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Read The TWO introductions to Juan Gonzalez’s Harvest of Empire: “Introduction to the Second Revised and Updated Edition” and “Introduction to the Second Edition”1. Identify and explain in your own words three ideas that you find new or worth discussing in more depth from González’s text.Read “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” by Gloria Anzaldúa, and “I am Joaquín,” by Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales2. Chose a quote from Anzaldúa’s text and a quote from “Corky” Gonzales’s poem that you think uses striking language. Why is the language from each quote striking to you?I have attached the all three files for question 1 you need Juan Gonzalez – Harvest of Empire Textbook.pdf and for question 2 you need Anzaldúa, How to Tame a Wild Tongue.pdf and I am Joaquín.pdf. just read the question and answer it apprpeiately.
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Praise for Juan Gonzalez’s Harvest of Empire
“A serious, significant contribution to understanding who the Hispanics of
the United States are and where they come from.”
—The New York Times Book Review “A profound book with an equally
profound message about the origins of Latino migration, domination, and
colonization, and historical lessons not found in many American
textbooks.”
—San Antonio Express-News
“A compelling—and enlightening—chronicle . . . offers an insider’s view
of the rich and varied fabric of the people soon to be the largest minority in
the United States.”
—The Miami Herald
“Anyone who finishes Harvest of Empire will never again see Latinos as a
monolithic group, but as a diverse society of citizens and future citizens,
worthy of recognition and respect.”
—Fort Worth Morning Star
“In what would seem an impossible task, journalist Juan Gonzalez tackles
the entire history of Latinos in North and Central America in a single
volume . . . illuminating.”
—Dallas Morning News
“Required reading, not simply for Latinos but for everyone.”
—The Kansas City Star
“Gonzalez’s ever-enjoyable prose grabs the reader and fills in the gaps left
by a traditional American history education.”
—In These Times
“Here at last is the extraordinary saga of the Latinos in North America,
brilliantly and compactly told. All the descendants of the old immigrants
should read this book, to remind themselves of where they came from, and
where all of us are going—together.”
—Pete Hamill, author of Snow in August and A Drinking Life “This
excellent history of Latinos in North and Central America is fair-handed,
extremely well-documented, and filled with the sort of details that explain
rather than enflame.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Juan Gonzalez brings us a sweeping account of the raw quest for empire
that shaped the New World and is finally in our time transforming the
United States. The history is often brutal, the experiences of the people
caught up in the process wrenching. But Gonzalez paints a canvas that is in
the end profoundly optimistic, for in the Latinization of the United States he
sees the possibility of a renaissance of American democracy.”
—Frances Fox Piven, coauthor of Regulating the Poor
PENGUIN BOOKS
HARVEST OF EMPIRE
Juan Gonzalez is the Richard D. Heffner Professor of Communications and Public Policy at
Rutgers University and a longtime cohost of the radio/television news show Democracy Now!.
He was a columnist with the New York Daily News for nearly thirty years, and is a two-time
winner of the George Polk journalism award. Born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, he grew up in a
New York City housing project, graduated from Columbia University, and was a cofounder of
the 1960s Young Lords.
PENGUIN BOOKS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
penguinrandomhouse.com
First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc., 2000
Published in Penguin Books 2001
First revised edition published 2011
This second revised edition published 2022
Copyright © 2000, 2011, 2022 by Juan Gonzalez
Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and
creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not
reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing
Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Names: González, Juan, 1947- author.
Title: Harvest of empire : a history of Latinos in America / Juan Gonzalez.
Other titles: History of Latinos in America
Description: Second revised and updated edition. | [New York] : Penguin Books, [2022] | “First published in the United States of
America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc., 2000.” | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022008432 (print) | LCCN 2022008433 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143137436 (paperback) | ISBN 9780593511473
(ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Hispanic Americans—History. | Immigrants—United States—History. | United States—Emigration and
immigration—History. |
Latin America—Emigration and immigration—History. | United States—Relations—Latin America. | Latin America—Relations
—United States. | United States—Territorial expansion—History. | United States—Ethnic relations—History.
