Anything But Mexican: Chicanos in Contemporary Los Angeles

Anything But Mexican

Anything But Mexican

Chicanos in Contemporary Los Angeles

UPDATED SECOND EDITION

Rodolfo F. Acuña

This updated second edition first published by Verso 2020

First published by Verso 1995

The map on page 21 is from Eugene Turner and James P. Allen, An Atlas of Population Patterns in Metropolitan Los Angeles and Orange Counties, 1990. Department of Geography, California State University, Northridge. It appears by kind permission of the authors.

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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Verso

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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-379-8

ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-380-4 (US EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-381-1 (UK EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Acuäna, Rodolfo.

Title: Anything but mexican : Chicanos in contemporary Los Angeles/Rodolfo F. Acuna.

Description: Updated Second Edition. | Brooklyn, NY : Verso, 2018.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018025525 | ISBN 9781786633798 (paperback) | ISBN 9781786632975 (united kingdom e book)

Subjects: LCSH: Mexican Americans—California—Los Angeles. | Los Angeles (Calif.)—Social conditions. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / Hispanic American Studies. | POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Freedom & Security / Civil Rights. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Discrimination & Race Relations.

Classification: LCC F869.L89 M5 2018 | DDC 979.4/940046872—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018025525

Typeset in Minion Pro by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall

Printed in the US by Maple Press

Contents

Preface: Anything But Mexican

Acknowledgements

Introduction to the Second Edition: The Context of Anything But Mexican

  1. Whose America?: Introducing Chicano L.A.

  2. Taking Back Chicano History

  3. Chicanas/os in Politics: The Illusion of Inclusion

  4. Marching Mothers

  5. Politics for the Few

  6. Immigration: The Border Crossed Us

  7. The Politicization of the Other

  8. Mexican/Latino Labor in L.A.: Working in a Meaner, Leaner World

  9. Chicanas in Los Angeles

10. México Lindo and NAFTA

11. Troubled Angels

12. The Stairway to the Good Life

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Preface

Anything But Mexican

In the course of the twentieth century, we have seen the United States shift from prejudice against the foreign-born, called nativism, directed at immigrants from certain European countries, to a full-fledged racism toward Third World immigrants. This racist form of nativism is not new; in the nineteenth century, for example, anti-Chinese hysteria led 94 percent of California’s voters to approve a referendum excluding all Chinese; Congress to pass the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act; and Wyoming settlers to murder in cold blood twenty-eight Chinese workers in 1885. The City of the Angels played its part in the history of violence toward Chinese. On October 24, 1871, responding to the alleged shooting of Robert Thompson, a deputized mob of 500 went on a rampage:

In the dim gaslight of recently installed street lamps, armed bands of men dragged cringing Chinese to gallows hastily erected downtown. Bodies soon were swinging from two upturned wagons on Commercial Street, as well as the crossbar of the Tomlinson Corral, a popular lynching spot that just the previous year had been used to string up a Frenchman named Miguel Lachenais.¹

Seventeen Chinese—men and boys—one of them a popular local doctor, were strung up on the gas streetlight lampposts. According to John Johnson, writing for LA Weekly, the violence had been premediated and officially covered up to protect many prominent citizens. These lynchings were not an aberration. Leonard Pitt memorialized the lynching of Mexicans in his classic book, The Decline of the Californios.²

During the last century we saw it in the repeated, mass deportations of Mexican workers, often including U.S. citizens. More recently the anti-immigrant hysteria has reached crescendo levels in places like California, with the passage of Proposition 187 under the banner of Save Our State. Past waves of U.S. racist nativism often had economic origins very similar to those of today, with scapegoating immigrants serving to mask the effects of economic crisis on the fortunes of native-born Americans. Unfortunately, immigrant bashing has not subsided even with the surge of the Latina/o population.

