Help!!

THIRD EDITION

PETER WINN

FOURTEEN

North of the Border

"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe

free," wrote Emma Lazarus in 1883. Inscribed on a bronze plaque at the

base of the Statue of Liberty at the entrance to New York Harbor, these

lines expressed the promise of "the land ofliberty" for generations of im-

migrants to the United States.

During the 1980s, more immigrants arrived in the United States than

in any other decade in history. Yet, unlike millions of their predecessors,

few of them were welcomed by Lady Liberty and few came from Europe.

Most were migrants from Latin America and the Caribbean who had

traveled north, not west, to reach the United States, and crossed borders,

not oceans, to arrive at its shores.

How this nation of immigrants deals with this new wave of immi-

grants from the south may well shape its domestic history and hemi-

spheric relations during the twenty-first century. It may also force the

United States of America to rethink what it means to be "American."

These new immigrants have made the United States the fifth largest

Spanish-speaking country in the world. Today, it has the hemisphere's

largest Puerto Rican city, second largest concentrations of Cubans, Sal-

vadorans, Haitians, and Jamaicans, and fourth largest Mexican metrop-

olis. People of Latin American origin have surpassed African-Americans

North of the Border I 585

as the nation's largest minority group. Their concentrations in such large

states as California, Florida, New York, and Texas-and in some of the

country's biggest cities-will increase their social and political impact

still further. By 202 5, they will be the largest race or ethnic group in Cali-

fornia, comprising 4 3 percent of the population of the largest state. Al-

ready more than half of Miami is of Latin American descent, and the

same is true for nearly 40 percent of Los Angeles and a quarter of Hous-

ton and New York. Increasingly, "Anglos"-a term that "Hispanics,"

people with Spanish American cultural roots, apply to all white English-

speaking North Americans-will have to come to terms with the fact that

they not only share the Americas with their Latin American and

Caribbean neighbors, but that they also share their own country with

growing communities of "Latinos," people of Latin American descent.

The 2000 census revealed that there were more than 3 5 million His-

panics living in the continental United States, a 58 percent increase over

1980 and a nine-fold rise over 1950. By 2005, there were over 40 million

Hispanics living on the mainland and their numbers were growing four

times as fast as the U.S. population as a whole, as a result of immigra-

tion-legal and illegal-as well as higher birth rates. If current trends

continue, there will be more than roo million Hispanic-Americans by

the year 2050, when they will comprise one-quarter of this country's

population.

These figures only confirm what many North Americans knew already.

The concentration of Hispanics in major urban areas has made them

more visible and increased public awareness of their presence and prob-

lems. Nor have Hispanic-Americans been content to remain a silent mi-

nority. Increasingly, they are participating in politics, electing represen-

tatives to defend their interests, and demanding bilingual education for

their children and a say in U.S. policy toward their countries of origin.

Some Hispanic-Americans are new neighbors, the result of the waves

of recent immigration-legal and illegal-that have multiplied the pop-

ulations of Latin American and Caribbean origin in cities around the

country. But others are descended from Hispanic colonists who had set-

586 I Americas

tled in what is today California and the Southwest long before those ter-

ritories became U.S. possessions. The Anglocentric history of the

United States, which begins with the arrival of English colonists in the

early seventeenth century, is misleading: Hispanics had been living in

what is today the United States for decades before the Pilgrims landed at

Plymouth Rock and exploring its lands for a century before John Smith

set foot in Jamestown.

THE OTHER SIDE

Mexicans were the first Hispanic-Americans, residents of territories

forcibly incorporated into the United States in the wake of the "Mexican

War" of 1845-48. By the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, which

transformed northern Mexico into the U.S. Southwest, some eighty

thousand Mexicans lived in the ceded territories, three quarters of them

in New Mexico, a state that is still nearly 40 percent Mexican-American,

despite receiving little of the massive Mexican immigration since then.

During the nineteenth century, the flow of Mexicans across the un-

guarded border reflected the drift of people in search of land or jobs. By

1910 Mexican migrants were crossing the border in large numbers in

search of work, drawn by the far higher wages in the United States, the

one constant in a changing relationship. By then Mexican laborers were

a major presence in the fields of Texas and the mines of Arizona and Col-

orado. The demand for agricultural labor in an expanding southwestern

economy during the years that followed led U.S. growers to recruit labor

inside Mexico, offering free transportation and advances on their wages

in an often intense competition for Mexican workers.

Before 1917 migration across the border with Mexico was largely un-

regulated, and even the creation of the Border Patrol in 1924 was mostly

directed at Asians excluded by the National Origins Immigration Act of

that year. By then Mexicans had replaced Asians as the low-paid menial

labor force of California and the Southwest, whose employers used their

political influence to keep the sluice gates of migration open.

North of the Border I 587

In the decades that followed, Mexican labor migration ebbed and

flowed with the U.S. economy, expanding in eras of prosperity and con-

tracting in times of trouble-often with an assist from the U.S. govern-

ment. During the Great Depression hundreds of thousands of Mexi-

cans-including many born in the United States-were deported as

scapegoats for the high levels of unemployment. World War II meant a

renewed need for labor and a new U.S. recruitment policy, the Bracero

Program, which brought roughly fifty thousand Mexican workers per

yearto the United States between 1942 and 1964 to work mostly as agri-

cultural laborers. A growing flow of illegal Mexican migration developed

alongside this legal, if temporary, labor migration and increased when

the Bracero Program came to an end after 1964. Most of the illegal mi-

grants also crossed the border to work for a season and then return home

with the money they had saved. Increasingly, however, both legal and il-

legal migrants stayed in the United States, joining Mexican-American

communities that swelled in size, and began to appear in U.S. regions

distant from the border zone. By 2000, there were more than twenty-

four million people of Mexican descent living in the United States.

By then they had ceased to be predominantly rural laborers and had

come to occupy a major place within the urban working class of the west-

ern states. Some have made it into the middle class, as owners of small

businesses or as professionals, although Mexican-Americans graduate

from college at a rate that is only one quarter of the national average.

Mexican-Americans have also emerged as a political force that is

courted by politicians of both parties and is producing its own elected

leaders. For many this political activism was a new departure. Until re-

cent decades Mexican-Americans had been noted for their political pas-

sivity. Many did not become citizens. Others fought bravely for the U.S .

flag in foreign wars but were not active in its domestic politics-a reflec-

tion both of their subordination within the United States and their con-

tinued identification with nearby Mexico. Those who did participate in

U.S. politics tended to be Democrats, but their special needs and inter-

ests were generally neglected by both major parties.

588 I Americas

For Mexican-Americans, as for African-Americans, the 1960s were a

political watershed. Inspired in part by the civil rights and Black Power

movements, "Chicanos"-as the most politicized Mexican-Americans

now called themselves, from a corruption of "Mexicanos"-extended

their activities from moderate civil rights organizations such as LULAC

(the League of United Latin American Citizens) to radical political par-

ties such as La Raza Unida, or the United (Inda-Mexican) Race, to re-

dress their grievances and promote their interests . La Raza won local

elections in Texas and LULAC fought discrimination in California, but

both failed to win their more militant demands. Still, they did succeed in

training a generation of Chicano political leaders, and L ULAC remains

an important Latino organization.

Yet it was not Chicano electoral politics but Mexican-American labor

politics that made their struggles part of the consciousness of the larger

nation. The efforts of Cesar Chavez, a charismatic leader inspired by

Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement, to organize the

exploited Mexican-American agricultural laborers of California for his

United Farm Workers, captured the conscience of the United States for

"La Causa"-and made Chicanos realize the possibilities of political ac-

tion. As they became increasingly urban, they faced different prob-

lems-substandard housing, inadequate schools, police brutality-and

found that the solutions to these problems required local political power.

By 1980 Mexican-Americans numbered over ten million. By then they

had begun to turn their numbers to political account, by electing repre-

sentatives who were themselves Chicanos, or else pledged to promote

their cause. Henry Cisneros, mayor of San Antonio from 1981 to 1989,

symbolized this new generation of Chicano politicians. An attractive

leader to both Anglos and Hispanics, Cisneros was named to President

Clinton's first cabinet as Secretary for Housing and Urban Development

(HUD).

In the 1990s, a new Mexican-American political star rose in Los An-

geles, where Hispanics constitute nearly two fifths of the population yet

have not exercised much political influence. Gloria Molina is the

North of the Border I 589

California-born daughter of an immigrant Mexican laborer. She began

her political career as a community activist, and went on to serve in the

California State Assembly and the Los Angeles City Council. In 1991 she

became the first Chicano elected to the five-member Los Angeles

County Board of Supervisors, one of the most important local govern-

ment offices in the country, making her the highest ranking Hispanic-

American woman in U.S. politics. Molina now represents the country's

largest Latino constituency and shares responsibility for overseeing a

county of nine million residents and a budget of twelve billion dollars.

In her new role, Gloria Molina has been a vocal and effective board

member who has been called an "anarchist" by its chair, but she has been

successful with most of her initiatives for social programs such as health

care and pro-Hispanic measures such as allowing people to testify in

Spanish before the board. "The most important thing," stressed Sergio

Muii6z, editor of La Opinion, Los Angeles's major Spanish-language

newspaper, "is that she has truly been the voice of a community that

didn't have any access to the Board of Supervisors-and it's a loud gutsy

voice."'

By 2005, there were other strong Chicano voices in California poli-

tics. In that year, Antonio Villaraigosa was elected mayor of Los Ange-

les, the second largest city in the United States, capping a political career

in which the one-time high school dropout and child of East L.A.'s

Mexican-American barrio had become a member of the city council and

speaker of the state assembly. Villaraigosa joined Ron Gonzales, who be-

came the first Hispanic to head a major California city since statehood

when he was elected mayor of San Jose in 1998 and again in 2002. Cruz

Bustamante, elected lieutenant-governor in 1999, was the first Latino

elected to statewide office in California since 1878. He was defeated for

governor of the nation's largest state by Hollywood star Arnold

Schwarznegger in 2003, the same year that Chicano Bill Richardson be-

came governor of New Mexico. Villaraigosa's election put him on the

cover of Newsweek, featured in a cover story on "Latino Power: L.A.'s

New Mayor-And How Hispanics Will Change American Politics."2

590 I Americas

Nationwide, however, Latinos were still underrepresented in elected

office, accounting for some 3 percent of elected officials, despite consti-

tuting over 12 percent of the population. But this was changing, partic-

ularly in California, where Hispanics comprise more than 3 2 percent of

the population and one out of every four members of the state assembly

is Latino/a. And California is not only the nation's largest state, but also

home to nearly one-third of its Hispanics, with "a tremendous influence

on the Latino community nationwide."3 Elsewhere in the West, for ex-

ample, Colorado elected Mexican-American Ken Salazar to the U.S.

Senate in 2004, the same year in which Cuban-American Mel Martinez

was chosen as the U.S. senator from Florida.

The presence of Latino officeholders in state houses and major cities

may be a sign of things to come. But equally important is the growing po-

litical participation of Mexican-Americans at the grassroots level in

communities such as Bell Gardens.

THE TAKING OF BELL GARDENS

Today Bell Gardens is an urban community sandwiched between two

freeways in Southeast Los Angeles. But not long ago, its name reflected

its reality. Bell Gardens, like other communities in southern California '

has been transformed during the past half century from an area of rural

plots to one of urban lots.

