The importance or lack thereof of the institutionalized study of Latinos, such as Latino and/or Latin American Studies departments.

The importance or lack thereof of the institutionalized study of Latinos, such as Latino and/or Latin American Studies departments.

What makes Latino groups different from each other? Which groups are known to be more traditional and why?

Try to write based on your own experience, what you read and what you can contrast with today’s reality in the US.

3) Anything you want to share or say about the experience of Latinos in the US will be welcomed.

Requirements: 4-6 paragraphs

1we are here because you were thereGómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

20 INVENTING LATINOSMyths and stereotypes reinforce each other. The myth sets out the story, the stereotype fits in the characters. It was said, for instance, that the post-war “influx” of West Indian and Asian immigrants to this country was due to “push-and-pull” factors. Poverty pushed us out of countries, and prosperity pulled us into Britain. Hence the stereotype that we were lazy, feckless people who were on the make. But what wasn’t said was that it was colonialism that both impoverished us and enriched Britain. . . . Quite simply we came to Britain (and not to Germany for instance) because we were occupied by Britain. Colonialism and immigration are part of the same continuum—we are here because you were there.—Ambalavaner Sivanandan, speech on the fiftieth anniversary of Britain’s Institute of Race Relations, 2009 1If, for African Americans, the fundamental racial origin story is one of capture in Africa, forced travel to North America, and brutal enslavement itself protected by law, what is the defining race- making crucible for Latinos? The clear answer is that it begins with American colonialism and empire in Latin America. Whether in order to extend the country to the Pacific (Mexico), to extract resources like coffee, sugar, or bananas (Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica), to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans (Panama, Nicaragua), to achieve America’s “manifest destiny” in the hemisphere (all), or to provide access to an exploitable labor force (all), the United States has invaded, annexed, covertly and overtly interfered, and governed its way across Latin America for two centuries. The linkages between America’s overt and sometimes covert interventions in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America, and the migration of people northward from those regions connects with how Latinos experience racial oppression today. Just as Ambalavaner Sivanandan expressed about Britain, colonialism and migration are likewise on the same continuum for the United States.Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

We Are Here Because You Were There 21Beginning only decades after America’s founding, with the takeover of Texas, extending through today with Puerto Rico and Guantánamo Bay, the United States has continuously pursued the exploitation of resources and people in the Western Hemisphere. The result has been the migration of poor people from Mexico, Central America, and the Spanish Caribbean for more than a century as an always available source of cheap labor, often one that has been especially vulnerable because of a prevalence of undocumented or temporary workers. Why tell the story of Latino racialization as it has affected only these regions of Latin America? There are two simple reasons. First, because U.S. military, civilian, and corporate intervention in these parts of Latin America has been especially harsh, causing often violent economic displacement that has in turn produced the flow of migrants to fill America’s least desirable jobs.2 Second, the vast majority of Latinos trace their birth or descent to the countries of Mexico, Central America (Nicaragua, Panama, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador), and the Spanish Carib-bean (Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic). Consider the four most populous U.S. states: in order of population, they are California, Texas, Florida, and New York. They are home to a combined 120 mil-lion people, including 60 percent of all Latinos. Of each state’s Latinos, between 96 and 99 percent of them trace their ancestry to one of these nine Latin American countries.3The typical narrative about the American footprint in Latin America focuses on the executive branch’s formal, ostensibly well- crafted “for-eign policy.” A standard story begins with the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 and culminates with the Good Neighbor Policy more than a century later. President James Monroe’s warning to England, France, and Spain, Europe’s three strongest colonial powers early in the nineteenth century, was to keep out of Latin America. Less than twenty years after the massive expansion of the United States via the Louisiana Purchase, the Monroe Doctrine encapsulated the idea of an American nation ordained to expand to the northwest, west, and southwest across the continent and beyond. Within roughly a century of the Monroe Doctrine, the United States would invade Mexico, taking half its territory; challenge Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

22 INVENTING LATINOSSpain to war, acquiring Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, and Cuba; and achieve a major geopolitical victory by connecting the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans via the Panama Canal. After all that, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1936 promise to be “a good neighbor” to Latin America proved easy to make, even as it would be repeatedly broken over the next century.The reality of U.S. intervention in the Americas was far more men-acing than these two symbolic pronouncements on the world stage. Over the course of three centuries, American presidents and Congress have executed colonial power in Latin America by deploying a variety of strategies and tactics. Some of them the United States learned as a colony itself, adopting techniques inspired by British colonial rule. Like the East Indian Company in South Asia, which eighteenth- century British philosopher Edmund Burke aptly called “a state in the guise of a merchant,” American corporations sometimes led the way in Latin America.4 The United Fruit Company is a major player in this story, especially in Honduras and Guatemala, with its direc-tors and in- country employees rotating from the corporation into positions within the governments of the U.S. and Central American nations alike. Frequently, American military intervention was justified in order to “protect” American corporate interests (Central America, Cuba). At other times, outright war, followed by the seizure of ter-ritory and people was the strategy (as in Mexico and Puerto Rico). This region, contiguous to the United States, was deemed fit for settler colonialism— understood as the colonial policy of promoting a region’s civilian occupation by Whites from the colonizing society in order to displace the native populations.5 The former Mexico was divided into regions which eventually became all or parts of ten of the most expan-sive states in the United States, though only when White settlers out-numbered Indians and Mexicans.6 In contrast, Puerto Rico and Cuba (along with Guam and the Philippines, all four taken from Spain in 1898), were never viewed as colonies to be settled and made states, as the ongoing controversy, 122 years later, over Puerto Rican state-Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

We Are Here Because You Were There 23hood shows.7 Instead, they were seen as sites for U.S. military power on a larger geopolitical chessboard. At the close of the Cold War’s first decade, Puerto Rico was home to 142,486 American military person-nel.8 Today, 13,520 members of the U.S. Armed Forces are stationed across 34 military sites in Puerto Rico.9 And despite the socialist rev-olution of 1959 and more than five decades of a crippling economic embargo against Cuba, the United States has continuously occupied the Guantanamo Bay military base for 123 years.Since World War II ended, U.S. imperialism in Latin America has been justified by anti- communism and the Cold War. The Cuban Revo-lution of 1959 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1961 drove American opposition to pro- labor populist governments and support for authori-tarian dictators in virtually every Caribbean and Central American nation. Covert, CIA-led operations to depose and install such govern-ments characterized American intervention in Central America from the 1950s until at least the 2000s. The U.S. Southern Command—the military’s presence in the Western Hemisphere—is formally based in Miami, but its force (Army, Navy, Special Forces) headquarters is in Puerto Rico; in 1999 Puerto Rico replaced Panama in that role due to the end of formal U.S. control of the Panama Canal. The U.S. Navy presence in Puerto Rico includes 200,000 square miles in waters around Puerto Rico that allow it to do everything from testing submarines to testing water- based warfare. Rather than direct military intervention, American control has shifted since the 1970s to a combination of covert intelligence, U.S. military training of local armies and national police, and “foreign aid” for drug interdiction and military weapons, and a combination of public / private international imperialism via agencies such as the World Bank. These stories follow, starting with Mexico, then Central America (Nicaragua, Panama, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador), and then the Spanish Caribbean (Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic). A final section describes a program for repara-tions for Latinos and future migrants that reflects how colonialism and immigration are part of one continuum.Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

24 INVENTING LATINOSMexicoThe timing of Monroe’s 1823 warning to European colonial powers that the United States would control the Western Hemisphere, as its back-yard, was far from accidental. It arrived as Spain’s hold on its Latin American colonies was faltering especially in Mexico, which fought a war of independence from 1811 to 1821. Formerly organized as the viceroyalty of New Spain, Mexico’s independence movement took its inspiration from the French and American revolutions with the goal of becoming Latin America’s first republic. Weakened from the long fight for independence and facing resistance from Indigenous peoples seeking their own sovereignty after the collapse of the Spanish empire, Mexico encouraged American settlement of its northeast region, known today as Texas. By 1830, Mexico’s liberal immigration policies had attracted so many Americans to Mexican Texas that they outnumbered Mexicans by a four to one margin. Many of them were Southern slave owners who, in violation of Mexico’s abolition of Black slavery in 1829, brought an estimated 2,000 slaves with them to Texas.10 Rather than comply with abolition, the Americans started an armed revolt against Mexico, plan-ning to declare independence upon their victory. At the Alamo in 1836, the Texans suffered an overwhelming defeat, but a few months later they prevailed, declaring the Texas Republic. The Texans cultivated allies on two fronts: with the small number of elite Mexican landowning ranch-ers and with the federal government.11The Texans sought Washington’s economic and political support, both of which were predicated on winning nation-to- nation recogni-tion. Mississippi senator Robert J. Walker urged recognition of the Texas Republic on the explicitly racist ground that the United States had a duty to support “our kindred race” against “the colored mongrel race, and barbarous tyranny, and superstitions of Mexico.”12 Nothing if not consistent, Walker invoked Mexicans’ inferiority again nine years later in support of statehood for Texas: “five- sixths” of Mexicans are Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

