HispanicVista Columnists
Latinos in the Age of National (in)Security
(This article first appeared originally in NACLA Report on the Americas)
By Roberto Lovato
The Chiapanecan Indian and Nicaraguan farm workers
fled their bucolic but troubled rural homelands to harvest these fields
carpeted with colorful tulips under the gray skies of northernmost
Washington State. They make on average $10,000 a year, have high rates of
infant mortality and most won’t live past 50. Yet, despite these
conditions, they’ll tell you they fare better than they did back home:
there are no forests decimated by bombs; no blood-stained roads or other
grisly reminders of wars left behind; most importantly, their children’s
future will surely be better.
And then, the white men in military uniforms arrive, bringing the traumas
of war and a struggle over identity to the farm workers of Skagit and
Washburn counties.
In Washington State and across the country, Latinos are being besieged by
two very different armies—with often counterintuitive agendas, at least
rhetorically—that are profoundly influencing what it means to be brown in
a United States where, by the year 2025, one in four Americans will call
themselves “Latino.” The U.S. military is deploying thousands of
recruiters in its efforts to conscript Latinos as the newest would-be
heroes in the President’s good war, even as conservative anti-immigrant
groups swell their ranks by casting Latinos as the latest national
security threat. “We’re fighting a two-front battle out here,” says
Rosalinda Guillén, head of Comunidad a Comunidad, a community-based
nonprofit that organizes and provides social services for farm workers in
Washington State. “On one side we have the Minutemen, and at the same
time, we’re trying to stop Army recruiters from taking our kids.”
Indeed, at town hall meetings from Arizona to New York and Washington,
D.C., Minuteman leader Chris Simcox pushes for private citizens to form
anti-immigrant patrols to plug up the holes left in the border component
of the government’s larger national security matrix. Denouncing the farm
workers and other Latinos as “immigrant terrorists” and “criminals,” the
self-described “patriots” in camouflage have begun harvesting hatred among
Washington’s white farmers. This September, the group formally announced
the expansion of its operation to Washington and seven other states along
the U.S.-Canadian border. Yet, ironically, while Simcox and the Minutemen
sow white fear amid the strawberry fields by portraying immigrant farm
workers as Evil Others, Army and Marine recruiters have intensified
enlistment drives targeting immigrant’s children for immediate service in
the battlefields of Iraq.
What these tensions playing out in northern Washington share is that
together they represent more than a battle over borders, whether domestic
or foreign; they are also struggles over the very notion of what “Latino”
is, and how Latinos fit into the idea of a nation constructed on violence,
war and assimilation. The scenario reflects well the “Clash of
Civilizations” ideology gripping government officials, academic elites,
anti-immigrant activists, border vigilantes, white supremacists and other,
mostly white, groups in the United States. Originally conceived by
rightwing Middle East historian, Bernard Lewis, the thesis was further
developed and popularized by the powerful political-military scientist and
author, Samuel P. Huntington, as a replacement for the more traditional
political and economic divide of the Cold War. After penning his highly
influential The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World
Order—which provided the ideological framing for war in the post–Cold War
period—Huntington, the former strategic planner of the Carter
Administration’s National Security Council (NSC), followed in 2004 with
Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity. This recent
book brings the “clash” vision home, presenting Latinos as “the single
most immediate and most serious challenge to America’s traditional
identity.”
Better than most, Huntington captures and plays to the national security
zeitgeist currently propping up limited notions of U.S. identity. The
underlying fears motivating anti-Latino and anti-immigrant politics like
those of the Minuteman movement are well elucidated in Huntington’s book:
“The most powerful stimulus to such white nativism will be the cultural
and linguistic threats whites see from the expanding power of Latinos in
U.S. society.” And in a chapter entitled “Assimilation,” Huntington makes
explicit the nexus between perpetual war, military recruitment and the
construction of national identity among Latino immigrants like the
Washington farm workers: “Without a major war requiring substantial
mobilization and lasting years ... contemporary immigrants will have
neither the opportunity nor the need to affirm their identity with and
their loyalty to America as earlier immigrants have done.” Having survived
their own experiences of war in El Salvador, southern Mexico and
Nicaragua, northern Washington’s Latinos are again confronted with war’s
collateral effects.
