Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 3, No. 4 | A Developing Identity Hispanics in The United States, page 4

A key to understanding this difference is recalling that there was, in fact, a Hispanic population in the U.S. when the civil rights era began and that it took part in the upheaval. Led primarily by native-born Mexican Americans, Latino organizations fought against discrimination that had been imposed on them both by law and custom, especially in Texas. An entire generation of Latino leaders and institutions used the tools developed by African Americans and benefited from the same types of legislation and court decisions in seeking redress of grievances. Those leaders and institutions were well established in Hispanic communities when the population began to grow through immigration in the 1970s. And, perhaps more significantly, Hispanics had been recognized in both judicial decisions and legal statutes as members of what many would describe as part of the newly recognized post-1960s social structure: the minority group.

So, everyone added to the Hispanic population automatically becomes part of a group that is formally defined as a people apart, a people with a shared identity, a people who had suffered inferior status and still might need protection from prejudice. Regardless of whether they are rich or poor, regardless of whether they come from a Caribbean capital or an Andean village, all of these people are categorized together under the label “Hispanic or Latino.” This inevitably means that the process of assimilation for today’s immigrants and their offspring will be very different than it was during the late 19th and early 20th century era of trans-Atlantic migration.

Mexican day laborers in Farmingville, New York.

Prejudice in many forms certainly existed a hundred years ago, and many immigrants certainly suffered from it. One important response to this experience was to organize socially, politically and religiously, as national groups; that is as Italians, Irish, or Jews for example. Out of necessity, many of the European immigrant groups actually strengthened their ethnic bonds and identities in the first stages of the assimilation process because organizing as national groups was often the most effective way of getting established in this country.

The United States is, arguably, a more tolerant place today than it was a hundred years ago, and the mechanisms for asserting group identities are different, as well. Immigrants from Latin America still often organize themselves as national groups, but the host society offers them an alternative in the form of an Hispanic identity, which overarches national differences. Indeed, U.S. institutions and legal regulations formally recognize and favor group identity far more than national origins. For example, there are about 700,000 people of Guatemalan origin living in the U.S., according to the Census. That is a pretty small group, and one that does not enjoy any particular recognition. As a Hispanic or Latino, however, each of those individuals becomes part of a formally recognized minority group—and the nation’s largest minority group, at that. Assertion of this identity, which does not exist in Guatemala, actually brings with it some stature and protection. The family of a recently arrived immigrant from Guatemala will have no connection to the experience of a Mexican-American who lived in South Texas in the 1950s, but their process of assimilation to this country will be highly conditioned by the great social changes put in place because of those Latinos who played a small part in the civil rights era. As a result, the trajectory from Guatemala to America now leads through this peculiar condition that we, as a society, label as Hispanic or Latino. Assimilation has never been simple or direct, but today, the avenues by which old identities fade and new ones are developed seem particularly complex, fluid and varied.

It may be tempting at times to expect, or hope, that Latinos at the beginning of the 21st century will follow the same pathways as European immigrants did at the beginning of the 20th. But the circumstances surrounding the two groups are hugely different and, as time goes on, those differences are only likely to grow.

During most of the last great era of immigration, the United States operated something very close to an open-door policy for those who came across the Atlantic. Asians were systematically excluded on racial grounds, but the only Europeans denied entry were those judged to be carrying disease or likely to become public charges. Although many thousands were quarantined and sent home from Ellis Island, those allowed to land were, in time—though sometimes after much turmoil—enfolded into the nation’s civic life. All had the right to seek citizenship, eventually. Today, the United States, however unintentionally, operates a two-tier immigration system. Some are allowed into the country legally, with a well-defined set of rights and obligations and most are granted the right to remain permanently and become citizens after a number of years. Many others, however, enter the country illegally. Despite laws and enforcement efforts to the contrary, their presence is tolerated, at least tacitly. Evidence of this fact is that best estimates suggest the population of unauthorized immigrants has grown to more than 11 million people, and that once beyond the border region, they face little risk of apprehension. By law, the undocumented are prohibited from working, from receiving most public services and from ever seeking citizenship, yet they readily find employment, albeit in the lower reaches of the labor force, and are essentially free to live here as long as they like.

By any measure, this is a sizeable population and arguably, the only one that is now systematically excluded from full participation in society. There are now more illegal migrants living in the United States than there were blacks living under Jim Crow in the states of the old Confederacy at the time of the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954—and this cohort represents a sizeable portion of the Hispanic population. About one-out-of-every-five Latinos is undocumented, including about one-half of all foreign-born Hispanics. Nearly one-out-of-every-three Latinos lives in a family with at least one undocumented relative. And, for the past several years, the number of unauthorized immigrants has exceeded the legal flow. Thus, illegality has become one of the defining characteristics of the Latino population.

Though drastically different than the kind of discrimination suffered by African Americans or Mexican Americans prior to the civil rights era, because it is a status that is chosen rather than imposed, being undocumented is a marker of exclusion and marginalization. It is the basis for an identity as a people apart. No matter to what extent an illegal immigrant learns English and adopts American ways, he or she faces an insuperable barrier to full inclusion and participation in American society. And then again—though it may seem an unlikely prospect—a single act of Congress could simply erase that barrier.

Next page: While it would be easy to overstate the potential leverage represented by the size of the Latino population, their numbers—and standing as America’s largest minority group—are already too big to ignore.

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