Claude Booker was one of the original residents of Bell Gardens, back

in 1935 when it was "gardens and animals" and "about four thousand

people . . . spread around the whole area," he recalled. "It was just a typ-

ical Midwest-type town, settled by people from the South and the Mid-

west"-and it was "a hundred percent Caucasian."

Like most of Los Angeles, both the rural character and ethnic composi-

tion of Bell Gardens underwent dramatic changes during succeeding

decades. After World War II, building on subdivisions began, and after

1970 "you began to see the transition" from a sparsely populated rural com-

munity to a densely populated urban community, Booker related. This was

North of the Border I 591

followed during the 1980s by the "real heavy transition from Caucasian to

Hispanic." In 1990 the population ofBell Gardens was 90 percent Hispanic.

Most of them were of Mexican descent. Some were middle-class

property owners like Marfa Chacon, who had come to Los Angeles from

Chihuahua, where her mother still lives. She was among those "who had

come to build a dream here in Bell Gardens-to build a house or estab-

lish a business and to accumulate wealth." By 1990 she and her husband

had built five rental houses on their Bell Gardens property. Their ten-

ants, like most of the Hispanic residents of Bell Gardens, are "humble

people, working people, most of them Mexicans who have just finished

fixing up their residency papers or hadn't really decided to become citi-

zens," Chacon explained. "Here you feel like you're in Mexico with your

people; you feel very comfortable here in Bell Gardens."

But the Mexican-Americans of Bell Gardens felt far less comfortable

when they ventured into its City Hall. Virtually all its City Council mem-

bers were Anglos, as was Claude Booker, its city manager. Frank Duran,

a local businessman, was only one of many Mexican-Americans who

complained of the "arrogance" with which the city's Hispanic majority

was treated, "especially people that didn't know how to speak English."

This lack of representation and respect had rankled with many His-

panic residents, but it had never moved them to action until Marfa

Chacon "got wind of the change in zoning" planned by the City Coun-

cil-which prohibited the building of more than two housing units on a

lot and mandated the removal over time of those that already existed, a

measure that could eventually affect most of the city's forty-two thousand

residents. The result was a grassroots movement that led to a revolution

in local politics whose implications transcended the Bell Gardens city

limits.

According to Claude Booker, the goal of the rezoning ordinance was

"to stop runaway growth" so as "to not have so much high-density de-

velopment in future years." To Mexican-American property owners like

Marfa Chacon, however, such rhetoric masked a "land grab" by the City

Council in which they were the victims. For years they had been hassled

592 I Americas

by city inspectors who cited their properties for building code violations

as minor as broken screens or cracked cement. As soon as they cured one

violation, they received notice of others. Since 1987, when the rezoning

plan was first drawn up, Bell Gardens was issuing notices of substandard

conditions "at ten times the rate of the city of Los Angeles," recounted

Alan Gross, a lawyer who in 1992 was Bell Gardens' city attorney. "The

main point is that none of them were ever terminated," he explained,

which created problems in mortgaging or selling the property. Instead,

city inspectors began to harass tenants and the city manager began to

press Mexican-American property owners to sell their parcels to the

city-at the lowered valuations to which these "substandard notices" had

caused their properties to fall. Between 1987 and 1991, the city had spent

forty million dollars buying up properties. For Gross it was a classic case

of urban removal masked as urban renewal. "They themselves said that twenty-five thousand people were going

to be affected," recounted Marfa Chacon, who had taken the lead in get-

ting property owners together, most of them modest Mexican-American

landlords like herself. For them, the rezoning ordinance was the last

straw, lowering the value of their property and their ability to sell it. Her

friend Sophie's parcel dropped in value from $850,000 to $250,000 as a

result. "If you came with the dream that if you bought your house when

you were young and you worked and sacrificed and saved you could have

something, and then they destroy it just so people can come build town-

houses and condominiums-that's not justice," Chacon charged. For

Marfa Chacon it would mean the death of her American dream, and she

was determined to fight the rezoning-and the Anglo power brokers of

Bell Gardens who had "abused us Latinos" all these years.

For behind the issue of rezoning lay the larger questions of racial prej-

udice and ethnic conflict. Marfa Chacon was convinced that the reason

the City Council pushed this rezoning was because "a majority of us were

Mexicans and the council people thought we weren't going to do any-

thing. Because the city manager said, 'All Mexicans are ignorant and ir-

responsible.' " Chacon bristled at the remark. "I thank God that I am not

North of the Border I 593

that irresponsible," she said, "and that I am always searching for justice."

Marfa Chacon united some seventy-five angry property owners, but

none of them had any political experience. So they went to someone in

a nearby town who did.

Rudy Garcia had been born in Arizona, but was raised in Mexico. He

returned to the United States in the 1950s and enlisted in the army. It was

only then that he became conscious of racial discrimination. "In Texas ...

we got thrown out of a restaurant because we didn't see the sign that said:

'No dogs or Mexicans allowed.' They want me to go fight for them, but

I can't even eat at their restaurants!" After he was discharged, Rudy Gar-

cia moved to Los Angeles, where he found work in Huntington Park. But

he was unable to live there "because they weren't renting to Hispanics."

Experiences like those were one reason that he got involved in LULAC.

The other was "the need to do something for our kids" because of their

54 percent high school dropout rate. To Garcia, "this is a different type

of discrimination .. . a revolving door" that kept Mexicans from pro-

gressing. Rudy Garcia became active politically "because if we don't

change this, we are going to fail as a people."

In Maywood, a town near Bell Gardens, LULAC's efforts to organize

the Hispanic community in the face of a similar zoning problem a few

years before had failed to stir it to action. So when Marfa Chacon and her

group came to Garcia for advice, he leaped at the opportunity, which he

saw "as a very important political movement for the community." For

Rudy Garcia, the underlying issue was representation. "I said to myself,

'This is it. The Southeast will never be the same again. First, we get our

people elected there in Bell Gardens and then the rest of the Southeast

cities will go.' Throughout the Southeast areas we're from 88 to 95 per-

cent, and look at the representation-there's none!"

Garcia provided the nascent Bell Gardens movement with the politi-

cal leadership they lacked, and brought in Alan Gross, an Anglo lawyer

who had taken part in the Maywood effort, to furnish legal advice and as-

sistance. They formed a "No Rezoning Committee," opened an office,

installed phones, and the complaints started to roll in. "People all over

594 I Americas

town who now had a place to vent their frustrations and send their com-

plaints were calling and coming in," Gross recounted, "and we were

hearing all kinds of complaints, focusing in large part on the arrogance

of the people who ran the city government."

The committee decided to organize a recall drive to force a new City

Council election. The problem was that many of the Hispanic residents

of Bell Gardens were not U.S. citizens, and among those who were, few

registered to vote and fewer still cast their ballots. As a result, Claude

Booker admitted, "in a town of forty thousand, six or seven hundred

votes would elect a person."

In response, the No Rezoning Committee decided on a two-pronged strategy. One goal was to convince Mexicans to become U.S. citizens and

to register to vote, because when Rudy Garcia asked a meeting packed

with one hundred angry Mexicanos, "How many of you here can vote?"

only four or five raised their hands. So, Garcfa said, "Okay, we are going

to get each and every one of you to become a citizen." First, he helped

them overcome artificial barriers created by interviewers who failed

Mexican applicants for not knowing President Reagan's favorite food.

Then he established "citizenship classes" and got four to five hundred

people to become citizens.

The second problem was to get the Hispanic community to vote. A

registration drive turned passive citizens into eligible voters, while an in-

novative strategy of getting people unlikely to come to the polls to vote

by absentee ballot addressed the problem oflow Hispanic voter turnout.

When the recall ballots were counted on March 10, 1992, "it was a land-

slide," Rudy Garcfa related. "We beat them by sixty-two percent." A sec-

ond vote one month later confirmed this shift in political power, elect-

ing a Hispanic majority to the City Council that included Rudy Garcia

and Frank Duran. In Bell Gardens, Mexican-Americans were no longer

a political minority.

The rezoning and recall movement was an important learning expe-

rience for all concerned, although people active in it extracted different

meanings. For Frank Duran, a neophyte city councilman, it was "the start

North of the Border I 595

of an education" and the beginning of opening up the political system to

Mexican-Americans in his community. "We'll probably be getting more

people coming in to the council meetings and start getting involved-

and then that person will talk to someone else and it will mushroom."

Alan Gross, the Anglo lawyer and activist, took a longer view. What

impressed Gross was that "over the year the inhibitions against speaking

out have worn away." At the start, Mexican-Americans had been afraid

to speak their mind and challenge the Anglo authorities who controlled

their community, but by late 1991 "they would go to the City Council

meetings and stand up there and vent their frustrations and tell the coun-

cil what they thought of them-older people, younger people, women,

men, high school students, priests, everybody." He recalled going home

to Beverly Hills and telling his friends: " 'You would pay money to go and

see this.' It was a fantastic lesson in democracy!"

It was also a lesson in the value of citizenship and political participa-

tion. Marfa Chacon had lived in the United States for twenty years but

had never become a U.S. citizen because she "never thought it was nec-

essary" and "always thought that [she] wanted to be a Mexican and to go

back," she explained. "I had to suffer and go so low as to have my rights

taken away before I finally said-Enough!" Chacon had become a citi-

zen during the recall drive and it changed her views. "We have rights,

and if they don't give them to us, then we have to take them. The Con-

stitution of the United States is there for everybody," Marfa Chacon af-

firmed. "Latinos need to fight because we have a very bright future, but

we have to unite and we have to show people that we can take the reins

of government."

For Rudy Garcia, too, the lesson was empowerment, but he saw it in

a larger frame. He now uses the Bell Gardens movement in his citizen-

ship classes, to demonstrate that "each and every one of you that is here

studying for citizenship ... you're going to be part of the process. You're

going to be able to participate. You're going to be able to tell somebody:

'Hey, wait a minute. You don't shine me off like that. I voted for you,

Mister'-something we never had the opportunity to say before." But it

596 I Americas

was the implications of the Bell Gardens victory for other Los Angeles

communities that was its greatest significance for him. "I look at Bell

Gardens as a first domino," he explained. "It went down ... and I will

make sure that it continues to go from one city to the next city." They

would use rezoning, recalls, "whatever it takes, because whether we go

over, under, around, or through it, we're going to do it. This is going to

happen." For Garcia, Bell Gardens marked the end of an era for the

area's Mexican-Americans: "We are tired of being victims and second-

class citizens. We no longer want to get on the bus and sit in the back.

Now we want to drive the bus-hell, we want to own the bus. Why not?

We're the majority, right?" A decade later, the mayor and all the mem-

bers of the city council were Latino.

But Latino empowerment through elections is not the only thing that

is happening in Los Angeles, as the dramatic riots of April 1992 under-

scored. While transfixed Americans watched South-Central Los Ange-

les burn on their television screens, commentators presented it as an out-

burst of African-American rage in the wake of the acquittal of white

police officers accused of beating a black motorist, Rodney King.

