Mapping Latina/o Studies: An Interdisciplinary Reader

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2 d d Mapping Latina/o Studies: An Interdisciplinary Reader Matt Garcia and Angharad N. Valdivia In the wake of September 11, 2001, Samuel P. Huntington, author of the controversial essay, The Clash of Civilizations? seemed to have foretold the future in earlier writings (1993, 1997) when he proposed: the greatest divisions among humankind and the dominating force of conflict will be cultural (Huntington, 1993, 1) The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon apparently provided ample evidence that religious differences an important factor in the distinctions among civilizations according to Huntington would be a force within the geopolitical landscape of the 21st century. Huntington s divisions of Islam versus Christianity, West versus East appealed to a simple and timeless binary logic held by most US Americans that the Middle East may be the cradle of civilization, but the United States is the beacon of progress and sophistication in today s world. (McAlister, 2001) In 2004, Huntington returned with an even more provocative thesis: the enemy not only comes from outside the borders of this country but also resides within. The single most immediate and most serious challenge to America s traditional identity, Huntington writes, comes from the immense and continuing immigration from Latin America, especially from Mexico, and the fertility rates of these immigrants compared to black and white American natives. (Huntington, 2004, 32) For those on the right of the cultural wars, Latina/o resistance to assimilation and their persistence in speaking Spanish now apparently represents a threat to the American dream and national security equal to, if not greater than Al-Qaeda and Islamic fundamentalism. Recent laws enacted in the state of Arizona reiterate this fear. While Huntington s vilification of Latina/os conforms to a long history of nativism in the United States (a charge he vigorously denies), few scholars invested in the study of US Latina/os would dispute a central truth of his analysis: Latina/os have transformed US society, especially over the last

3 2 Matt Garcia and Angharad N. Valdivia thirty years. Huntington shows special concern for the shifting ratio of white Americans to ethnic Mexicans in the urban Southwest, a subject that has captivated Chicana/o scholars for years. Historian David Gutiérrez, for example, observed Mexican resistance to assimilation and cited a transformation in the national orientation of many inhabitants of the Southwest. In interpreting Latina/o protests against Proposition 187 and ethnic Mexican insults waged against US players during a US-Mexico soccer match in Los Angeles, Gutiérrez concludes: these spontaneous, emotional displays of national identification provide poignant glimpses of the ways changing social contexts in this case the ubiquitous presence of thousands of ethnic Mexicans in the national territory of the United States are continuing to destabilize fixed and unitary notions of community, culture, nationality, and, indeed, of the territorial nation itself. (Gutiérrez, 1999, 483) Observing these very same events, Huntington similarly concludes: Such dramatic rejections of the United States and assertions of Mexican identity are not limited to an extremist minority in the Mexican-American community. Many Mexican immigrants and their offspring simply do not appear to identify primarily with the United States. (Huntington, 2004, 40) Huntington s observations, therefore, are not novel or even insightful. They do, however, provide valuable evidence of the continuing polarization of US society on the question of immigration and challenge us to understand the causes, context, and effects of Latina/o cultural and community formation. The controversy surrounding Huntington s essay also signals larger and more complex issues facing Latina/os in the US today. Latina/os now constitute approximately 16% of the United States population and are predicted to become a quarter of the US population by While we have demanded a greater share of the media s attention, resources and services have been harder to come by. Salma Hayek and Shakira may have crossed over into the US mainstream, but millions of undocumented workers cannot get adequate education and health care services. In 2000, 32% of US Latina/os lacked health insurance, accounting for one quarter of the nation s 44 million uninsured. (American Health Line, 2000). These figures have remained consistent; 35% of Latinos under 65 years of age were without health insurance coverage in 2005 (National Center for Health Statistics, Health of Hispanic/Latino Population, nchs/fastats/hispanic_health.htm retrieved October 22, 2010) as well as a 2007 Pew survey reporting 33% uninsured (Pew Hispanic Center, pewhispanic.org/questions/?qid= &pid=54&ccid=54#top, retrieved August 8, 2010). Increasing HIV rates among Latina/os exacerbate the problem as AIDS cases in the black and Latino gay male population now outnumber cases in the white gay male population (Center for Disease Control, 2000). The latest CDC estimates show that they account

