Guest Column
Countering Huntington with 'Latino Sun, Rising'
By Marco Portales
This is Hispanic Heritage Month here at Texas A&M and across the nation. We
are celebrating the contributions of Latinos to the great country that the
United States has become and is in the process of becoming. I say becoming
because the U.S. has always been evolving. It has always been in flux, and
we have some great accomplishments of which we can be proud, just as we have
some events and periods which we would rather not discuss. My point is that
it is up to us, the common citizenry, and to the leaders we elect to
continue to work to make the United States progressively better. Some people
seem to believe that our best days are behind us, but personally I won’t
accept that. I believe that we have not yet reached the point when the
Constitution protects everybody equally. When the Constitution arrives at
that point, then the U.S. will be at its true apex.
In previous years when I have been invited to talk about Hispanics, I have
sometimes consciously included what I knew would be some sour notes. I have
done so because I have felt the need to make some realistic observations
about the Latino condition in this country that have not agreed with the
positive outlook that most of us understandably prefer to hear. I must
confess that I, too, would rather hear a cheerful message; but, we have to
be real, we have to understand the world we live in and we have to be
sensitive, practical and committed to improving the United States for
everyone. In 2000, for example, Temple University Press published my
Crowding Out Latinos: Mexican Americans in the Public Consciousness, a study
where reluctantly I took pains to point out how Latinos have been elbowed
out of the consciousness of this country. That was my assessment of the 20th
century for Latinos, but I did so because I was concerned with the 21st
century, because what happened during the last century will continue to
affect Spanish-speaking people today—if we do not speak out. Since then I
have taken several hits because people, including some forward-looking
Latinos, did not like that message. People do not like to hear how the
reality of our situation has been different from the rhetoric that we would
rather embrace and advance.
This year I have not had to work as hard as in previous years because part
of our reality has made manifest what I have been saying about Latinos for
some time. This year, five years after Crowding Out Latinos, we are
currently awaiting a lecture by Distinguished Harvard Professor Samuel P.
Huntington who will be on campus early next month to tell us just how
threatening the continued immigration of Latinos is to the cultural make-up
of this country. He is not only interested in crowding us out; he is
interested in keeping us out of the U. S. The problem is that most of us
were born here in the U.S. Huntington believes in the innate inferiority of
some cultures, and among the inferior cultures he nonchalantly locates
Mexicans and Latinos. I find his views unacceptable, and I hope you will,
too. One day soon we will develop a true appreciation for the Latino
presence and for the contributions of our people.
In two books by Huntington titled Who Are We: The Challenges to America’s
National Identity (2004)) and in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking
of World Order (1998), he misrepresents people from Mexico and from Latin
America. By doing so, Huntington displays a fundamental misunderstanding for
people who speak Spanish and for people whose ancestral roots are connected
to the Spanish language and heritage. His misrepresentations are
particularly exasperating because instead of looking for points of harmony
between cultures, Huntington’s publications emphasize cultural differences
that he uses to encourage cultural clashes. What is ironical is that his
views basically counter our highest document, the Constitution of the United
States. The Preamble of the Constitution, for instance, is succinct enough
to quote in its entirety:
We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union,
establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common
defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to
ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for
the United States of America.
The founders literally capitalized the following nouns in the Preamble: We
the People, United States, Union, Justice, Tranquility, Welfare, Blessings
of Liberty, Posterity and Constitution. These are all wonderful words that
express some of humanity’s highest ideals. Professor Huntington’s writings
do not equally bestow these civic virtues upon all Americans. What
distresses me about the 816 pages of Professor Huntington’s two books is
that he argues that only a “nativist” and Anglocentric emphasis is important
enough in the U.S.--as if the descendents of the New England Puritan
tradition had so special a claim to America that everybody else, including
the indigenous people of the Americas, never existed. Basically that is what
Professor Huntington says again and again. He erases or tries to erase what
he does not like. And he erases, or desires to erase people he dislikes and
who do not comfortably fit into his Boston American world. But, since when
is Boston not a multicultural world, too--just like the rest of America
today?
Everybody who is not White, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant, Huntington sees as
peripheral or of secondary importance to his own heritage. Indeed, that is
why I wrote Latino Sun, Rising—to show that U.S. Latinos also have a
heritage that we have been struggling to articulate so that people can see
how we have contributed to the American mosaic and how we can contribute
more, given opportunities and the good will of others. My question is: why
would he come to Texas, given the message of his books? To tell Latinos and
non-Latinos that the heritage that we are celebrating this month is no good,
that we are not part of the great American culture to which we all belong?
Why separate us and then encourage others to see us as he does?
