Latino Unity Fails to Live Up to Hype

It may not have been the act that sealed his fate, but there is little doubt that Gov. Gray Davis’ signing of a bill that allows illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses didn’t do much to save his political skin. He must have known that his signature on legislation that he had twice vetoed would incur the wrath of many Anglo, black and Asian voters. But the governor evidently calculated that a windfall of Latino support would offset his Anglo losses. He was wrong.

According to the most recent Times poll, Latinos are much more likely to support the new driver’s license law than are their non-Latino counterparts. But when asked if they would be more or less likely to vote for a candidate who supported the legislation, the results were pretty much a wash. Though 32% of likely Latino voters said they would be more likely, 27% said they’d be less likely and 37% said it made no difference. I’m sure that is not what Davis had expected: alienating large numbers of white, black and Asian voters just to split the Latino vote.

Davis repeated a mistake many analysts have made during the recall campaign: He distilled the burgeoning and diversifying Latino electorate of 2.3 million into a lump of uniformity.

It’s not that the idea of providing licenses to undocumented immigrants is inherently bad. A few more security provisions to protect against fraud would have strengthened the legislation. In fact, the two previous bills contained these protections, and Davis vetoed both. The one he signed had fewer of them. So Davis’ about-face had nothing to do with policy. It was pure ethnic politics.

The bill’s backers initially tried to de-ethnicize the issue. They spoke of highway safety, greater numbers of insured drivers and the harm to society that comes from having millions of people living without rights and under the radar. But they tipped their hands when two of the bill’s supporters in Sacramento insisted on debating the issue in Spanish on the Assembly floor, presumably for the benefit of their colleagues in the Legislature with limited English- language skills.

For a generation now, Mexican American activists have been trying to portray the Latino population as a well-oiled political fighting machine. They’ve warned Anglo political bosses that if they do this, Latinos will be angry, or if they do that, Latinos will love them. A naive media accustomed to speaking in ethnic and racial shorthand followed along. When Davis signed the driver’s license bill last month, the San Diego Union Tribune claimed simply that “Latinos across the state celebrated.”

But for just as long as activists have been feigning unity, there have been writers warning Latinos against passing themselves off as what they are not. In their pioneering 1966 essay on Mexican Americans in the Southwest, Ernesto Galarza, Herman Gallegos and Julian Samora concluded that the “historical conditions for solidarity do not exist” for this ethnic group. A few years later, Galarza cautioned against the political culture that stressed unity and protest. “[An ethnic group] is unified mainly from without,” he wrote. “Its strategies must depend on alien decisions; it is constantly forced to be where the reaction and not the action is.”

Throughout the recall campaign, activists warned -- and some commentators echoed -- that Latinos would react in angry unison against this or that campaign tactic. They said a candidate’s support for Proposition 187, the 1994 anti-illegal-immigrant initiative, would unleash a wave of Latino indignation. But a Times poll in August revealed that Latino public opinion was much more nuanced than that. When asked whether a candidate’s support of Proposition 187 made them more or less likely to vote for that nominee, a hefty 42% of likely Latino voters said they’d be less likely. On the other hand, 9% said they would be more likely and fully 45% said it made no difference.

Though no ethnic experience is monolithic, Mexican Americans, who make up 77% of California Latinos, are even more wildly heterogeneous than most. African American history and identity were forged by a singular, collectively shared experience of forced migration and white oppression. American Jewish identity has been shaped by a tradition, thousands of years old, stressing continuity and cohesion. Other American immigrant waves have had a beginning, middle and end in which group self-definition gradually shifted from an immigrant identity to an ethnic American one. For many European immigrant groups, scholars can point to the year when the children of immigrants eclipsed their foreign-born parents both in numbers and cultural influence.

The same can be said for Mexican Americans. But because Mexican America is largely the product of successive waves of migration, the transition is not linear, one-way or even singular. The first wave became Americans after annexation and conquest in the mid-19th century. By the start of the 20th century, migration had turned Mexicans into a largely foreign-born group. By the 1930s, the children of immigrants were asserting their cultural preeminence. In 1970, 84% of Mexican Americans were native-born, and the majority of them were the grandchildren of immigrants. Twenty years later, the immigration that began in the mid-1970s had turned that equation on its head. By 1990 in Los Angeles County, two-thirds of adult Latinos were foreign-born.

In other words, the constant influx of unassimilated newcomers makes Mexican American integration a perpetual process. Far from having a fixed identity, Mexican Americans have always struggled with a confusing and oftentimes painful collision of competing identities. The Mexican American experience has been characterized by a mixture of conflict and cooperation between newcomer and the long-established, between Mexican and Anglo American cultures, between English and Spanish, between past and future, between immigrants and their acculturated children. At any given moment, millions of Mexican Americans are living at varying distances, physical and psychological, from the immigrant experience and at different levels of acculturation.

Thus, with the exception of responding to anti-Mexican attacks, ethnic Mexican political unity has historically been hard to come by. Galarza said that Mexican Americans lived a “culture in process.” Their heterogeneity made it difficult for them to engage in unified political action. Perhaps the one worthwhile lesson of this recall will be that Latinos should be seen for what they are rather than what the political class wishes them to be.