Yet in a city in which nearly two out of five people are of Hispanic de-

scent, their invisibility was striking as Anglos rushed to define the issue

in the familiar terms of black-white racial conflict. Only gradually did it

become clear that many of the rioters and victims---one third of those

killed and arrested and 40 percent of those who suffered property dam-

age-were not blacks but Hispanics. "Latinos actually got the brunt of

this," argued demographer Dr. David Hayes-Bautista, head ofU.C.L.A.'s

Chicano Studies Research Center. "They got beat up, burned out, and ar-

rested. Yet it is still being looked at as a black-white issue."4

Equally surprising to many was that in large part, the Hispanics in-

volved were not Mexican-Americans-the established Chicano barrios

of East Los Angeles remained mostly quiet during the riots-but Cen-

tral Americans, recent immigrants who peopled decaying South-Central

neighborhoods where there are today as many Hispanics as blacks. The

influx of Central Americans during the 1980s has added hundreds of

North of the Border I 597

thousands of Hispanics to Los Angeles's ethnic mix and made it the

world's second largest Salvadoran city. Most of these recent residents are

illegal immigrants, whose fears of being deported make them vulnerable

to exploitation and abuse . Many of them work in jobs in domestic service,

sweatshops, and agriculture where they get paid less than the minimum

wage, receive no benefits, and run greater risks of injuries. In South-

Central Los Angeles, one third of the Hispanics live below the poverty

line and many sleep in crowded rented garages. These people had little

reason to defend their neighborhood stores-though many of them

were owned by enterprising members of their own community-and

every incentive to participate in the looting.

Many were also refugees who brought with them memories that

shaped their behavior. Salvadorans often "looted" food and diapers.

"We've been through things like this in El Salvador, so the first thing you

do is to be sure that there will be enough food to feed the family," ex-

plained Francisco, a Salvadoran in South-Central. "Unconsciously many

people acted as if they were still back there."5 As far as the U.S. govern-

ment was concerned, they ought to be back in Central America. Illegal

migrants who were arrested were summarily deported. One result was

that Los Angeles youth gangs began to appear in San Salvador, brought

there by deported Americanized teenagers, adding their violence to El

Salvador's already complex problems.

Faced with abuses of police authority, the Central Americans of

South-Central had little recourse. Unlike the Mexican-Americans of Bell

Gardens, they had no political representation-and as illegal immi-

grants little prospect of electing representatives. When Hispanic politi-

cal and community leaders met in Chicano East L.A. after the riots to

chart a common course, they were unable to identify a single leader from

South-Central to invite. "At a time when we really needed to reach out

there, we found that we were not as informed as we could have been

about who the Latino leaders were in that area," Gloria Molina con-

fessed. "All of us have a lot of work to do to learn about the changing de-

mographics of South-Central Los Angeles."6

598 I Americas

But Los Angeles is not the only city in the United States whose de-

mographics have been transformed during recent decades by the flood of

migrants from Latin America and the Caribbean. In 1959, Miami was a

city of southern whites, retired Jews, and aspiring blacks that styled itself

a winter resort for the northern United States. Today it has a Cuban

mayor, a Hispanic majority, and a sizable Haitian minority, and regards

itself as the capital of the Caribbean.

A LITTLE HAVANA, A CUBAN METROPOLIS

In Miami, Eighth Street is now known by its Spanish name, Calle Ocha.

The main street of Little Havana, it is the core of a Cuban community

that dominates the city. It is also the heart of South Florida's large and

growing Hispanic population, which comes together once a year in the

Calle Ocha Festival, the biggest Latino street fair in the United States.

In 2004, more than a million people attended this annual event, where

they ate Latino food, listened to Latino music, and danced to Latino

rhythms. Most of them were Cuban, but many were from Central or

South America, members of the more recent immigrant wave to South

Florida that has diluted the Cuban character of Miami's Hispanic com-

munity even while confirming its ascendancy. Today Miami is the largest

Latino-led city in the United States and the first major North American

city to undergo such a radical transformation of its ethnic character. But

first and foremost, it is a Cuban city, the largest aside from Havana, and

far more prosperous than Cuba's capital some ninety miles away.

Like Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans have been in the United

States for more than a century. But the origins of the Miami community

are more recent, and the bulk of the Cuban immigrants arrived in the

United States after 1959. Moreover, from the start, the Cuban commu-

nity in the United States has been composed of exiles whose migration

was shaped by political events rather than economic processes.

The first Cubans to settle in the United States were emigres fleeing

Spanish repression of the Cuban independence movement that rose in

North of the Border I 599

rebellion in 1868 but did not triumph until three decades later with U .S.

intervention. Jose Marti, the Cuban poet and patriot, was only one of

many independence leaders who took refuge in the United States and

stayed to organize the struggle for Cuban independence from its shores,

relying on the resources of the Cuban communities concentrated in

New York and in Florida's cigar-making centers of Tampa and Key

West. But the size of the Cuban-American community remained small

before the Cuban revolution, probably not exceeding thirty thousand

people in 1959. During the two decades that followed, over eight hundred thousand

Cubans fled their island, more than 8 5 percent of whom settled in the

United States and Puerto Rico. The impact of this intense immigration

was magnified by the concentration of Cubans in the Miami area, which

despite U.S. government efforts to disperse them, was home to three out

of five Cuban-Americans in 1980.

This Cuban emigration wave began during the early days of Castro's

revolution with the supporters of defeated dictator Fulgencio Batista at

the start of 1959 and continued with upper- and middle-class opponents

of the revolutionary regime. During the four years of increasingly radi-

cal revolution that followed, over 200,000 Cubans came to the United

States-landowners and industrialists whose properties had been expro-

priated, managers whose enterprises had been nationalized, and profes-

sionals and small businessmen who saw no future for themselves in a

Communist Cuba.

Luis Botif6ll came in this first wave of Cuban exiles. "I left Havana in

August 1960," he related, because "I was a lawyer and I didn't see how I

could survive under a Communist regime in which there were no rights,

no free enterprises. So I decided to come to this country with my family,

just for a short time, because I didn't think that the situation would last

for a long time. Thousands of Cubans like me came under those condi-

tions." Botif6ll was also typical of that first wave of Cuban emigres in that

he arrived in Miami with the intention of taking part in reversing the rev-

olution he had fled. This was encouraged by the U.S. government, which

600 I Americas

treated the exiles as "freedom fighters" and recruited heavily in the exile

community for the CI& secret army against Castro. "We came here with

the purpose of going back to Cuba. We came as exiles. We didn't come

to stay. We didn't come just because we thought we could get a better life

here than we had in our country. We came here because of circumstances

in Cuba that we thought would not last long-and that in the meantime

being here we could help to overthrow Castro."

It was the failure of the CI& exile army at the Bay of Pigs in April

1961 and of the U.S. efforts to oust Castro that culminated in the mis-

sile crisis of October 1962 that turned a group of refugees into a com-

munity of immigrants. More than half a million Cubans would arrive in

the United States during the two decades that followed, but this first

group of exiles defined the community they joined, charted its course,

and shaped its character.

"When I first came here, I didn't expect to stay, so I didn't want to en-

gage in anything," recalled Luis Botif6ll. "I just wanted to survive, wait-

ing for the day of going back to Cuba." Once they realized that they were

in the United States for the long-term-and possibly forever-Cuban ex-

iles like Botif6ll began to adapt to their new country and to make their way.

They were helped in starting out by their status as political refugees, which

gave them legal residence in the United States and access to government

assistance denied other migrants from Latin America and the Caribbean.

But, above all, they were helped by the capital, skills, credentials, and ex-

perience that they brought with them to Florida, the site of$150 million

in Cuban real estate investments even before the revolution. Botif6ll

began at the top, in the Republic National Bank, which was taken over by

wealthy Cuban exiles. "I got involved with this bank that was changed

from being a community American bank to a Cuban bank. I started as a

member of the board of directors. Eventually I became chairman."

Cuban-run financial institutions like the Republic National "played a

very important part in the development of this community," Botif6ll as-

serted, "because ... in those days, the Cubans who came here didn't have

a financial statement that could support a loan. But since we knew them

North of the Border I 601

from Cuba, and knew their abilities and how honest they were, we took

a chance with them and gave them what we call a 'character loan'-a loan

based on their character, not on their collateral. Fortunately, these people

were very successful; they paid us back and continued to be our clients.

And that made this bank not only the biggest spending bank in the

United States but also the biggest local bank, with over a billion dollars

in assets."

Among Republic National's clients "from the beginning," was Felipe

Valls, today one of Miami's most successful entrepreneurs. Valls also

came to the United States in 1960, but unlike Botif6ll, he came without

capital or connections, and with two children and a pregnant wife to sup-

port, so he "started working in a restaurant equipment business in Miami

Avenue." Valls was typical of the middle-class Cubans who constituted

the bulk of that first wave of exiles. "Most of the Cuban businessmen who

came here in that year had small businesses in Cuba," he explained. Once

in Miami, "most of them went to work and then opened their own busi-

nesses." Valls worked in a restaurant equipment business for two years

and "then I opened a very small place, importing espresso coffee ma-

chines from Italy .... That was my start." It was a rocky one, because "no

Cuban had any credit here" so "I had to give credit to my own customers.

So I had no money and it was a big struggle because the profits here were

big but not enough to finance the equipment." From there Valls

branched out into restaurants, including the Versailles, today one of the

most popular Cuban restaurants in Miami's Little Havana, but at first "a

very small place with a seating capacity of sixty people. Now it's over

three hundred." By 1992, he owned twelve restaurants and a glass factory,

as well as shopping centers and other real estate. Today, a stretch of Calle

Ocho bears his name and his son Felipe Valls,Jr., employs more than one

thousand people, most of them Cuban-as is the food in his eighteen

restaurants and most of the customers who consume it.

It is this enclave character of Miami's Cuban community that gave it

an autonomy and strength lacking in other Hispanic-American commu-

nities without comparable capital, education, and business experience.

602 I Americas

"The Cubans who came here were lawyers, bankers, businessmen,"

stressed Botif6ll, contrasting them with immigrants who came to the

United States to "make a better living based only on their hands." As a

result, the Cubans "had the know-how ... the ability, and if they had a

little help and they had a market-which was created by ourselves-they

could succeed."

Felipe Valls was not the only Cuban exile to begin his business career

in Miami with a small cafe or restaurant in the 1960s and end as a man-

ufacturer three decades later. In prerevolutionary Cuba U.S. enterprises

had dominated the industrial sector, limiting Cubans to the role of man-

agers and redirecting Cuban entrepreneurs into services and real estate.

It was to these sectors that they gravitated when they first settled in

Miami, before broadening out into manufacturing. Together these dy-

namic Cuban entrepreneurs created an economic enclave with low-cost

labor provided by more recent Cuban emigres from working-class and

lower-middle-class backgrounds. As each wave of Cuban exiles found its

bearings and began to work its way up into the middle class, it was re-

placed by newer arrivals both directly from Cuba and from other areas

of the United States. The last sizable Cuban wave was the more than one

hundred twenty-five thousand Mariel refugees of 1980. Since then, the

smaller groups of Cubans arriving in Miami have not kept pace with the

labor needs of its expanding economy. As a result, the bottom rungs of

Little Havana's labor force-such as the unskilled jobs in Valls's restau-

rants-are now filled by Central Americans, who arrived during the

1980s from Nicaragua or El Salvador, as refugees from leftist revolution

or rightist repression.

