From Chapter 1
In the early 1950s, the esteemed University of Texas at Austin social scientist George I. Sánchez wrote to a young scholar to warn him that a pan-ethnic identity group for Americans with Latin American roots made no sense. The professor did not mince words: “For gosh sakes, don’t characterize the Spanish-American with what is obviously true of the human race, and then imply, by commission or omission, that his characteristics are peculiarly his and, of course, radically different from those of the ‘Anglos’!” He enumerated further objections: “We insist that ‘Latin American’ (‘Spanish-American,’ ‘MexicanAmerican,’ etc.) has no precise meaning nor does the term connote generalized cultural attributes. . . . We say that, for convenience, all non-Latins are to be called ‘Anglos’ (Germans, Italians, Jews, Catholics, Baptists, hill-billies, Bostonians, poor whites, Texans, Minnesotans, ad infinitum) have a precisely defined common culture whose features can be correlated with the non-existent (or, at best, undefined) features of the Latin ‘culture.’!!!!”
The recipient of this letter was Julian Samora. What had occasioned Sánchez’s letter was a paper by Samora on a Colorado health-care program for “Spanish Americans.” As quoted by Benjamin Francis-Fallon, Sánchez went on: “The time orientation of a ‘poor white’ is no different from that of a poor Negro or of a poor Spanish. Neither can provide for the future; each has to live for the present; after laboring for 14 hours a day, none of them has the energy or interest or curiosity to go to PTA’s or to Association meetings. You wouldn’t either, nor would I—nor would Abraham Lincoln!” Sánchez belonged to that generation of Mexican Americans that still believed that individual effort would lead to prosperity and assimilation. As Francis-Fallon puts it: “Material improvements in jobs, housing, and schools would not only allow them to live better but would reveal their fundamental similarity with other Americans.” Sánchez’s concerns were with obstacles to individual improvement.
Sánchez criticized the notion that Mexicans were a race and even more vehemently rejected the attempt to create a pan-ethnic group out of people with origins in various Spanish-speaking countries. Not only did this not make sense to him, but it stood in the way of the emphasis on individual agency. In an earlier letter to Samora, Sánchez urged him to consider that “the characteristics that distinguish the Spanish-speaking group in any part of the United States are much less ethnic than they are socio-economic.” He also sent Samora a review he had written of a book about Spanish-speaking Americans, in which, as Francis-Fallon notes, “Sánchez cast doubt on the entire concept of such a book. It ‘takes a veritable shotgun wedding to make Puerto Ricans, Spanish-Mexicans, and Filipinos appear to be culturally homogeneous,’ he wrote.”
Sánchez remained constant in this view. A decade later, in 1963, after the influx of Cubans escaping Fidel Castro’s communist takeover of the island nation, he wrote, Spanish-speaking Americans “are just too many different peoples to be adequately covered under one umbrella. While they could be called, loosely, ‘Americans who speak Spanish’ they would have to be treated in separate categories—for, by way of illustration, though a Cuban in Florida and a Mexican in Laredo both speak Spanish, they really have little else in common (even though both may be aliens or citizens, or a combination).”
Historical Fault Line
Samora, however, persisted in his belief that a collectivity was needed. Both men are towering figures in the history of the Mexican American evolution in the twentieth century, and this early clash of views represents an ideological divide of historic proportions. In Sánchez, we see the emphasis on individual agency and the strong belief in the goal of becoming part of the American mainstream; in Samora, we see the emerging rejection of this view in favor of a collectivist, ethnic identity–based category to lift a “subjugated” people out of their plight. This category would need official and legal recognition by the federal government. Samora became a leader for members of the new generation.
The Census Bureau in 2018 put the number of Mexican Americans at close to thirty-seven million, or just over 11 percent of the US population. Mexican Americans, as the earliest sizable group of Spanish speaking people to live in the United States, form the nucleus of the group that came to be called Hispanic, and any analysis of this group must therefore start with them. The creation of “Hispanics,” moreover, was an early cornerstone of the identity politics edifice, which is all the more reason to begin at the beginning.
