Customer Reviews

Out Of The Barrio: Toward A New Politics Of Hispanic Assimilation

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I was coming home from a Dia de la Raza march in 1993 and was asked to steal this book from the public library in Yuma and destroy it. So I stole the book and ended up flipping through it on my way back to Tucson. I read the entire book, and for the first time in my life, I realized that I could be both the American patriot who loves the U.S. and the proud Chicano who never forgot where he came from. After I read this book I thought about being more open-minded and started listening to opposing viewpoints. In reading the works of Linda Chavez and others, such as Alan Keyes and Thomas Sowell, I saw that being a minority and believing in less government and lower taxes and being opposed to the welfare state didn't automatically make you a sell-out. This, I believe, has been the mistake of civil rights leaders in the past: if you're white and disagree with Jesse Jackson when he says that racism and nothing else accounts for minorities being turned down for home loans, then you're a racist homophobe; if you're Mexican and disagree with Octavio Paz that the only truly original creations of America were pre-Columbian, then you're a coconut - that is, brown on the outside, white on the inside; brown, wishing to be white. Actually, we are not a monolithic group and we don't all have to agree on important issues to have genuine Latino credentials. In truth, we a growing and still-evolving people, and there are a great number of us who love being Mexicano, proud of the Indian blood we carry, and love our beautiful Spanish language, and happy to live in the U.S., and proud to defend its honor. (*And in case you're wondering, yes, I took the book back the library, and yes, the alarm went off as I walked in through the front door trying to sneak it back to the shelf.)

Chavez criticizes a number of policies pursued by Hispanic activists over the last thirty years, but she is particularly critical of bilingual education. She provides evidence that the program has strayed from its original mission of helping Spanish-speaking children keep up with other subjects while learning English. Now it's more concerned with the retention of Spanish. Moreover, the longer children stay in these programs, the more money the bilingual education bureaucracy gets.

She also points out that civil rights groups and activists who lobby on behalf of Hispanics are not actually accountable to the people they claim to represent. They are unelected and their funding comes from elite foundations. (So whose agenda are they really promoting?)

Furthermore, these groups can only maintain or increase their funding if they present Hispanics as a permanent underclass. They do this by including recently arrived immigrants--both legal and illegal--in all the data pertaining to education, housing, income, etc This clouds the data about older groups of Hispanics who have assimilated or who are still making progress. Because most immigrants come from Mexico, the information about Mexican-Americans is skewed the most. The more negative the data, the more jobs and funding the lobbyists get. They're fighting for the bottom.

She says that these groups ignore assimilated, successful Hispanics. I recently read that Mexican-Americans are the nation's largest group of minority business owners, and that in 1995 a Mexican-American man won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The lobbyists and civil rights groups don't mention it.

I highly recommend this book. I am not at all surprised that people have tried to censor it.

Linda Chavez presents a detailed view of the state of Hispanic residents of the United States. Despite the recurring media myth and the noisy claims of some self-appointed spokespeople, Hispanics overall are not an underachieving victim group. As Ms. Chavez articulates before the affirmative action mentality took hold, there was no Hispanics minority. Rather there were Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Guatemalans etc. Cleverly she proclaims, "it is only in the United States `Hispanics' exist; a Cakchiquel Indian in Guatemala would find it remarkable that anyone could consider his culture to be the same as a Spanish Argentinean's." One ironic angle to the multicultural mumbo-jumbo is the stripping away not only of individuality but also the uniqueness of various nationalities. Today Poles, Italian, Irish, Russians, Germans, and a host of other Caucasians are regularly lumped as "whites" as though they are all one and the same.

Within the sub-Hispanic groups, a great variance exists in terms of overall level of success. Immigrants from Cuba in many ways have achieved equality with any white ethic group in the United States. Perhaps this unprecedented success rate can be seen as at least one factor in the left's justification for anti-Cuban bigotry. (Can anyone imagine Elian Gonzalez being ripped away from his family and sent back to a slave state had he been black or white or Puerto Rican?) Among Cubans a very low divorce rate exists as do lower numbers of unwed births and female headed households which certainly bodes well for them. As Ms. Chavez writes, "no institution is more important to the success of Hispanics (or any group) than the family."