But there are certain significant and indeed sinister differences between past and present forms of racist nativism. The anti-immigrant movement has become more global with the chickens coming home to roost, the former colonized peoples seeking access to the bounties of their erstwhile colonial masters. Dutch professor Teun A. van Dijk writes: In late 1991 and early 1992 … ethnic minorities, immigrants, and refugees in North America and especially Europe continued to be confronted with increasing racism, ethnocentrism, and xenophobia.³ The movement is also more open to fascism … directed against all migrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers displaced from their own countries by the depredations of international capital.⁴

The U.S. twenty years later is mirroring Europe’s racist nativism, which at one time was hidden in a closet. Here in the United States, racist nativism sees all immigrants of color as illegal aliens, regardless of their actual legal status. It does not distinguish one Brown person from another, citizen from immigrant, recent immigrant from second generation. It seemingly exempts African Americans because they are citizens and speak English. But racist nativism, as Europe today shows us, ultimately categorizes all people of color as immigrants and refugees and all immigrants and refugees as terrorists and drug dealers⁵; in the U.S., we can add, as welfare recipients, criminals, or other morally inferior creatures—in short, anyone not a real American. By 2016 this rhetoric became accepted as part of the political rhetoric of the Republican Party in Arizona, and was the consensus among the Republican candidates for president.⁶

The tensions and excesses of racist nativism are nowhere more evident than in Southern California today. This has changed, and it is now a major epidemic. A major reason why Anything But Mexican focuses on Los Angeles, once a thriving industrial city and now the Third-World capital of the United States, is the size of the Latino population there. Many Euroamericans continue to be nestled in areas formerly protected from the decaying inner city, with the difference that today, in search of housing, they are invading the inner city. Their children who had once fled integrated schools by transferring to private schools are shifting to charter schools.

In this edition I have again focused on Los Angeles because racist nativism promises to have a profound impact on Mexican-origin people and other Latinas/os. It is here that immigration from Latin America, as well as from Asia and the Middle East, has dramatically challenged Euroamerican racial and cultural hegemony. In 2014, L.A. County had 10,116,705 persons; nearly 48.4 percent were Latinas/os and nearly 80 percent of the Latino total were of Mexican origin.⁷ Nearly four million persons of Mexican descent in the United States live in Los Angeles and its environs. As of 2013, approximately 11.6 million Mexican immigrants resided in the United States—up from 2.2 million in 1980—and Mexicans accounted for 28 percent of the country’s 41.3 million foreign born.⁸ As of 2012, Mexicans numbered 6.7 million (59 percent) of the estimated 11.3 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States.⁹ These numbers get even more interesting when the Los Angeles-Riverside-Orange County area is joined with the Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area (CMSA).¹⁰

In Los Angeles, the rest of California, and much of the United States, racist nativism feeds on white fears of losing control over this society as a result of changing demographics. Whites are afraid of losing their whiteness. The reality of non-whites being the majority fuels a vicious antipathy that admittedly is not as bad in Los Angeles as in other parts of the country. Racism in L.A. is compartmentalized. For Latinas/os there is safety in numbers. Everything is categorized in the fashion of porn sites, where sex is the equalizer. Since 1970 the number of Hispanics married to non-Hispanics has tripled, reaching over 1.5 million in 2000. By 2008, the intermarriage rate for native-born Latinos was 52.5 percent, 90 percent of those marriages being with non-Latino whites.¹¹ Always defined as white, the standard for an American’s self-image is white.¹² For the first time since the birth of the nation, many whites are threatened by the change. However, this is less the case today in L.A. than it was twenty years ago. At stake, then, are power and control, as well as the definition of individuality and collectivity. At stake is history: how it is written and how it is remembered. At stake is culture: how is U.S. culture to be defined, and whose definition shall be dominant?

Not surprisingly, in an era when many whites fear the surrender of what have been their least challenged, most comfortable assumptions, people of color have been pushing for a drastic overhaul of those same assumptions. Again, Los Angeles is an ideal social laboratory for the examination of these forces at work. This book is, in essence, about the struggle of Chicanas/os and Mexicans in Los Angeles to affirm their political, economic, and cultural presence as peoples during the last fifteen years—the same period in which racist nativism has built to a new crescendo. Key to that Chicana/o/Mexicana/o struggle is reconstructing a historical memory of Los Angeles that has been diluted or erased by Eurocentric forces. This requires retelling what happened and redefining the causes of what happened. In these ways the reconstruction of history and affirmation of identity go hand in hand.

The complexity of identity

Anything But Mexican grapples with the issue of identity. Identity has always been problematic among the other in U.S. society—and it is no different among Mexican Americans, who ever since their arrival in this country have hotly debated what to call themselves. Naturally, this debate grew more intense as immigration from Mexico and Central America increased dramatically, and the national origins of the various Latino groups grew more complex. The issue of identity was not confined to nationality, but included class considerations. For example, prominent in this conversation are the aspirations of rising middle-class Latino professionals, who sought to package their group in ways furnishing them maximum leverage in economic and political markets. Also important were the voices of nationalists within the various Latino communities. The complexity of identity thus made it harder to find solutions to common problems.

