Race and Ethnic Relations
Darryl Hall
Department of Sociology
University of Nevada, Reno
Hispanic Americans
• More than one in eight people in the U.S. population are of Spanish or Latin American origin. Collectively, this group is referred to as Hispanics or Latinos. The Census Bureau estimates that by the end of the year 2050, Hispanics will constitute about one-quarter of the U.S. population. Already Census 2000 showed 35.3 million Latinos, outnumbering the 34.7 million African Americans.
• Some prevailing images of Hispanic settlements in the United States are no longer accurate. Latinos do not live in rural areas. They are generally urban dwellers: 86 percent live in metropolitan areas, in contrast to 73 percent of the general population. Some Hispanics have moved away from their traditional areas of settlement. In 1940, 88 percent of Puerto Ricans residing in the United States lived in New York City, but by the 2000 Census the proportion had dropped to less than a third.
Mexican Americans
• A large number of Mexicans became aliens in the United States without ever crossing any border. These people first became Mexican Americans with the conclusion of the Mexican-American War. In the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed February 2, 1848, Mexico acknowledged the annexation of Texas by the United States and ceded California and most of Arizona and New Mexico to the United States for $15 million.
• In exchange, the United States granted citizenship to the 75,000 Mexican nationals who remained on the annexed land after one year. With citizenship, the United States was to guarantee religious freedom, property rights, and cultural integrity—that is, the right to continue Mexican and Spanish cultural traditions and to use the Spanish language.
• Nowhere else in the world do two countries with such different standards of living and wage scales share such an open border as Mexico and the United States. Immigration from Mexico is unique in several respects:
1) It has been a continuous, large scale movement for most of this century. The United States did not restrict immigration from Mexico through legislation until 1965.
2) The proximity of Mexico encourages past immigrants to maintain strong cultural and language ties with the homeland through friends and relatives. Return visits to the old country are only one- or two-day bus rides for Mexican Americans, not once in a lifetime voyages, as they were for most European immigrants.
3) There is an aura of illegality that has surrounded Mexican migrants. Throughout the twentieth century, the suspicion in which Anglos have held Mexican Americans has contributed to mutual distrust between the two groups.
• The years before World War I brought large numbers of Mexicans into the expanding agricultural industry of the Southwest. The Mexican revolution of 1909-1922 thrust refugees into the United States, and World War I curtailed the flow of people from Europe, leaving the labor market open to the Mexicans Americans. After the war, continued political turmoil in Mexico and more prosperity in the Southwest brought still more Mexicans across the border.
• Corporations in the United States, led by agribusiness, invested in Mexico in such a way as to maximize their profits but minimize the amount of money remaining in Mexico to provide needed employment. Conflict theorists view this investment as part of the continuing process in which American businesses, with the support and cooperation of affluent Mexicans, have used Mexican people when in has been in the corporate leaders’ best interests. The Mexican workers are used either as cheap laborers in their own country by their fellow Mexicans and by Americans or as undocumented workers here who are dismissed when they are no longer judged to be useful.
• Beginning in the 1930s, the United States embarked on a series of measures aimed specifically at Mexicans:
1) The Depression brought pressure on local governments to care for the growing number of unemployed and impoverished. Government officials developed a quick way to reduce welfare rolls and eliminate people seeking jobs: ship Mexicans back to Mexico. This program of deporting Mexicans in the 1930s was called repatriation.
• As officially stated, the program was constitutional because only illegal aliens were to be repatriated. Actually, it was much more complex. Border records were incomplete because, before 1930, the United States had shown little interest in whether Mexicans entered with the proper credentials. Also, many Mexicans who could be classified as illegal aliens had resided in the United States for decades. Because they had children who were citizens by birth, they could not legally be deported.
• The legal process of fighting a deportation order was overwhelming, however, especially for a poor Spanish-speaking family. The Anglo community largely ignored this outrage against the civil rights of those deported and did not show interest in helping repatriates to ease the transition.
2) When the depression ended, Mexican laborers again became attractive to industry. In 1942, when World War II was depleting the labor pool, the United States and Mexico agreed to a program allowing migration across the border by contracted laborers, or braceros. Within a year of the initiation of the bracero program, more than 80,000 Mexican nationals had been brought in; they made up one-eleventh of the farm workers on the Pacific Coast.