Classification: LCC E184.S75 G655 2022 (print) | LCC E184.S75 (ebook) |
DDC 973/.0468—dc23/eng/20220310
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022008432
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022008433
Cover design: Alicia Tatone
Cover photograph: John Moore / Getty Images
Designed by Sabrina Bowers, adapted for ebook by Estelle Malmed pid_prh_6.0_140193378_c0_r0
The scorn of our formidable neighbor who does not know us is Our America’s greatest
danger. And since the day of the visit is near, it is imperative that our neighbor know us,
and soon, so that it will not scorn us. Through ignorance it might even come to lay hands
on us. Once it does know us, it will remove its hands out of respect. One must have faith in
the best of men and distrust the worst.
—José Martí, January 10, 1891
Contents
Introduction to the Second Revised and Updated Edition
Introduction to the Second Edition
PART I
Roots (Las Raíces)
1. CONQUERORS AND VICTIMS: The Image of America Forms (1500–1800)
2. THE SPANISH BORDERLANDS AND THE MAKING OF AN EMPIRE (1810–1898)
3. BANANA REPUBLICS AND BONDS: Taming the Empire’s Backyard (1898–1950)
PART II
Branches (Las Ramas)
4. PUERTO RICANS: Citizens Yet Foreigners
5. MEXICANS: Pioneers of a Different Type
6. CUBANS: Special Refugees
7. DOMINICANS: From the Duarte to the George Washington Bridge
8. CENTRAL AMERICANS: Intervention Comes Home to Roost
9. COLOMBIANS AND PANAMANIANS: Overcoming Division and Disdain
PART III
Harvest (La Cosecha)
10. THE RETURN OF JUAN SEGUÍN: Latinos and the Remaking of American Politics
11. IMMIGRANTS OLD AND NEW: Closing Borders of the Mind
12. SPEAK SPANISH, YOU’RE IN AMERICA!: El Huracán over Language and Culture
13. FREE TRADE: The Final Conquest of Latin America
14. PUERTO RICO, U.S.A.: Possessed and Unwanted
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Interviews
Notes
Index
Introduction to the Second Revised and
Updated Edition
I
n June 2018, media reports revealed that U.S. Border Patrol agents had
detained hundreds of Latino children inside chain-link cages at a
warehouse in the southern Texas border city of McAllen. The disturbing
images of terrified toddlers wailing for their parents provoked worldwide
condemnation. The children had been initially seized with their parents,
who were seeking to cross illegally into the country. Federal authorities
then opted to jail and criminally prosecute the adults, while dispatching the
children to makeshift detention sites for up to weeks at a time before
transporting them to temporary care facilities around the country. Nearly
two thousand minors were seized during April and May of that year,
officials soon acknowledged, all part of a Trump administration “zero
tolerance” policy aimed at stemming the sudden surge of migrants from
Central America. The number detained eventually grew to more than four
thousand, including some sixty cases of children whose families had been
seeking asylum when apprehended.[1]
In the months that followed, six children died in U.S. custody, including
seven-year-old Jakelin Caal Maquin in New Mexico. The public outcry
prompted President Trump to quickly rescind his policy, yet more than two
years later, hundreds of children had still not been reunited with their
parents.[2] The family separation scandal was the most tragic example of
decades of failure by political leaders in Washington to fashion a
comprehensive and humane reform of the nation’s immigration laws. No
group was more directly affected by that failure than U.S. Latinos, given
that nearly 80 percent of the nation’s estimated eleven million
undocumented migrants hail from Latin America.[3] Meanwhile, the Latinx
population has continued to grow at a faster rate than the rest of the nation.
