Suchergebnisse

In 2019 the Hispanic population of the United States surpassed sixty million—or sixty-four million if the inhabitants of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico are included. Only Mexico is larger among Spanish-speaking countries in the world. The rapid growth of the Hispanic population—which had been estimated at only four million in 1950—has been stunning. The US Census Bureau has projected that, given moderate levels of immigration and natural increase, Hispanics would grow by 2060 to an estimated 111 million people (about 28 percent of the US population), significantly exceeding the proportions of other ethnic or racial minorities. And while Hispanic Americans now account for one of every six persons in the United States, their impact—social, cultural, political, and economic—is much more profound because of their concentration in particular states and localities. Hispanics are at once a new and an old population, made up both of recently arrived newcomers and of old timers with deeper roots in American soil than any other ethnic groups except for the indigenous peoples of the continent. They comprise a population that can claim both a history and a territory in what is now the United States that precede the establishment of the nation. At the same time, it is a population that has emerged seemingly suddenly, its growth driven by immigration from the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America—above all from Mexico—and by high rates of natural increase. Today, a third of the Hispanic population is foreign- born, and another third consists of a growing second generation of US-born children of immigrants. And the label itself—"Hispanic"— is new, an instance of a pan-ethnic category that was created by official edict in the 1970s. The ethnic groups subsumed under this label were not "Hispanics" or "Latinos" in their countries of origin; rather, they only became so in the United States. But the Spanish roots of the United States antedate by a century the creation of an English colony in North America and have left an indelible if ignored Spanish imprint, especially across the southern rim of the United States, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In US popular culture and in official narrative and ritual the American past has been portrayed as the story of the expansion of English America, suppressing if not silencing the Hispanic presence from the nation's collective memory. But past is prologue, and no understanding of the Hispanic peoples in the United States today or of the category under which they are now grouped can ignore the historical and geographic contexts of their incorporation.

Closing keynote to the Scribani International Conference in Madrid, and European premiere of the documentary "Harvest of Loneliness," a critical reexamination of the bilateral US-Mexico contract labor program instituted in 1942 ostensibly to meet temporary labor shortages in the U.S. during World War II. But the program did not end when the war ended in 1945; at the behest of the corporate growers, it kept being extended by the U.S. Congress until 1964, becoming the largest such "guest worker" program of its kind to date — and one of the largest mass movements of workers in history. The program was presented to the public via newscasts, newspapers, journals and government publications as an ideal program that uplifted the economy of Mexico and satisfied the need for workers in the United States. The reality was much different. The Bracero Program was implemented to ensure accessible, cheap, controlled and disposable labor with little regard for the adverse and irreversible impact it had on Mexican families. During its 22 years no agricultural labor union succeeded in organizing or carrying out a strike — it was not until the end of the Bracero Program, which cut off of the supply of Mexican workers, that saw the emergence of the United Farm Workers. Still, after the Bracero Program ended formally in 1964 it was de facto maintained informally by growing streams of undocumented immigrant labor, leading to the present moment. Practically all of Mexico has been affected: fewer than 4% of Mexico's 2,443 municipalities have no migrants living and working in the U.S. Mexican-born immigrants in the U.S. today number nearly 12 million; over half of them are undocumented. In the U.S. the political vacuum left by the failure of the federal government to pass "comprehensive immigration reform" — given the irreconcilable conflict between those who sought "enforcement" solutions to the presence of millions of migrant workers (from their criminalization and deportation to fencing the southern border) to those who sought to forge paths to their eventual legalization and integration (denigrated as "amnesty" by opponents) — has been filled by hundreds of attempts by state and local governments to assume federal immigration control functions in a growing climate of fear and enforced opprobrium. Yet it is not an American problem but a worldwide issue of vast consequence that will grow in magnitude in the years to come. In looking to the future it is wise to reexamine the experience and lessons of the past — especially given Europe's parallel needs for manual laborers. These new braceros have been dubbed "outcasts of modernity," "irregular" labor migrants, "illegal aliens" — terms which describe an unequal master status affecting every aspect of the life of a subclass of people without rights. They are products of a globalized political and economic system that creates illegality by displacing people and then denying them equal rights to do what they have to do to survive: move to find work. As migration pressures continue to mount as a result of global inequality, so will fear of the foreigner — the xenophobia of what has been called a "society of contempt."

"Assimilation," a protean concept with an American pedigree and a checkered past, is back in vogue. But in academic and colloquial usage, in social science, public policy and popular culture, the idea and the ideal of "assimilation" have had a bumpy history. Over time the term has conflated various normative prescriptions ("e pluribus unum," "melting pot") and empirical descriptions (cultural adaptations, economic mobility, social acceptance by a dominant group) to make sense of the incorporation of "ethnic" difference in American life. After more than a century of use and misuse the term itself remains confusing and contentious. For a "canonical" concept, there remains surprising ambiguity as to its meaning, measurement and applicability. This essay, prepared for a Festschrift in honor of Herbert J. Gans, explores the history of the idea in American society and social science as a master frame and the teleology of Progress underlying it; considers cultural, social, legal, economic and identificational indices of intergenerational change among contemporary ethnic groups based on an array of census and survey data; and raises questions about the limitations and paradoxes of the concept itself in the study of ethnicity and inequality in American life. Despite the grand narratives of modernization which undergird the concept of assimilation, neither race nor religion nor ethnicity has vanished in American life. Linguistic "Anglicization" and other forms of acculturation do proceed rapidly, especially among immigrant children and the second generation. But alongside undeniable upward social mobility from the first to the second generation for most groups, especially the children of the poorest and least educated - though the gains appear to peak in the second generation and decline or plateau thereafter - there is compelling evidence of widening "ethclass" and legal inequalities, of new conflicts and political mobilizations around ethnic and racial issues, and of downward mobility and marginalization for vulnerable segments of these populations. An undocumented status has become a caste-like master status blocking access to the opportunity structure and paths to social mobility for millions of immigrants. A fraught concept like "assimilation," weighted by the normative baggage of its past, seems ill-suited to grasp these complex dynamics and to focus critical attention on enduring structural inequalities and persistent ethnic and pan-ethnic formations in this "permanently unfinished" society.