The Hispanic collective was created, to put it simply, to give the leaders of then-emerging Mexican American–identity organizations a measure of political clout and federal funding. Many of the activists and elites who conjured up the collective were, indeed, transparent about this. Before Antonio Gramsci made his observations about the inability of the proletariat to overthrow an existing system, Marxists had thought that the members of the working class would rise up. Their analysis was color-blind; the proletariat was an economic class made up of all races. The problem, as Gramsci, and later Herbert Marcuse, came to see it, was that too many proletarians reasoned like Sánchez and believed in their ability to improve their individual lot; they believed that personal striving would allow them in time to overcome barriers and join the mainstream.
Samora was deaf to Sánchez but attuned to Gramsci and Marcuse. Recognized today as the founder of Hispanic ethnic studies, Samora in 1967 cofounded an ethnic identity organization, the Southwest Council of La Raza, which went national in 1973, changing its name to the National Council of La Raza. La Raza was devoted to that “shotgun wedding” that Sánchez had warned about, and for the past half century it has been at the forefront of the effort to implant identity politics in the educational system, corporate America, and government. It continues this work under its new name, UnidosUS. Its original goal was precisely to eliminate the “false consciousness” that Gramsci had derided: the belief in individual agency. To the followers of Gramsci, assimilation was the height of false consciousness.
Samora used key positions he held to make Mexican Americans a racial group apart from the mainstream. He and his colleagues in this project then did the same with the larger group, Hispanics. They persuaded wealthy donors and federal officials to regard Hispanics, whether individuals whose ancestors had arrived in the United States a century ago or had themselves arrived one year earlier, as an oppressed group that could succeed only by acting as a racial collective. In the process, they altered the American social order, perhaps permanently. In addition to his role as La Raza leader, he was also appointed to the Census Bureau’s first Advisory Committee on the Spanish Origin Population for the 1980 Census, the first census to include the panethnic categories, and held top positions in universities. From these lofty perches in nonprofit advocacy, the academy, and the federal bureaucracy, he wielded great authority.
Samora’s personal experience with discrimination had a great impact on his thinking, something with which we can’t help but empathize. “I tried to be equal to, and as good as, the Anglos. I wanted to make as much money, speak as well, and have all the goodies as the dominant society. But no matter what I did, I was always a ‘Mexican,’” he once said, as quoted by his daughter, Carmen Samora. He had struggled with abject poverty, fatherlessness, and intense discrimination while growing up in Colorado. An episode that must have particularly stung occurred while he was in college, when he ran for class president. His own roommate voted against him, telling Samora he could not bring himself to vote for a Mexican.
Seen another way, however, his personal story also proves that Mexican Americans could indeed surmount barriers through individual striving. Samora earned a PhD in sociology and anthropology at a major university, Washington University in St. Louis. He later founded the Mexican American Graduate Studies program at the University of Notre Dame. This last achievement came courtesy of a grant from the Ford Foundation, which in the late 1960s was already in the midst of a spending spree aimed at bolstering what the foundation was calling “group identity.” Chapter 6 delves further into this endeavor, but suffice it to say here that Samora’s founding of the program at Notre Dame represents a personal victory over adversity by a man who grew up in poverty and suffered from discrimination.
It is worth noting that George Sánchez also faced discrimination. After lobbying to improve the education of New Mexico’s rural, poor, Spanish-speaking population, which put him at odds with the governor, he and his family required police protection, and Sánchez started carrying a gun. At one point he found a pipe bomb outside their home. Sánchez and Samora may have had the experience of discrimination in common, but they took sharply different approaches to how to overcome it and to questions of ethnicity.
Samora drank deeply from the well of German philosophies brought over during and after World War II. The language of “dominant” and “subservient,” or “subordinate,” groups, integral to critical theory and the Frankfurt School (covered in more detail in chapter 5) pervades Samora’s academic work. His dissertation, titled “Minority Leadership in a Bi-Cultural Community,” quotes the German-born American social psychologist Kurt Lewin, who was associated with the Frankfurt School.
Samora’s thesis can in fact be seen as a classic of the critical theory genre. The very first “problem” that Samora sets out is that Mexican Americans (the “subordinate group”) have no chance of succeeding if the standards of success are defined by American society (the “dominant system”). As with all critical writing, his thesis and other writings can be abstruse. Here’s one example: “In situations of dominant–subordinate relationships where the goals of the subordinate group are largely goals to be achieved within the dominant system, the in-group cohesion of the subordinate group will be considered inadequate by members of the subordinate system.” Creating a race out of people of many backgrounds became for Samora and others of the same mindset the way to break out of this dominant system. The decision to turn
Mexican Americans into a racial minority produced the first artificial but legal identity group, and thus one of the first building blocks of identity politics.