3) Another crackdown on illegal aliens, called “Operation Wetback and Special Force Operation,” was fully inaugurated by 1954. The term wetbacks, or mojados, the derisive slang for Mexicans who enter illegally, refer to those who secretly swim across the Rio Grande.
• Like other roundups, this effort failed to stop the illegal flow of workers. For several years, some Mexicans were brought in under the bracero program while other Mexicans were being deported. With the end of the bracero program in 1964 and stricter immigration quotas for Mexicans, illegal border crossings increased because legal crossings became more difficult.
The Borderlands
• The term borderlands refers to the area of a common culture along the border between Mexico and the United States. Legal and illegal emigration from Mexico to the United States, day laborers crossing the border regularly to go to jobs in the United States, the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the exchange of media across the border all make the notion of separate Mexican and U.S. cultures obsolete in the borderlands.
• The economic position of the borderlands is complex in terms of both businesses and workers. Very visible is the presence of maquiladoras on the Mexican side. These are foreign-owned companies that establish operations in Mexico yet are exempt from Mexican taxes and are not required to provide insurance or benefits for their workers. Pay at $1.60 to $2.20 an hour is considered very good by prevailing wage standards in Mexico. By the year 2000, an estimated 1.3 million Mexican people were employed in 3,600 maquiladoras. The emergence of factories has been criticized in the United States as contributing to the flight of manufacturing jobs from other parts of North America to Mexico.
• Immigrant workers have significant economic impact on their home country while employed in the United States. Many Mexicans send some part of their earnings back across the border to family members remaining in their country. This substantial flow of money, called remittances or migradollars, is estimated at a minimum of $9 billion in 2001.
• Inland from the border, hometown clubs have sprung up well into northern cities with large settlements of Mexicans. Hometown clubs typically are nonprofit organizations that maintain close ties to immigrants’ hometowns in Mexico and other Latin American cities. Hometown clubs collect money for improvements in hospitals and schools that are beyond the means of the local people back home. The work of over 1500 hometown clubs in the United States or Mexican communities (where they will match funds to encourage such public-inspired efforts) alone reflects the blurring of border distinctions within the Latino community.
Stereotypes in the Mass Media
• Despite the decrease in the use of some extreme stereotypical depictions of Mexican Americans in advertising and the media, serious problems remain. For example, a 1990s’ study of the portrayal of Mexican Americans and other Latinos in television programming found that most shows ignore Latinos in or present them disproportionately as criminals:
– Latinos made up only 1 percent of television characters during the 1992-1993 season, down from 3 percent in earlier years.
– Sixteen percent of Latino characters in network series programs committed crimes, compared with only 4 percent of white characters.
– Forty-five percent of Latinos appearing in reality-based shows, such as America’s Most Wanted, were criminals, compared with 10 percent of white characters on these shows.
• Mexican American families are labeled as having traits that, in fact, describe poor families rather than specifically Mexican American families. Indeed, as long ago as as 1980, a report of the Commission on Civil Rights stated that the two most prevalent stereotypical themes appearing in works on Hispanics showed them as exclusively poor and prone to commit violence.
Chávez and the Farm Laborers
• The best-known Hispanic labor leader for economic empowerment was César Chávez, the Mexican American who crusaded to organize migrant farm workers. Efforts to organize agricultural laborers date back to the turn of the century, but Chávez was the first to enjoy any success.
• In 1962, Chávez formed the National Farm Workers Association, latter to become the United Farm Workers (UFW). Chávez’s first success was the grape boycott launched in 1965, which carried the struggle into the kitchens of families throughout the country. The UFW launched the boycott with the aim of damaging growers economically until they accepted the union and improved working condition. It took 5 years for the grape growers to sign 3-year contracts with Chávez’s union. This victory signaled a new era in labor relations and made Chávez a national folk hero.
• Chávez had difficulty fulfilling his objectives. By 1993, union membership had dwindled from a high of 80,000 in 1970 to 21,000. Nevertheless, what he and the UFW accomplished was significant:
– They succeeded in making federal and state governments more aware of the exploitation of migrant laborers.
– The migrant workers, or at least those organized in California, developed a sense of their own power and worth that will make it extremely difficult for growers to abuse them in the future as they had in the past.
– Working conditions had improved. California agricultural workers were paid an average of less than $2 an hour in the mid-1960s. By 1987 they were being paid an average of about $5.85 an hour.
