The Power in Forgetting

Six months ago, the city’s Latino political elite was under fire for its reputedly ethnocentric defense of Supt. Ruben Zacarias in his tug of war with the L.A. school board. As the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart scandal unfolds, these same officials are being criticized for not being ethnocentric enough. Whether accused of being too anxious about their “crossover” appeal or “too middle class” to fight for their immigrant constituents, Latino officials have disappointed many of their liberal allies for not exhibiting more public outrage over widespread police abuse directed at Latinos.

To be sure, L.A.’s response to the corruption at Rampart Division conspicuously lacks the racially polarized emotions set off by the New York Police Department’s treatment of minorities. The fact that both victim and victimizer at the core of Rampart have Spanish surnames is one explanation. But something more fundamental has sidelined the racial morality plays that usually accompany cases of police misconduct in America: the growing political presence of Latino, particularly Mexican, immigrants.

Instead of asking why Latino officials are not “appropriately outraged” over Rampart, it may be more productive to understand why their constituents have not prodded them to speak up more. If nothing else, the battle over Proposition 187 showed that immigrants are quite capable of mobilizing for and participating in civic protests. But after six months of Rampart, it’s equally clear that Latino immigrants are not responding to the scandal in ways that some activists would prefer. To date, the largest public demonstration in Westlake of Latino sentiment toward Rampart was a pro-police rally in September last year.

This doesn’t mean that Latino immigrants are more tolerant of police abuse. They certainly aren’t. What it means is that the city’s immigrants, in general, do not regard Rampart corruption as racially motivated, and they actually trust government to bring the offending cops to justice. In his surveys, Mark Baldassare of the Public Policy Institute of California has found that, overall, Latinos tend to have a “more positive and less jaded view of government” than do Anglos. Widespread stereotypes notwithstanding, Latino immigrants do not harbor deep distrust of or disdain for government, including its most visible institution, the police.

Indeed, as immigrants become a greater proportion of the Latino electorate, there are increasing signs of their deep social conservatism. For example, last month, Latino voters favored Proposition 22, the ban on same-sex marriages, by a greater margin than any other ethnic group.

A generation ago, the political ideology of Chicano activism was shaped on U.S. university campuses. By contrast, the ideological underpinnings of immigrant political behavior stem from the Latin American emigrant experience. As with many previous immigrant groups, traditionalism conditions Latino newcomers to reject radical politics. In “The Age of Reform,” historian Richard Hofstadter wrote that, with few exceptions, most immigrants to the U.S. have been suspicious of reformers’ pleas for drastic social innovations and have limited the range and achievements of U.S. progressivism.

Latin American immigrants also bring with them a racial outlook that does not fit well in traditional U.S. racial politics. Mexico’s common acceptance of mestizaje (racial synthesis) has not created the bifurcated “us versus them” dialogue that characterizes Anglo American notions of racial purity and segregation. The fact that people of mixed racial ancestry came to form a much greater proportion of the population in Latin America than in Anglo America is the clearest sign of the difference between the two outlooks on race.

Intermarriage patterns of second- and third-generation Latinos strongly indicate that the Hispanic ideology of mestizaje survives U.S. assimilation. For example, the marriages of local and national Latino political elites are more likely to be racially mixed than are those for white or black. The husband of Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Los Angeles), chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, is Anglo. Both Antonia Hernandez and Vilma Martinez, current and past heads of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, married Anglos. The wives of former Transportation Secretary Federico Pena and Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, respectively, are non-Latino. Apart from the cultural isolation common to first-generation immigrants, subsequent generations of Latinos do not tend toward exclusive, ethnocentrist lifestyles. Latinos, particularly Mexican Americans, have been conditioned by their history to accept racial and cultural ambiguity as a fact of life.

As Latinos become the largest minority in the country, they will continue to undermine traditional U.S. racial and ethnic politics. Just as Jews were the quintessential American minority in the first half of the 20th century, and African Americans set the standard for racial debate in the second half, Latinos will redefine America’s understanding of race and ethnicity in the new century.

The early 20th-century debates over “the melting pot” and “cultural pluralism” were sparked by Jewish writers trying to envision an America in which Jews could socially integrate and retain their distinctiveness. Playwright Israel Zangwill, who first produced “The Melting Pot” in 1908, and Zionist social thinker Horace M. Kallen, who first articulated his theory of cultural pluralism in 1915, played central roles in shaping discussions on ethnicity. Zangwill believed a melting pot would allow Jews to inject much of their own culture into America. Kallen argued for a version of ethnic federalism in which the U.S. would become a federation of separate but equal nationalities.

By the 1960s, America’s unwillingness to incorporate African Americans into mainstream society helped forge a more virulent form of cultural pluralism known as multiculturalism. Like its milder predecessor, multiculturalism rejects the idea of assimilation, considering the melting-pot concept as an unwelcome imposition of the dominant culture. African Americans, who had become the minority by which all other minorities were compared, turned their rejection into a virtue.

But Latinos don’t share the strong corporate identity or overarching ethnic narrative of Jews or the shared history of suffering that has united African Americans. Jews arrived in America deeply self-conscious of their distinctiveness. African Americans were never included in the melting-pot scenario. Because Latino identity has always been more fluid and comfortable with hybridity, assimilation has never been an either/or proposition. Coming from a mestizo Latin American world, where an Asian is president of Peru and an Arab was the chief executive of Ecuador, Latinos bring a more syncretic sense of race and culture to their American minority experience.

While no one argues that race is irrelevant in Latin America, there is not the same obsession with distinctiveness and purity as there is in the United States. By extension, Latinos in the U.S. generally do not conform to the idea that race is the primary means of social organization and identity. This means race is not a significant social issue among Latinos. Hence, a police-misconduct case will not necessarily have racial overtones for them.

Memoirist John Phillip Santos said that Mexicans are to forgetting what the Jews are to remembering. While the critical mass of Latinos in the U.S. ensures that Hispanicity will be a permanent fixture in American life, Latinos cannot properly be understood as a third, mutually exclusive racial or cultural category in a country of competing minorities. Perhaps the best illustration of the constant redefining of Latino identities is the changing role of U.S. Latino women. While foreign-born Latinas are the least likely to work outside the home of any group of women in the country, their U.S.-born daughters and granddaughters have among the highest rates of labor-force participation.

But the end of racial politics as we know them doesn’t obliterate social divisions. Race and ethnicity are only two of many claims on an individual’s loyalty. The undermining of traditional race politics, combined with growing income inequality, may encourage Americans to focus on the country’s most glaring divide. A greater Latino political presence may even help ensure that economic class will be to America’s 21st century what race was to the 20th. *