Indeed, national security driven recruitment efforts targeting Latinos in
the northwest and elsewhere reflect a cultural milieu in which Latino—and
other—identities are being defined by conflict and fear. Huntington, a
warrior-scholar with direct links to vast networks of political, military,
academic and media power, understands better than most how to manipulate
culture and race as a kind of psychological operation. Manufacturing
various types of fear—including racial fear—is a standard “psy-ops” tactic
that affects multiple audiences in multiple ways. For Latinos, then,
paramilitarism, military recruitment, extreme poverty and racism combine
to leave few alternatives to the binary, zero-sum cultural logic of
Huntington, the Minutemen, recruiters and others who’ve made an industry
out of national security.
In the more globalized twenty-first century search for post–Cold War
enemies, yesterday’s communist sympathizer in the United States and Latin
America has been supplanted by today’s terrorist threat. At a time when
the Bush Administration seeks to establish firmer politico-military
footing in the lives of Latinos throughout the hemisphere, the U.S.
solidarity activist, the subversive unionist, the guerrillero, the
activist nun and others of the anti-communist past are being replaced by
an amalgam of threats magically united by their Latin extraction—and by
their alleged links to terrorism in the national security present.
Immigrants, drug traffickers, narco-guerrillas, gang members and other
perceived transnational threats throughout the hemisphere are now
intimately linked in the minds and speeches of Minutemen, government
officials and many others. U.S. policies toward Latin America regularly
invoke the image of the “bad” Latino to connect the anti-terrorist dots
from northern Washington to the Southern Cone.
Viewed through this global lens, the perceived need to control rural and
inner-city youth, border crossers and Central American gang members is now
politically coupled with the need to control a Latin America moving
leftward—and further from U.S. control. No less a national security
specialist than Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has—in one broad,
unifying, national-security stroke—signaled the government’s willingness
to fuse stereotypes of U.S. Latinos with refried stereotypes of Latin
Americans. During a recent meeting of Latin American and Caribbean defense
ministers, Rumsfeld outlined his view of the “new” hemispheric threats:
“The new threats of the twenty-first century recognize no borders.
Terrorists, drug traffickers, hostage takers and criminal gangs form an
anti-social combination that increasingly seeks to destabilize civil
societies.” In this context, Rumsfeld’s switch from a “War on Terror” to a
“global struggle against violent extremism” appears designed to extend the
moral, legal and politico-military reach of the United States throughout
the Latino Americas. Thus far, though, top officers of the U.S. military’s
Southern Command and other Administration officials have failed to solidly
merge the hemisphere into the larger anti-terrorist project of the other
better-funded Command centers of the military.
But their efforts continue in earnest, and militarizing the U.S. Latino
mind remains an essential part of the Pentagon’s designs if the children
of Latino farm workers and other immigrants are to adopt an identity
committed to doing Bush’s bidding in Iraq and beyond. Making distinctions
is key to that strategy. Contrasted against police officers, Army and
Marine effectives and other uniformed representatives of the post-9/11
“good,” transnational gangs, drug traffickers and border-crossing “illegal
aliens” have become metaphors for all that is “bad” in the Latino
diasporas. The molding of Latino and Latin American identity allows Bush
Administration officials like clean-cut, good-brown-guy Attorney General
Alberto Gonzalez to shape domestic anti-terrorist laws against gangsters
that Fox News (and Fox News en Español) and police chiefs like Los
Angeles’ William Bratton tell us are “terrorists.” In this sense, the
front-page pictures and newscasts featuring the dark-skinned former gang
member and alleged U.S. Al Qaeda operative Jose Padilla (the so-called
“Dirty Bomber”) may preview the ultimate melding of “Latino” with
“terrorist threat.” The recent killing of aging Puerto Rican independence
fighter Filiberto Ojeda Ríos by federal agents is also indicative of this
trend [See page 42]. Labeling Ojeda Ríos a “terrorist” and killing him in
the name of national security contrasts strikingly with the treatment of
convicted anti-Castro bomber Luis Posada Carriles, who is currently under
consideration for asylum by the Bush Administration.