We Are Here Because You Were There 25“semi- barbarous hordes . . . composed of every poisonous compound of blood and color.”13 In a deliberate move to provoke a war with Mex-ico, the Americans asserted an outrageously expansive border, claim-ing both Santa Fe and El Paso along the Rio Grande. Armed with a declaration of war from Congress, President James Polk launched an invasion of Mexico 175 years ago. The timing of the war, five decades after the nation’s formation, served to simultaneously cohere American identity and undercut anti-war opposition by Whig congressmen from New England.14 White Americans’ view of Mexicans’ racial inferiority played a critical role in uniting the nation behind Manifest Destiny, as a newspaper editorialized: “Mexico was poor, distracted, in anarchy, and almost in ruins [after its prolonged war of independence] —what could she do to stay the hand of our power, to impede the march of our great-ness? We are Anglo- Saxon Americans; it was our ‘destiny’ to possess and to rule this continent—we are bound to it!”15Over the course of the next two years, every branch of the American military participated in the invasion, ultimately resulting in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in which Mexico was forced to cede half of its territory and 115,000 Mexicans received collective natural-ization as American citizens.16 The seven out of ten Latinos who are Mexican Americans began with this population—the original Mexican Americans—and continue with today’s migrants from Mexico. After U.S. soldiers captured Santa Fe, Los Angeles, and northern California’s Monterey in 1846, they moved by land and water to seize control of Mexico City.17 Future U.S. president General Zachary Taylor led the ground forces from Texas into the capital city. The U.S. Navy controlled Veracruz, Mexico’s most important Atlantic port, by March 1847, and six months later Mexico had surrendered. Mexico sought to protect the civil rights of its citizens who lived in the ceded territory by inserting into the armistice agreement requirements that the U.S. treat them as equals and that their property, whether privately or communally owned, be protected; both provisions were later violated. For its part, the United Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

26 INVENTING LATINOSStates gained the so- called Mexican Cession but also Mexican people, 14,000 in California, 23,000 in Texas, and 75,000 in what is today New Mexico.18The conviction that Mexicans were racially inferior informed every decision about the incorporation of these original Mexican Americans. The peace treaty promised the Mexicans living in the now- American territory they would receive collective naturalization as American citi-zens, but the Constitution still required Polk to obtain approval for the treaty. Polk’s two-day cabinet meeting about the treaty came first. Sec-retary of State James Buchanan, who would be elected president within a decade, asked rhetorically: “How should we govern the mongrel race which inhabits [the Mexican lands] ? Could we admit them to seats in our Senate or House of Representatives? Are they capable of Self- Government as States of this Confederacy?”19 The next hurdle was the Senate, which held off ratification after an unprecedented eleven days of secret deliberations.20 In the end, senators ratified the treaty by a two to one vote, but they did so only after adding an amendment that nearly scuttled the entire deal when the revised treaty was returned to Mexico for ratification. The amendment amounted to a bait-and- switch tactic; rather than provide immediate statehood for the entirety of the Mexi-can Cession, as agreed and as would have ensured the political and civil rights of the new Mexican American citizens, the Senate gave Congress the power to decide when, if at all, statehood would occur in the newly acquired lands.Although Texas had been admitted by the Senate as a slave state in 1845, Mexico did not relinquish its control over Texas until its surrender in 1848. For California, statehood came almost immediately in 1850. The discovery of gold in northern California in 1849 caused a fivefold increase in California’s White settler population, smoothing the path to statehood. The rest of the vast Mexican Cession entered a colonial status that ensured political limbo for the next sixty-four years. The problem was twofold: two- thirds of the first Mexican Americans lived in what is today New Mexico and the rest of the Mexico Cession was actually Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

We Are Here Because You Were There 27controlled by Indian peoples who had successfully resisted both Span-ish colonial rule and then incorporation as citizens by Mexico. What followed was the gradual breaking up of what remained of the Mexican Cession into regions that—as White settlers and American corpora-tions in railroads and mining, among other sectors, moved into them— became U.S. states. The final two to become states were Arizona and New Mexico. After repeated conventions to draft state constitutions and intensive lobbying efforts by their non- voting delegates in Con-gress, Arizona and New Mexico became states in 1912. Despite a larger population of enfranchised men than Colorado, Utah, and other west-ern territories, as long as Mexicans and Indians remained the demo-graphically and politically dominant groups, statehood remained elusive for these regions.21The war with Mexico, fought largely by a volunteer army, left young American men teeming to continue colonial exploits, even as pri-vate individuals as historian Jason Colby has noted. They were called “filibusters” or “freebooters” and sought, ostensibly without support from the U.S. government, to foment insurrections in other countries (such as the White Americans who formed the Texas Republic or the short- lived California Republic). Inspired by Manifest Destiny and motivated to extend the boundaries of slavery, young men like William Walker left Tennessee to pan for gold in northern California. By age thirty, he had briefly declared himself “president” of Baja California and Sonora, two Mexican states; he then faced trial for launching an illegal war against a sovereign nation under the Neutrality Act of 1794 but was acquitted by a jury.22Ultimately, private businesses with American addresses played a far more lasting role in Latin America than did private individuals, fili-busters or not. This corporate colonialism began in the late nineteenth century with substantial investment in Mexican railroads and mining enterprises.23 These same railways soon came to play a major role in transporting cheap labor to the southwestern United States during the early decades of the twentieth century, where jobs in agriculture and Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

28 INVENTING LATINOSmining awaited them.24 Far from merely the “pull” factors of these eco-nomic sectors, American corporate colonialism dramatically changed entire sectors of the Mexican economy. It displaced tens of thousands of campesinos, rural Mexicans who spoke one of dozens of Indigenous lan-guages native to Mexico. Campesinos were forced from their homelands to find work in Mexico’s cities, and, when that failed, they migrated north to the United States to find work. As inequality grew in Mexico, the wage gap between neighboring countries became irresistible to both poor Mexicans and American agribusiness and other industries that depended on a cheap, flexible labor force. While the Mexican Revolu-tion (1910–1920) led some middle- class Mexicans to move to the Unit-ed States, the bulk of those coming north in the past century have been mestizo or Indigenous Mexicans taking jobs on the bottom rung of the U.S. labor market.By 1911, the U.S. Immigration Bureau was already reporting that 50,000 Mexicans crossed the border annually without legal autho-rization.25 In a cycle that continues today, White elites and workers demonized Mexican immigrants, directly leading to the formation of the Border Patrol in 1924 (the same year, you will recall, in which the quotas favoring immigrants from northwestern European countries were instituted).26 Proponents of the Border Patrol— which today is the nation’s largest law enforcement agency, with 20,000 officers— claimed it would prevent the “degradation” of America, degradation they said flowed directly from the campesinos’ “mongrel” character, a result of the mixture of “Spanish peasants,” “low- grade Indians,” and “negro slave blood.”27 Even with the Border Patrol in place, agribusiness in Texas and California called the shots. By 1950, some 90,000 Mexican Ameri-cans and Mexicans worked as farmworkers in California, and 160,000 more were based in Texas, including 60,000 who called Texas home yet who seasonally migrated back and forth to harvest crops in other states.28 During the Great Depression, Latino workers became scapegoats, subject to the vagaries of local and state reactions to unemployment. Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

We Are Here Because You Were There 29In the 1930s, as many as two million people, including some American citizens of Mexican descent, were deported so that their jobs could be given to Whites.29 In Los Angeles, labor unions proclaimed “Employ no Mexican while a white man is unemployed. . . . Get the Mexican back to Mexico regardless by what means.”30 In Texas in 1931, the state legislature mandated a 50 percent reduction in cotton- growing acreage, driving jobless Mexican cotton pickers into cities and towns to look for work. When a prolonged drought drove unemployed Mexican American beet workers to Denver in search of jobs, Colorado’s governor ordered the National Guard to the New Mexico border to prevent Mexican American farmworkers from entering the state.31 If they reached Colo-rado, Mexican workers were greeted with signs reading: “Warning all Mexicans and all other aliens to leave the state of Colorado at once.”32When Latinos stood up for themselves, they were imprisoned or deported. In one incident at a Gallup, New Mexico, coal mine, Latino miners went on strike because they were receiving less pay than White miners for the same work. The strike dragged on for months, resulting in the eviction of three hundred Latinos from company- owned housing, which, in turn, prompted an attack on the sheriff who tried to enforce the evictions. The resulting melee led the sheriff to jail two hundred miners, forty- eight of whom were convicted for the single crime of an accidental homicide and the rest of whom were deported to Mexico.33 Mexican American and Japanese American farmworkers were seen as a threat to white supremacy, both because they engaged in labor activ-ism and because the alien land laws, which prohibited land ownership by those who were not U.S. citizens, were applied to both groups in the western states.34 By 1940, the Latino population in Texas and Los Angeles County fell by one- third due to “voluntary” departures to Mex-ico or government- mandated deportations, with one study showing that 80 percent of those pushed out or deported were, in fact, American citi-zens or legal immigrants.35The reverse played out during World War II, when the shortage of male workers led the United States to establish a bilateral labor Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