Few Miami Cubans are wealthy and many are poor, but most are mid-

dle class, and the average income of Cuban-Americans is now as high as

the national average for all U.S. citizens, the only community of Latin

American and Caribbean origin to have reached that plateau. As Cubans

made it into the middle class, many of them moved out of Little Havana

into the Miami suburbs, where they have flavored their American dream

with a Spanish accent and a Caribbean style.

North of the Border I 603

Businessmen such as Botif6ll and Valls have done far better than the

national average. Today Cubans own a disproportionate share of the na-

tion's largest Hispanic-owned businesses. They have also been hired by

U.S. corporations as their intermediaries with Latin America. Until his

death in 1997, Roberto Goizueta, the chairman and president of Coca-

Cola, was "the richest and most influential Hispanic in the United

States." Under Goizueta's direction Coca-Cola not only grew and prof-

ited-its shares rose more than 900 percent in value-but it also became

a more international company, with Latin America and the Caribbean

accounting for much of its lucrative expansion overseas. After his death

from cancer, Coca-Cola maintained a bilingual website in his memory,

as a "tribute to the man who brought the company to the gates of the 21st

Century."7 Coca-Cola's new international focus reflected Goizueta's own

background. It also paralleled the increasingly international orientation

of Miami's Cuban-led economy. With Cubans who spoke their language and understood their culture

running Miami's financial institutions, Latin American capital-flight

capital looking for a safe harbor or drug money in need oflaundering-

poured into South Florida. Its banks became some of the nation's busiest

and most profitable-Republic National went from some ten million

dollars in deposits in 1967 to over one billion dollars by 1992-and

Miami became the financial capital of the Caribbean Basin.

It also became the U .S. commercial gateway to Latin America.

Miami's port surpassed New Orleans in its Latin American trade, and its

airport bested Atlanta's in its international traffic. "We are responsible

for making Miami a center of commerce with Latin America," claimed

Luis Botif6ll. "Because even though Miami has a very good geographi-

cal position, in order to succeed in attracting people from Latin Amer-

ica you have to speak their language," he stressed. "So we provided the

language . And the multinational companies started using Cubans as rep-

resentatives in Latin America. So these Cubans were more or less am-

bassadors of goodwill for Miami. And the people in Latin America real-

ize if we have to do something in the United States we better go to Miami

604 I Americas

where we can make ourselves understood. So we created that relation be-

tween Miami and Latin America which is in certain part the reason why

Miami has grown so much," Botif6ll asserted. "Castro was a blessing for Miami!"

In recent years, Miami's Cuban community has begun to flex its po-

litical muscles as well as its economic strength. At first, Cuban exiles con-

centrated their economic energies on making it in Miami, while focus-

ing their political efforts at the national level on trying to influence U.S.

policy toward Castro's Cuba. Right-wing exiles grouped in semiclandes-

tine organizations such as Alfa-66, many of whose members had been

trained by the CIA, made politics their priority. Their goal was to over-

throw Castro and they were willing to use intimidation, even terrorism, against those who did not share this objective.

As the years passed and Castro consolidated power, Miami's Cuban

community also began to focus on local politics. At first, Miami's Cubans

were content to support a Puerto Rican, Maurice Ferre, a diplomatic

moderate, for mayor. But as their numbers and citizenship grew, Cubans

pressed for a comparable share of political power. By 1990, Cubans were

a majority in Miami and they deserted Ferre to choose one of their own,

Harvard-educated Xavier Suarez, as the first Cuban mayor of a major

U.S. city. He was followed by Joe Carollo in 1996. Also, in 1996, they

elected Alex Penelas as Miami-Dade County's first Executive Mayor.

Penelas, a dynamic, telegenic politician with national ambitions, leads

the Southeast's largest metropolitan area, with more than 2 million res-

idents. In 2004, Miami-Dade votes helped elect Mel Martinez, the first Cuban-American U.S. senator.

Cubans have been equally successful in national politics. Unlike

Mexican-Americans, the wealthier and more conservative Cuban-

American community linked itself to the Republican party, which it

helped to break the Democrats' domination of Florida politics. In return, successive Republican administrations in Washington gave its Cuban

constituents, led by the right-wing Cuban National Foundation, virtual

control over its policy toward Castro's Cuba, rewarding them with the

North of the Border I 605

creation of Radio Marti, a powerful station run by conservative Cubans

and beamed to Cuba. Cuban-Americans became the first community of

Latin American and Caribbean origin to gain the kind of leverage over

U.S. policy toward their country of origin exercised by Jewish-

Americans or Greek-Americans. They maintained this leverage even

under the Democratic Clinton administration and extended it under

George W Bush.

With economic and political power have come resentments-from

the former Anglo majority they displaced, from the African-American

minority whose hopes of progress they dashed in the process of securing

their own, and from other immigrant groups that have fared less well.

Haitians, for example, have bristled at the special treatment that

Cubans have received, which they ascribe to racial discrimination. The

most dramatic difference has been in the past reception of would-be im-

migrants from Cuba and Haiti, neighboring islands with very different

populations and politics. Cubans have been welcomed as political

refugees from a "totalitarian government ... while the Haitians also were

coming from an authoritarian government but were still not accepted in

this country," charged Rolande Dorancy, an attorney at Miami's Haitian

Refugee Center. To her, this proved that "it's a racial problem. The

Cubans are considered to be white and the Haitians are black." As a re-

sult, she claimed, instead of the open-arms welcome that Cuban refugees

received, the Haitian "boat people" fleeing their country's brutal military

dictatorship were intercepted at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard and, as

"economic migrants," returned to their country, where many suffered

persecution. In fact, many Haitian refugees were fleeing political perse- cution, while many Cuban immigrants were looking for better economic

opportunities.

But even those Haitians who made it to Miami---over roo,ooo by

1998-complain that they have been discriminated against by the U.S.

government. "If you walk through Little Haiti and Little Havana, you

will see there's a big difference," Dorancy underscored, contrasting Hait- ian poverty with Cuban prosperity. "The Haitians who are coming don't

606 I Americas

have a way of supporting themselves economically. But the Cubans do,

because the U.S. government gave them their patronage," she charged.

Haitians also face job discrimination from Cubans in Miami, she

claimed, and not "only because we don't speak Spanish, because we do

have Haitians speaking Spanish. It is because of the color of our skin."

Many African-Americans in Miami feel even more resentful. "Before

the influx of Cubans in the early 1960s, blacks felt that with the civil

rights movement, we were in the process of really energizing our com-

munity economically and politically," recounted African-American at-

torney H. T Smith. "Now, since so much is based upon Latin America

and speaking Spanish, African-Americans blame Cubans for taking away

their jobs and political empowerment ... At least 90 percent of black

Miami" does.

African-American community leaders like Smith argue that local An-

glos still "have the money and the real power" in Miami. He contends

that they have manipulated these tensions to play off "the African-

American community and the Cuban-American community against each

other in the typical divide-and-conquer-type approach to maintain its

power."

To many Anglos, however, their concern is not retaining power in

Miami, but "becoming foreigners in their own country." Philip Thomas,

a leader of Miami's "English only" movement, was willing to acknowl-

edge that Cuban immigrants had "given a great impetus to the city," but

contended that "the quality of life has suffered" in Miami. "Whereas be-

fore we had a fairly homogeneous community and things were quiet and

peaceful, now you have a great deal of ethnic tension that we didn't have

before. Nearly two thirds of the people living here now have come from

other parts of the Americas, bringing in a wide variety of cultures and a

spectrum of other languages, Spanish more than any other." Thomas's

daughter had had to learn Spanish before she could land a job in a local

bank. "Spanish has become so much a dominant language here, that if

you're not conversant in Spanish, you are pretty much frozen out of a

great many opportunities."

North of the Border I 607

It was this growing predominance of Spanish in Miami that persuaded

the Herald, the city's leading newspaper, to begin publishing a Spanish-

language edition in 1976. For the Herald, a venerable daily confronted by

dramatic changes in the community it served, it was a business decision,

as was its creation in 1987 of a full-fledged Spanish newspaper, El Nuevo

Herald. Its Anglo publishers sought "to meet the needs of more people

coming in from different parts of Latin America-Central Americans,

Colombians, Puerto Ricans," explained El Nuevo editor Carlos Verdecia.

"The Cuban exodus stopped, but that made the Hispanic community

more diverse and we needed to address that." Today only half of this

Spanish-speaking community is Cuban, and El Nuevo Herald has become

"not a Cuban paper" but rather "a paper for all Hispanics in South

Florida." Despite its efforts to adapt to changing demographics, the Miami Her-

ald has had to confront differences in political culture. When El Nuevo

Herald published charges of corruption leveled against Jorge Mas

Canosa, the leader of the Cuban National Foundation, Carlos Verdecia

was accused of being a "Communist" and received death threats. "The

Cuban-American National Foundation," Verdecia asserted, "is a group

that has been very successful in changing the approach to the Cuban

issue in the political system of the United States. They created PACs,

they created lobbying arms. They've been very influential in Washing-

ton." But "they have not been as successful in learning how to deal with

a free press in a democratic system." In a Miami dominated by Cuban ex- iles, a hard line on Castro-and unquestioning support of his enemies-

is still a political litmus test. The death of Mas Canosa in 1997, however,

left a vacuum that has yet to be filled, and created an opening for more

moderate Cuban voices to be heard, although this gradual process may

take a generation. As the generation that fled Cuba ages and passes from the scene, their

obsession with overthrowing Castro and support of rightist politics may

fade as well. The generation of Cubans raised in the United States has

other concerns and priorities, more similar to those of their Anglo peers

608 / Americas

than their Cuban-born parents. They have gone to college in similar

proportions and acquired the professional degrees that are passports to

success in the United States.

They have also integrated into U.S. society much more than their par-

ents and absorbed far more of Anglo culture, while infusing it with their

own unique contribution. Their stance is symbolized by the crossover

success of Gloria Estefan, the "Latin Madonna," whose fusion of Anglo-

American pop lyricism with Caribbean rhythms made her a national star.

Estefan, the daughter of a Batista bodyguard who was captured at the Bay

of Pigs, lacks his political commitments and stresses the difference be-

tween her generation and older Cuban exiles who have attacked her for

supporting cultural exchanges with Havana. "Cubans who've grown up

in the United States have the best of both worlds," she affirmed, "because

we've been inspired by the business mind and the unbelievable freedom

of the Anglo world, but we have a lot of our own ethnic flavor, especially

inMiami."8

Unless the collapse of Castro's Cuba or another massive wave of

refugees fleeing the crisis of communism reinforces their preoccupation

with the island to the south, Miami's Cuban community is likely to con-

tinue its successful integration into North American society on its own

terms.

To some, this Cuban success story-sticking together and using

their numbers, language, and culture to obtain their American dream-

is a formula for other Latino groups to follow. To others, the Cuban suc-

cess was a product of a time and place that are difficult to replicate. Luis

Botif6ll himself stressed the uniqueness of the Cuban experience in

Miami, with its large numbers of professionals and businessmen. He was

also aware that the peculiar advantages of Miami were not confined to

its geographical location. "Coming to Miami had the advantage that

Miami was a little place, so our presence here could be important," Bo-

tif6ll explained. If "we had gone to New York or Chicago, I'm sure we would not be successful, because we would get mixed up in that big me-

tropolis."