Issues of identity, immigration, class, and relations with other minorities are often joined in the arena of electoral politics. Thus readers will find that chapters 3 to 7 are devoted primarily to electoral politics and immigration issues in Los Angeles. Minorities in general, and Mexican Americans in particular, are obsessed with electoral politics; victories in this arena have become measures of empowerment. The number of office-holders from a particular minority—rather than the quality of their representation—has become the measure of success. In this context, it cannot be denied that Latinas/os made significant electoral gains during the 1980s and 1990s. Since 1994—when Latinas/os for the first time obtained three representatives on the Los Angeles City Council, one on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, and statewide ten state legislators and four members of Congress, plus the appointment of a host of judges—their potential power has increased. Latinas/os became political power brokers. Governor Jerry Brown noted this at the 2016 National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Convention at San Diego, telling the delegates: The power you represent is growing, and it is growing in very important ways. He cited the driver’s licenses for undocumented residents, and school financing.¹³ The problem, as we shall see, has been a reluctance to use that power.

The reconstruction of identity in Los Angeles also involves addressing the cultural, generational, and class differences that permeate a community. The issues of identity facing my middle-class Chicano students at California State University, Northridge, provide a case in point. These students often pass through a crisis in their first year of college, when they come into contact with a critical mass of barrio students for the first time. Raised in predominately white neighborhoods, they identify with their white neighbors and classmates to the point that they adopt a white sense of racial identity. Looking at and listening to barrio youth, who are more often than not from working-class families, the white-oriented students are often ashamed of them. The barrio students are poorer, and speak differently from Chicanas/os raised in Euroamerican neighborhoods. They no longer dress different. Becoming aware of this false identity, many Chicana/o youth have sought to reject it. Others try to avoid the whole issue, while still others are attempting to identify with their roots.

The culture war

Though identity is important to Mexican Americans, Anything But Mexican is not only about identity. Rather it is a political work, one that attempts to define an emerging Mexican American/Latino political space. The definition of this political space is problematic, in that it challenges Eurocentric interests that want to preserve the national identity of the United States as a Western European nation.¹⁴ To this end, Eurocentrists have declared a culture war against those wanting to define U.S. history in terms of realities not comprehended by white America, and have attempted to establish their version of reality and their terms of reference as the common sense of U.S. political discourse. For example, Ernest Lefever, a fellow at the ultraconservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, accused the proponents of affirmative action of distorting and corrupting language: We should call a quota a quota and a subsidy a subsidy, and not sugarcoat it by calling it affirmative action.¹⁵ By the late 1980s, right-wing ideologues in alliance with conservative politicians had invented a multiculturist revolution in universities, and portrayed themselves as the last-ditch defenders of civilized standards against political correctness.

The debate over identity took a more radical twist when Arthur Schlesinger Jr., one of the most prominent and vocal voices of the academic left, criticized the demands of African Americans and other minorities to hold onto their identities in The Disuniting of America.¹⁶ He recalled that George Washington was a sternly practical man who counseled newcomers against retaining the language, habits, and principles (good or bad) that they bring with them. Many considered Schlesinger’s argument an academic con game, and his assertion that the United States has been relatively successful at avoiding the fragmentation that plagued Europe a denial of the truth. It was not the Blacks or Latinas/os that were Balkanizing the United States, but the xenophobes. Schlesinger’s brand of Americanism was an illusion of inclusion. He naively posited that Americans should renounce old loyalties and melt away ethnic differences.

Schlesinger condemned the multiculturalists and minorities who harped on about what was wrong with America, and he accused multiculturalists and Afrocentric black scholars of exaggerating past injustices. (Schlesinger knew better.) He argued that minorities should not teach history in order to promote group self-esteem, but instead to promote an understanding of the world and the past. The role of the public school system was to Americanize students and teach them the American creed. It was the schools’ job to unify the population. An obsession with differences led to separatism, and separatism nourishes prejudices, magnifies differences, and stirs antagonism. In part, Anything But Mexican is a retort to Schlesinger.

