And what about "Hispanics"?

These people who are so fond of erasing Native treaty rights love to claim that "we are all immigrants." Challenged on their facts they go on to make the bizarre claim that people whose ancestors have occupied this continent for at least 14,000 years must also have come from somewhere. This just hollows out any meaning of the world immigrant at all. It also stuns me to imagine that they consider people who were kidnapped from their homes and shipped in chains across the Atlantic to be immigrants. It also raises questions when we consider groups of people who - in some part - trace their ancestry to Europeans who arrived here before Jamestown.

But they are perfectly content to discuss all these questions using the language of "race." The contradictions emerge immediately when we start looking at the peoples variously denominated as “Hispanic” or “Latino” or some variation of those. How is it possible that people can be assigned a biological category, like race, because they speak the same language? How is it possible that people can be assigned to the same race when a cursory physical examination shows that individuals in this “race” appear to be of different races? How is it even imaginable that the Indigenous people of Mexico, Central, and South America magically become Hispanic or Latino upon arrival in the United States when they speak Indigenous languages like Mixtec or Q’eqchi’ or Aymara instead of Spanish? Since 1980, the US Census has finessed these questions by treating “Hispanic or Latino” as separate from “race” and asking everybody both questions: What is your race? Are you Hispanic, Latino or Spanish? But Americans are in the habit of seeing those as a race. People who are familiar with the predominantly Mexican-American character of the Rio Grande Valley may be surprised to see that Hidalgo County, for example, is listed by the 2010 census as being 88% white. But then they look further and discover that the same census says it is 90% Hispanic or Latino. 

Since race is a social construct anyway it may be easier to just say that Mexican Americans or Chicanos are considered a “race” in the United States. But then what about Puerto Ricans? What about Dominicans? What about Central and South Americans? Are they members of the same “race”? That’s why I think it is useful to look at the forms of domination white supremacy (and US imperialism) has imposed on the peoples. They are clearly not all the same.

Mexican Americans alone, excluding all the other “Hispanic or Latino” peoples, make up 11.3% of the US population, almost as much as African Americans, who are 12.3% of the population. Since World War 1 popular white supremacist thinking has treated them as immigrants and as crossers of the river or desert that makes up the roughly 2000-mile-long border between the United States and Mexico. This particular prejudice presents a kind of cognitive dissonance because it contradicts the basics of US history that every American child is supposed to learn in elementary school. Between 1845 and 1853 the United States took over more than half of the territory of the Republic of Mexico, about 950,000 square miles: More than the Louisiana Purchase. More than the entire United States before the Louisiana Purchase. Look at California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas on a map of the US. You’ll see.

There were plenty of Mexicans living there, too, in their own country. Many of their descendants are still there today. White people in the southwest like to pretend their "Hispanic" neighbors snuck across the border yesterday, even though the families of these Mexican Americans have been there for generations. Some people's grandparents and great grandparents did cross that border before it became militarized during the First World War but many come from families who have been crossing the river or the survey line in the desert for many generations, long before it became a border. (The Apaches, O’odham, and other Native peoples of the area had of course been crossing that non-existent border for hundreds of generations.) So that border is a historical imposition and Mexican people in the area often say: “No cruzamos la frontera; la frontera now cruzó.”

White supremacy has acted on Mexican Americans both by encouraging them to identify as white themselves and by suppressing them as members of a Mexican “race.” We can look at a few examples of white identification first. 

In New Mexico especially there is a long history of people of Mexican descent calling themselves “Spanish American” or “Hispano.” They like to trace their ancestry to the first conquistadors who arrived in the late 16th century. Until two years ago, the city of Santa Fe held an annual pageant called the Entrada to celebrate the reconquest of the city in 1692 and the defeat of the Pueblos who had kicked the Spanish out in 1680. The Native people of New Mexico had been protesting this for years. White-identifying Mexican Americans treat that Native opposition as an insult and a denial of their heritage. Last month statues of the conquistador Juan de Oñate were removed in Albuquerque and in Rio Arriba County during the current reconsideration of monuments to white supremacy. Oñate, if you don't know, headed a band of Spanish soldiers who entered New Mexico in 1598. They massacred 1000 Natives at Acoma Pueblo and destroyed the town. At Okhkay Ohwingeh Pueblo he and his men enslaved and cut the toes off 500 people. White-identifying Mexican Americans were so incensed at the removal of the statue in Albuquerque that an armed right-wing militia showed up to protest and a member shot a counter-protester!

In the early 20th century, purveyors of racist pseudoscience ridiculed the claims of New Mexicans to whiteness. Madison Grant, for example, said that Spanish American was a “courtesy title” for detribalized Indians. I am not going to jump on any bandwagon with racists like him. I will point out, though, that towns like Belén, Tomé, Socorro, San Miguel de Vado, Abiquiú, Taos, and Chimayo were largely or wholly founded in the 18th century by people - many of them from other tribes - who had been taken captive by Comanches or Apaches and subsequently ransomed by the Spanish in Santa Fe. They were placed under indenture by the Spanish governor to pay off their ransom and then settled in these outlying villages to function as military outliers for Santa Fe. 

The other long-time centers of Mexican Americans in the region, California and Texas, each have distinctive histories. For this discussion, though, it is worth looking at the struggle to desegregate schools. Texas was a Jim Crow state right up into the 1960’s. School law mandated the segregation of whites from Blacks, but custom in most places segregated Mexican Americans as well, although in many places that meant denying them schools at all. In 1930, Mexican Americans sued. The basis of Del Rio ISD v. Salvatierra was not an opposition to segregation at all, though. Instead, the attorneys of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) argued that Mexicans are white and should therefore attend white schools. The Texas courts rejected this argument, creating a judicial precedent for three-part school segregation where it did not exist in the State Constitution. LULAC relitigated the issue after World War 2 in the case of Delgado v. Bastrop ISD. This time the court ruled that segregation of Mexican American children was illegal. The argument again was that this segregation was illegal because they were white.” 

In California, a landmark case, Mendez v. Westminister School Dist., 64 F. Supp. 544 (S.D. Cal. 1946), challenged the segregation of Mexican American children by the school districts of Orange County, but the plaintiffs took a different tack. California law allowed the segregation of Chinese, Japanese, and Native children, but did not mention Mexicans. In fact, the Orange County schools didn’t formally establish “Mexican” schools; they simply created the subterfuge of “remedial” schools. The only test they used, though, to determine which children were needed remediation was their surname. Regardless of academic aptitude, regardless of fluency in English (regardless, in fact, of whether they spoke Spanish at all!) children with Spanish surnames were assigned to those remedial schools. No Mexican children in Orange County were admitted to “white” schools. No Anglo children attended the remedial schools. The parents in this case argued that the discrimination against their children was a violation of the 14th Amendment. Favorable rulings by the Federal district and circuit court judges made an important precedent for Brown v. Board of Education. Nevertheless, the judges at both levels made a point in their decisions of saying that Mexicans are white. The decision in the 9th Circuit says: “Nowhere in any California law is there a suggestion that any segregation can be made of children within one of the great races.” (My emphasis.)

However one chooses to read all this history, though, the US presence throughout the Southwest has been undeniably antagonistic to Mexican Americans. They were stripped of their land and political rights and reduced to a caste of laborers. On occasion US citizens of Mexican descent have been deported from the US, even those who were born here! That is why it certainly looks as though Mexican Americans have been treated as a race.

But we must not fail to see the history of conquest.  Tomorrow I will try to make time to write about how the land was stolen from people who actually held formal title.