30 INVENTING LATINOS agreement with Mexico. Known as the Bracero Program, it recruited young, single men called braceros, slang from the root word in Spanish for “arms,” emphasizing the hard labor these men did. Between 1942 and 1947, 220,000 Mexican men earned 30 cents a day as agricultural workers in the United States.36 Like those campesinos who went north decades before, these largely Indigenous and mestizo men were forced, due to Mexico’s austerity and modernization, to migrate from rural villages to Mexico’s cities. Given its own economic struggles, Mexico welcomed their employment in the United States, and American agri-business welcomed them to fill jobs vacated by enlisted servicemen.Once they arrived at the U.S. border, braceros underwent invasive and demeaning medical inspection, as shown in an iconic photo. Taken at the El Paso, Texas border station, the photo shows dozens of brown- skinned young men lined up, naked with only a paper towel covering their genitals, while an American doctor inspected them one-by-one. By the 1940s, the racist stereotype of the “dirty Mexican” was already well entrenched in the United States. Historical accounts of the cre-ation of the public health bureau in Los Angeles County in the early twentieth century show that officials perceived Mexicans as inherently dirty and disease- infested and, as a result, did not bother fighting poor sanitation due to poverty in Mexican American neighborhoods.37 Bra-ceros complained both to Mexican consulates in the Southwest and to the Mexican government when they returned about every aspect of the Bracero Program, from those initial exams to American employers’ fail-ure to provide adequate housing to the theft of their mandatory savings by Mexican banks. Only in this century has a “Bracero Justice” social movement sprung up on both sides of the border. In a tale of usurpa-tion, the photograph of naked braceros has been reclaimed as a symbol of pride for braceros who left as campesinos barely past adolescence and returned home as young men who had seen the world and often become acculturated as mestizo workers.38Long after the war made it necessary, agribusiness successfully lob-bied Congress to extend the Bracero Program until 1964.39 In total, Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

We Are Here Because You Were There 31some 4.6 million Mexicans participated in the program over the course of two decades.40 The reality was that it provided a new, legal way to exploit Mexican workers under coercive labor contracts, as if hir-ing undocumented workers did not give employers sufficient bargain-ing power.41 Perhaps paradoxically, unauthorized Mexican migration surged over the course of the Bracero Program era. According to one scholar, such crossings were a way for migrants to resist repressive work contracts that did not allowed for control over one’s labor, the formation of families in the United States, or inclusion in American society.42The result was that, even as the Bracero Program was extended, the federal government’s new Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)—the precursor to today’s Immigration and Customs Enforce-ment (ICE)—stepped up deportations of Mexican migrants who had entered the United States without legal authorization. The INS pejo-ratively named its 1950s deportation initiative “Operation Wetback,” using a derisive reference to Mexicans who cross the border without papers whose bodies are presumably wet from crossing the Rio Grande. So many Mexicans were rounded up in Chicago under Operation Wetback that the INS established a Chicago-to- Mexico airlift just for deportations; in total, 3.7 million people were deported under the program.43 In fact, Operation Wetback was so extensive in Chicago that Puerto Ricans—who by law may live and work on the mainland as American citizens— routinely were asked to show proof of citizen-ship because they were mistaken for Mexicans.44 By the late 1970s, the civil rights movement had prompted the discursive shift away from “wetback” to the seemingly race- neutral “illegal alien.” Today, of course, that phrase has morphed into simply “illegal,” used as a noun to refer to human beings, usually with a decidedly racist connotation.45By the late 1960s, two major trends characterized Latino migration. First, Mexican workers were entrenched as a disposable labor force, deported when unemployment rose or job needs changed (the 1930s, the 1950s) and readily lured north when demanded by specific employ-ers or economic sectors (i.e., the recruitment of temporary farmworkers Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

32 INVENTING LATINOSunder the Bracero Program, 1942–1962). A second trend was launched by the 1965 overhaul of immigration laws, rightly hailed as a civil rights landmark for ending the ban on immigration from Asia in place since 1917. The 1965 law also set aside the country quotas from 1924 that had favored immigrants from northwestern European countries. Moreover, it was in 1965 that the policy of family reunification came to characterize U.S. naturalization preferences. Trump derisively refers to the latter as “chain migration” because it allows immigrants who become American citizens to place their relatives on a waiting list to be allowed entry to the United States as authorized immigrants with a path to citizenship. Mexican immigrants have disproportionately benefited from family reunification, yet the same 1965 law implemented quotas on migration from Western Hemisphere countries, thereby limiting Latin American immigration untethered from family reunification.46It was precisely these built-in constraints on authorized Mexican migration— coupled with employer demand for low-wage workers in the manufacturing and service industries—that produced a dramatic increase in the population of undocumented Mexican immigrants in the United States. Between 1970 and 1990, the number of undocumented Mexican migrants increased six times over, from fewer than 900,000 to 5.4 million people.47 During this period, President Reagan signed into law the Immigration Regulation and Control Act of 1986, providing a path to citizenship for 2 million undocumented immigrants, increas-ing border enforcement, but continuing to hold employers harmless for hiring workers without legal authorization to be in the country; not surprisingly, then, the law failed to curtail demand for Mexican work-ers.48 The 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, which in late 2019 was replaced with the United States- Mexico- Canada Agreement, was supposed to reduce undocumented immigration from Mexico by providing Mexican workers with better jobs in Mexico. Yet, NAFTA is widely believed to have had the opposite effect .49 In response to increased migration caused by the massive restructuring of the Mexi-can economy due to NAFTA, President Clinton signed into law the Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

We Are Here Because You Were There 33Illegal Immigrant Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act.50 Sociol-ogists Nelson Rodriguez and Cecilia Menjívar have called it “the Latino Exclusion Act,” nodding to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, because the law fostered “a new atmosphere of exclusion that had not been felt by Latino immigrants since the federal roundup of over a million Mexicans during Operation Wetback in the 1950s.”51 The number of deportations quadrupled in the space of a decade, with Mexicans the majority and Central Americans a significant number. During the final years of the twentieth century, annual deportations increased fivefold, to 208,000.52In some respects, it is the Clinton era that was the precursor to the early twenty- first- century state and local laws that seek to penalize undocumented persons (and discourage future migrants) by cutting off public benefits and restricting private landlords’ and employers’ abil-ity to do business with them. Here too the result was not a reduction in unauthorized migration but, instead, a strengthening of the bar-gaining position of employers hiring undocumented migrants which, understandably, increased the demand for exploitable workers.53 President Obama expanded the visa program for guest workers under which 361,000 Mexican nationals received visas as temporary agricul-tural workers in 2010; combined with record-breaking deportations, the Obama administration’s immigration policy was nothing short of “schizophrenic” because it was giving such visas to the same kind of migrants it was deporting at record numbers in 2009–2012.54 Once again during the Obama administration, arrests and prosecutions of immigrants skyrocketed, for example, climbing from 13,249 prosecu-tions in 1998 to more than 60,000 in 2017, the last year of the Obama presidency. Whereas Obama had in 2015, with the 2016 election loom-ing, instituted a slow-down in deportations by directing that 87 percent of undocumented immigrants were to be low- priority for enforcement, Trump ramped up all aspects of immigration detention and deporta-tion.55 In the first two years of the Trump administration, compared to the last two of the Obama administration, federal prosecutions of immigration crimes increased 66 percent to 99,479 annually; similarly, Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

34 INVENTING LATINOSObama’s deportations set a record high, only to be surpassed by Trump’s first two years.56And yet, Mexican immigrants keep coming north. Today, 10 percent of Mexico’s population lives in the United States. Their remittances back to relatives are Mexico’s second- largest source of foreign exchange.57 These numbers, in turn, explain why Mexico has twice—in 1996 and 2005— enacted laws to allow its citizens living in the United States to become naturalized American citizens and still retain their Mexican passports, own property in Mexico, and vote in Mexican elections from abroad.58Central America and the Panama CanalAmerica’s acquisition of the northern half of Mexico in 1848 unleashed a flood of migration westward to California’s newly discovered gold mines. While most traveled over land by wagon, some 200,000 went by sea, crossing from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean via Central Amer-ica, the most narrow isthmus in the hemisphere. Cornelius Vander-bilt, who already controlled steamship routes and railway lines in and around New York, offered transportation between New York and San Francisco, relying on a combination of ocean steamships, river steam-boats, and a twelve-mile carriage ride across Central America in what would later be Nicaragua.59 In 1854 Vanderbilt requested American military intervention when native men attacked his business and the British (who had six years earlier established a presence in Nicaragua) refused to intervene. To justify his decision to send a naval ship to Nica-ragua, President Franklin Pierce told his cabinet that the natives were “dangerous” and that they were “composed for the most part of blacks and persons of mixed blood.”60 This was reminiscent of the racist trope around “mongrelization” popularized during the war with Mexico, in which Pierce had been a brigadier general serving in key battles, includ-ing Mexico City. Although he was born and bred in New Hampshire, Pierce was an outspoken critic of abolitionists, believing they would Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

We Are Here Because You Were There 35destroy the young nation by causing a rupture with the South.61 A year after ordering trips to aid Vanderbilt, Pierce recognized William Walker’s claim as president of Nicaragua (the same Walker who had filibustered in Mexico).62 Apparently, Pierce had not consulted Vander-bilt, who it seems persuaded Costa Rica to oust Walker within months because he feared Walker would endanger his investments by seeking control of all Central America.63And so began American imperialism in Central America, a toxic mix of corporate greed, filibusters, military might, and racism. The complete United States occupation of Nicaragua was delayed by the Civil War and Reconstruction, and later by the Spanish- American War of 1898. It was left to President William Taft to take up the task in 1911. Taft, who by the time he became president had an extensive resumé as a colonial administrator, sought a sea route connecting the newly acquired island colonies in the Pacific (Philippines, Guam, Hawaii) with those in the Atlantic (Puerto Rico, Cuba). Taft had served briefly as the American governor in Cuba and as the first territorial governor of the Philippines. Like most other American leaders, he went to great lengths to convince people (and perhaps himself) that military intervention by the United States was benign. In a 1907 article for National Geographic while he was Secretary of War, Taft wrote that American imperialism reflected the “sense of duty only,” what he called “national altruism.”64Taft’s first action in Nicaragua was to order American troops to remove the nation’s anti- American president, replacing him with a Nicaraguan who had formerly been employed by an American mining company. The newly installed pro- American president signed a treaty with the United States providing a naval base, control over the Nicaraguan economy, and an exclusive option to build a canal through Nicaragua.65 When the American ambassador warned Taft that a rebellion was brewing among Nicaraguans, whom he described as having “a majority of Indian and Negro Indian blood,” Taft ordered the Marines to Nicaragua, where they remained for two decades.66 Only in 1936 did the United States judge the climate calm enough to install its chosen leader, Anastasio Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