That is what is especially galling to those of us who feel the
responsibility of celebrating the contributions of our ancestors. For our
ancestors arrived here so that we can enjoy lives that unfortunately they
never had. That is what Latino Sun, Rising, seeks to communicate.
According to Professor Huntington, there are 7 or 8 world cultures today
that our national leaders should be mindful about when shaping U.S. foreign
policy. In world circles that thesis would not appear to offer an especially
profound insight, for it is not a political revelation of much consequence
or novelty. So, to incite the views of people who do not like Mexican and
Latin American immigrants, Huntington’s book declare as undesirable not only
Hispanic cultures but all cultures that are different from his sense of what
the United States is or ought to be. That is why his publications have
elements that offend almost every other culture that is not American, that
is to say, the rest of the world’s major civilizations, including the
Eastern Orthodox, Latin American, Islamic, Japanese, Chinese, Hindu, and
African cultures. As a one-time presidential advisor, what should we think
of diplomatic views like this? With such a global view, what kind of foreign
policy can the U.S. mount that will allow us to deal with integrity with the
rest of the world?
Cultures that exhibit diversity he finds particularly threatening and
irreconcilable. To fit neatly into his views, for example, Huntington wants
to believe that Latino culture exhibits a monolithic uniformity that he
finds antithetical to American culture today. Actually, this very diversity
is what is increasingly defining America—and all to the good. Why? Because
the diversity movement is progressively granting more U.S. residents the
protection of the Constitution. The Constitution, Huntington must be
informed, is not a document only for white people; it is for every American,
including Latinos, regardless of race, color, creed, and gender. According
to his published theories, Spanish-speakers belong to a civilization that
celebrates values and mores that are so different from Americans who trace
their descent to England and Puritan America that Latinos will never
assimilate or acculturate. He doesn’t appear to understand that there are
many more Latinos like myself who were born here and who have studied in the
U.S. all of the days of our lives. As such, we know not only about the good
side of the Puritans but also about their intolerant ways. We also know,
however, about the Iroquois, the Chippewa, the Pawnee and the Comanche, the
Karankawa and the Caddo here in Texas, among others. We know about the
French effort to colonize America as well as the Spanish one. This is a part
of history that no one can ignore because it continues to shape so much of
what we continue to live with today.
The U.S. is a wonderful conglomeration of everything that has happened
before, and we ought daily to celebrate that, as Whitman, Emerson and others
repeatedly pointed out in various ways. However, because there are always
people like Professor Huntington who insist that only certain people are the
rightful Americans, we have to assert, yet again, that the only people who
may not be interlopers in America are the indigenous people who were clearly
here when Columbus arrived. The rest of us are interlopers, Johnny come
latelies and Mary come latelies, Juans and Marias who came to the U.S.
generations ago or as recently as yesterday, all propelled by the Americano
Dream of owning a house and living a better life. There is no greater
country in the world. The United States has no parallel, and there has never
been another country like it, mainly because we have a Constitution that
promotes and encourages freedom and diversity.
In America people are free to acculturate or to assimilate to the degree
that each individual desires. In the United States, “we the people” have the
freedom, guaranteed by the First Amendment, to express ourselves in however
way we choose, so long as we do not impose or run rough-shod over the
freedoms and property of other Americans. Indeed, it is this very freedom
that allows Huntington to express his views, but we should not be deluded by
his message. A counter message, in effect, is what I endeavor to show in
Latino Sun, Rising.
Writing about Latinos today is not an easy job. It is not easy to come up
with a neat synthesis that convincingly explains why I believe that the
Latino Sun is finally rising, even in the face of disparagements like
Huntington’s. It is a difficult task to look at some of our realities today
and still to maintain hope. It is difficult, for example, to see our high
Latino dropout numbers and still hope that our students can somehow take a
quantum leap that will allow them to enter a University like Texas A&M.
Nonetheless, that is the nature of our challenge. Some non-Latinos might
even say, Hispanics don’t even know what to call themselves, they are so
confused. But we are not. Everything depends, of course, on whom you are
talking to or about. We definitely feel comfortable using the names we do;
the problem is that other people have not taken the time to learn about us.
Huntington, for instance, makes no distinctions between Latinos. For him, a
Puerto Rican, who is an American because the island is our commonwealth, is
the same as a Peruvian. But there is a wealth of difference between the two,
just as being a Nicaraguan is totally different from being a Bolivian.
