"Hombre, Where You From?" -- A Latin-American Discrimination Primer

“Today, an estimated 54 million Latinos live in the U.S. and around 43 million people speak Spanish. But though Latinos are the country’s largest minority, anti-Latino prejudice is still common. In 2016, 52 percent of Latinos surveyed by Pew said they had experienced discrimination. Lynchings, 'repatriation' programs and school segregation may be in the past, but anti-Latino discrimination in the U.S. is far from over.”

-- Erin Blakemore, history.com

Even in the modern times of 2019, it is difficult to dispute the continued existence of Latino-American discrimination. The current outbreak of the “Latino threat narrative” has deep roots in history and in the overall documentary of racism in the United States. Studies show that anti-immigrant and anti-Latino rhetoric leave psychological damage in their wake. 

The country must consider how the discriminatory words and attitudes of today recruit new disciples of bigotry and hatred while threatening the promise of a nation dedicated to e pluribus unum – “out of many, one.”

I understand Latino is defined as "a person of Latin America." The term "Latino" includes peoples with Portuguese roots, such as Brazilians, as well as those of Spanish-language origin. In the United States, many Hispanics and Latinos are of both European and Native American ancestry (mestizo).

The United States Census uses the ethnonym Hispanic or Latino to refer to "a person of Dominican, Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race. It is my belief most Americans do not know the differences in the many cultures commonly referred to as “Latino.” False and stereotyped images cause great inequality and mistreatment of these peoples. The past certainly supports this.

Discrimination Escalates

The recent history of Latino-American discrimination largely began in 1848, when the United States won the Mexican-American War. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which marked the war’s end, granted 55 percent of Mexican territory to the United States. With that land came new citizens. The Mexicans who decided to stay in what was now U.S. territory were granted citizenship; thus, the country gained a considerable Mexican-American population.

Later in the 19^th century, American employers like the Southern Pacific Railroad desperately needed cheap labor, so the railroad and other companies flouted existing immigration laws that banned importing contracted labor and sent recruiters into Mexico to convince Mexicans to emigrate.

And, during the California Gold Rush, as many as 25,000 Mexicans arrived in California. Many of these Mexicans were experienced miners and had great success mining gold in California. Some Anglos perceived their success as a collective loss to U.S. wealth and intimidated Mexican miners with violence. White miners begrudged former Mexicans a share of the wealth.

However, even though Latinos were a critical part of the U.S. economy, anti-Latino sentiment in the United States grew. Like other minorities, they were barred from entering Anglo establishments. They were segregated into urban barrios in poor areas. These people – with a different language and a different color – became an underclass stereotyped as lazy, stupid, and even dangerous.

* Note of Interest – Mexicans are heterogeneous in their racial characteristics, ranging from having light to dark skin and eye color with many in the brown and mestizo middle. Outsiders tend not to see Mexicans as White or Black. Rather they are viewed through the stereotypic lens of being non-white or brown and largely indigenous-looking. Eventually Mexicans moved from being considered White to brown, probably due to both legal and social changes although it is difficult to tell which of these occurred first.

Unspeakable violence against Latinos escalated quickly. The lynching of Mexicans and Mexican US-Americans in the Southwest has long been overlooked in American history. This may be because the Tuskegee Institute files and reports, which contain most comprehensive lynching records in the United States, categorized Mexican, Chinese, and Native American lynching victims as white.Statistics of reported lynching in the United States indicate that, between 1882 and 1951, 4,730 persons were lynched, of whom 1,293 were white and 3,437 were black.

“According to historians William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, mob violence against Spanish-speaking people was common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They estimatethat the number of Latinos killed by mobs reach well into the thousands, though definitive documentation only exists for 547 cases.”

The Mexican American community has long been the subject of widespread immigration raids. The Bisbee Deportation was the illegal deportation of about 1,300 striking mine workers, their supporters, and citizen bystanders by 2,000 vigilantes on July 12, 1917. The workers and others were kidnapped in the U.S. town of Bisbee, Arizona and held at a local baseball park. They were then loaded onto cattle cars and transported 200 miles for 16 hours through the desert without food or water. The deportees were unloaded at Hermanas, New Mexico, without money or transportation, and warned not to return to Bisbee.

During the Great Depression (1930s), the United States government sponsored a Mexican Repatriation program, which was intended to pressure people to move to Mexico, but many were deported against their will. More than 500,000 individuals were deported, one source estimates that approximately 60 percent of which were United States citizens.

According to the National World War II Museum, between 250,000 and 500,000 Hispanic Americans served in the Armed Forces during World War II. Thus, Hispanic Americans comprised 2.3% to 4.7% of the Army. The exact number, however is unknown as at the time Hispanics were classified as whites. Generally Mexican American World War II servicemen were integrated into regular military units. However, many Mexican–American War veterans were discriminated against and even denied medical services by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs when they arrived home.

Since World War II, Latino-American discrimination continues. Persuasive anti-immigrant sentiment and treatment has worked against all Mexicans whether immigrant or born in the United States. Viewed as alien and low status, Mexican immigrants were (and continue to be) scapegoated and targeted for mistreatment.