36 INVENTING LATINOSSomoza García, whose family remained in power for more than forty years.67 Under the Somoza regime, American banking, agricultural, mining, and railway corporations reaped great wealth, while everyday Nicaraguans remained impoverished and illiterate.68Somoza’s son, also named Anastasio, headed the Nicaraguan Nation-al Guard after graduating from West Point in 1946. The younger Somo-za made it a point to send his best officers to receive intensive training at the U.S. School of the Americas, where Latin American military personnel were trained by American officers using state-of-the-art mili-tary technology.69 In total, over the course of six decades, 60,000 Latin American military officers and soldiers trained at the school between its early 1940s founding in the Panama Canal Zone and its rebranding in 2001 as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Drawing heavily from government records obtained via requests under the Freedom of Information Act, historian Lindsey Gill concludes that the School of the Americas was “implicated in some of the worst human rights violations in Latin America” and that it played a key role in American imperialism in the region by training repressive states and supplying them with arms and other technologies of violence.70In a country of 3.5 million, the Somoza regime killed or dis-appeared 50,000 people and wounded another 100,000 in the 1970s— proportionally, this would be equivalent to 5 million American casualties today.71 By 1979, the tide had turned against Somoza and in favor of the Marxist- revolutionary Sandinista movement. Named for Augusto Sandino, the leader of the anti- American resistance in the 1930s, the Sandinistas were recognized by President Jimmy Carter, who, alongside others in the region, offered to assist the new govern-ment. But that was not to be as Carter lost re- election to Ronald Rea-gan, who had campaigned on the promise to reverse the Sandinista revolution.72 Reagan ordered 20,000 American troops to Nicaragua between 1985 and 1990; during the same period, he ordered a covert operation to support the anti- Sandinista forces known as the Contras, a Spanish abbreviation for counter- revolutionaries. Over the course of five Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

We Are Here Because You Were There 37years, the Reagan administration covertly funneled $400 million to the Contras.73 Since Congress objected to funding, this money came mostly from the proceeds of cocaine sales orchestrated by the CIA, moving cocaine from Colombia to Panama to Los Angeles at the peak of the crack cocaine epidemic.74 The U.S.-financed Contras killed 31,000 peo-ple and wounded twice that number in the 1980s.75Nicaraguan Latinos are split between anti- communist, pro- Somoza migrants and those who were the victims of Somoza and the National Guard.76 Compared to other Central Americans who succeeded in their asylum applications at the rate of 2-3 percent in the 1980s, during the same period, 25 percent of Nicaraguans seeking asylum were successful (still far below that of Soviet exiles, who were granted asylum 77 per-cent of the time).77 Compared to Latinos from other Central American countries, the first-wave Nicaraguans were received much as the Cuban exiles were in the 1960s, as anti-communist “freedom fighters.”78 In contrast, the approximately 40 percent of Nicaraguan Latinos who came to the United states after 1990, when the Sandinistas were defeated by the Contras were far less favorably treated. In 1995, Cuban American congressional representatives sponsored the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act, which became law in 1997, providing legal permanent resident status (green cards) for undocumented nation-als from Nicaragua, Cuba, the Soviet Union (and, to a much lesser degree, to those from El Salvador and Guatemala) if they had lived in the United States for more than seven years continuously, could show good moral character, and would face extreme hardship from deporta-tion.79 It is due to the special character of Nicaraguan Latinos as split between anti- communist and pro- socialist migrants that, relative to other Central Americans, has led them to have a much higher rate of naturalization as U.S. citizens, at just over 50 percent.80The story of American colonial exploits is particular to each Latin American country, but the connective tissue is the same: the racializa-tion of native peoples as subhuman; the region’s geopolitical strategic value; how military exercises support and reinforce corporate capitalism; Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

38 INVENTING LATINOShuman rights abuses by U.S.-installed dictators; and displacement caused by violence and economic deprivation, leading to migration of an exploitable workforce.81 The creation of Panama and the Panama Canal Zone puts these themes on vivid display. In addition to having the shortest route to the Pacific, Panama was a strategically important hub for the north- south traffic of people and goods on the new railroads connecting South America with North America.82After failed attempts by English and French companies to build the canal, the United States took up the project, at first sending the Marines to the Atlantic Coast town of Colón in 1898. The Marines failed in their mission to persuade the town, based in Panamá Province, to secede from Gran Colombia (a newly independent nation that then included present-day Colombia, Panama, Venezuela, and Ecuador). Five years later, a new president, Teddy Roosevelt, again sent in the Marines, this time having received the assurance that the Panamanians were ready to secede from Colombia. Unwilling to risk a military defeat against the Americans, Colombia declined to assert sovereignty over Panama, in an example of “gunboat diplomacy.” In an agreement similar to the one with Nicaragua, the United States in 1903 signed the Hay- Bunau- Varilla Treaty with the new Panamanian government. It provided the United States a ninety-nine-year lease on “the Panama Canal Zone,” over which the Americans would have complete sovereignty, and gave the United States the right of military intervention in Panama proper.83American construction of the canal began the following year, although the project took decades to complete. Racism was a central feature of the project from the beginning. The first American governor of the canal zone protectorate said there was nothing wrong with his American civil-ian employees calling dark- skinned Panamanians the N-word.84 When enumerators conducted the census of 1910, they counted 26,000 Pana-manians living in the Panama Canal Zone and classified three- quarters of them as “Negro,” a vestige of the heavy importation of African slaves to the region under Spanish colonialism.85 The United States preferred to employ English- speaking Jamaicans and other West Indians in canal construction, and tensions arose due to a racial hierarchy in which the Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

We Are Here Because You Were There 39best jobs went to West Indian immigrants, including supervisory roles over Spanish- speaking Panamanians. An anti- Black backlash emerged over time, fueling Panama’s exclusion of Black immigrants beginning in 1926.86 Panamanians in the United States today self- identify as Black at the relatively high rate, compared to other Latinos, of 20 percent.87The canal zone essentially functioned as an unincorporated U.S. ter-ritory, where persons, American and non- American, were subject to federal police and federal courts, and where several American military bases were located. Even more than most military base zones, clash-es between American military personnel, civilian employees, and the locals were common. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a series of riots tempered the American zeal for empire, and, in the 1970s, President Carter negotiated an American withdrawal to occur in 1999. As with Nicaragua, Reagan took a very different approach to Panama upon his assumption of the presidency in 1981. He supported the CIA’s cultiva-tion of General Manuel Noriega as Panama’s ruler in the early 1980s. Noriega had trained at the School of the Americas, led the Panama-nian security forces, and styled himself the Maximum Leader of the National Liberation. During the Contra war against the Sandinistas, Noriega provided the planes used to traffic cocaine from Colombia to the United States. The CIA turned on Noriega in the late 1980s, accus-ing him of fraternizing with Fidel Castro and conspiring with Colombi-an drug cartels.88 President George H.W. Bush, who had been Reagan’s vice president and CIA director before that, ordered Noriega removed by U.S. armed forces. It took six weeks to do so, during which 6,000 Panamanians were killed.89 Noriega was removed to the United States, convicted of racketeering and drug crimes in Miami, and sentenced to forty years in prison.90The Americans ran the campaign against Noriega from a Hondu-ran military base. Similarly, the 20,000 Contra fighters used Hon-duras as their base of operations with approval from their American benefactors.91 In short, the United States created a regional counter- revolutionary force in Honduras. U.S. military aid to Honduras increased more than twenty-fold between 1978 and 1984 compared to Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

40 INVENTING LATINOSthe prior three decades. The Honduran military doubled in size during this period, including the addition of the region’s most elaborate air force.92For a nation of fewer than four million people, high numbers of Honduran military personnel trained at the School of the Americas: 1,100 in the seventies and 800 in the eighties.93 The country’s notori-ous “Battalion 3-16”—named for its service to three military units and sixteen battalions of the Honduran army— emerged in 1979 under the leadership of General Gustavo Álvarez Martínez. Álvarez graduated in 1961 from the Argentine Military College, known for its role in Argentina’s “Dirty War,” during which 30,000 people were murdered or disappeared by military death squads. The 3-16 functioned as an intel-ligence unit and a state death squad, brutally torturing and murdering Honduran students, scholars, journalists, and other civilians.94 The U.S. Armed Forces awarded Álvarez the Legion of Medal in 1983, one of the highest honors possible for foreigners.95 Even today, members of the now officially disbanded 3-16 continue to wield power in Honduras. In 2005 Hondurans elected a leftist president, Manuel Zelaya, who was ousted four years later with help from former 3-16 members.96 Eight of ten Honduran Latinos migrated after 1990, when the United States formally ended its alliance with Battalion 3-16.97Today, Honduran Latinos are 1.6 percent of all Latinos, close to one million persons. They are an especially vulnerable part of the Latino community because three- quarters of them are undocumented. Not surprisingly, then, Hondurans’ rate of deportation is double that of Guatemalan Latinos and triple that of Salvadoran Latinos.98 Moreover, the number of Honduran unaccompanied children and family units apprehended at the border has dramatically increased since 2016, nearly doubling for children migrating alone and increasing nine times over for family units.99 Since then, 188,416 Honduran families (at least two or more related persons) left their homes to cross Mexico in order to reach the United States, an astounding number in a short time period. In 1998, an estimated 60,000 Hondurans received Temporary Protect-Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