It surpassed sixty-two million people in 2020—even more if you count
some three million residents of Puerto Rico—thus increasing the pressure
on the nation’s leaders for immigration reform. Unfortunately, the Trump
era produced far more heat than light on the issue of migration. Racially
tinged anti-immigrant hysteria spread to large sectors of U.S. society, while
restrictive policies on migrants became enshrined as official national policy,
some of which persisted even after Democrat Joseph Biden succeeded
Trump.
The main theme of this book when first published more than twenty
years ago was that mushrooming migration from Latin America, Asia, and
Africa to the rich nations of the world can only be understood—and,
ultimately, will only be resolved—by a reckoning with the legacy of the
colonial empires the United States and other Western nations created in
those regions during the previous two centuries. Quite simply, the modern
immigration crisis is a direct result of the political upheavals and wealth
inequalities those empires produced and sustain to this day.
Throughout the Obama and Trump years, however, congressional leaders
could not agree on how to overhaul the U.S. immigration system. They
failed not just to resolve the fate of unauthorized migrants within the
country, but also to modernize outdated guest worker programs, or to
refashion processes for granting permanent visas and handling asylum
seekers and refugees. They repeatedly deadlocked on such an overhaul
precisely because the stakes are so high in an increasingly multiracial
nation. Any comprehensive reform, after all, will determine who can
legitimately become a U.S. citizen in the twenty-first century. It will
reshape the nation’s voting population for decades to come and will alter
the distribution of political and economic power at both the national and
local level. The Trump era produced instead a concerted effort by
conservative whites to institute massive new crackdowns on both legal and
unauthorized immigration, even on asylum seekers, along with the macabre
expansion of a physical wall with Mexico. Trump earmarked some $15
billion for wall construction during his four-year term—none of it paid for
by Mexico, as he had originally promised. When Joe Biden won the
presidential election in 2020, only about 350 miles of the new barrier had
been built, most of it replacing preexisting fencing or walls, and only 650
miles along the border had any kind of fencing at all.[4]
A few months after the family separation scandal erupted, voters shifted
control of the House of Representatives from the Republicans to the
Democrats in the November midterm elections. One underreported result of
that election was the extraordinary growth of turnout among Latinx voters,
especially young people. An estimated 11.7 million Hispanics cast ballots in
2018, nearly double the number who did so in the midterm elections of
2014—and almost as many as voted for president in 2016. That unexpected
increase was a major factor in Democrats achieving a net gain of forty-one
seats in the House that year. Many young U.S. citizen Latinos were no
doubt stirred to political activism in direct response to years of
demonization of their community by Trump. Among the political activists
to emerge that year was a twenty-nine-year-old New York–born Puerto
Rican and democratic socialist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who toppled one
of the most powerful Democrats in the House of Representatives in an upset
primary victory. Ocasio-Cortez (she was soon dubbed AOC) went on to
become the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, and she quickly
captured national attention as the most charismatic figure among
progressive Democrats nationwide. But her rise was not the only sign that
Latinx voters were a growing political force. By the start of 2021, a record
six Hispanics held seats in the U.S. Senate—four Democrats and two
Republicans—and forty held seats in the House of Representatives.[5]
In the wake of Biden’s presidential election victory, an avalanche of
media reports all claimed that exit polls and voting returns showed a
marked shift had occurred among Latinx voters toward more conservative
views and in support of Trump, a narrative that captivated considerable
attention. Those of us who have spent decades chronicling historical trends
among Hispanic voters quickly recognized this as a false, or at best
superficial, narrative. We saw instead a very different picture, one that
stressed the main story as being the unprecedented increase in voting
among Hispanics in 2020, an increase that had eclipsed even the historic
overall jump in national turnout that year. We pointed out how Latinx voters
had proved instrumental to Biden’s victory in several key battleground
states. And while it was true that there had been percentage increases in
support for Donald Trump in some Hispanic areas, his share of the Latino
vote remained squarely within historic parameters achieved by previous
Republican presidential candidates (see chapter 10). In fact, the enormous
attention suddenly devoted to how Latinos voted, or even the renewed
skepticism expressed by some as to whether a cohesive Latinx community
even exists, were themselves reflections of that community’s rapidly
growing importance in U.S. politics and society. We must not lose sight of
the fact that even though nearly seven thousand Latinos held some kind of
elected office in the country in 2020 (a record number), they still
represented just about 1 percent of all officeholders, which is a tiny share
when you consider that Hispanics composed 18 percent of the country’s
population. In other words, the greatest advances in Latino political
representation have yet to come.