Similarly, the completely preposterous and unproven alleged connection
between Salvadoran gangs and Al Qaeda carries the image of the gang to
new, hemispheric levels of media and political hysteria. Reports (also
unproven) I heard near the Arizona-Mexico border of “terrorists” moving
into the United States among undocumented immigrants have a significance
to many beyond Washington’s farm workers and others without papeles.
Images of border crossers, “gangster thugs” and any number of other
stereotypes are also among the most popular representations of Latinos in
the U.S. media. Newscasts, movies, “Cops” shows and other television
programs (many of which are transmitted throughout the hemisphere) set the
stage for new forms of Latino identity formation in times of perpetual
anti-terrorist war.
Alarmingly, in the name of “fighting terrorism” and other evils, the
militaries and more-militarized law enforcement agencies of the United
States and Latin America are again working closely together. Cold War
experience moves—and scares—critics of the announcement this June by
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice of plans to create an International
Law Enforcement Academy (ILEA) in El Salvador that would train students
from the region’s police forces. Salvadoran critics are calling the ILEA a
new “School of the Americas” for cops. U.S. Latino, especially bilingual,
troops play fundamental roles in bridging and connecting these military
and national security cultures. Like their camouflaged peers in wartime El
Salvador, many Latinos are echoing high-sounding slogans that sanctify war
and killing by claiming to defend Dios (God), Patría (Homeland) and
Libertad (Liberty). Yet, even couched in the religious rhetoric of civil
defense, the brutish war cries of Bush, Rumsfeld, Huntington and the
Minutemen have led many other Latinos to say “Ya Basta!” (Enough already!)
to the entire national security project.
More and more U.S. Latinos are now exercising their preferential option
against Empire. The anti-militaristic traditions of U.S.-born Latinos
(especially Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans) are combining with the
anti-militarismo traditions of more recent Latin American immigrants from
such countries as El Salvador, the Dominican Republic and other sites of
Cold War devastation. This new politico-cultural sensibility is taking
hold among Latinos throughout the country. Under the leadership of people
like Mexican immigrant Fernando Suarez Del Solar and Chicano professor
Jorge Mariscal, Latino groups are joining forces to discourage Latinos
from joining the military. They are planning a nationwide Latino
counter-recruitment summit in early 2006 and are reaching out to groups in
Latin America as well.
Many among this country’s largest “minority” are feeling the pressure to
decide whether they are more black or white, whether they will fight the
power or serve it. The cultural carpet-bombing of U.S. Latino life—media,
schools, non-profit funding and more—by the numerous recruitment entities
of the Pentagon has had a political blowback effect reflected in the
growing numbers of Latinos, especially young Latinos, joining the ranks of
the counter-recruitment movement. Latino parents, students and teachers
are also opposing the recruiters and the school officials that promote
militarism on campuses.
Until recently, the failure to recognize the psychological and cultural
effects of this national security strategy and to confront it on its own
terms had been Latinos’ central strategic error in the domestic policy
wars that vilify immigrants, destroy schools and disproportionately push
larger and larger numbers of former students of crumbling education
systems into prisons—and into the ranks of the dead and endangered in
Iraq. Fortunately, many have decided that the time has come to meditate
on, and lay siege upon, the nefarious workings of national security
culture—as if we are, indeed, the very barbarians conjured by Bush,
Rumsfeld and Huntington.
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About the Author
Roberto Lovato (robvato63@yahoo.com)
is a New York-based writer with New America Media. He is a regular
contributor to The Nation magazine and his work has also appeared
in the L.A. Times, Salon, Utne, La Opinión and
other publications.