We Are Here Because You Were There 41ed Status (TPS) due to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Mitch, which caused 7,000 deaths in Honduras. TPS is an immigration sta-tus that allows undocumented migrants to live and work in the United States when their home countries have been hit by natural disaster or overcome by civil war. The Trump administration in 2019 ordered an end to TPS for migrants from El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, and Sudan— which together compose 98 percent of all TPS recipients—but in late 2019 federal courts blocked the order, and the Department of Homeland Security announced it would extend TPS until January 2021.100Different countries in Central America have served different U.S. agendas. Honduras was essentially a military base where the United States was either in control or largely unfettered. Guatemala, which shares a southern border with Honduras and El Salvador and a north-ern border with Mexico, was ill suited to serving as a base of American military operations in the region at least in part because of its proxim-ity to Mexico.101 (The longer history between Mexico and the United States—the American invasion, occupation of Mexico City, and Mex-ican surrender that included signing away half of its territory to the United States—has made Mexicans wary of appearing submissive to the United States, and there are no American military bases in Mexico.) Another factor was the size and diversity of Guatemala’s Indigenous population, apart from Indo- mestizos. The country is divided into twen-ty-two regions, some of which closely mirror Indigenous groups, which speak different languages. Twenty- three Maya groups divided into four major language groups live in Guatemala, constituting at least 40 per-cent of the population. Very likely this is an undercount due to pressures for Indigenous people to acculturate to appear mestizo, with some esti-mating that Indigenous people actually compose 60–80 percent of the population.102Yet, as was the case in Mexico, American corporations were not deterred by Guatemala’s large and diverse Indigenous population. The United Fruit Company, founded in 1899 (in the 1970s it merged with Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

42 INVENTING LATINOSanother corporation to become United Brands Company and then, in 1984, Chiquita Brands International), by 1910 employed 4,000 workers on thirty banana plantations in Guatemala. The corporation controlled the railroads across Central America, which, in fact, an earlier iteration of United Fruit had built to maintain fluid transportation of its fruit to markets in the United States. United Fruit tried to avoid hiring local, Indigenous laborers. In order to build the railways, it recruited hundreds of newly freed African Americans, most of whom died from malaria and other tropical diseases.103 The idea that Central America was an “ideal” home for resettlement of the newly freed slaves after the Emancipation Proclamation was widespread in the United States. In 1862, President Lincoln, in a meeting with African American leaders, suggested Cen-tral America was “an ideal” place for American Blacks “because of the similarity of climate with your native land.”104With its earlier failure with African American workers in mind, Unit-ed Fruit turned instead to English- speaking Black workers from the West Indies. They soon resented the strict segregation in living, social, and work quarters between White American supervisors and Black laborers, and in 1910, six hundred Black workers sought to unionize. In response, United Fruit adopted a different strategy to stoke racial divi-sion among its workers. The company hired fewer West Indian work-ers than before, placing them in higher-paid, skilled positions, often as supervisors over Spanish- and Indigenous- speaking workers native to Guatemala.105 United Fruit’s White managers derided both classes of workers, routinely using racial slurs including the N-word and the word “spig” (likely a variant of spic).106 By racially dividing its labor force, United Fruit blocked concerted worker organizing, but it also introduced greater conflict. Already high tensions between Black immi-grant and native Guatemalan workers were exacerbated in 1914 when Guatemala began enforcing a new law barring cohabitation between West Indian men and mestizas (in the Guatemalan racial typogra-phy, they were called ladinas, women of Indo- Spanish descent, but the term was often applied with respect to Mayan people who assimilated Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

We Are Here Because You Were There 43to mestizo customs and dress).107 Just as Panama and Honduras barred Black immigrants in order to signal both racism and resistance to cor-porate colonialism, the Guatemalan law reflected the new imposition of American- style racism as well as the centuries-old Spanish colonial racial hierarchy of White-over- Indigenous-and- Black racism.In the 1920s, in another effort at American gunboat diplomacy, the USS Niagara docked off the Guatemalan coast, in a move designed to intimidate the Unionist Party from overthrowing the anti- labor dicta-tor, Manuel Estrada Cabrera.108 In Guatemala’s first election later that year, however, the Unionists prevailed, electing Carlos Herrera presi-dent. But before Herrera assumed office, a U.S.-backed military coup ousted Estrada. United Fruit persuaded President Woodrow Wilson to order coup-leader General José Martí Orellana to quell mounting labor unrest. By early 1923, Orellana complied, deporting labor leaders lead-ing the strike against United Fruit, who were Salvadoran and Honduran by nationality.109For the next thirty years, Guatemala was free of American military intervention. Leftist Jacobo Árbenz rose to power in 1944, carrying out significant pro- labor and pro- peasant reforms. For example, a new Agrarian Reform Law— designed to break United Fruit’s stranglehold on the nation’s best land— allocated forty-two acres to each individual farmer from the unused land on banana plantations. Within two years of the law’s implementation, 100,000 Indigenous families had received land and credit to begin cultivation. Indigenous and Ladino workers on banana plantations also formed twenty-five unions during this peri-od.110 When the corporation had exhausted its in- country tactics to rein in Árbenz, United Fruit campaigned for U.S. government intervention. First it persuaded Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, United Fruit’s former attorney, and his brother, CIA Director Allen Dulles and a for-mer member of United Fruit’s board of directors, that Guatemala’s dem-ocratically elected president posed a communist threat.111 The Dulleses then went to President John D. Eisenhower, who in the first decade of the Cold War, was an easy mark. In 1954, Eisenhower ordered the CIA’s Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

44 INVENTING LATINOSoverthrow of Árbenz, setting in motion a deadly Guatemalan civil war lasting thirty-five years.112 Guatemalan police and armed forces, includ-ing some officers who had been trained by American military personnel at the School of the Americas, murdered 200,000 civilians and carried out the disappearance of another 45,000 between 1978 and 1983.113 The Commission for Historical Clarification, a United Nations– supported truth and reconciliation body, concluded that 83 percent of those mur-dered were Maya; it is no overstatement to call the killings an Indig-enous genocide. In her 1983 memoir I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchú Tum chronicles the atrocities of the Guatemalan military and paramili-tary forces and the power of Maya survivors.114In 1999, President Clinton apologized for the role played by the Unit-ed States in the Guatemalan genocide.115 Despite that unique recogni-tion of American complicity in violence in Central America, the United States has been largely unwilling to accept Guatemalan Latinos’ asylum claims. Under the 1980 Refugee Act signed into law by President Carter, the United States moved from a collective asylum law based on country of origin to one based on individual identification of refugees.116 Under this policy, less than 2 percent of Guatemalans who requested asylum in the United States between 1983 and 1990 received it.117 This is no sur-prise, since to grant widespread asylum to Maya migrants would be to acknowledge America’s role in the genocide. Given that three- quarters of Guatemalan Latinos now living in the United States migrated after 1990, it is likely that the proportion granted asylum in the subsequent three decades is even lower. In short, Guatemalans, particularly those who are Maya, live in a hyper- violent society given the history of geno-cide and the ongoing history of sexual violence against women, such that their only option has become migrating without legal authorization to the United States.118 This is borne out by the fact that only one in four of the 1.5 million Guatemalan Latinos has American citizenship, meaning that three in four live in the shadows, subject to exploitation by employers and everyday violence yet again.119Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

We Are Here Because You Were There 45During 2018 and 2019, Trump referred to Guatemalan, Hondu-ran, and Salvadoran migrants seeking entry to the United States as an “emergency” for the United States. He spoke of so- called “caravans” of migrants seeking to force their way into the United States without acknowledging that they traveled in large groups in order to protect themselves on the arduous and frightening journey north, especially so for children traveling alone or families traveling with children. In fiscal years 2018 and 2019, 50,656 Guatemalan children traveling alone were apprehended at the U.S. border, and a stunning 235,634 family units were apprehended.120 Meanwhile, in the midst of this crisis, U.S. Attor-ney General Jeff Sessions announced that Central American migrants claiming asylum based on domestic violence or gang violence would be summarily turned away.121 And in late 2019, Trump announced that for the entirety of 2020, only 1,500 refugees from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador combined would be accepted.122 The “emergency” is of Trump’s making, exacerbating a humanitarian crisis fueled by a century of American imperialism in Central America.The American pattern of imperialism was different in El Salvador, where a small number of wealthy families controlled coffee and sugar plantations after independence from Spain.123 When the U.S. depres-sion affected global markets in 1932, Indigenous peasants and labor unionists protested, and the government of Maximiliano Hernán-dez Martínez massacred 30,000 mostly Indigenous campesinos.124 The episode was a powerful lesson to Indigenous peoples, some of whom responded by feigning assimilation, speaking Spanish, migrating from rural to urban areas, and passing as mestizos.125 In the three national censuses following the massacre, Indigenous persons were not even counted, suggesting just how strong the pressure was to assimilate.126The first direct U.S. intervention in El Salvador occurred when the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, fearing another Cuba in the region, covertly supported an anti- communist coup that came to power in 1961.127 Under the guise of foreign aid programs such as the Alliance for Progress (1961–1969), the United States built up El Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