4 Mapping Latina/o Studies 3 for an estimated 18% of people living with HIV in the U.S. (194,000 persons), and an estimated 17% of new infections each year (9,700 infections). The CDC estimates that approximately one in 36 Latino men will be diagnosed with HIV during their lifetime, as will one in 106 Latinas. Men account for three-quarters (76%) of new infections among Latina/os. Women account for 24%. The rate of new HIV infections among Latino men is more than double that among Anglo men, with gay and bisexual men particularly affected. Most new infections among Latino men (72%) occur among men who have sex with men (MSM). The rate of new HIV infections among Hispanic women is nearly four times that of white women. AIDS continues to claim the lives of too many Latina/os. Since the beginning of the epidemic, more than 85,000 Latinos with AIDS have died. (CDC report, 2010, based on data gathered in newsroom/docs/fastfacts-latinos-final508comp.pdf, retrieved Oct. 22, 2010) In the area of education, Latina/os now constitute the largest minority group in many urban school districts (and in some they are the majority), yet they suffer the highest dropout rates, way beyond their proportion of the student body (Suárez-Orozco, Suárez-Orozco, and Doucet, 2004). The rollback of Affirmative Action and bilingual education in key states such as California and Massachusetts has only contributed to the education gap between Latina/os and non-latina/os (Gutiérrez, 1999; Marin, Lee, and Orfield, 2003; Horn, Flores, and Orfield, 2003; Bickel, Billings, and Hakuta, 2004). So-called achievement gaps in mathematics and literacy remained the same in 2005 (according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress [NAEP] asp?printver= id=tab2&subtab_id=tab_1#chart, retrieved October 22, 2010). Meanwhile, Latina/os continue to be the poorest of the poor in the US despite having the highest rates of employment. (Suárez-Orozco and Páez, 2002). The Latino poverty rate increased from 23.2% in 2008 to 25.3% in Twelve million Latinos were counted as poor in 2009, representing an increase of 1.4 million since In 2009, a four-person family was considered poor if income fell below $21,954. In 2009, the poverty rate for Latina/os was 25.3%, compared to 9.4% for Whites and 25.8% for Blacks ( releases/archives/income_wealth/cb html, retrieved October 22, 2010). It is in this conflicting and tumultuous era that Latina/o Studies must make sense of Latina/o lives, past and present. The proliferation of edited volumes concerning Latina/os over the last decade provides one indication of the growth of this field of study (e.g., Darder and Torres, 1998; Delgado and Stefancic, 1998; Flores and Rosaldo, 2007; Fox, 1996; Rodriguez, Saenz, and