Spanish-speaking people employ terms like Hispanics, Latinos, Chicanos,
Mexican Americans, Puerto Rican Americans, and Cuban Americans, for example,
to express our nationality and ethnicity. Our members hail from all of the
existing races. Latinos exhibit all the colors of the human spectrum, and
the point of commonality is that we speak Spanish or that our ancestors
spoke Spanish. Spanish is the 4th most used language in the world, after
English, Chinese and Hindustani. In the United States, we currently have a
little more than 41.3 million Latinos, according to the U.S. Census Bureau,
and Spanish-speakers have roots in all twenty-one Spanish-speaking
countries. Sixty seven (67) percent of U.S. Latinos are Mexican American;
Puerto Ricans make up nine (9) percent of this population; Cuban Americans
comprise four (4) percent; and all of the other Latin American countries,
including Spain, make up the remaining twenty (20) percent. These are
particulars that Huntington is not concerned with when he writes about the
scourge of the immigration problem which he feels is currently threatening
to destroy civilization in the United States. That, however, is hardly the
case.
Out of the current 293 million Americans, about fourteen (14) percent of the
U.S. population is Hispanic. It is true that certain states, like California
and Texas, to name the largest two, are projected to become what
demographers call minority majority states some time in the next quarter
century. But even when that happens, I have been seeing this immigration
where I grew up in South Texas most of my life, and I am convinced that
Latinos are not arriving in the United States to weaken and to destroy it,
as Huntington believes. Mexicans and other Latinos have been immigrating for
157 years, that is, since the U.S. War with Mexico ended in 1848. What
Latinos have been contributing, indeed, are the energies and the talents of
their lives, replenishing and reshaping the United States in the process. As
a people, we have sacrificed and we have worked for the mutual benefit of
this country as well as ourselves, as so many different types of
testimonials assert. Yet it is exactly this transformative interaction
between immigrants and the residents already in the U.S. that Huntington
apparently fears. Frankly, I do not see how Huntington can see
Spanish-speakers as an undesirable threat to the United States, so I am left
with supposing that it must be because Latinos are not directly connected to
the English Protestant background that he write and talks.
The 1846-1848 War with Mexico is the historical event that culturally
constructed Spanish-speakers as less than the Anglo-Americans who defeated
the Mexican soldiers. The end of that war ceded or turned over roughly
fifty-five (55) percent of the Mexican territories to the United States by
the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on February 2, 1848. That land amounted to
the current-day states of New Mexico, Arizona, California and parts of
Nevada, Utah and Colorado. Texas, you may recall, had given up its
independent status as a republic and joined the union a year before in 1845.
To make up for damage to Mexican property during a war where the U.S. was
the recognized aggressor, the U.S. gave Mexico $15 million, the same amount
that Thomas Jefferson paid France in 1803 for the Louisiana Purchase, or all
the land drained by the Mississippi River.
Historians claim that roughly about 70,000 Mexicans lived in the lands
turned over to the United States at the end of the war in 1848. The treaty
gave the Mexican citizens in those territories one year to return to Mexico,
or to stay where they were and become American citizens. Some, of course,
returned to Mexico, but most stayed where they had their homes, lives and
possessions. After the war, the U.S. Congress actually considered annexing
all of Mexico, an idea that most of us have forgotten or never knew. And
there was some support for making Mexico part of the United States, but for
Senator John Calhoun of South Carolina. The story is that he stood up in
Congress and said that the U.S. could not bring all of Mexico into the union
because that would make the U.S. a bilingual nation, and speaking both
English and Spanish would tilt political power. Calhoun prevailed, and the
American troops were pulled out of the Mexican capital, leaving Mexico as a
sovereign country. One can see a certain ideological connection between
Professor Huntington and Senator Calhoun, for neither embraces Mexico or
Mexicans.
Now, how “American” could the Mexican citizens in the lands ceded to the
U.S. become? After all, at the end of 1849, the year of the storied
California Gold Rush, the people still looked Mexican and they likely still
spoke Spanish, with perhaps a little English. And, if this first generation
of 1849 Mexican Americans could or would not become full-fledged
“Americans,” what about their sons and daughters? What does it take to
become a “full-fledged American”? I guess it takes the full desire of the
individual, the full desire of a society that is willing to leave its
heritage behind, and the full desire of the society being courted. As soon
as we itemize what it takes, we begin to see why assimilation and
acculturation have been so difficult all of these years. First, not too many
self-respecting group of people will choose to leave their traditions behind
completely; second, no group of people will uniformly work together toward
accepting another group of people into their fold; and, third, that should
explain why assimilation and acculturation tend to take place on an
individual basis, with some people desiring that goal, while others take
comfort in the culture into which they were born.