Historically and legally, Mexicans have been treated as second-class citizens. Within a few short decades after their conquest in the mid-nineteenth century, Mexican Americans, although officially granted United States citizenship with full rights, lost much of their property and status and were relegated to low-status positions as laborers. Instead of being recognized as important parts of the American melting-pot of immigration, they are considered as outsiders and unwanted citizens.

Mexican immigration has continued to be of predominately low status. Throughout the twentieth century, Mexicans with low levels of education and from poor backgrounds immigrated to the United States to fill the lowest paid jobs (agriculture, domestic work, construction).

Even though immigrants were a minority of all Mexican Americans up to the 1980s, the perception of all Mexican Americans as low status immigrants has been pervasive. The immigration legislation of the 1980s has made legal entry to the United States by Mexicans almost impossible, yet immigration has continued.

This slow-down of legal entry forced the overwhelming majority of Mexican immigrants in the late twentieth century to enter the United States without proper documentation. This has served to further fuse anti-Mexican and anti-undocumented immigrant sentiment. This suggests that in the eyes of many White Americans, all Mexicans are “illegal” and all “illegals” are Mexican.

An important study (2013) titled “Racial Identity and Racial Treatment of Mexican Americans” by Vilma Ortiz and Edward Telles found the following indicative of the ways in which Mexican Americans are racialized in the United States ...

* Darker Mexican Americans, therefore appearing more stereotypically Mexican, report more experiences of discrimination.

* Darker men report much more discrimination than lighter men and than women overall.

* More educated Mexican Americans experience more stereotyping and discrimination than their less-educated counterparts, which is partly due to their greater contact with Whites, and

* Having greater contact with Whites leads to experiencing more stereotyping and discrimination.

Let us face some truths. First of all, darker skin color contributes to increased Latino-American discrimination because darker Mexican-Americans are stereotyped as "bad people"  – a dumb, lazy, and dangerous segment of society. This is consistent with prior research showing that minority men are especially likely to face obstacles in education, the labor market, and criminal justice system.

Truth number two is pitifully sad. That is this – outsiders expect Mexican Americans to be less educated and treat them accordingly. Whites treat them in discriminatory ways; for instance they report being passed over promotions or not getting hired. In education settings, teachers and other school staff make derogatory remarks or convey the message that Mexican Americans are less worthy. Mexican Americans also reported unfair treatment in public spaces, like restaurants and stores. It is in these interactions beyond the family and ethnic neighborhood, that Mexicans Americans face unequal treatment.

Lastly, and most regrettably, Latino-American discrimination is still a constant threat. Polls by groups like the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Pew Research Center reveal that a third (37%) to a half (52%) of Hispanics in the United States have experienced discrimination because of their race or ethnicity – while applying for jobs, being paid equally or being considered for promotions, and when trying to rent a room or apartment or buying a house.

Is it any wonder that concepts of identity and race are complex and varied for Latinos? About one-in-four Hispanics in the U.S. identify as Afro-Latino, and a quarter say they are of an indigenous background. At the same time, two-thirds of Latinos say their Hispanic background is a part of their racial identity – a racial identity constantly under attack in America, an identity many in Trumpian America believe to prone to criminality and terrorism.

“Mexican” – what image most enters the mind of White America when reading this word? It behooves us to consider the truth about millions of citizens who attach a very negative racial stereotype to the term. And, in truth, so many do not differentiate between “illegal” and “legal” in their conception.

The word “prejudice” comes from the word pre-judge. We pre-judge when we have an opinion about a person because of a group to which that individual belongs. A prejudice has the following characteristics:

1. It is based on real or imagined differences between groups.
2. It attaches values to those differences in ways that benefit the dominant group at the expense of minorities.
3. It is generalized to all members of a target group.

Yes, I believe imagined differences are being promoted by politicians who use fear to monger hatred of Latinos. In doing so, they create real walls of division in America. In its current state under the resurgence of White Nationalism, the United States adheres to equality under e pluribus unum strictly in shades of unpigmented descent.

Sources

Blakemore, Erin.”The Brutal History of Anti-Latino Discrimination in America.” history.com. September 27, 2017.

Carrigan, William and Clive Webb. "When Americans Lynched Mexicans". The New York Times.  The Journal of Social History. February 20, 2015.

Chacón J, Davis M. No One is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U S-Mexico Border. Chicago: Haymarket Books; 2006.

Massey DS. Racial Formation in Theory and Practice: The Case of Mexicans in the United States. Race and Social Problems. 2009;1:12–26. [PMC free article] [PubMed]

Orozco, Cynthia. “Porvenir Massacre.” tshaonline.org.

Ortiz, Vilma and Edward Telles. Racial Identity and Racial Treatment of Mexican Americans.” Race Soc Probl. Author manuscript. 2012 April.

"Refusing to Forget: Monica Muñoz Martinez Uncovers America's History at the Border". The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Vasquez J. Blurred Borders for Some but not “Others”: Racialization, “Flexible Ethnicity,” Gender, and Third-Generation Mexican American Identity. Sociological Perspectives. 2010;53(1):45–72.