Even beyond politics, however, several other significant events and
trends shaped the development of the U.S. Latinx community and of Latin
America since the last edition of this book was published more than a
decade ago. This revised and updated edition seeks to incorporate and
assess those changes. The book’s first two parts, “Roots” and “Branches,”
have remained largely the same, given that they trace the origins and
evolution of the Latino community from colonial times through the early
twentieth century. I have made only minor changes to correct factual errors
somehow overlooked in prior editions, or to add vital new information from
the explosion of research on the Latino experience that a raft of terrific new
scholars produced in recent years. But the final five chapters of the book,
composing Part III, “Harvest,” have undergone more extensive revisions.
There I have included the latest demographic and other data while also
adding new narratives that aim to draw important lessons about the
community’s evolution. Given the complexity of the subject matter, any
choice of such developments necessarily involves personal judgment. In my
case, that judgment comes from a half century of being immersed in and
studying the Latino experience through three distinct lenses—as a social
activist, as a journalist, and as a scholar of its history. Thus, the main new
trends I highlight in this edition are:
The rise of anti-immigrant xenophobia as the cutting edge of neofascist
populism in the United States, along with the mushrooming emergence
of “border security” and the immigration detention system as a new
arm of a racialized prison industrial complex.
The phenomenal growth of climate refugees from Central America and
the Caribbean, with masses of people fleeing not only gang violence
and intractable poverty, but storms and drought disasters that have
resulted from the planet’s climate crisis.
The emergence of Puerto Rico as a recurring national political issue,
from the debt crisis of 2015, to the devastation of Hurricane María in
2017 and its aftermath, to the massive popular protest on the island in
2019 that ousted a sitting governor for the first time in U.S. history.
Those successive upheavals sparked an unprecedented nearly 12
percent decline in Puerto Rico’s population in just a decade, renewing a
mass exodus from the island to the fifty states, especially to Florida and
the South.
The growing ethnic, racial, and class diversity of the Latino migrant
population, with Central Americans now outnumbering even Mexicans
in apprehensions by the Border Patrol for illegal entry, with
Salvadorans surpassing those of Cuban descent as the third largest
Latino group in the country, and with a new wave of more middle-class
migrants and refugees from countries such as Venezuela, Colombia,
and Nicaragua reviving existing conservative trends long espoused
largely by Cuban refugees.
The resurgence of right-wing neoliberal regimes in Latin America, with
the new leaders moving rapidly to reverse the economic and social
gains achieved by pink tide populist governments that came to power
during the previous decade. This conservative movement gained force
with the 2009 coup against Honduran president Mel Zelaya and the
reign of terror in Honduras that followed, events that the Obama White
House sanctioned. The movement then spread to coups or “lawfare”
investigations that ousted progressive presidents in Brazil, Argentina,
Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay, and Chile. Only Venezuela,
Nicaragua, and Cuba managed to survive the new tide, with Mexico the
sole nation to run counter to the trend when its people elected left-wing
populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador as their president in 2018.
Many of the new governments, however, were marked by persistent
corruption, implicated in the rise of criminal gangs and drug trafficking
in their countries, and the austerity programs they imposed only
exacerbated economic inequality among their citizens to the point that
in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, voters began returning leftist
movements to power.