We cannot separate either scholarship or government policy from their consequences. We should remember that the U.S. Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924, which excluded Asians and gave advantages to Northern Europeans, provided the intellectual as well as legal framework for the massive repatriations of Mexicans in the 1930s, and set the precedent for putting over 100,000 Japanese Americans into concentration camps in 1942. The consequences of cultural wars can be serious indeed. The logical next step in the New Right’s culture war is the resurrection of eugenics doctrines that seemed dead after the defeat of Nazi Germany at the end of World War II. In 1994 Charles Murray, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Richard Herrnstein published The Bell Curve. The book provides a theoretical base for reactionary policy-makers and politicians seeking to use hot-button rhetoric about immigration, crime, and welfare reform to exploit white fears of Mexicans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and African Americans. The Bell Curve offers a pseudoscientific justification for ignoring the real causes of poverty and crime and for dismantling the social safety net. It makes social pathology a function of genes, as supposedly proven by the large numbers of Blacks and Browns in prisons.¹⁷

The essence of the New Right’s strategy was expressed in 1994 by Florida gubernatorial candidate Jeb Bush, who, when asked what he would do for the African American community, responded: Probably nothing.¹⁸ Instead, Bush said, he would reduce welfare, fight crime, and downsize government, a message tailored to fit white middle-class biases. In California, Governor Pete Wilson mastered the Orwellian game of politics by code word, substituting criminal for Mexican and blaming immigrants for the state’s budget crisis and the impact of recession and defense cuts.¹⁹ The result was an increase in interracial tensions, and the racial polarization of the 1994 California gubernatorial election.

In the past, coded language has usually been a way for the oppressed to disguise their criticism of those in power. Today it is part of the ideological strategy of white elites, serving to justify their domination of communities of color while disguising openly racist sentiments (criminal instead of Mexican). Related to the current use of code words are other forms of language manipulation that serve ruling-class interests. For example, the Hoover Institution and the American Free Enterprise Institute work hard at deconstructing and then exploiting the language of the civil rights movement, as part of an attack on the entire concept of equity. Through access to the media, they control the debate on class and race exploitation by delegitimizing any discussion of the struggle of the oppressed for equity, and dismissing it as an effort to impose political correctness.²⁰

In summary, the power relationship between Mexican Americans/Latinos and whites in Los Angeles affects the interpretation of history and of political discourse itself. There is constant dialogue between minorities and the white Left. However, once again the terms of the discussion are usually in the hands of these elites. The social climate of Los Angeles, like other developed cities, has been marked by mass narcissism and historical amnesia.²¹ Once again we see the United States and Europe portrayed as the custodians of civilization. The problem for Chicanos and other Latinos is that because of the disparity in power between them and the white population, their interpretation of social reality tends to be given less value—although it may be more valid—than that of those in power.²²

A Chicana/o perspective

Up to this point I have purposely avoided the word Chicano, an identification given to a movement by its younger members. It emerged out of California and spread throughout the nation. However, the surge of immigrants washed out the meaning of the term. Later arrivals did not perceive the legacy of the 1960s that secured or concretized the group’s Civil Rights gains. Mexican immigrants brought their biases against the word Chicano, and knew little about Civil Rights history. The children obeyed their parents. One legacy of the Chicano movement was the opening up of higher education to Mexican Americans and other Latinos, a role that was played on the East Coast by Puerto Ricans. Perhaps the greatest gift turned out to be a mixed blessing: the creation of a middle class, beginning in the 1970s. That, along with the population surge, gave Chicanas/os a modicum of power. They were at the vanguard of the protection of the foreign-born movement and the opposition to draconian laws such as Proposition 187 (1994). The bulk of the leadership and the shock troops came out of the Chicano Movement. It was also they who kept the collective memory of 187 and Pete Wilson alive, henceforth preventing the election of a Republican to statewide office. This generation would not be erased.

Anything But Mexican by no means pretends to be a definitive work on the New Right’s ideological assault on immigration policy, Eurocentric racism, or contemporary Los Angeles. It is a micro-view of Chicanos and Chicanas, and sometimes other Latinos, in Los Angeles, written to inform and redirect the present national and global discourse about diversity and racism in relation to the growing presence of the Third World in one of the First World’s premier cities.

This book is divided into twelve chapters and an epilogue. Chapter 1 introduces the Chicana/o and Latina/o in Los Angeles. Its theme is Chicano identity in the context of Euroangeléno racism, and how race, class, and gender intersect. The chapter explores the theme of anything but Mexican, the book’s term for the prevailing Euroangeleno evaluation of Mexicans and Mexicans’ view of themselves. It shows where Chicanas/os live and how they are changing Los Angeles’s physical and cultural environment.