Puerto Ricans
• Puerto Rico is an island at the eastern end of the Caribbean Sea. Columbus “discovered” the island during his second voyage in 1493. When the Spanish arrived, the native inhabitants, the Táino Indians, were killed or fell prey to European diseases. The few who remained were absorbed into the conquering population.
• The cultural features of Puerto Rico remain those of Spain: the language is Spanish, and the religion is predominantly Roman Catholic. Intermarriage and sexual unions have resulted in a varied racial population ranging from completely white to completely black.
• Puerto Rico became a possession and territory of the United States in 1898 after the Spanish-American War. However, its present political status was not clarified until 1952, when it became the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Today, Puerto Rico remains a Free Associated State, which is similar to a U.S. state but without its rights and responsibilities. Puerto Rico is the only possession to have such a status.
• The beginning of rule by the United States quickly destroyed any hope that Puerto Ricans – or Boricas, as Puerto Ricans call themselves—had for self-rule. All power was given to officials appointed by the president, and any act of the island’s legislature could be overruled by Congress. English, previously unknown to the island, became the only language permitted in the school system.
• In 1917, the Jones Act awarded U.S. citizenship to all Puerto Ricans. In 1948, Puerto Ricans were finally permitted to elect their governor, and in 1952 the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico was created with a constitution that was approved by the U.S. Congress. Those living in Puerto Rico have no vote in national U.S. elections and no U.S. senators or House members; their only representative in Congress is a nonvoting commissioner.
Racial Construction in Puerto Rico
• The most significant difference between the meaning of race on Puerto Rico and the mainland is that Puerto Rico, like so many other Caribbean societies, has a color gradient. The term color gradient describes distinctions based on skin color made on a continuum rather than by sharp categorical separations. The presence of a color gradient reflects past fusion between different groups.
• Rather than being either “black” or “white,” people are judged in such societies as “lighter” or “darker” than others. Puerto Ricans perceive people as ranging from pale white to very black; they are more sensitive to degrees of difference and make less effort to pigeonhole a person in one or two categories.
• The presence of a color gradient does not necessarily mean that prejudice is less; generally, however, societies with a color gradient permit more flexibility and therefore are less likely to impose specific sanctions against a group of people based on skin color alone. Puerto Rico has not suffered interracial conflict or violence; its people are conscious of the different racial heritages.
• Racial identification in Puerto Rico depends a great deal on the attitude of the individual making the judgment. If one thinks highly of a person, he or she may be seen as a member of a more acceptable group. A variety of terms are used in the color gradient to describe people racially, including blanco (white), prieto, Moreno, de color, and negro (black). Factors such as social class and social position determine race.
Operation Bootstrap
• In the late 1940s, Operation Bootstrap, a program designed by the Puerto Rican governor to bring economic development by attracting U.S. corporations, was implemented. Lured by low wages and exemption from taxation, 1,700 factories came to the island by 1975.
• Tax exemptions for most new industries left the burden of financing the public infrastructure on the local population, resulting in a high income tax. Operation Bootstrap’s emphasis on industry and its neglect of agriculture tilted the island economy further away from its heritage of locally owned farms. Today, little of the island’s economy is agricultural.
• By 1900 some 2,000 Puerto Ricans lived on the mainland, most in New York City. Significant immigration to the mainland began in the late 1920s, and by 1940 mainland Puerto Ricans numbered almost 70,000. Over the next two decades, the number increased more than tenfold, to 887,000, largely because of Operation Bootstrap, which resulted in a net loss of jobs and encouraged emigration. Between 1945 and 1970, about one in three Puerto Ricans left the island. Puerto Rican communities were established in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Chicago, although the majority of immigrants settled in New York.
• According to the 2000 Census, just over 3.4 million Puerto Ricans now reside on the mainland, up 25 percent over the previous decade. Today the population on the island is just over 3.8 million.
Indicators of Relative Powerlessness
• There is a substantial gap in per capita income between Puerto Rico and the mainland United States. Per capita household income of Puerto Rico in 1990 was 44.3 percent that of the mainland. Additionally, income inequality within Puerto Rico itself is very high: the poorest 40 percent of all families received only 7.5 percent of all family income on the island in 1989.