The sudden emergence of the People’s Republic of China as a new
economic power on the Latin American stage. China’s leaders
repeatedly offered the region’s economically burdened governments
unprecedented sums of money in grants and low-interest loans to
finance enormous infrastructure projects, often in exchange for longterm access to vital raw materials. The new Chinese presence allowed
those governments to pursue policies more independent from
Washington’s dictates, thus marking the end of centuries in which Latin
America was the uncontested backyard of the U.S. empire.
Nowhere was the cultural diversity of the U.S. Latinx community more
evident than in the field of culture, with the last decade witnessing a
revolution in the arts spearheaded by a young Puerto Rican from the
Dominican neighborhood of Washington Heights in New York City. In
just a few short years, Lin-Manuel Miranda not only captured countless
accolades for his artistic work, including the Pulitzer Prize and a
MacArthur genius grant, he virtually transformed American theater and
music through his hit Broadways shows Hamilton and In the Heights.
He even prompted new approaches to how public schools teach U.S.
history and the contributions of immigrants and people of color to the
nation’s development. Miranda and other new Latinx artists are not
merely enriching U.S. culture, they are reconstructing it on a new
foundation.
In the midst of such momentous change, even the panethnic term used to
describe U.S. residents of Latin American descent has once again become a
subject of debate. During the past decade, the term Latinx grew increasingly
popular among young college-educated and professional Hispanics as a way
to disrupt the gender binary and to be more inclusive of LGBTQ people.
Still, only 3 percent of the nation’s Latinos acknowledged in 2019 that they
use the term to describe themselves, and only 23 percent have even heard of
it.[6] Twenty years ago a similar controversy raged in some circles over
whether Hispanic or Latino was more appropriate. Back then, I explained in
the first edition of this book my belief that “needless time has been spent by
Latino intellectuals debating which term . . . best describes us. Neither is
totally accurate, but both are acceptable, and I use them interchangeably.”
That is still my view, which is why I have sought in this edition to
incorporate Latinx as an alternative to Hispanic or Latino, especially when
referring to more contemporary issues, but I have done so while still
regarding both Hispanic and Latino as appropriate, if imperfect, terms.
Moreover, most migrants from Latin America still prefer to identify
themselves by their particular country of origin, or in the case of indigenous
peoples, by their native heritage. Their U.S.-born-and-raised children,
grandchildren, and great-grandchildren will increasingly adopt different
views. Ethnic identity, after all, is a social construct, much like racial
identity. It requires a dynamic and fluid approach, not a static and rigid one,
with every generation free to reimagine and redefine its own place in
society, though the actual economic and social conditions of any
community should always take precedence over labels and intellectual
descriptions.
As I was completing revisions to this edition, two historic upheavals
shook the United States and the world, the reverberations of which will be
felt for years to come. First was the COVID-19 pandemic and massive
economic recession, followed by an unprecedented international protest
movement for Black Lives Matter. This movement, energized by the brazen
killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, by a white Minneapolis
policeman—all of it captured on video—sparked the largest street
demonstrations on any issue in U.S. history, dwarfing even the giant
women’s rights protests at the start of the Trump administration, or the
immigrant rights marches of 2006.
Both the pandemic and the racial justice marches underscored how
historic inequities in U.S. society continue to afflict not just African
Americans but Latinos as well. According to the federal Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, the Latinx community endured some of the worst
outcomes during 2020 from COVID-19 of any ethnic or racial group in the
country in both hospitalizations and deaths. Latinos were 3.1 times more
likely to be hospitalized than non-Hispanic whites and 2.3 times more likely
to die from the virus, rates that were slightly higher in both categories than
for African Americans. Only Native Americans registered even more tragic
results—3.7 times more likely than whites to be hospitalized and 2.4 times
more likely to die. Moreover, nearly three months after health officials
launched mass vaccinations, only 7.2 percent of those fully vaccinated were
Hispanic and only 6.7 percent were Black.[7]
As for fatal shootings by police, an extensive Washington Post study of
such incidents since 2015 showed that as of 2022 they occurred at a rate of
thirty-eight per million among Black Americans and twenty-eight per
million among Hispanics, compared with just fifteen per million among
non-Hispanic whites and just five per million among other racial groups.[8]
Blacks and Latinos, in short, were roughly twice as likely to be shot and
killed every year by police as white Americans.