North of the Border I 609

PUERTO RICAN AND PROUD

June 14 is Flag Day in the United States, and in New York, red, white,

and blue flags were everywhere on a hot Sunday in 1992. Yet the flags

were not the stars and stripes of the United States, but the lone-star ban-

ner of Puerto Rico. Pride was the watchword for the day, along with an

insistence that with education and persistence Puerto Ricans, too, could

share the American dream, despite increasing poverty, unemployment,

drug use, street crime, and school dropouts. It was the largest march in the Puerto Rican Day parade's thirty-five-

year history, with some one hundred thousand marchers and more than

a million spectators, making it the year's biggest demonstration of eth-

nic pride in New York City. The high turnout was reflected in the polit-

ical importance of the event, as candidates of all ethnic backgrounds and

ideological persuasions used the occasion to woo a potentially decisive

voting bloc, although one that, like Mexican-Americans, too often has

not registered and shown its political strength at the polls.

It was a joyous occasion and a vibrant parade, with drum majorettes

dressed like Middle Americans but moving to syncopated Caribbean

rhythms exemplifying the mix of North and Latin American that ~s

today's "Nuyoricans," or New York Ricans. As the marchers made their

way up Fifth Avenue past Rockefeller Center, little girls in red, white, and

blue waved Puerto Rican flags from their fathers' shoulders in time to the

salsa beat. "We are here to show our pride in being Puerto Rican and to

celebrate our culture," one man in the crowd explained as others nodded

agreement. "We are both Americans and Puerto Ricans."

After Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans are the largest group of

Hispanics on the U.S. mainland. What makes this remarkable is th~t

Puerto Rico has a population-a little under 4 million in 2000-that 1s

roughly one third the size of Cuba's. There are nearly as many Puerto

Ricans on the mainland-some 3 .4 million-as on the island. Part of the

explanation for this proportionally larger Puerto Rican presence is _that

they are not foreign immigrants but, since 1917, U.S. citizens by birth,

610 / Americas

who need no visas to make the journey and no green cards to remain or

work.

Like Cuba, Puerto Rico came within the U.S. orbit as a result of the

Spanish-American War of 1898, which transformed a Spanish colony

into a U.S . possession. Capital from the mainland flooded the island,

turning self-sufficient farms into export plantations and their displaced

peasants into rural migrants to burgeoning cities. The Depression of the

1930s hit Puerto Rico with particular severity. New Deal reformers re-

sponded with the creation of a self-governing "commonwealth" and a

program of industrial development known as "Operation Bootstrap,"

which modernized the island but failed to provide jobs for most of the

migrants flooding its cities.

When their expectations of jobs in the industries they saw around

them and of participating in the consumer society they saw on television

were disappointed in San Juan and Ponce, Puerto Ricans sought to ful-

fill them on the mainland, aided by inexpensive postwar air fares and ag-

gressive labor recruiting for expanding U.S . industries in need of un-

skilled workers. In 1945 there were fewer than one hundred thousand

Puerto Ricans living on the mainland, but their numbers multiplied rap-

idly during the decades that followed.

Most of them settled in the New York City area, where Puerto Rican

men found jobs in factories, hotels, and restaurants, while women

worked as seamstresses and domestics. As with Mexicans in the South-

west, Puerto Ricans filled the need for low-wage menial labor in the ex-

panding economy of the Northeast. Over time, the concentration of

mainland Puerto Ricans in New York fell from 80 percent in 1950 to less

than 40 percent by 1980. They branched out into New England, where

Hartford, the insurance capital, with its service jobs, became their second

largest mainland city and the mill towns of Massachusetts offered factory

work. They also headed west to Chicago, where the Puerto Rican and

Mexican migration streams met and mingled. In New York, Puerto Ri-

cans settled in decaying neighborhoods vacated by earlier immigrant

groups who had made it into the middle class and moved out to the sub-

North of the Border I 6 II

urbs, turning Italian East Harlem into Spanish Harlem and the Jewish

Lower East Side into Loisaida. By 1980 New York had become the

world's largest Puerto Rican city.

By then the light industries of the Northeast had begun to decline in

the face of competition from lower-wage areas of the U.S. South and the

Third World. Moreover, the Puerto Rican hold on unskilled jobs in New

York was being contested by newer immigrants-many of them illegal-

from other countries of Latin America and the Caribbean who were will-

ing to work for less and in conditions that Puerto Ricans, as U.S. citizens

and union members, would no longer accept.

But escalating unemployment in Puerto Rico itself combined with the

presence of relatives and the availability of social services in New York to

sustain the flow of migrants despite the decline of job opportunities. The

result was an enlarged but impoverished Puerto Rican population, which

at the start of the new century was in danger of joining poor African-

Americans as a permanent underclass, with similar income and education

levels, drug problems and crime rates.

But many Nuyoricans are neither poor nor drug pushers. They have

made it into the middle class and become educated professionals, who

offer their community political and cultural leadership. Nearly rn per-

cent of mainland Puerto Ricans are college graduates, double the rate of

Mexican-Americans, although only half the national average. Geraldo

Rivera and Jennifer Lopez are only two of the Puerto Rican success sto-

ries who have become household names in Anglo as well as Puerto Rican

homes. Even in areas like the South Bronx that have become national bywords

for poverty and urban blight, Puerto Ricans have struggled to retain their

dignity and culture. Lacking the political strength of California's Chi-

canos or the economic resources of Miami's Cuban community, Puerto

Ricans have turned to their culture as a source of community, identity,

and pride. In burned-out neighborhoods whose empty lots were filled

with garbage and industrial wastes and whose streets had been taken over

by drug dealers, community gardens began to appear, along with casitas,

612 / Americas

little frame houses that served as cultural centers and places for children

to play and teenagers to hang out.

For Jose Rivera, who was born in Puerto Rico but raised in the Bronx,

the casitas are also an affirmation of his community's continuity, of its

links to its island legacy and culture. "The casitas go back to Puerto Rico ,

where people would build little houses by the rivers that they could move

from place to place when the government forced them to relocate," he

explained. But few of the Puerto Rican migrants who moved into the

apartment buildings of New York City thought that the time would come

when they would once again build their casitas-in the Bronx.

"In the late 1960s we had a lot of problems in the Bronx with fires,"

Rivera recounted. "Landlords were benefiting from the destruction of

their buildings for the insurance, and you had fires that would burn down

five or six complete blocks." His own neighborhood "turned into a des-

olate area" of demolished buildings and empty lots. "And people got

tired of seeing them used to dump garbage and abandoned cars and in-

dustrial wastes, so people got together and planted community gardens

and built these casitas . .. so that they would have a place to hang out," he

explained. "People would come to the casita to play music or to celebrate

holidays together."

The casitas have defied the efforts of an uncomprehending city bu-

reaucracy to tear them down and emerged as oases of hope and symbols

of the survival of New York's Puerto Rican community even amid the

squalor and violence of the South Bronx. They also began the renewal of

Jose Rivera's neighborhood. The communities organized themselves

around the casitas, but then went on to bring the gangs and drug problems

of their barrios under control. This demonstration that they could fight

urban blight was recognized by the city, and Rivera's neighborhood is now

"being remodeled and becoming a good place to live, with lots of smaller

houses, which are less vulnerable to vandalism"-and more Puerto Rican,

he asserted, "because many of us are from the country. So it's really like

bringing Puerto Rico here: The casitas are Puerto Rico in New York."

They are also cultural centers, where Puerto Ricans like Jose Rivera

North of the Border I 613

maintain their heritage. Rivera is a full-time musician, lead singer, and

drummer with Los Pleneros de la '2 1, a group "dedicated to the preser-

vation of Puerto Rican culture and Afro-Caribbean folk music," he ex-

plained. It was organized in 198 3 by a group of musicians whose parents

had known each other on the island. Today they keep alive the traditional

music of Puerto Rico-the Hispanic plena, with its topical lyrics, and the

Afro-Caribbean bomba, with its evocation of plantation culture and Spiri-

tist rites of possession.

But the Pleneros do more than just preserve the old songs. They also

create new ones, itself an old tradition. In Puerto Rico, explained Rivera,

plenas ''were like a newspaper-people would write plenas about what was

happening and take them from town to town." The Pleneros de la '21

maintained this tradition as well. "Two days after the Rodney King trial

verdicts" in Los Angeles, he related, "we had a song about it."

"This is our music, the music of our parents," Rivera stressed, adding

that the Pleneros' role was to bring it to their own children, even in the

heart of New York City. On a steamy June Saturday in Central Park,

Puerto Ricans of all ages formed an enthusiastic audience for the Plen-

eros, including teenagers who looked more likely to be singing salsa than

plena. For Nelly Tanco, one of the group's featured singers, this enthu-

siasm was understandable. "I used to be into salsa myself, but I feel that

in this more traditional music I am more into my country," she explained.

"When you talk about salsa, it is a mix of everybody's music, but when

you are talking about traditional music like plena, you are talking about

something as Puerto Rican as rice and beans," she affirmed. "Put it this

way: We cannot live without rice and beans-and the same is true for our

music."

But for many Nuyoricans, who grew up in the ghettos of Manhattan

and the Bronx with African-Americans and are often regarded as "blacks"

by a North American society that does not recognize mulattos, rap--it-

self a stepchild of Jamaican dub-is a more natural musical outlet than

plena or even salsa, the popular music of today's Puerto Rico.

"We were raised in the ghetto, and all our friends was all into hip hop.

614 / Americas

Every street comer there was a jam. So we just got influenced by that and

began to rap, because it was there," explained Rick "Puerto Rock" Ro-

driguez, lead singer of Latin Empire, a dynamic Nuyorican rap group. "If

we would have been raised in Puerto Rico, we'd probably be singing

salsa." Although they had been bored as children by the sentimental

boleros of a Daniel Santos that their parents loved, "we don't dislike salsa

or anything-we love it and we include it into our raps." This mix was a

natural one for Nuyoricans like Latin Empire's Anthony "Krazy Taino"

Boston, who "started off speaking Spanglish. I mean Spanish at home,

then all of a sudden I began speaking English at school, and then I started

to adapt to both, and I found myself mixing them both." The result was

"street jams with a Spanish flavor," said Rick, describing his "bilingual

rap," which mixes rhymes in both languages-like reggaeton.

Yet, now that they are "older and wiser," they are proud of the songs of

their parents, which also show up in their raps. Because "if you lose your cul-

ture," stressed Tony, "then you gonna be lost in the sauce." Latin Empire

sees their own raps as a continuation of the Puerto Rican plena tradition, but

in a different context and with a different beat. Rap is like "plena, saying the

story of something that happened in one pueblo," Rick explained. It was one

reason "the older people give us R-E-S-P-E-C-T," affirmed Tony, but it

also made the younger Nuyoricans "feel proud of their culture," Rick

stressed. "Like yeah, that's right, I'm Puerto Rican and proud."

Puerto Rican artists and community activists have taken the lead in

this effort to preserve and promote their unique culture in an urban en-

vironment where Nuyoricans are subject to the dual lures of mainstream

Anglo culture and African-American ghetto culture-the first a passport

to assimilation and ascent into the middle class, the second a reflection

of the racism, poverty, and urban problems that both communities share.