My point is that we have people living all along the
assimilation/acculturation spectrum, telling us that people have every right
to position themselves wherever they culturally want, wherever they feel
most comfortable. That is what gives individuals their personal identity,
their link to the heritage they are born into or the one they choose. Doing
so makes us a stronger, more diverse country, because people will then be
motivated and propelled to make their contributions to society by relying on
their strengths and talents, and not according to what someone else thinks
or what the government happens to believe.
The transformative, social vehicle helping to shape where people are on the
assimilation/acculturation scale that I have sketched would have fallen to
the schools. But how good were the mid-nineteenth century schools of the
Great American Southwest? Although it has now been more than 150 years, more
than 7 generations, to what extent are the Spanish-speaking people of Texas,
New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado Americanized?
What we have is what people have rightly chosen, given the opportunities
afforded them and their prerogative to choose. The issue is not a matter of
blaming anyone. It is a matter of understanding how past opportunities have
shaped the mores, the values and the life decisions that people have made,
given their constitutional rights to choose.
Latino Sun, Rising discusses these issues and considerably more. The book is
divided into 3 parts, Youth, Parenthood and Public Policy issues. It is
comprised of 43 nonfiction essays and a fictive one, covering 3 generations
of my own family--not because it is my family, but because I believe that
the experiences of the Portaleses are representative of what other Latinos
have also gone through in this country. My grandparents came to the United
States in 1918 toward the end of the Mexican Revolution. They arrived in
Buda, Texas outside of Austin, where my six-year old dad started picking
cotton with his mom and father and brothers to feed the family. If I was
paid $2.50 per 100 pounds when I picked cotton in the mid-1960s, we can
imagine how much they must have gotten paid forty years before in 1920. I
mention the pay mainly because I want to underscore the fact that our
family, like countless other Hispanics, just happened to arrive in the U.S.
before the Roaring Twenties. The Rio Grande River was our Ellis Island, but
I do not see that the National Park Service of the U.S. Department of the
Interior has spent $162 million as it did in 1990 setting up something
comparable on our southern border to an Ellis Island Immigration Museum to
commemorate the millions of Latinos who have also crossed searching “for
freedom of speech and religion, and for economic opportunity in the U.S.”
Why not, we may well ask. What’s the difference in the immigration stories
from Europe and the ones from Mexico and Latin America? Why honor immigrants
from Europe and why fail to appreciate the Spanish-speaking ones?
When the Border Patrol, the same one that chases illegal immigrants today,
was established 81 years ago by Congress in 1924, my ancestors
understandably moved to Edinburg, the seat of Hidalgo County, where I was
born 24 years later. My dad and his mother, who lived to be 97 years, never
told us much about those difficult years. He and my mom wanted my brother
and me to succeed in America, so they provided us with the best they could
and sufficient love and encouragement. We had what would have been a
middle-class upbringing by 1950 standards because my dad worked until he was
able to build a neighborhood grocery store in 1946 on which the family
relied for twenty-three (23) years when he passed away. Latino Sun, Rising
sketches the trajectory and evolution of our family’s history, including the
barrio where my brother and I joyfully played as kids, and then the school
years, all the way to my Ph.D. in English in Buffalo, New York. Today, my
brother works for Lockheed-Martin located by the NASA Johnson Space Center.
I believe people today will say that we have “made it,” which to me means
that, with the proper support and encouragement, other Latinos can be
successful, too, suggesting that what Professor Huntington says about
Hispanics is simply wrong.
For, we, too, are interested in building America in the 21st century. We
have assimilated and become acculturated to the extent that we have wanted
to, and to the extent that society has encouraged and discouraged us.
America, I nonetheless feel, is a great place because it should provide all
people with opportunities, and everybody is aware that opportunities require
hard work. I know that Latinos have never been scared of that because life
has shown me that we tend to be pretty good at hard work.
My wife Rita and I wrote our most recent book, Quality Education for Latinos
and Latinas: Print and Oral Skills for All Students, K-College, because we
are eager to share what we have learned in more than thirty years of
teaching apiece. We want to show people how we can all capitalize on
opportunities that can make the U.S. a better place for everyone. Hispanics
continue to enrich and contribute to American society, as we have
demonstrated again and again during Hispanic Heritage Month and throughout
the year. The Latino Sun is shinning brighter than ever before, making our
Spanish-speaking world a stronger, better partner in the effort to create a
fairer U.S.A. For that we should all be proud. We have, of course, more to
say, but let’s talk about that book on another occasion. Thank you for your
kind attention today.
____________________________________________________
- Remarks prepared for Hispanic Heritage Month Presentation at Texas A&M University Evans Library, 204E; 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, September 28, 2005.
- Texas Civil Rights Review article posted at: http://texascivilrightsreview.org/phpnuke/index.php
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed by HispanicVista.com (www.hispanicvista.com) without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)