Over the past two decades, I have been repeatedly surprised by the
number of complete strangers who recounted to me how Harvest of Empire
awakened them to a new understanding of the Latino experience in the
United States. The book’s impact on Latinx college students and young
university scholars has been especially gratifying, given the significant role
those young people will play in shaping the nation’s future. They are, after
all, our greatest hope for a world without empires, without the exploitation
and forced migration of millions.
—march 2021
Introduction to the Second Edition
B
etween March and May of 2006, an estimated three million to five
million people, most of them Latinos, filled the downtown streets of
some 160 U.S. towns and cities in the largest series of mass protests the
nation had seen until that point.[1]
Not even during the heyday of the American labor movement in the
1930s, or during the high tide of civil rights protests and public opposition
to the Vietnam War during the 1960s, had such astonishing numbers
paraded peacefully in so many different localities over a common
grievance. Never before had a group at the margins of U.S. society taken
our political establishment by such complete surprise. Word of the
mobilizations, it turned out, had spread largely via Spanish-language radio
and TV and through social networks of young Latinos on the internet, so
government leaders and the general public had little idea of what was
happening until the huge crowds suddenly started to appear on our city
streets.
The immediate aim of the marchers was to defeat a bill in Congress that
would establish tough new criminal penalties for immigrants who were in
the country illegally. The opponents sought not only to derail what came to
be known as the Sensenbrenner bill, but to replace it with a comprehensive
overhaul of U.S. immigration policy, one that would include a “path to
citizenship” for an estimated twelve million undocumented workers already
in the country. Protest leaders framed their effort as a moral call for
compassion and respect, for dignidad for illegal immigrants. Many adopted
the slogan ¡Si Se Puede! (Yes We Can!), the nearly forgotten words that
legendary Mexican American labor organizer Cesar Chavez had coined half
a century earlier for his United Farm Workers organization.
Their message reverberated from the bustling streets of established
Latino neighborhoods in the major cities to scores of newly sprouted
barrios in small towns and hamlets across the American heartland. The
rallies they scheduled suddenly swelled with tens of thousands of maids,
nannies, and maintenance workers, with lowly gardeners and day laborers,
with restaurant busboys and dishwashers, with hotel waiters and bellhops,
with hardened slaughterhouse workers and construction hardhats, many of
whom had quietly led a furtive existence in the shadows of society, always
afraid of being stopped by a local cop or sheriff, or of being caught in an
immigration raid and hastily deported. Suddenly this brown-skinned and
once-docile mass of humanity was parading through glistening city centers
in broad daylight. With spouses and children at their side and their infants
in strollers, they proudly marched with their entire Pentecostal or Catholic
congregations, their ministers and church banners at the front, waving both
the American flag and those of their native countries.
These were not simply gatherings of the undocumented, however.
Hundreds of thousands of Latinos who had been born in the United States
or become naturalized citizens, or who were longtime legal residents, also
participated. And leading the way in virtually every protest were startling
numbers of U.S.-born Hispanic high school and college students, many of
them facing the prospect of being separated from their immigrant parents
who could end up being deported.
All shared the same burning sense of outrage. All were fed up with the
mainstream media’s reigning stereotype that depicted hordes of Latinos and
undocumented workers as a new menace engulfing the country.
And though Latinos made up the overwhelming number of marchers,
they were hardly alone; joining them as well were thousands of Polish,
Irish, Korean, Chinese, and Filipino immigrants, along with many white
and Black religious and labor leaders and supporters.
The immigration protests of 2006 marked a rare example of an outcast
group suddenly rising up and forcing the majority to rethink accepted
notions of democratic and human rights. For most of the marchers, it was
their first act of social protest, one that would permanently alter the way
they viewed the world. For just as the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs
and Freedom defined the outlook of many Black Americans, and just as the
college rebellions of 1968 shaped the thinking of a generation of white
Americans, so too did these protests represent a political coming of age for
the nation’s Hispanic minority.