The Puerto Rican Traveling Theater-a mobile troupe that offers free

performances at community centers and schools around the city-has

satirized the willingness of upwardly mobile Puerto Ricans to deny their

cultural heritage as the price of assimilation. In The English-Only Restau-

rant no Spanish is spoken, and a ghetto macho who refuses to play by

North of the Border I 6 I 5

these rules is ostracized-until a police raid reveals them to be all "just

Puerto Ricans" in the eyes of Anglo society and their heritage reasserts

itself.

Ecuelecua is a community-based performance group in Manhattan's

Loisaida, or Lower East Side, which creates plays on themes of everyday

concerns such as domestic violence, which they develop through com-

munity informants and then present as part of a strategy of community

empowerment. "The role of culture in addressing the issues that Puerto

Ricans face in New York is a key one," argued director Marfa Mar. "It

goes back to the role that the arts have played in Puerto Rican and Latin

American history, which is that of education and bringing people to-

gether to analyze their problems and to celebrate their own power." Her

codirector, Ben Soto, agreed. "Puerto Ricans are one of the most assim-

ilated of the Latino groups, yet still you're always an outsider," he em-

phasized. Culture is "fundamental to the issue of political power, because

the way people see themselves is essential to their feeling capable of

doing things, to feeling that they can move forward."

But it is not just Puerto Rican artists who are maintaining their cul-

tural traditions and community in New York's concrete jungle. Ordinary

Nuyoricans share their fierce pride in being "Boricuas" (after the Taino

Indian name for the island) and in their culture and ethnic identity-

"even Puerto Ricans that don't speak Spanish and aren't into Spanish

music," underscored Rick Rodriguez. It is why Puerto Rican Day is an annual occasion for an outpouring of ethnic pride.

On Manhattan's Upper West Side, an area shared by Anglo profes-

sionals, African-Americans, and Latinos, the celebrations started the

night before, as Puerto Rican flags sprouted out of the basement apart-

ments of supers and syncopated Caribbean rhythms took over Broadway.

Around the comer from my house, a super had set up a stand selling "I

am Proud to be Puerto Rican" buttons and homemade paste/es de bacaliio,

pastries stuffed with salt codfish. Behind him his friends sat in his door-

way-as their fathers had sat in front of their casitas in Puerto Rico-with

their guitars and maracas and bongo drums, playing "the old songs,"

6 r 6 I Americas

breaking into rakish harmonies, while their wives talked and their chil-

dren danced on the sidewalk. "We are proud to be Puerto Ricans," he ex-

plained, "and we want everyone in this neighborhood to know that."

QUISQUEYA HEIGHTS

The plane for Puerto Plata was late and we were the only ones waiting

in the empty airport lounge at Port-au-Prince, so conversation came nat-

urally.Jose was heading home for a visit to San Francisco. "No, not Cali-

fornia," he laughed, "the Dominican Republic." I should come and visit,

he said. They had everything there one could want-swimming pools,

restaurants, discos-and he had just built a new house for his mother

with the money he had made in New York. It turned out that he lived in

Washington Heights, my old neighborhood, so we talked about el barrio

and how it had changed: "It's Quisqueya Heights now, man," he crowed,

invoking the ancient Taina Indian name for his native island of Hispan-

iola. I didn't ask him what he did for a living, although his flamboyant

clothes, expensive jewelry, and streetwise style gave me a clue: Most of

the Dominican cocaine dealers in northern Manhattan come from the

little town of San Francisco de Marcoris overlooking the rich Cibao Val-

ley. Their remittances had transformed it from a poor hill town into a

repository of riches.

They had also given its sons an unsavory reputation. In 1991, 160 of

them returned home in closed coffins, victims of New York's drug wars.

The shooting death by police ofJose "Kiko" Garcia, an alleged cocaine

dealer, in disputed circumstances, had set off days of rioting in Wash-

ington Heights that one Dominican resident called "a mini-Los Ange-

les." It had not attracted the same national attention or caused compara-

ble losses, but the Dominican riots ofJuly 1992 revealed to many New

Yorkers for the first time the existence of a community that constitutes

the city's largest group of recent immigrants, yet one that had remained

largely invisible-except for headlines about crack houses and drug wars.

There are narcotics traffickers in the Dominican community of Wash-

North of the Border I 6 r 7

ington Heights, although much of their business is in selling to Anglo

users in cars from suburban New Jersey who cross the nearby George

Washington Bridge.

But few of the over half million Dominicans in New York are drug

dealers. Some are entrepreneurs who have opened supermarkets in neg-

lected ghetto areas. Many more are small businessmen, owners of stores,

bars, and restaurants throughout the city. Most are manual workers in

factories where they earn the minimum wage or less. They are hard-

working immigrants whose remittances to their families in the Domini-

can Republic now constitute that island nation's largest source of dollars.

They are also one of New York's fastest-growing ethnic groups .

Like other immigration from the Caribbean Basin, the growing tide

of migrants from the Dominican Republic reflects U.S. involvement in

its internal affairs. It began during the 1960s, a decade of U.S . military

intervention, economic expansion, and political interference. It acceler-

ated during the 1980s, and by 2000 Dominicans were the seventh largest

immigrant group in the United States. It is also one of the most concen-

trated, but in New York, not in Miami, unlike their Caribbean neighbors

from Cuba. By 1985 Dominicans had become the largest foreign-born

group in New York-a status they maintained in 2005.

Unlike the Puerto Rican migrants, the new Dominican community in

New York is largely composed of middle-class people whose educational

and financial resources are greater than those of most of their compatri-

ots. Many are children of small landowners from the countryside who

were seeking ways to supplement their family incomes or to save the

money with which to expand or modernize their family farm. Others had

owned businesses in Santo Domingo and looked to set up their own en-

terprises in New York, or else to accumulate the capital to establish a

business back home. Most were forced to accept work that was beneath

their occupational status in the Dominican Republic, jobs they left as

soon as they had accumulated the capital to open their own businesses.

Today, Dominicans own mami y papi bodegas-mom and pop grocery

stores-throughout New York, and some have gone on from there, fill-

6 r 8 / Americas

ing the niche left vacant by the withdrawal of mainstream businesses

from ghetto areas. C-Town, an expanding chain of owner-operated su-

permarkets, is a good example of this Dominican success. It was created

by Krasdale Foods, a large grocery wholesaler, in 1975 to replace their

customers in the chain stores that had abandoned New York City for the

suburbs. Today, C-Town is a "voluntary association" of 167 franchised

stores with one billion dollars in sales a year. Roughly half of these stores

are owned by Dominicans, who impressed Krasdale president Charles

Krasne, himself the son of an immigrant Russian grocer, with their will-

ingness to work hard and take risks: "They are very industrious and they

stick their necks out," he asserted. "They came to New York to get rich,

and they succeeded."9

Mariano Diaz, who went to New York fifteen years ago without any

money and came to earn a six-figure income from his store, is a case in

point. Diaz began by working in his uncle's bodega in Queens, saving the

money for his own store. In 1982 he bought a bodega on moth Street in

Manhattan, which he sold in 1987 to help finance the C-Town store that

he leased on the ground floor of a building at the northwest corner of

Central Park, on the edge of Harlem. Dominican owner-operators like

Mariano Diaz manage the stores themselves, work six-day weeks and

twelve-hour days and double the normal profit margins. Diaz's store sales

exceed four million dollars a year, part of the more than one billion dol-

lars in groceries sold by Dominican storeowners in New York annually.

Bodegas and supermarkets may be emblematic of the Dominican road

to riches, but they are not the only route. Inwood, at the northern tip of

Manhattan, is honeycombed with stores and services whose names and

owners reveal their Dominican origins. Tucked in between Rosa's Bar

and a pool hall in the shadow of the elevated subway line, El Lina looks

from the outside like so many other small Latin American restaurants in

New York-a space divided between a counter and a table area, clean but

modest, with plastic flowers and tablecloths and tile floors. But to

Onesimo Quesada and his brother Santiago, it is the start of their Amer-

ican dream. Following in the footsteps of an elder brother who had mi-

North of the Border I 6 I 9

grated in 1981, they came to New York from Santiago, the Dominican

Republic's second largest city. There they had trained under their father,

the head chef in El Pez Dorado, or the Golden Fish, honored in 1991 as

the country's best restaurant. But after sixteen years, they had little to

show for their labors except the skills they had learned, and little chance

of going further in their own country. So they decided to come to the

United States to open a restaurant of their own. "There is more oppor-

tunity here," Onesimo, the head waiter, explained as he served plates of

rice, red beans, and fried plantains that the New York Times has described

as "an essay in Caribbean aesthetics." 10 He served us with a flourish

learned in more elegant surroundings, but with a pride in his food and a

confidence in his future. "This restaurant is just a beginning," he con-

fided. "Someday we will have a restaurant in New York like El Pez Do-

rado." For the Quezadas, the United States of America remains the land of opportunity.

During the 1990s, Dominicans elected their first city and state legis-

lators. Then, in 1998, they had something else to celebrate: Sammy

Sosa's 66 home runs and most valuable player award in America's Na-

tional Pastime. Sosa's smiling face replaced drug dealer mug shots as the

image of Dominicans in the national consciousness, and New York

Mayor Rudy Giuliani presented the Dominican baseball star with the

keys to the city after a tickertape parade up the "Canyon of Heroes."

Four years later, the Yankees paid a record $2 52 million to bring another

MVP Dominican slugger, Alex Rodriguez, to star in the Big Apple. Do- minicans had arrived in "America."

LATINOS

The United States attracted more immigrants during the 1980s than in

any previous decade. They came from all over the world to "the land of

liberty," but almost half came from Latin America and the Caribbean.

Mexico accounted for nearly half of these 3. 5 million legal immigrants,

with the Dominican Republic providing the next largest American con-

620 / Americas

tingent, followed by El Salvador and Jamaica, Cuba, Haiti, Colombia,

and Guyana. But many of those who settled in the United States did so

illegally and a count of their numbers would increase these official totals.

In New York, a city that historically has been the gateway to America

for immigrants, these recent arrivals have transformed its neighbor-

hoods, creating a "new New York" very different from the old. The 2000

census documented a "Hispanic" population of New York City of nearly

2.2 million, but this is an underestimate. Many New Yorkers from Latin

America and the Caribbean entered the United States illegally and are

reluctant to be counted for fear of being deported. Guesstimates, more-

over, are part of a political numbers game that makes any statistic suspect,

as the distribution of power and resources depends upon the numbers

that are accepted. Today Hispanic-Americans are New York's largest minority, account-

ing for 2 7 percent of its population. New York has twice as many Puerto

Ricans as San Juan, almost 800,000, making them the city's largest eth-

nic group. It also has over half a million Dominicans. Since 1990, how-

ever, Mexicans have been the fastest-growing Latin American group in

New York, bringing their enumerated population to over 125,000 in

2000, along with more than rno,ooo Ecuadorians, almost 80,000 Colom-

bians, some 60,000 Cubans, and substantial numbers of Central Ameri-

cans. In addition to these Spanish-speaking Americans, New York is also

home to a growing community of Brazilians, more than 200,000

Haitians, and more than half a million West Indians (now a quarter of the

city's Black population), most of whom are Jamaicans but with nearly

90,000 from Trinidad and Tobago and with the smaller islands repre-

sented as well. Together they have made New York the world's largest

Caribbean city, not only turning Washington Heights into Quisqueya

Heights, but also transforming Brooklyn's Crown Heights into a West

Indian "island," whose annual Carnival parade attracts a million people.