• Close to 70 percent of women in Puerto Rico and 57 percent of the total population lived in poverty in 1990. Poverty was much worse in nonmetropolitan areas and among the very young and the very old.
• In 1990, 50 percent of the population twenty-five years of age or older did not have a high school diploma. Of that same population, 14 percent had a college degree or more advanced education.
Issues of Statehood and Self-Rule
• Puerto Ricans have periodically argued and fought for independence for most of the 500 years since Columbus landed. They continued to do so in the 1990s. The contemporary commonwealth arrangement is popular with many Puerto Ricans, but others prefer statehood, whereas some call for complete independence from the United States.
• The arguments for the continuation of commonwealth status include both serious and trivial issues. Among some island residents, the idea of statehood invokes the fear of higher taxes and an erosion of their cultural heritage. Some even fear the end of separate Puerto Rican participation in the Olympics and the Miss Universe pageant. Although independence may be attractive, commonwealth supporters argue that it includes too many unknown costs, so they embrace the status quo.
• Proponents of independence have a long, vocal history insisting on the need for Puerto Rico to regain its cultural and political autonomy. Some supporters of independence have even been militant. In 1950, nationalists attempted to assassinate president Truman, killing a White House guard in the process. Four years later, another band of nationalists opened fire in the gallery of the U.S. House of Representatives, wounding five members of Congress. Beginning in 1974, a group calling itself the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN, for Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional) took responsibility for more than 100 explosions that continued through 1987. The FALN is not alone; at least four other militant groups advocating independence were identified as having been at work in the 1980s.
• The island itself is occasionally beset by violent demonstrations, often reacting to U.S. military installations there—a symbol of U.S. control.
• Those who favor statehood see it as a key to increased economic development and expansion for tourism. They argue that an independent Puerto Rico might be faced by a tariff wall when trading with its largest current customer, the mainland United States. Also, Puerto Rican migration to the mainland could be restricted if it gained an independent status.
Cuban Americans
• Cuban Americans are the third-largest Latino group in the United States. Like Puerto Ricans, this group has its roots in an important Caribbean island, Cuba, an island with more than a century of close ties to the United States. Through all the recent decades of political conflict between the U.S. and Cuban governments, the U.S. government has maintained a major symbol of past colonialism on the island—the naval base at Guantánamo Bay.
• Most migrations from Cuba to the United States have stemmed from political upheaval or economic distress on the island. Nineteenth century wars of independence brought the first immigrants to the United States. Most were from Cuba’s middle and working classes. Some went to New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, but most settled in Florida because of its proximity to Cuba and its climate. By 1873, Cubans were the majority of the population in Key West, Florida.
• When Cuba finally won its independence, many returned home. Yet, tens of thousands stayed in the US where they had established homes and held jobs. Theses early Cuban Americans made major contributions to their adopted homeland; they organized Florida’s first labor union and established Key West’s first fire department and bilingual school.
• Early Cuban exiles lobbied for official U.S. support of Cuba’s liberation from Spain. Initially, the U.S. government supported continuing Spanish rule of Cuba. Later, after attempting to purchase the island, the United States sent troops to Cuba. Spain was driven out in 1898, and the Unites States occupied the island. In 1902, Cuba became a U.S. protectorate. The Platt Amendment to a 1900-1901 U.S. military appropriations bill gave the United States the right to military intervention in Cuba to preserve the island’s “independence” and to protect life and liberty.
• During the first two decades of the twentieth century, U.S. involvement in Cuban politics took the form of military intervention to settle political disputes. After the 1920s, diplomatic interference replaced military intervention. So great was U.S. power in Cuban affairs that no elected president of the island who was opposed by the United States could remain in office long. Cuba was in effect a U.S. colony from 1898 until the Cuban revolution in the late 1950s.
• During this long period, U.S. financial domination of Cuba was also extensive. Within fifteen years after Cuba gained independence from Spain, U.S. business investments grew from an estimated $50 million to an estimated $220 million. By the late 1920s, U.S. firms controlled three-fourths of the island’s sugar industry. By 1959, U.S. businesses controlled 90 percent of Cuba’s mines, 80 percent of its utilities, half of its railways, 40 percent of its sugar production, and one-fourth of its bank deposits.
• The political turbulence that accompanied a succession of repressive dictators in Cuba during the first half of the twentieth century brought political exiles to the United States. During the corrupt dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in the 1950s, between 10,000 and 15,000 refugees per year entered the United States.