Chapter 2, Taking Back Chicano History, deals with Chicano history and the Chicano sense of place in Los Angeles in the context of the struggle for identity and human rights in this country. It speaks to struggles within the Chicano community and with forces outside it to control the definition of Chicano history and culture. The fight over Olvera Street and the campaign for a Latino museum symbolize this taking-back of Chicano history. Finally, the chapter discusses the role of the Catholic Church, which remains a colonial institution, although a benevolent one at times.

The work of City Councilman Edward R. Roybal in the 1950s gave birth to modern Chicano politics. Roybal was the first Chicano politician to develop an independent grassroots organization that freed him from special-interest groups. Throughout this period, the success and form of Chicano politics were limited by low registration and the politics of the Democratic Party. The dramatic growth of the Chicana/o/Latino population forced redistricting after the 1970 and 1980 censuses that enabled the rise of Assemblyman Richard Alatorre, and his election to the Los Angeles City Council in the mid 1980s. These developments are covered in Chapter 3, Chicanos in Politics: The Illusion of Inclusion.

The dramatic events surrounding the mobilization of the Mothers of East Los Angeles and their fight to keep a prison out of Boyle Heights begin Chapter 4, Marching Mothers, which describes Assemblywoman Gloria Molina’s election to the City Council and then to the County Board of Supervisors. Threats of yet another prison, a gas pipeline through Boyle Heights, and a toxic waste incinerator mobilized disparate interests, as the women of East L.A. marched through the streets. Molina’s ability to exploit these energies put her in a position to challenge the old guard led by Richard Alatorre.

Marching Mothers is also a case study of Boyle Heights and how it is slowly being gentrified. It is an important chapter because it mirrors what is happening to adjacent Mexican neighborhoods.

Chapter 5, Politics for the Few, covers the backlash against Chicano political successes, which—aside from representation—have meant more city and county jobs, as well as the growing influence of Chicana/o and Latino developers and other interest groups. Efforts of ultraconservatives to retain their dominance over the unrepresented Latino community resulted in a power struggle over space and resources. This struggle was intensified by Proposition 13 and its clones, which have cut taxes on private property, driven the downsizing of government and closed opportunities for all people of color, for whom civil service employment has always been a route into the mainstream economy. Economic restructuring also increased competition between African Americans and Chicanas/os for jobs in the ever-shrinking labor market. Rounding off the chapter are accounts of the struggle over reapportionment following the 1990 Census and the 1992 presidential election, both marked by immigrant bashing to divert attention from the growing gap between rich and poor.

Chapter 6, Immigration: ‘The border crossed us,’ deals with the history of Chicano immigration to Los Angeles. Its title comes from the reaction of Chicano youth to conservative attacks on immigrants: We didn’t cross the border; the border crossed us. Indeed, the dynamics of immigration and the border drive Euroamerican–Chicana/o relations. The Great Repatriation during the 1930s politically disempowered Chicanos. It also furthered the idea of the Chicano as other, as did militarization of the border and professionalization of the border patrol after World War II. Racist nativism increased further after the 1965 Immigration Act opened the gates of the U.S. to the Third World, ushering in an era when the United States joined Europe in creating a racist discourse to justify the exclusion of the other. The chapter then looks at how the immigrant has become the scapegoat for economic restructuring and its social consequences, which accelerated during the 1970s and 1980s.

Multisided struggles for control of L.A.’s government marked the 1990s and are the theme of Chapter 7, The Politicization of the ‘Other.’ Changing neighborhood demographics led to conflicts over turf and resources among Chicanos, Blacks, and Asians—and these tensions were often poorly handled by community leaders. Mexicans and Blacks contested for political control of districts where Latinos were becoming the majority, but remained a minority of voters. Understandably, Black leaders were not ready to relinquish the power that ensured badly needed jobs and contracts for Black contractors. In 1992 the City Council created a second Chicano district on the Board of Education, cutting into the San Fernando Valley. This unleashed the pent-up frustration and anger of Euroamerican San Fernando Valley homeowner associations, which responded by launching a campaign to break up the mammoth Los Angeles Unified School District. The political power of the San Fernando Valley and its white voting majority intimidated politicos such as State Senator David Roberti and progressive State Senator Tom Hayden into supporting this power play. In this context, Richard Riordan, a representative of L.A.’s ruling elite, was elected mayor. In 1994, Pete Wilson resurrected his flagging governorship and was reelected thanks to a campaign strategy that scapegoated immigrants as the reason for California’s recurring budget crises. Californians overwhelmingly passed Proposition 187, whose provisions deny education and basic human services to immigrants, and which badly polarized Los Angeles and the rest of the state.