46 INVENTING LATINOSSalvador’s security state and promoted “economic integration” that favored American- based multinational corporations.128 Fidel Sánchez Hernández came to power in 1972 in elections widely acknowledged as fraudulent. His repressive government generated widespread protest by students, labor groups, and a new radical wing of the Catholic Church known as “liberation theology” that preached social justice for poor peo-ple.129 The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, named after one of the leaders of the 1932 rebellion so brutally crushed, was gaining momentum, prompting anti- communist hysteria in Washington.130 The United States responded by providing $6 billion to El Salvador between 1981 and 1992 in a combination of economic aid, covert aid, and mili-tary aid.131 In only three years in the late 1980s, El Salvador’s armed forces ballooned from 15,000 to 52,000 troops, thousands of whom the U.S. military trained at the School of the Americas.132 It was these mili-tary forces, organized into brutal death squads, that in the 1980s mur-dered 75,000 mostly Indigenous Salvadorans.133 Among the martyrs of the resistance in those years was San Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Romero, assassinated in 1980, whose weekly radio sermons condemned state violence and admonished the United States to end its support for the regime.134The civil war led one in six Salvadorans to flee the country, mostly to the United States.135 Despite the government’s offensive against its political opponents, less than 3 percent of Salvadoran Latinos who have sought asylum in the United States have received it.136 Indeed, in the 1990s, Salvadoran immigrants freeing the violent civil war were por-trayed as “economic migrants,” much as Guatemalan and Honduran migrants seeking asylum are today.137 Today there are as many Salva-doran Latinos as Cubans, and more than 2.3 million and 4 percent of all Latinos migrate from El Salvador. Compared to Guatemalans and Hondurans, the number of Salvadoran children traveling alone and families migrating is much smaller, judging by Border Patrol apprehen-sion numbers.138 Two- thirds of Salvadoran Latinos now living in the United States arrived after 1990; 30 percent of them are U.S. citizens but most remain undocumented.139Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

We Are Here Because You Were There 47The Spanish Caribbean: Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican RepublicFor Americans, the Spanish- American War of 1898 is most famous for Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, the all- volunteer infantry that landed on Cuban shores to fight Spain as it sought to keep power over its last New World colonies. Ironically, Spain’s defeat meant American colonial control over Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, while only Cuba gained independence. America’s empire building in 1898 had much in common with the invasion of Mexico five decades earlier, including the prominence of Senator Albert J. Beveridge. As chairman of the Sen-ate’s committee on territories in 1902, Beveridge took pride in block-ing statehood for New Mexico because its Mexican American majority spoke predominantly Spanish and had no intention of assimilating.140 In 1898, while campaigning for the Senate, he emphasized a platform of Manifest Destiny: “We are a conquering race, and we must obey our blood and occupy new markets, and, if necessary, new lands. . . . [The result will be] the disappearance of debased civilizations and decaying races before the higher civilization of the nobler and more virile types of men.”141As a newly elected senator from Indiana, one of Beveridge’s first official acts was to visit the Philippines, where he preached, “No self- government for peoples who have not yet learned the alphabet of lib-erty.”142 This quote exemplifies the notion of “tutelary colonialism” prominent in the Philippines and Puerto Rico, the idea that the natives of these new American colonies were unfit to govern themselves, thus making it necessary for the United States to rule their countries until such time as warranted.143 In political cartoons of the day, the people of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines “were often pictured as dark- skinned, childlike, effeminate, poor, and primitive peoples . . . standard themes from the old white racist” playbook.144 On the surface, the objective of American colonial rule in the Philippines and Puer-to Rico was the same: to “liberate” island peoples under the thumb of Spain’s long colonial rule. In fact, however, the two islands’ responses Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

48 INVENTING LATINOSto American invasion could not have differed more. In the Philippines, 400,000 Filipino men, women, and children were slaughtered in the American conquest, compared to a mere 4,000 American deaths.145 In contrast, there were few natives killed in Puerto Rico. There, a small elite controlled the island, and they fully believed Puerto Rico would be quickly incorporated as a U.S. state.146 Prior to the outbreak of war in 1898, these elites had been negotiating with Spain for a political status that was in between independent nation and colony. Rather than force independence from Spain, as Cuba did, Puerto Rican elites favored incorporation as a distant province.147The United States organized Puerto Rico and the Philippines as pro-tectorates, quite unlike the New Mexico Territory formed forty- eight years previously. In New Mexico, the majority Mexican population controlled the territorial legislature (with the important caveat that Congress retained veto). In Puerto Rico the Americans did not create a similar representative body. Whereas the New Mexico state constitu-tion of 1912 specified that no one was to face discrimination for speak-ing only Spanish or only English, the U.S. colonial governor insisted that all Puerto Rican schools provide instruction only in English. Near-ly two decades after the American occupation, the U.S. governor finally allowed school instruction in Spanish, but only for the first four grades of primary school. Puerto Ricans’ anger at this mandate persisted until 1948, when given the chance to decide the matter for themselves, they elected to have public K–12 school instruction exclusively in the Spanish language.148Since the Foraker Act of 1917, Puerto Ricans have had the right to travel back and forth, much as if Puerto Rico were a state, with its citi-zens going to visit another state of the union.149 On the other hand, if they remain on the island, they lack essential rights and privileges, including the right to vote in federal elections or to have voting repre-sentatives in Congress, even after 122 years as an American possession. Unlike the Mexican Cession and Hawaii, for example, Puerto Rico never was envisioned as a settler colony where White colonists would Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

We Are Here Because You Were There 49eventually outnumber the native, pre- colonial population. Instead, Puerto Rico, despite being so much closer to the mainland U.S. than Hawaii, remains a colony. Legal scholar Ediberto Román concludes that this is so because its “nonwhite, non- European peoples were inher-ently foreign—and thus inferior—and could not therefore constitute a populace prepared for . . . statehood.”150 The difference between Hawaii and Puerto Rico was twofold. Puerto Rico’s people not only differed from Protestant, European stock, but they were read as Black by many Americans. Second, Puerto Rico had not been subject to corporate colo-nialism as had Hawaii prior to American rule. Today Puerto Rico (like Guam) remains in political limbo, neither a U.S. state or a nation inde-pendent of U.S. imperialism.151In his book Boricua Power, José Ramón Sánchez contends that the United States treated Puerto Rico as a pool of cheap labor from the moment of its occupation in 1898. To be sure, there is ample evidence for this, but one exception was the rise of Puerto Rican cigar makers in New York City in the 1920s. By 1925, highly skilled cigar making was the largest occupational category of Puerto Ricans in the city, and also one of the best paying due to an all- unionized workforce. But by 1930, the sun had set on Puerto Rican cigar makers as they lost their jobs to mechanization. This left many in New York’s 40,000- strong Puerto Rican community unemployed and increasingly channeled into low-wage, unskilled jobs.152 Puerto Rican migration to the mainland boomed in the late 1940s, as low-wage jobs previously taken by Jews and Italian Americans became available, when those working- class groups began attending public universities in large numbers. Puerto Rico part-nered with the New York Employment Service to “train” Puerto Rican women on the island in house cleaning, home nursing, cooking, and child care so that they could go to New York for jobs.153 In the decade of the 1950s, “more Puerto Ricans moved to the U.S. mainland than did immigrants from any other country.”154Puerto Rico’s proximity to the continental United States and the fact that its people faced no immigration hurdles fed the exploitation of Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

50 INVENTING LATINOSPuerto Rican workers on both the island and the mainland. The great Puerto Rican migration of World War II is illustrative of both dynam-ics.155 Between 1940 and 1950, the mainland Puerto Rican population tripled to 225,000, and then, between 1950 and 1960, more than tripled again to 892,000 (these are conservative estimates from the census, which likely undercounted Puerto Rican migrants new to the main-land). But this migration did not happen on its own. One rationale of the Americans dictated that the island’s agricultural, rural population was backward and needed “improvement.” But another, evident over time, was that Puerto Rico’s large class of subsistence farmers was pushed off the land, into cities, while the island’s rich agricultural tradition became increasingly dominated by corporate farming. In 1940, 45 percent of the island’s workers were employed in the agricultural sector, but, by 1970, that proportion had declined to 10 percent.Two different work programs facilitated this transformation, along with the migration of Puerto Ricans to the U.S. mainland. Operación Manos a la Obra— translated literally as “Put Your Hands to Work” but more commonly known in English as Operation Bootstrap— started in 1947 with the goal of funneling workers from the island into manu-facturing jobs in the northeast and midwest. A year later, Puerto Rico started the Farm Labor Program, which over decades placed nearly half a million Puerto Ricans in temporary agricultural jobs on the main-land.156 As with Mexican braceros (which was a model for the Puerto Rican farmworker program), these programs functioned as state-run labor contractors, screening candidates, arranging their transportation by plane (which they were obligated to pay for out of their future earn-ings), and even inspecting employer housing for workers.157 In this way, these programs functioned as a way to streamline the exploitation of an ever- available, but easily fired, non- unionized workforce from the colonies.Puerto Rican farmworkers had migrated away from the island as early as 1900, just two years after the American occupation, when five thousand of them became contract laborers on Hawaiian sugar planta-Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