5 4 Matt Garcia and Angharad N. Valdivia Menjivar, 2007). From the time of its inception in 1996 as an interdisciplinary graduate and faculty seminar at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign until the publication of this book in 2011, Mapping Latina/o Studies joined a growing national and transnational discussion that has attempted to identify what is unique about the study of US Latina/os. Some schools have embraced the question from a strictly disciplinary approach, while others have explored Latina/o studies from a multidisciplinary perspective. Still others have directed their collective attentions towards a particular identity such as women, LGBT/Queer, undocumented Latina/os; a place such as New York, Los Angeles, or the border ; a theme such as dance, film, or popular culture generally. Mapping Latina/o Studies, like its predecessors and contemporaries, provides new perspectives on this changing, multiethnic community, while adding complexity by highlighting subjects previously understudied within this emerging field. Given the dynamism of Latina/o lives and Latina/o Studies, we promise to offer an incomplete though generative understanding of this diverse and ever-changing group. In light of this diversity, scholars and policy makers have fiercely debated whether Latina/o constitutes an accurate label for this group. Mapping Latina/o Studies embraces this debate by including scholars who challenge the a priori existence of a pan-ethnic group and question the acceptance and usefulness of the Latino label (see Hernández, this volume; Anzaldúa, this volume; Torres-Saillant, 2002; Oboler, 1995; Padilla, 1985). Although the editors and the majority of contributors to this volume have invested in the concept of Latinidad, the lack of consensus demonstrates the unstable, tense, dynamic, and contingent nature of ethnic community and identity formation in the US and elsewhere. 1 Considerations of how, why, and if this group is to be constructed place Latina/o Studies at the center of academic discussions about racial, community, and identity formation in the US today. Given the changing nature of the Latina/o community and Latina/o Studies, we want to foreground our deployment of geographies as the organizing principle for this book. The history of US intervention in Latin America and uneven economic development across the hemisphere has produced constant immigration to the United States from Latin America, complicating and expanding our definition of Latinidad. This immigration has tended to come in waves from specific nations in the past, most significantly Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, thereby leading to somewhat ethno-nationalist community and identity formations during the 1960s and 1970s such as Chicano for ethnic Mexicans and Boricua for Puerto Ricans. Moreover, these groups tended to concentrate in particular regions, or the coastal areas and national perimeters (such as Texas and Florida), which created, at times, parochialism among these ethnic communities. Although a degree of internal or stage migration within the US has

6 Mapping Latina/o Studies 5 been a feature of Latina/o immigrant mobility, since the 1920s the appeal of inexpensive labor, harassment from government officials, and the perception that there are jobs that Americans just won t do over the last few decades has driven internal Latina/o migration to new locations within the U.S. 2 The expanding Latina/o presence has led to the formation of new ports of entry as well, challenging old assumptions about the location of Latina/o lives. The spatial practices and mobility of Latin American im/migrants and more rooted ethno-nationalists groups have combined to produce something approximating a U.S. Latina/o community. While the boundaries of this imagined community remain in flux and somewhat in debate, the common practice of identifying Latinos or Hispanics by U.S. media (i.e., Latina Magazine, Hispanic Business), government bodies (i.e., the US Census), and academics (i.e., this book, the Pew Hispanic Center) contributes to the discursive mapping of this group. In this regard then the practice of everyday life, to borrow a phrase from Michel de Certeau (1984), has been instrumental in forging a sense of identity and community among disparate groups divided by generation, origins, race and even language. In Washington D.C., for example, Carlos Rosario, a Puerto Rican migrant and early community leader, described how members of this diverse community related to one another on the dance floors in the Adams Morgan/Mt. Pleasant district: People got to meet each other and they got married Ecuadorian girls with Peruvians, Salvadoran girls with Hondurans. (Cadaval, 2006) In Los Angeles, 500,000 people descending from Guatemala, Mexico, El Salvador, and other Latin American countries took to the streets on March 25, 2006 to demonstrate pan-latino unity against a proposed U.S. law that would turn millions of undocumented immigrants into felons overnight. (Gorman, Keller, and Suarez, 2006) In fact this movement was preceded and begun in the Midwest by an equally large march in Chicago on March 10, 2006 and followed by marches in cities across the country throughout the months of March, April and May The diversity within Latinidad demands an attention to what draws us together as well as what threatens to break us apart. Indeed, the very concept of us a referent present as early as the 19th century cannot be taken for granted and must be rigorously interrogated. Our America, as the Cuban poet and revolutionary José Martí described the space occupied by people of Latin American descent in the Americas (including the US), has had a tenuous existence that is not an inevitable part of North America s future. This is not to suggest that a massive repatriation and deportation of Latina/os will take place, though, as the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign has demonstrated this fear is not unwarranted. (Lizza, 2007) 3 Rather, our argument is that Latinidad has been and is in an exciting, dynamic, and somewhat unstable process of producing a widespread community that has economic, cultural, and political implications for the nation.