As Peter Skerry observes, “Mexican-Americans emerge in California as not just any interest group, but—in keeping with the dynamics of our new American political system—as one organized around an idea. That is that, like blacks, Mexican Americans comprise a racial minority group. This abstraction poses no problems for the ideologically oriented Chicano activists who see the world in such terms.” This racialization, Skerry adds, “is highly useful to elite network insiders who are in need of some cogent category that subsumes the disparate population they aspire to represent. Yet, this race idea is somewhat at odds with the experience of Mexican-Americans, over half of whom designate themselves racially as ‘white,’ and the overwhelming majority of whom draw sharp distinctions between themselves and blacks.”
That many Mexican Americans saw themselves as white was a problem for activists and elites. Indeed, the federal government counted them as white on the decennial US census and for legal purposes. When the census of 1930, in an exception to general practice, classified Mexican Americans as a race of their own, Mexican American leaders protested bitterly, and officials reverted back to the white classification in the 1940 census. The leading Mexican American organization at the time, the then pro-assimilationist League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), complained that declassifying Mexicans as white had been an attempt to “discriminate between the Mexicans themselves and other members of the white race, when in truth and fact we are not only a part and parcel but as well the sum and substance of the white race. . . . Jim Crow did not apply to us.” In 1947, in Mendez v. Westminster, a case concerning the segregation of Mexican American students in remedial schools in Orange County, California, both sides, and the court, agreed that Mexican Americans were classified as white. (The judge in his ruling wrote, “It is conceded by all parties that there is no question of race discrimination in this action.”) What the district was accused of doing was using Spanish-speaking as a proxy for segregating darker-skinned Mexican Americans while admitting lighter-skinned ones.
Mexican Americans inhabited a racial space not unlike that of American Jews. Both were classified as white, yet both faced discrimination and some segregation. To this day, Mexican Americans and other Hispanics are technically not a race. On the census, “Hispanic” is treated as an “ethnicity.” The Obama administration tried to revise the 2020 census form by amalgamating the census question on whether a person is “Hispanic” with a question about biological race, but the Trump administration didn’t support the change. To what extent Hispanics are now considered a race by their fellow Americans is open to question. It is obvious to me, at least, that for reasons I explain in this chapter and subsequent ones, many Americans now dimly view Hispanics as something of a race apart from whites but that this process of racialization is not yet complete. Social scientists define racialization as “the extension of racial meaning to a previously unclassified relationship, social practice or group.” That process is well under way but can still be stopped. What is important for those who want to stop identity politics is to recognize that racialization is a main goal of the Left.
The process of making all Mexican Americans into victimized “people of color” (POC) came at a price. As Cristina Mora observes in her study Making Hispanics, it required that Mexican Americans “[accept] a disadvantaged minority status,” with no possibility of ever escaping minority status. For the elites and activists such as Samora who desired this racialization, the process was not easy and is still not complete. But they had a powerful ally in the media and the entertainment worlds, who liked the idea of another sort of POC. “Journalists tend to accept uncritically the racial minority interpretation of the Mexican-American experience offered by advocates and activists,” wrote Skerry in the 1990s, an observation that indubitably holds today. Philip Gleason surmises, aptly in my view, that the expression “people of color” came into vogue because it makes acceptable in the popular mind the status and benefits accorded to “designated minorities,” which are distinguishable by “racially linked phenotypical features.” That runs into trouble with Mexican Americans and others designated as Hispanic who don’t look different from non-Hispanic Americans— think Marco Rubio or the Boston Red Sox’s David “Papi” Ortiz—or other “whites” who can be phenotypically identifiable, for example, some Italians and Jews. Nevertheless, the exigencies of group making required that what’s obvious to the eye be ignored, if the entire group was to be deemed POC.
But, as Mora puts it, with emphasis, “It did not have to happen.” Absent the conflation of ideology, the economic benefits granted to members of some groups, and the emergence of determined individuals in powerful positions, Mexican Americans would not have been abstracted into a racial minority, let alone form the nucleus of a larger pan-ethnic group. By extension, we might not have identity politics today. There was a roadmap in America that showed a different path, and Mexican Americans seemed eager to follow it.