It is in the borough of Queens that the new New York is most clearly

on display. Here, Koreans and Cambodians, Russians and Jamaicans live

cheek by jowl with Latinos in neighborhoods where an elementary

North of the Border I 62 r

school like Corona's P.S. 19 may have children from forty-seven coun-

tries, including virtually all the Latin American republics. "We are a lit-

tle OAS," quipped the school's principal, Dr. Barbara Miles, herself the

daughter of West Indian immigrants.

This multicultural mosaic is visible in the street signs and audible in

the accents of passersby. It is also savored in the great variety of foods and

restaurants available in Queens. "You can see the melting pot in the

restaurants-Argentine and Uruguayan, Colombian and Dominican,

Peruvian and Ecuadoran," explained actor John Leguizamo, who lived in

Jackson Heights during the 1980s. Today, the best Argentine chorizo

sausages and meat pies in New York are to be found in Jackson Heights,

home to the largest Argentine community in North America, most of

them white middle-class professionals.

But Argentines are only one of the many groups from Latin America

and the Caribbean who have made Queens their new home and the new

New York an inter-American mosaic. There is a five-block stretch along

Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights that contains no fewer than ten

Colombian restaurants. Underneath the elevated subway tracks, store-

fronts advertise delivery services to the families left behind in Bogota and

Baranquilla, Cali and Medellin. A few blocks farther into Corona, the

neighborhood becomes Dominican and the sound of the Spanish and

smell of the food changes. Here, a bottinica selling herbal remedies and

statues of Afro-Caribbean santos competes for attention with Blockbuster

Video. In the other direction are polyglot neighborhoods, with Ja-

maicans and Koreans, Peruvians and Filipinos mixed with Mexicans and

Ecuadorians, in addition to older groups of Greeks and Italians. It was in

such a multicultural neighborhood that Leguizamo spent his teenage

years in the 1980s. "School was like Benetton," he recalled. "You'd look

around the class and there were so many different colors and faces."

Most of those faces were from Latin America, but "it was different

growing up in Queens than in Miami, where there is one big group of

Hispanics-the Cubans," he underscored. "I grew up in a mixed neigh-

borhood-even among the Latinos. There were a lot of Puerto Ricans

622 / Americas

and Colombians, but there were also Salvadorans and Argentines, and

some Hondurans and lot of Ecuadorians. And now there are many Do-

minicans and Mexicans as well." Though these groups all spoke Spanish,

within Latin America they stressed their separate national identities, with

their racial differences and claims of superiority. In Queens, on the other

hand, "you saw the differences, but it didn't matter. In Queens, we all felt

drawn to each other and there was an instant bond, because of this lan-

guage and culture that we share," he explained. "People started to iden-

tify not as Colombians or Puerto Ricans but as Latinos."

The result was the emergence of a new synthetic Latino identity and

a new syncretic popular culture. Leguizamo's friends danced to reggae

and rap, as well as to cumbia and tango, merengue and salsa. It is salsa, which cannot be identified with any one country of the Hispanic

Caribbean but draws on the musical traditions of all of them, plus the di-

verse Hispanic communities in the United States, that best expresses this

new "Latino" culture.

Leguizamo, the child of a Puerto Rican father and a Colombian

mother, exemplifies this Latino identity, which he explores in perform-

ance pieces, like his prize-winning Mambo Mouth, with its focus on the

working-class and street people of his Queens adolescence, or its suc-

cessor, Spic-O-Rama, which examines the middle-class Latinos of to,jay.

Mambo Mouth-Salsa Mouth might have been a better title for his wide-

ranging and pungent skits-he satirizes a rogues' gallery of Latino types,

from an older generation Cuban talk-show host bragging about his sex

appeal to a teenage Puerto Rican street kid looking for his first sexual en-

counter, and from a failed Colombian "Inca God Dad" to a successful

Latino "Crossover King" who offers seminars on how to assimilate-and

become Japanese.

But his most poignant and explicitly political skit is the confrontation

between an illegal Mexican immigrant and an I.N.S. official of Domini-

can origin who is implementing Anglo laws and deporting him. To the

Anglo majority in his audience, Leguizamo has his Pepe Vasquez proclaim

in Spanish-accented English: "Come on ... it's not like I'm stealing or !iv-

North of the Border I 62 3

ing off you good people's taxes. I'm doing the shit jobs Americans don't

want ... Who the hell wants to work for $2.25 an hour picking toxic

pesticide-coated grapes?" But his message to the large Latino minority

watching his show is expressed in Vasquez's appeal in Spanish to his Do-

minican interrogator: "Somos de la misma sangrita. Los latinos debemos ser

unidos y jamds seremos vencidos"-"We are of the same blood. Latinos ought

to be united and if we are, we will never be defeated."

"And I truly believe that," Leguizamo affirmed. "The characters in my

show are representatives of the community. They are prototypes."

Leguizamo explained: "America may not realize it yet but Latin proto-

types are being created right now-and not just by me. It is these mambo

kings and salsa queens, Aztec lords and Inca princesses, every Hernan-

dez and Fernandez, whom this country will one day come to understand

and respect."

John Leguizamo's one-man show not only won critical praise, it also

played to sold-out theaters and was featured on HBO. It is only one of

the many signs that Latino culture is coming of age within the United

States and winning increasing appreciation among non-Hispanics as

well. In 1990, Oscar Hijuelos won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel The

Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, with its nostalgic evocation of the world

of the first Latin crossover dream, the Cuban musicians of the postwar

era.

In 1998, the year "Nuevo Latino" cuisine became the rage in New

York City, a symbolic shift took place. The Manhattan restaurant Main

Street became Calle Ocho, the main street of Miami's Little Havana, the

home of its hot new chef, Alex Garcia. Its menu followed suit, exchang-

ing the bland "comfort food" of main street for the strong flavors of Latin

American dishes and Caribbean spices. Garcia, who was born in Cuba,

raised in Miami, and trained in New York's famed Culinary Institute, cre-

ates sophisticated dishes inspired by the entire region. He is clear about

the roots of his success. "I cook Nuevo Latino cuisine," he stressed, "but

I also serve rice and beans." 11 If Americans are what they eat, Latinos

have won acceptance at last.

624 / Americas

The risks-as well as the richness-of multicultural fusion is the cen-

tral subject of Mexican poet-performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena,

whose many Mexican masks reveal the ambiguities of North-South cul-

tural tensions that are at once destructive and creative. More self-

consciously intellectual than Leguizamo, G6mez-Pefia focuses on the

border as a metaphor for U.S.-Latin American relations, as an obstacle

for Mexican immigrants like his family, and as an opportunity for the

United States. "There is a great new fusion taking place," he argued, "and

I think that syncretism is as much a part of U.S. culture as it is in Latin

America." 12 Along both sides of the two-thousand-mile U.S.-Mexico

frontier, a new "border culture" has emerged, a fusion of both cultures

into a new popular culture that will enrich both countries. Los Lobos,

the award-winning Chicano band from Los Angeles that plays every-

thing from rancheras to rhythm and blues, is one example. The murals

of East L.A. artist Judy Baca, which draw on both the Mexican muralists

and the WP.A. populist tradition while adding something uniquely Chi-

cano, are another.

For G6mez-Pefia the task is for Latinos to "rediscover" their Amer-

ica and for Anglos to understand the Latino experience of North Amer-

ica. It is a goal that brings border art into the mainstream of the U.S. de-

bate over bilingualism and multiculturalism and what it means to be an

"American."

AMERICANS

When I was growing up in the Inwood section of Washington Heights

at the north end of Manhattan Island during the postwar years, it was an

ethnic mosaic of Irish and Jews, Germans and Greeks, Italians and Ar-

menians. Most of my schoolmates were children or grandchildren of im-

migrants, who were trying to make it into the middle class and fulfill

their American dream in New York City.

Today my old neighborhood seems changed. The language heard

most frequently on the streets is Spanish, as are the signs on the stores.

North of the Border I 62 5

Most residents are from the Dominican Republic, part of the complex

wave of migration, legal and illegal, from south of our borders that has

transformed New York City-and the United States-during recent decades.

Below the Hispanic surface, though, much about my old neighbor-

hood remains the same. Most of these new neighbors are also hard-

working immigrants determined to make good in the United States. The

Irish bars now have Spanish names and the insistent rhythms of

merengue have replaced the lilting strains of Celtic harps in their juke-

boxes, but they remain local watering holes whose music defines their

ethnicity. The kosher grocery stores are now bodegas selling "tropical

products," but they still lend immigrant tables a nostalgic taste of home.

The neighborhood still functions as a way station of integration for im-

migrants on the way up into the lower middle class, and my old elemen-

tary school is still seen as their children's first step in that direction. Much

has been written about the new wave of immigrants from Latin America

and the Caribbean, but how different are they from the earlier waves of European immigrants?

Until recently, the "making of the United States" out of a "land of im-

migrants" was a linear story of progressive "Americanization," in which

the immigrants' acquisition of English-language skills and educational

credentials were their passports to success. Its popular counterpart was

the ideology of the "melting pot," in which immigrants lost their ethnic

characteristics and identities and emerged as "Americans."

In the wake of the ethnic revival that followed the black consciousness

movement of the r96os, historians are questioning whether assimilation

was ever as linear a process as an earlier generation believed, and arguing

that the melting pot was always more ideal than real. In addition, Latino

intellectuals like dramatist Ben Soto have criticized the melting pot as "a

dangerous place," where Puerto Ricans "just become sludge at the bot-

tom." Notions of "ethnic resilence" now shape scholarly studies, while

the "multicultural mosaic" has replaced the "melting pot" of assimilation

as the dominant metaphor of public policy and political debate.

626 / Americas

Although this revolution in conventional wisdoms reflects a reevalu-

ation of the experience of earlier immigrant groups, the seeming resist-

ance to assimilation by the new wave of immigrants from Latin America

and the Caribbean has become a driving force. Among Latinos, the ini-

tial formulation of this alternative vision emerged from Chicanos influ-

enced by the civil rights movement, but the notion of "La Raza"-a Mex-

ican fusion of Spaniard and Indian-was more a reaction to failure than

a recipe for success.

Among Latinos it was Miami's Cubans who first demonstrated that

success in the United States could be a product not of assimilation but of

banding together and resisting its lures. In South Florida they created an

ethnic enclave in which a knowledge of Spanish and an understanding of

Latin American culture became central to economic and political

achievement. "There's a good bit of bad feeling about that," Philip

Thomas asserted. This "bad feeling" found an expression in Thomas's

Dade Americans United, which for a time succeeded in making English

the sole legal language of Miami's Dade County. But legislation did lit-

tle to alter Miami's bilingual and multicultural character.

Thomas blames the Miami Herald's Spanish-language newspaper for

"encouraging people to retain their own language and culture almost to

the exclusion of English." For him it was a case of American institutions

adjusting to immigrants where it ought to be the other way around, as

had been the case in the past. For the Herald, it was an effort "to be re-

sponsive and sensitive to what the community needs," according to Car-

los Verdecia. "Everybody thought that Cubans would assimilate, that

they would start reading in English and there would be no need for a

Spanish-language publication," the editor recounted. What happened

was "quite the opposite. El Nuevo had to be launched as an expanded

newspaper in 1987 to meet the needs" of a new wave of immigrants who

"were more comfortable in Spanish." It is this continual flow of new im-

migrants that sustains Miami's Spanish language and culture-as it does

that of Los Angeles and New York.