We Are Here Because You Were There 51tions.158 In 1960, after the Farm Labor Program had been operating for twelve years, Puerto Rican workers earned an hourly wage of 80 cents to $1.159 The program likely appealed to workers because of the massive displacement of subsistence farmers that produced poverty and malnu-trition insecurity in large families, but it may also have attracted those who wanted to migrate to the mainland permanently or at least for lon-ger than a migrant farmworker’s tenure. Since Puerto Ricans were free to remain on the mainland without restrictions on citizenship, the Farm Labor Program was an important vehicle for the post-war Puerto Rican settlement; between 1963 and 1987, the largest number of workers went to New Jersey and Connecticut, which large numbers of Puerto Ricans still call home.160 Operation Bootstrap likewise provided the transition to life on the mainland. Its stated goal was to convert Puerto Ricans from subsistence family farmers (where there were, the rationale went, incentives for large families) to urban, industrialized workers. The plan did, in fact, lead people to migrate from rural towns to urban areas of Puerto Rico, but once they arrived to the island’s cities, there was an extreme shortage of jobs, creating urban poverty and migration to the mainland, often via the Farm Labor Program or Operation Bootstrap’s manufacturing jobs program, whether in factories on the island or, more commonly, on the mainland.“Operation Bootstrap was never equipped to create the number of jobs necessary to gainfully employ the mass of Puerto Rican workers (largely coming from agriculture) without significant reductions in the population or the labor force,” according to Edna Acosta- Belén and Carlos E. Santiago.161 Instead, Operation Bootstrap operated as cor-porate welfare of three types. First, the program provided incentives to mainland corporations to move to the island, at the expense of Puerto Rican workers and taxpayers. These included tax breaks for relocating a factory and a minimum wage deliberately set below the mainland’s; even today, the island is still recovering from these features of the post-war economy. The second form of corporate welfare was providing a low-wage, exploitable workforce to mainland employers (likely disrupting Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

52 INVENTING LATINOSunionized workforces), which was facilitated by government middle-men whose role was to find and screen workers. Finally, in some cases, mainland factories received experienced workers who had been trained in factory jobs on the island, and, thus, who arrived at mainland manu-facturing jobs acclimated to wage labor (unlike when they first left the family farm).Operation Bootstrap, like the agricultural workers program, laid the foundation for the massive migration of workers to New York City, Camden, New Jersey, and Chicago, among other cities. A new arm of the government, formed in 1947, facilitated workers’ transition to the mainland: the Puerto Rican Bureau of Employment and Migration (lat-er named the Migrant Division of the Department of Labor).162 It was a boon to corporations to have a government agency coordinating employ-ment, social services, and acculturation.163 Indeed, mainland employ-ers depended on the labor department to screen candidates for health and literacy, with two- thirds of them weeded out.164 It is possible those rejected from Operation Bootstrap were funneled to the Farm Labor Program which had less demanding standards. In the end, programs like these and others could not protect Latino workers from the vicis-situdes of low-wage, insecure employment in the United States, whether being laid off, subjected to discrimination based on race, national origin, or language, or downgraded to low-wage manufacturing or service jobs when the manufacturing jobs for which they had been recruited slipped away in the 1970s.165Of all Latinos, Puerto Ricans sit in arguably the most ambiguous position, a direct result of 122 years of colonial status. Puerto Rico pro-vides the base of operations for extensive American military pursuits including the Southern Command headquarters, is home to corpora-tions that exploit human capital and natural resources, and serves as a magnet for well-off Americans to play tourist in an “exotic” island close to home. Since the U.S. occupation began, American colonial governors have been preoccupied with making Puerto Ricans more enterprising, even when that turned out to mean, in the context of Operation Boot-Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

We Are Here Because You Were There 53strap and the Farm Labor Program, exploitation as workers in mainland jobs deemed “good for them.”166 The result has been what Puerto Rican sociologist Jorge Duany calls “the Puerto Rican diaspora as a transna-tional colonial migration” filled with ambiguity: “I define Puerto Rico as a nation, an imagined community with its own territory, history, language, and culture. At the same time, the island lacks a sovereign state, an independent government that represents the population . . . ”167 Perhaps no time since the early years of the American occupation have put into such sharp relief Puerto Rico’s colonial subjecthood than recent years, when Hurricane Maria’s devastation showed the utter disregard of the federal government and when, because it is not a sovereign (either as a nation or a U.S. state), Congress refused to allow a bankruptcy fil-ing and instead mandated that a U.S.-imposed body decide the island’s economic future.168Cuba is only ninety miles from the Florida coast, much closer than Puerto Rico, and was a natural object of colonial desire early in United States history. As early as 1854, Southern expansionists petitioned Pres-ident Pierce to purchase Cuba from Spain and declare war in the event Spain refused.169 Spain demurred, and the military option was deferred, at least in part because Pierce feared “another Haiti”—a Black-led rebellion.170 Americans viewed Cuba in military and economic terms: its sugar industry added value, and Guantanamo Bay became the coun-try’s first overseas military base.171 By 1860, Bostonian Elisha Atkins controlled much of Cuba’s sugar production, influencing the course of American intervention to come. Letters to his wife written two years before the Spanish- American War blamed labor unrest on his planta-tions on “a few negroes supposed to have come from Haiti or Santo Domingo.”172In contrast to Puerto Rican elites’ warm reception, Cubans had been in a sustained war for independence from Spain when the United States intervened to support them. The strategy had included the abolition of slavery, and, as a result, many of the independence fighters were only a generation or two removed from Africa. In 1899, Atkins, the sugar Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

54 INVENTING LATINOSplantation tycoon, predicted that the “United States withdrawal [from Cuba] would allow ‘unscrupulous politicians and ignorant black Cubans’ to take control,” and, he implied, seize his sugar empire.173 Washing-ton did not need much persuading: the first colonial governor, Gen-eral Leonard Wood, actively opposed allowing Blacks to vote; Cubans rebuffed him and in their constitution of 1901 established universal male suffrage without regard to color. The formal American occupa-tion of Cuba was intended to be short- lived, given the strong opposition from the multiracial independence movement. In one of his final acts as governor, General Wood opened Cuba’s “public lands” to Ameri-can investors; the United Fruit Company acquired vast tracts of land in northeastern Cuba.174 In the 1902 addendum to Cuba’s constitution, known as the Platt Amendment, the U. S. retained the power to invade Cuba when it deemed U.S. economic interests threatened.175The U.S. Navy invaded twice early in the twentieth century. In 1903, the United States established a military base at Guantanamo Bay. The base, shortened to GTMO by the Americans, was a strategic post dur-ing World War II, when 7,200 American military personnel were posted there (along with another 13,000 Cuban and Jamaican civilian employ-ees).176 Later the United States cultivated Cuban president Fulgencio Batista, who closely aligned himself with American corporations. With Fidel Castro’s communist revolution in 1959, Eisenhower instituted a “temporary” trade embargo that remains in place six decades later. There is little doubt that it pushed Castro toward alliances with the Soviet Union and, later, the People’s Republic of China. Cuban opposition to GTMO has only grown since the attacks of September 11, 2001, when President George W. Bush began imprisoning war-on-terror suspects there.177 Since 2002, 779 men have been imprisoned by the United States at GTMO in order to maximize CIA and military flexibility. As of late 2019, 40 men remained detained.Dominicans are a growing portion of the Latino population, now at more than 2 million or 3.5 percent of all Latinos. For both Dominicans and Cubans, fully one- eighth of their worldwide population lives in the United States. 178 Not surprisingly, given their ability to freely migrate Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

We Are Here Because You Were There 55between the island and the mainland, unlike all other Latino migrants, many more Puerto Ricans live on the mainland (5.6 million) than on Puerto Rico itself (3.7 million).179 Latinos from each of these three island countries date primarily to the mid- twentieth century, although there were smaller numbers of Puerto Rican and Cuban migrants in the United States before then.180Whereas for Cubans, the United States has welcomed those flee-ing the socialist regime, in the Dominican Republic, the United States collaborated closely with the government to limit migration. For three decades (1930–1961), the United States backed the Dominican Repub-lic’s repressive, right-wing dictator Rafael Trujillo, such that it was in neither country’s interest to allow migration as a form of protesting with one’s feet. During that three- decade period, fewer than 20,000 Domin-icans came to the United States.181 Indeed, the first wave of Dominican migrants came when Trujillo was assassinated in 1961. They were affili-ated with his regime as members of the ruling class; more than 84,000 migrated in the 1960s.182 Since the 1970s, Dominican migration has been primarily economic, with, for example, around 300,000 autho-rized migrants per decade in the 1990s and 2000s, with others entering without authorization via Puerto Rico or otherwise.183As early as 1841, well before ventures into nearby Cuba and Puerto Rico, U.S. presidents considered annexing the Dominican Republic.184 The Dominican Republic of course shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, along with a long history of animosity. The two countries were subject to different colonial powers, with different languages and colonial structures. After Haitian independence, Haiti occupied the Dominican Republic for two decades, from 1822 to 1844.185 Multiple presidents sent envoys to assess the Dominican Republic’s racial fitness, including Navy Commander David Dixon Porter in the late 1840s. He emphasized Dominicans’ racial superiority to Haitians: “One was white, Spanish and Catholic; the other was black, French, and irreligious. One was ‘civilized’ because it courted the United States and Americans; the other was ‘barbaric’ because it jealously defended its political and eco-nomic sovereignty.”186 The most serious nineteenth- century American Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

