Mexican Americans Are Now Just Family

Were it not for Latinos, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, George W. Bush, would have no credible claim to being a “compassionate conservative.” Were it not for his outreach efforts, nobody would be calling Latino voters the soccer moms of the 2000 campaign. In large part, Bush’s reputation as an inclusive politician stems from his onetime success in garnering 40% of the Mexican American vote in his home state of Texas. That 1998 milestone was enough to put the national Latino vote more in play this year than in recent campaigns and create welcome competition for a growing bloc of voters that Democrats have long taken for granted.

While nobody is predicting that Bush will win a majority of Latino votes this November, recent polls show he could capture up to 35%. When it’s all over, however, analysts will probably conclude that this year’s results will not tell us anything about Latino political behavior in the long run. After all, Richard M. Nixon received about one-third of the Latino vote in 1972. But there is one aspect of the 2000 presidential campaign that may make Latino cultural history. In a country that has long had an ambivalent relationship with Mexican immigration, and in a political party that has never seemed to care, Bush is proudly proclaiming that Mexican Americans are, well, family.

Former President George Bush once called them his “secret weapons.” In the 1988 presidential campaign, he tried to attract Latino voters by mentioning his three half-Mexican grandchildren, the children of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and his Mexican-born wife, Columba. But the strategy backfired when he referred to them in the presence of Nancy and Ronald Reagan as his “little brown ones.” Although no one ever articulated why, activists insisted his description was offensive, and the elder Bush wound up portrayed as just another insensitive Republican.

But this year, the eldest of the little brown ones, George P. Bush, is old enough to hit the campaign trail on his own. And the message he is pitching on behalf of his uncle is not only eye-opening; it also says a whole lot about the evolution of Latino identity in the U.S.

A generation ago, a child of an Anglo U.S. governor and a Mexican immigrant mother probably would not be called “Latino.” Despite the usual romantic rap about maintaining cultural identity, assimilation for most immigrant groups has always been about survival. Now as ever, parents tend to impart the behaviors, identities and languages they believe will best benefit their children’s life in America. Forty years ago, when Latinos were politically, socially and culturally marginalized, and there was no Latino middle class to speak of, most Latino parents didn’t encourage their children to speak Spanish for fear it would invite discrimination.

Today, in the era of the burgeoning “Latino market,” bilingualism and Latinidad offer distinct advantages in the marketplace and politics. The tide of assimilation has turned, and the shame once attached to being Mexican in America is disappearing.

In all the hoopla about the Latinization of America, it’s forgotten that native-born ethnic identification is not the same as immigrant identity. The difference is that cultural identity is still a largely voluntary allegiance for the ethnic, but not for the immigrant. English-dominant Mexican Americans, particularly those of mixed ancestry, can stress their ethnicity when it’s convenient and obscure it when it’s not. A generation ago, when being Mexican in America was still synonymous with being poor and marginal, upwardly mobile Mexican Americans were reluctant to call attention to anything that could impede their access to the overwhelmingly Anglo middle class.

Conversely, the chasm between “Mexican-ness” and American-ness” allowed Chicano movement ideologues in the late 1960s and ‘70s to forge “essentialist” conceptions of Mexican American experience. By defining the essence of Latino identity as working or lower class, early Chicano intellectuals characterized Mexican Americans who achieved middle-class status as cultural traitors or “sellouts.” Their ethnic nationalism called for cultural, political and class unity as well as homogeneity. Their simplistic definition of ethnicity allowed the most radical activists to claim cultural ownership and decide who was “truly” Latino.

But as the Latino middle class has grown over the past few decades, the definition of Latino has broadened. Upwardly mobile Mexican Americans have begun to define their ethnicity in a way that is compatible with achieving success in America, not just a milestone along the road to assimilation. Growing numbers, class diversification and the opening up of mainstream American cultural attitudes have all converged to help Latinos recast their ethnicity as a vehicle, not an impediment, to prosperity.

Some have worried that this rise in Mexican Americans’ ethnic confidence will inhibit full assimilation into the U.S. mainstream. But contrary to myth, assimilation has never required the obliteration of ethnic identity. Throughout U.S. history, assimilation was never about people of different racial, religious and cultural backgrounds becoming homogenous. Instead, as pioneering sociologist Robert E. Park wrote in 1930, it is the process by which people of diverse backgrounds achieve a cultural solidarity sufficient to sustain a national existence. Ethnic pride does not, by definition, prevent people from believing that they are part of a larger family of Americans.

If anything, anti-Mexican sentiment was a far greater inhibitor to Mexican acculturation. The non-upwardly mobile bore the brunt of society’s prejudice, and defiance and withdrawal were common responses. Today’s growing Latino confidence, on the other hand, makes the journey from ethnic “Mexican-ness” to “American-ness” much easier. It’s no longer a matter of choosing one identity over the other.

All immigrant groups to America have faced ethnic prejudice in their earliest stages of social integration. But because Mexican labor has been recruited in the U.S. during boom times and expelled during busts, Mexican Americans have had to weather cyclical waves of anti-Latino sentiment. Meantime, countless other ethnic groups have been stripped of their foreignness and have achieved mainstream acceptance over the past 100 years. In 1939, Life magazine complimented Italian American ballplayer Joe DiMaggio for not reeking of garlic or using grease in his hair. But by his retirement, it called him an All-American hero.

In recent years, more and more Latino political and pop cultural figures have been making that same transition. Their Hispanicity is no longer considered at odds with their being fully American, and in the process, they help normalize the image of Latinos for society at large. In a small way, so do the three television ads George P. has made on behalf of the Bush campaign. In a series of 30-second spots, the 24-year-old bilingual future law student with olive skin and black hair extols his pride in ethnicity while boasting of the candidate’s virtues. After praising his uncle, he asks: “His name? The same as mine. George Bush.” The melding of the young man’s self-declared Latino-ness and his patrician pedigree is seamless.

None of this is to say that the George P. ads will persuade Latino voters to cast their ballots for his uncle in November. In the end, their ultimate value may be more cultural than political. But when aired in the heavily Latino regions of the country, they are bound to raise eyebrows, if only for the reason that no one has ever met a Latino whose middle name is Prescott.