For Anglos such as Philip Thomas, this is a sign that Hispanics are re-

North of the Border I 62 7

fusing to assimilate. Carlos Verdecia disagrees: "Hispanics and Cubans

feel that they are as American as apple pie," he insisted, and despite Anglo

fears, second-generation Cubans speak English well. "In fact, we are the

ones to worry," argued Verdecia, "because our children lose their Span-

ish"-a worry supported by recent studies. Thomas's concern was mis-

placed, he concluded. "I don't think there should be a fear of Miami los-

ing its English language, but I do think that it is so much richer for

having so many different cultures and so many different languages."

The Cuban success in a bilingual and multicultural Miami may be too

much a product of a particular time and place to serve as a model for

other immigrant groups. Elsewhere, the demand for bilingual education

and advocacy of a multicultural mosaic reflect frustration at the power-

lessness of even sizable Latino populations and the failure of schools to

stem the alarming dropout rates of Latino children, which augur ill for their future in a society stratified by education.

Yet Anglos like Philip Thomas are not the only ones worried about

the multicultural trend. Linda Chavez, a director of the U.S. Civil Rights

Commission under President Ronald Reagan, has attacked bilingual ed-

ucation and multiculturalism and argued for assimilation out of a con-

cern for both Hispanic success and U.S. unity. Chavez sees bilingualism

as an understandable response to high Latino dropout rates, but argues

that "the results are counterproductive and lead to increased segregation

and prejudice." She is concerned that Hispanic youngsters spend "their

entire school lives" in bilingual programs, leaving them unprepared for

the English-speaking society outside. She also worries that there are

communities in the United States where no English is spoken and criti-

cizes Spanish-language ballots for U.S. citizens who are supposed to

know English, transforming these communities into political enclaves as

well. Chavez defends the older notion of assimilation, which she recog-

nizes "has become a dirty word," arguing that Hispanics can assimilate

"and still celebrate their own traditions within their families." She warns

that "if we persist in emphasizing our separateness rather than our same-

ness, then we can only expect that race and ethnicity will be a major

628 / Americas

source of conflict in coming decades." 13 In California, these concerns

came together in 1998 in Proposition 227, a successful ballot initiative

that banned most bilingual education, winning many Hispanic votes with

the argument that it doesn't work.

Dr. Barbara Miles, the principal of P.S. 19 in New York, a city where

bilingual education is mandated for all children who lack the fluency to

learn in English, disagrees. The great majority of the students in her

Queens school come from Latin America and half of the kindergarten

classes are bilingual, with children learning thematic units in both Spanish

and English. She had received angry phone calls demanding: "Why are we

accommodating the needs of the Spanish-speaking children?" But Dr.

Miles argued that "research demonstrates quite clearly that children need

to be taught in their native language first and then we can transfer those

skills to English." She was convinced that bilingual education worked: At

P.S. 19, by fifth grade only one bilingual class remained to serve recently

arrived older children. All the other children were now able to learn in En-

glish. "That is our focus," Miles stressed. "We want them to become

English-speaking because they live in an English-speaking country."

Like their parents, few of whom are U.S . citizens, the children in P.S.

19 are proud of the country they came from, a pride that P.S. 19 en-

courages through activities that "celebrate the diversity" of its student

population. In one bilingual class, students choreographed and cos-

tumed a play in which they presented information about their countries

of origin. "We celebrate the independence day of the Dominican Re-

public," where most of the school's children come from, related Dr.

Miles. The children "told us about the history of the Dominican Re-

public, and it was very heartwarming when they sang the national an-

them of the Dominican Republic."

Yet, for Miles and her staff, "another aim is for all of the children to

be aware that they are or will be U .S. citizens. We pledge allegiance to

the flag every day," she stressed, "and every assembly begins with the

singing of 'America the Beautiful.'" The fifth-grade graduation, the cul-

North of the Border I 629

minating event for P.S. 19 students, featured patriotic songs sung by a

United Nations of young voices.

Even the kindergarten graduation celebrated the children's first steps

toward becoming "Americans," yet without losing their identities as Do-

minicans or Colombians. Watching their children create a ceremony in

both English and Spanish, Adolfo Avila was proud that his daughter had

"learned a lot at school," but also "proud that she speaks both languages."

So was Silvia Baiz, who was not yet a U.S. citizen, but was "very proud

to live in this country" and felt "one hundred percent American. And,"

she stressed, "all my children feel totally American."

The presence of a large and growing group of immigrants who speak

a foreign language, take pride in their distinctive culture, and insist on

bilingualism and a multicultural society has sparked alarm among many

in the United States-as was the case with nativist reactions to previous

immigrant waves. Former Colorado governor and vice-presidential can-

didate Richard Lamm articulated these fears when he wrote in The Im-

migration Time Bomb: The Frag;menting of America: ''Increasingly, the po-

litical power of ... Hispanics is being used not to support assimilation

but to advance 'ethnic pride' in belonging to a different culture." 14 Nor

was Lamm the only prominent U.S. critic of Hispanic migration. In

2004, influential Harvard professor Samuel Huntington charged that

"the persistent flow of Hispanic immigrants" was the biggest threat to

"America's national identity."15

There are some special characteristics of the recent wave of immi-

grants from Latin America and the Caribbean. There is more return mi-

gration and transnational communities, a reflection of shorter distances

and low air fares-although post-September 11 security measures have

made this more difficult. These new neighbors also arrived during the

era of the "new ethnicity," a time of revived ethnic awareness among all

hyphenated-Americans. There was greater demand for bilingual educa-

tion, and educators were more receptive to the need of immigrant chil-

dren for special programs to ease their integration into U.S. society.

630 I Americas

There has been more integration than assimilation perhaps among first-

generation immigrants, and greater reluctance among some of them to

become citizens.

But nativist concerns are misplaced. Bilingual education accelerates

both integration and assimilation. As in the past, assimilation has been a

gradual process, but the second generation of recent immigrants, U.S.

citizens at birth, speak better English and are more assimilated than their

parents. There is every reason to believe that succeeding generations will

continue the pattern of progressive assimilation-though with a greater

complexity and ethnic pride than may have been true for immigrants

who arrived in an era when such ethnic retention seemed less legitimate.

Even the Hispanic ethnic pride and politics that Lamm warns against

have both precedents in the past and a different meaning than he lends

them. In the past, such reaffirmation of ethnic identities was a step to-

ward the social and political integration of European immigrant groups,

many of which still vote for candidates of their ethnic origin. There is

every indication that the same is true of the new ethnic politics within

communities of Spanish American origin, who are learning the value of

citizenship and democracy by using them to defend their interests.

In 2004, Latino voters in Colorado and Florida assured the election

of two Hispanic U.S. Senators-a Mexican-American Democrat and a

Cuban-American Republican. The importance of Hispanic-American

votes was clear in the national campaigns of both parties in that election.

In its wake, George W. Bush named Mexican-American Alberto Gonza-

lez to be the nation's first Hispanic attorney general and is widely ex-

pected to appoint the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice.

At the local level too, Hispanics are participating more in politics and

becoming active citizens. In Los Angeles, experiences of the power of

the vote persuaded Mexicans in Bell Gardens to become U.S. citizens.

Across the country, legislation restricting social services for non-citizens

is having a similar impact. In 1998, moreover, Latino voters turned out

in record numbers to punish California Republicans for initiatives ban-

ning affirmative action and bilingual education and ending public serv-

North of the Border I 63 r

ices (including education) for illegal immigrants. Few communities have

learned to play the U.S. political game as well as Miami's Cuban com-

munity, but Chicanos and Haitians have tried to repeat their success in

influencing U.S. policy toward their countries of origin. In many ways

the newer immigrants are following in the footsteps of the old, who

learned to use their numbers and political influence to promote the in-

terests of their communities.

What is perhaps new is the question posed by these Latin American

communities to the larger U.S. society: Why do we have to give up our

culture of origin in order to become "American"-in a melting pot that

never really melted? It is a question that this nation of immigrants would

do well to ponder. In the century of the global village, in which interna-:

tional distances are shrinking but economic competition is increasing, an

insistence on "English Only" seems both anachronistic and self-

defeating. Miami's Cuban community has demonstrated how a bilingual

and multicultural environment can be an economic advantage in a new

world order of mobile capital and global sourcing. In Miami, where His-

panics have won the battle over bilingual education, the goal of the

school system is now bilingual fluency for all students. Within the pro-

posed hemispheric free-trade area, a knowledge of Spanish and Por-

tuguese and an understanding and appreciation of the cultures of Latin

America and the Caribbean will be indispensable for North Americans.

It is an argument for promoting a bilingual and multicultural society

within the United States instead of insisting on assimilation as the price

of acceptance.

The vibrant cultures that these immigrants bring with them can only

enrich the culture of the United States. The strong arms, needed skills,

and feisty entrepreneurship of immigrants from Latin America and the

Caribbean have already contributed to this country's economic progress,

helping to rejuvenate decaying cities and to maintain declining indus-

tries. Latinos have participated increasingly in this country's politics and

contributed their artistic traditions and talents as well. There is every

reason to believe that their children and grandchildren will play increas-

632 I Americas

ing roles in this country's future, just as the children and grandchildren

of European immigrants have done.

On Ellis Island in New York Harbor, a "Wall of Honor" bears the

names of hundreds of thousands of European immigrants who entered

the United States through this gateway to the "land ofliberty" during the

late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and helped to make this

country the land of opportunity. The recent wave of immigrants from

the Americas have arrived by more diverse routes-they have landed at

airports, traversed dangerous straits in small boats, and crossed porous

borders-and the site for their monument is less clear. Yet, a century

from now they too should merit a monument to their courage in immi-

grating and to their contribution to their new country.

The United States has always prided itself on being a land of immi-

grants, but historically its citizens have also been ambivalent about the

most recent immigrant wave. In the twenty-first century, people of Latin American and Caribbean origin will be the largest minority in the United

States, which will have to come to terms with the fact that they are not

immigrants but "Americans"-citizens of both the country and the

hemisphere that we all share.

EPILOGUE

Latin America and the Caribbean in the Twenty-First Century:

A New Millennium?

As Latin America and the Caribbean confront the twenty-first century,

the question is whether it will mean merely another century, or will also

usher in a new millennium in the lives of the people of the region. The

future may be hazardous to predict, but one prediction is safe to hazard:

the face of Latin America and the Caribbean will continue to change in

the twenty-first century.

The problem is to discern which of the late twentieth century changes

will continue into the new century-and which have run their course.

Many of the long term trends in the region-such as rural migration to

the cities or the growing roles of women outside the home-are likely to

continue in the new millennium. The same is true for the creative trans-

formation of religion and popular culture that this book has explored. Al-

though these shifts may be affected by government policies, they reflect

deeper historical processes in the economies, societies and cultures of

Latin America and the Caribbean.

Other changes of the late twentieth century represent the decisions of

policymakers and electorates, often in response to the failed policies of

the past. Some of the most dramatic and important changes have been in

economic policy. Throughout the region, policymakers have turned

away from protectionist, inward-looking models such as import substi-