In Linda Chavez' broad evaluation, one of the most threatening detriments facing America's Latino population is it out-of-touch self-appointed spokesmen. In her words, "Hispanic organizations that insist on special benefits, not just for Hispanic citizens but for immigrants as well-legal and illegal-severely strain the comity of the American public. Moreover there is no reason to believe that the Latin immigrants who are purported beneficiaries of such policies seek their implementation." She shrewdly contradicts those who place racism toward Hispanics on a par with what black citizens were once forced to endure. The slave trade never treated Latinos as chattel.

In stead of the separatist mentality now strenuously promulgated by multicultural martinets, Linda Chavez lays out a brilliant argument for assimilation-dirty as that word may have become in some liberal circles. She sites increasing intermarriage rates and other quotidian interactions between Latinos and non-Latinos as doing far more good for all communities than the current race-obsessed regulations putatively enforced. "From 1820 to 1924 the United States successfully incorporated a population more ethnically diverse and varied than any other in the world. We could not have done so if today's politics of ethnicity had been the prevailing ethos." The Statute of Liberty welcomes all to a land where no one should ever be a hyphenated-American.

Excellent book. Chavez doesn't try to be "PC" and ignore the cold hard facts. The reader who gave this book only one star clearly demonstrates the kind of brainwashing most Hispanic leaders give to their communities.The Sicilian,Japanese,Chinese,Pakistani,Asian Indian,and Arab American communities, in this country have all become very successful and have had similar experiences and in some cases (such as Sicilian Americans) much, much worse experiences of discrimination and underpaid, dangerous jobs than any of the Hispanic groups in this country that haven't even been published in school text books. If you don't believe me, read Jerre Mangione's "La Storia". Yet Hispanic leaders continue to emphasize the chip-on-the-shoulder attitude and tell their communities to blame all of their problems on non-Hispanic whites. I just wish all of the Hispanic communities in the U.S. had leaders like Linda Chavez to pull them up by their bootstraps and help them become successful and be truly proud of their individual Hispanic backgrounds whether they be Mexican American,Puerto Rican American, or Cuban American.

Linda Chavez continues here her stock-in-trade invocations against affirmative action, civil rights enforcement, and social programs. Chavez, who does not speak Spanish and who grew up in a household in which her family spoke only English, has long traded on her presumed "Hispanic" origins and has consistently fronted for those who more crudely disregard endemic poverty and discrimination in American society.
While she attacks the notion of "groups" and remedies for the persistent effects of discrimination and poverty, she is quite willing herself to identify "groups" and draw broad generalizations about them. In fact, those who remember the debacle that followed the nomination of Chavez for U.S. Secretary of Labor, will recall her evasions, self-serving half-truths, and theatrical self-pitying as she attempted to explain away her employment in her home of an undocumented domestic worker. The moment displayed Chavez trying to pitch herself as the friend of the little person, the victim of discrimination and "Borking", and the stout defender of traditional American values. In truth, Chavez has spent most of her life working as a paid apologist for those who have little regard for immigrants, racial minorities, and the poor.
Out of the Barrio reflects the pet theories of Linda Chavez and is the facile work of a journalist with thin academic credentials and pet opinions founded on anecdotes and derivative readings of selected social science research.
I read a great deal in the area of social science, economics, and law. I found this book to be quite weak, more a polemic than a thoughtful assessment of American social problems. Linda Chavez urges that assimilation and speaking English will solve the many problems of immigrants in America. Her own assimilationist experience obviously demonstrates that this is a possibility. However, for others the American experience may turn out differenty and with less satisfying results.
Ironically, this book pushes a narrow agenda that ignores the individuality and particular circumstances of immigrants, persons of color, and the poor. Ms. Chavez seeks to present herself as a "compassionate conservative" but in reality she demonstrates little genuine curiosity and displays a subtle meanness of spirit in her writing and her public pronouncements. In the end, she seems to be saying that she overcame adversity by her own efforts and that others should do the same. Notably, however, Chavez seems to have routinely and cynically taken advantage of her ethnic origins whenever it has been convenient for her to do so. What she fails to acknowledge in her book and in her public life is that for many in our society being a minority or person of color or poor offers painfully circumscribed opportunities. Linda Chavez' book attacks "self-appointed" leaders and the "victimization industry". However, what her book ignores is that our society and economy has winners and losers and that those who give voice to the concerns and needs of the least among us are in the great tradition of King, Gandhi, Lincoln, and Roosevelt.
I was disappointed by this book. It really felt like a lightly edited collection of op-ed pieces that were patched together to make a book. Thoughtful readers can find better ways to spend their reading time.