• Large numbers of Cubans migrated to the United States after Cuba’s 1959 revolution when Fidel Castro, the young rebel leader of the grass-roots insurrection that overthrew Batista, came to power. To the majority of Cubans, Castro’s victory brought hope for economic and political reforms. Land grants to tenant farmers, guaranteed compensation for small sugar growers, and nationalization of utility companies were among Castro’s stated goals.
• However, these reforms were not welcomed by Cuba’s business, industrial, and political elites or by U.S. investors. Exaggerated views of the Cuban revolution’s threat to U.S. business and political interests, suspicions that Castro was a Communist, and Castro’s declarations that he would not tolerate manipulation of Cuba led to open U.S. government and business hostility toward the new Cuba, a break in diplomatic relations, and a U.S. policy that welcomed refugees from Cuba’s “Communist oppression.”
Early Cuban Immigration
• The first major immigration after the revolution began with Cuba’s monied elite—former government officials, bankers, and industrialists who had done well under the Batista dictatorship and feared Castro’s revolutionary orientation. This group’s economic position in Cuba was directly related to Cuba’s economic and political relationship with the United States.
• Because they were fleeing a Communist government, they found the U.S. government a willing host. Both the immigrants and the government viewed these Cubans as refugees who were forced into temporary exile but who intended to return home when Castro was overthrown. This is a major reason why most chose to stay in south Florida.
• Another group of immigrants, totaling more than 250,000, arrived between 1965 and the late 1970s. In late 1965, almost five thousand relatives of refugees already in the United States were allowed to leave Cuba aboard hundreds of boats. This exodus was followed by an airlift negotiated by the U.S. and Cuban governments. Concern with economic scarcities and hop for a higher standard of living in the United States as well as disagreement with Cuba’s political regime were the major push factors for this largely lighter-skinned, working class and small business group.
• As with earlier groups, these immigrants settled primarily in south Florida. A 1968 nationwide study of 300 immigrant families found that relocation patterns reflected family associations: More than three-fourths of new immigrant families had relatives already in the United States.
• To provide for the needs of the early waves of refugees, the Eisenhower administration created the Cuban Refugee Emergency Center in Miami and allocated $1 million in federal funds. The Kennedy administration expanded this aid by establishing a Cuban Refugee Program that assisted refugees with resettlement, helped locate employment, and provided for health services, education and training programs, and food distribution. Unlike many other Latino and Caribbean immigrants, the Cubans were well-treated and welcomed as allies in the struggle against Communism.
Later Cuban Immigration
• Another group of immigrants, the sudden influx of 125,000 Cubans in 1980 often called the “Mariel boatlift” (after the port from which they sailed), gave rise to some popular myths and stereotypes that characterized these refugees as undesirables—poorer and less educated than earlier groups of immigrants and containing a large percentage of criminals and the mentally ill.
• Some in this group left Cuba voluntarily and some, considered undesirable by the Cuban government, were forced to leave. However, of the entire group, only a few hundred were mentally ill and required institutionalization, and fewer than one in five had been in prison in Cuba. Fewer than 2 percent were subsequently imprisoned in a U.S. penitentiary. Moreover, the education level of the group was similar to that of the 1970s’ immigrants. More than 11 percent were professionals; 71 percent were blue-collar workers. Nevertheless, the arrival of this group fueled an upsurge of prejudice against all Cuban Americans.
• On arrival the Mariel immigrants were housed in tent cities in the Miami area and flown to military bases in Arkansas, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Some were held in processing centers for an extended time while the government attempted to identify refugees who were “dangerous.” Many of these immigrants became angry at the contrast between their actual socioeconomic conditions in the United States and the exaggerated reports they had heard in Cuba about the ease of life in the United States. Disillusionment and crowded conditions in the detention centers also led to some inmate riots and scattered violent confrontations between refugees and the police or National Guard troops.
• Unlike earlier immigrants, most of whom were lighter-skinned, approximately 40 percent of the Mariel group were darker-skinned Cubans with more substantial African ancestry. Because their reasons for immigration were substantially economic, most of the Mariel immigrants were ineligible for the financial support to earlier political refugees.
• Most were eventually integrated into Cuban American communities, yet as a group these late immigrants have not done as well economically as earlier immigrants.