56 INVENTING LATINOSattempt to colonize the Dominican Republic was in 1869 by President Ulysses S. Grant. The Senate rejected his plan to collectively naturalize Dominican citizens, as it had Mexicans living in the Mexican Cession. As with Lincoln’s earlier idea to relocate Blacks to Central America, Grant envisioned African American settlement of Santo Domingo. Missouri Senator Carl Schurz spoke for many when, arguing against Grant’s plan, he railed against Santo Domingo’s “Latin race mixed with Indian and African blood . . . [who have] neither language nor traditions nor habits nor political institutions nor morals in common with us.”187In the end, the United States invaded both Haiti and the Dominican Republic, in 1915 and 1916, respectively. U.S. Marines occupied the Dominican Republic for eight years, but they stayed twice as long, until 1934, in Haiti.188 An enduring perception of racial superiority over Haiti in the Dominican Republic has been propagated for centuries, including by the Trujillo regime in the nation’s myths and museums.189 Accord-ing to both elite and popular views, Dominicans have far less African ancestry than Haitians, as well as Spanish and Indigenous ancestry not possessed by Haitians. In this racist narrative, it is commonplace for dark- skinned Dominicans to refer to themselves and those with their complexion as Indio (Indian in Spanish), although more as an anti- African designation than one of Indigenous ancestry.190 When Trujillo objected to the U.S. Marines’ departure from Haiti, he justified it by claiming impoverished Haitians would invade the Dominican Repub-lic. In 1937, Trujillo ordered the army to kill 15,000 Haitian peasants who had set up makeshift camps along the Dominican border.191 Tru-jillo appealed to American racism to justify the massacre, saying he did it to “preserve our racial superiority over them.”192 President Roosevelt turned a blind eye to the brutality.Colonialism and Immigration as Part of the Same ContinuumNearly a century ago, Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) sought to placate growing anti- American sentiment across Latin America by proclaim-Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

We Are Here Because You Were There 57ing his Good Neighbor Policy. In point of fact, 1933 did not make the United States a welcome neighbor so much as it marked a new modality of colonialism. Instead of warships and Marines, U.S. domination took the form of American military training for death squads and paramili-tary national police with the consent of dictators covertly installed (and sometimes later removed) by the CIA, all with the purpose of fight-ing communism. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has shifted its justification for interference in Latin America to the war on drugs. Since the 1970s, and especially over the past three decades, the United States government has spent more than $1 trillion in Latin America on drug interdiction and the war on drugs in general (the larg-est expenditures have been in Colombia and Mexico).193 On an annual basis, Latin America now receives more U.S. aid to combat drugs than the region received “in any given year during the Cold War to combat communism.”194Today and for the past several decades, America has reaped what it sowed. We should not be surprised that the results have been the migra-tion north of people escaping poverty and state violence. Thus, it should also surprise no one that where Latinos fit in the American racial hier-archy has been overdetermined by at least 125 years of Latino migrants as an easily available, expendable low-wage workforce for American fac-tories, farms, and other corporations. The history of American empire in the Western Hemisphere is powerful evidence that we ought to think of migrants from Latin American countries as the byproduct of colonial-ism. In his study of Central America, sociologist William Robinson has coined the phrase “trans- national economic colonialism” to describe the movement of capital and people between the United States and its poorer neighbors to the south.195In the case of the five Central American nations where the United States has been the most recently active in supporting brutal military dictatorships, it is especially compelling to treat migrants from these countries as rightfully in the United States, such as by collective grant of refugee status. Indeed, the United Nations in 1981 declared that all Salvadorans who left their country should be considered “bona fide Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

58 INVENTING LATINOSrefugees” and in 1984 the UN argued that Central Americans flee-ing their countries were refugees under its definition: “persons who have fled their country because their lives, safety, or liberty have been threatened by a generalized violence, foreign aggression, internal con-flicts, massive violations of human rights, or other circumstances that have seriously disturbed public order.”196 The United States defines refugees much more narrowly, emphasizing that each individual must make a claim of individualized threat to their life if they remain in their country. Instead of allowing migrants who make a credible claim of asylum, in 2019 the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security stepped up pressure on Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Hondu-ras to prevent refugees from reaching the U.S.-Mexico border.197 For Latino immigrants more generally, the concept of an “open border” makes sense as reparations for direct and indirect American imperial-ism in the region.Unlike the British, Americans rarely think of themselves as colo-nizers. Following World War II, a weakened Britain seeking to main-tain control over its forty- seven colonial territories enacted the British Nationality Act. Among other rights, it allowed for “an unqualified right to enter and remain in the United Kingdom.”198 The purpose of the law was to maintain close ties with its White settler colonies (Australia, Canada, New Zealand), but its effect was to open the door to people of color from the West Indies and its colonies and former colonies in South Asia, Hong Kong, and Africa. Between 1948 and 1962, 500,000 people of color migrated from the colonies to Britain proper. Another million people of color migrated over the next decade. Though they made up only 2.4 percent of the population in England, their visible presence was enough to prompt a change in policy that restricted immigration from the British Commonwealth. In 1981, the British Nationality Act changed the law to, effectively a “Whites-only” policy by limiting legal immigration to persons who possessed at least one Britain-born parent or grandparent.199For most of its history, the United States has sought to have it both Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

We Are Here Because You Were There 59ways, implementing border restrictions but allowing immigrants from Latin America to enter without authorization in order to fulfill critical roles in the labor market. More severe border restrictions and tighter immigration policies have counter-intuitively resulted in a steady stream of migrants from former colonies or de facto colonies in Latin America. It is these migrants who, for more than a century, have settled in the United States, becoming Latinos. Today especially, the 20 percent of Latinos who were not born in the United States live precarious lives, vulnerable to exploitation at work in mostly low-wage, low- skill jobs and fearing ICE raids that could result in deportation and separation from their American- citizen spouses, partners, or children. Significantly, it is not only the 11.5 million undocumented Latinos who live in fear, since Latino families and communities rarely live, marry, work, and worship in only-“legal” or only-“illegal” spaces.America is at a fork in the road, ready to choose the later U.K. or earlier U.K. model: will we choose the politics of fear, with its accom-panying brutality at the border, or the politics of accountability, with its accompanying inclusion of migrants? Modeling a policy on the period of British openness to migration from its colonies and former colonies, the United States should embrace entry, a legal right to work, and a path to American citizenship for Latino immigrants currently in the country without legal authorization. Such a policy would acknowledge Ameri-can colonialism as well as constitute a form of reparations for historic wrongs: two centuries of economic and military exploitation in Mexico, the Spanish Caribbean, and Central America and the harms of ongoing U.S. intervention. By targeting undocumented migrants already residing here, the proposal would benefit those most vulnerable to exploitation by employers who prey on them. Moreover, future migrants would like-wise receive the benefit of the right to live and work in the United States under certain conditions. For example, if someone desiring to migrate could show proof of hardship linked to U.S. government actions in their country— including economic displacement caused by NAFTA, which disproportionately negatively impacted Indigenous Mexicans, or U.S. Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

60 INVENTING LATINOStraining of police and death squads in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador—they would be allowed the opportunity to live and work in this country. Undocumented migrants already residing in the United States would not have to offer such proof to receive benefits.Other scholars have proposed granting class-wide immigration and / or naturalization to Latin American migrants, although none has done so on such an expansive level. An analysis of the 2014 migration “surge” from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador argued that the United States has a moral obligation to allow entry to migrants from those countries because it selfishly pursued its own interests in the region, contributing to devastating conditions that caused the migra-tion.200 Taking a broader view, however, brings into sharp relief the pat-terns of American empire across time and across space—with Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America as distinct regions where the foot-print of U.S. imperialism looms large. In the past, U.S. immigration policy has not generally been designed to redress the wrongs of its colo-nial exploits, but there are examples of country- specific and category- specific immigration policies. For instance, international law recognizes the rights of refugees, those who leave their country because they fear “persecution, conflict, generalized violence, or other circumstances that have seriously disturbed public order.”201 However, this interpretation under U.S. law has been narrowed since the late 1970s, and increasingly so under the Trump administration.202During the Cold War, the United States earmarked refugees from anti- communist countries for streamlined admission to the country and special resettlement benefits without the need to prove individual persecution or fear of persecution, including those fleeing Cuba, South Vietnam, Nicaragua, and the Soviet Union. At other times, Congress has passed laws providing class-wide refugee status to the abandoned children of U.S. service members in Southeast Asia. More recently, cer-tain categories of Afghani and Iraqi nationals who assisted the military as interpreters have been granted entry as refugees.203 The advantage of this type of class- based remedy is its efficiency, helping more peo-Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

We Are Here Because You Were There 61ple more quickly at a time when immigration courts face a backlog of 869,000 cases.204 A group approach would also raise consciousness about America’s role in the existence of Latinos as a racially oppressed group by challenging the notion that Latinos came as voluntary immigrants. And because the lives of Latino immigrants are intertwined with those of native-born Latinos, these reparations would positively affect large numbers of all Latinos.Gómez, Laura E.. Inventing Latinos : A New Story of American Racism, The New Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5905464.Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2021-08-23 14:22:47.Copyright © 2020. The New Press. All rights reserved.

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