The new movement burst on the scene with such unexpected force that it
quickly gave rise to several contending narratives in the commercial media.
On the one hand, scores of mainstream newspapers and television stations
started for the first time to produce poignant and sympathetic stories about
the lives of the undocumented, a perspective the press had largely ignored
until then, preferring instead the stereotype of the “illegal alien.” On the
other hand, the fast-growing Spanish-language media offered a radically
different narrative—one of solidarity, not of sympathy. From the scores of
popular radio DJs around the country to the big television networks like
Univision and Telemundo, from the hundreds of weekly Hispanic
newspapers to the big-city dailies like La Opinión in Los Angeles and El
Diario–La Prensa in New York City, the Spanish-language press openly
extolled and promoted the movement. They depicted it as a heroic effort by
Hispanic Americans to finally be recognized for their contributions to the
nation.
But an equally powerful narrative emerged from right-wing talk radio
and TV hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and Lou Dobbs. Seizing
on the fact that some protesters proudly waved the flags of their home
countries alongside the Stars and Stripes, these commentators openly
sought to stoke public rage. They demanded tougher immigration policies
and mass deportations and warned of an attempt by Latino radicals to
reconquer the former Mexican territory of the Southwest as a Hispanic
homeland.
Not surprisingly, anti-immigrant sentiment in the general population
became more virulent, more sustained, and more overtly targeted at
Hispanics. As it did so, local politicians around the country turned into
overnight celebrities for instituting local crackdowns on immigrant
communities. They included Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Arizona’s Maricopa
County; Lou Barletta, the mayor of Hazleton, Pennsylvania; and Steve
Levy, the Suffolk County commissioner on Long Island, New York. From
across the political spectrum, many white and Black Americans angrily
demanded stepped-up deportations and stiffer penalties on companies that
employed undocumented workers. They urged a sealing of the U.S.-Mexico
border through the rapid completion of a physical and virtual wall across its
entire two-thousand-mile length.
The protesters and their allies, however, were equally defiant. Such was
the force of their outcry that the Sensenbrenner bill died in the Senate. But
so did a proposed bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform bill in
2007 that was backed by Massachusetts senator Edward Kennedy,
Republican senator John McCain, and President Bush.
The new movement failed to achieve its main goal of immigration reform,
yet it still left a deep and unexpected imprint on the entire country, for its
stunning rise effectively marked the end of thirty years of conservative
domination over national politics. Six months after the immigration
protests, Democrats swept control of both houses of Congress, and one of
the chief reasons for that historic power shift was the mushrooming Latino
vote. The number of Hispanics casting ballots that November jumped by
nearly 1 million over the previous midterm election—from 4.7 million in
2002 to 5.6 million in 2006. And in so far as the Republican Party was most
closely associated with the Sensenbrenner bill, the percentage of Latinos
who cast ballots for Republican candidates in the House of Representatives
sank from 38 percent to 30 percent.[2]
Then, in 2008, Illinois Democratic senator Barack Obama, borrowing the
same “Yes We Can!” slogan of Chavez’s farmworkers and the immigrant
rights movement, prevailed in the race for the White House. Obama owed
his historic victory in no small measure to the overwhelming support he
received from Latino voters. Some 9.7 million Hispanics cast ballots for
president in 2008, 2.1 million more than in 2004. Obama garnered 67
percent of those votes, while Republican John McCain received just 31
percent, with McCain’s share representing a significant drop from the 40
percent Latino support George W. Bush enjoyed in his 2004 reelection.
The 2.1 million additional Latino voters in 2008 mirrored a similar
startling jump among African Americans; and along with a sharp increase
of more than 300,000 Asian Americans, it produced the most diverse
electorate in the nation’
