistance. The real question is how the rest of
America, the rest of us, can assimilate and find belonging within all the
Americas, where so many flags are fluttering in the gusts of
self-determination.