Chapter 8, Mexican/Latino Labor in L.A.: Working in a Meaner, Leaner World, charts the restructuring and globalization of L.A.’s economy. Although Mexicans and other Latinos have one of the highest labor-force participation rates in the U.S., they are L.A.’s lowest-paid workers. The elimination of jobs in heavy industry has widened the gap between rich and poor, while the new service economy has failed to produce well-paying jobs. The dismantling of the region’s defense industries has intensified competition among workers, often along racial lines. The chapter also focuses on the heroic struggle of immigrant workers to unionize through the Justice for Janitors campaign, and on the leadership of organizers such as María Elena Durazo to empower the most vulnerable workers in L.A.

Chapter 9 addresses the gendered particulars of identity, and the political space occupied by Chicanas in Los Angeles. Although they make up half the city’s Latino population, until the gains of Latinas in the 1980s in politics and the professions they had been almost invisible as subjects of their own history. The chapter thus attempts to take them out of the shadow of the Chicano male. The lack of consciousness about Chicanas and Latinas is in part due to the dearth of available information and analysis. To begin to fill this gap, the chapter presents a demographic profile of Latinas in L.A., and analyzes the effects of the glass ceiling in education and the workplace on their upward mobility.

It is said that Mexico is always with Chicanas/os, and that they still feel an emotional attachment to México Lindo, even to the third and fourth generations. This love for the motherland strengthens relations between Chicanos and Mexico, as the growth of a Chicano petty bourgeoisie makes that population even more valuable to Mexican elites. Chapter 10, México Lindo and NAFTA, analyzes the intersection of Mexican–Chicano interests. During the presidency of Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the Mexican government increased its efforts to yoke Chicana/o interests to those of Mexico, with the president of Mexico openly courting Chicano business and political leaders. Middle-class Chicanas/os played an important role in the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), while Chicano organizations tried to have it both ways, using NAFTA as a bargaining chip to increase their influence with the Clinton administration.

Chapter 11, Troubled Angels, is about Los Angeles’s reaction to growing poverty and Third Worldization: with an increase in poverty and a decrease in hope have come more crime and the decay of the family and the social infrastructure. Rather than address these realities, the media draws a portrait of Los Angeles entering a Blade Runner epoch. The L.A. Police and Sheriff’s departments have long envisioned themselves as an occupying army, with people of color as the enemy population. However, the overreaction of police and their brutality in the case of Rodney King led to police reform of sorts. Education is one of the last avenues of upward mobility open to people of color, enabling Chicanas/os and other Latinos to rise above the minimum-wage limbo where the working poor live.

Chapter 12, The Stairway to the Good Life, describes how educational opportunities shrank in the 1980s and 1990s as an undemocratic tax system allowed the state’s education system to deteriorate, from one of the top five in the U.S., to one of the poorest in the country. The business community responded by arguing that the schools did not need money—they only lacked good business management. Corporate America would teach the Los Angeles Unified School District how to manage its resources. Lack of funds led to the dismantling of bilingual education programs, while expensive magnet schools were constructed to serve the children of the middle class, especially the white middle class; Latinos were generally relegated to below-average facilities. Colleges and universities also closed the window of opportunity as higher tuition rates excluded minorities, while New Right scholars perpetuated the myth that the presence on campus of Chicanos and Latinos along with Blacks drags down the quality of education. Chicano students have reacted to these attacks with increased militancy, including hunger strikes, perhaps most notably in their struggle for a Chicana/o Studies Department at UCLA.

The epilogue is an examination of the term anything but Mexican in the context of what I call divorce America style. Recent trends have all but abandoned educational innovation to the point where it seems as if the education-industrial complex does not want Mexicans to learn. In this context, I introduce Marcos De Leon and L.A. Times reporter Ruben Salazar and the death of bilingual education. I close the book discussing the theme of Mexico exploding; everyone loves Paris, but Mexico is only the Third World—let them kill themselves off.

Acknowledgements

I would like to take this opportunity to thank my wife Guadalupe Compéan, without whom I would not be alive. The writing of this book was especially trying, since it was completed during a period when I successfully sued the University of California, Santa Barbara, for political, race, and age discrimination. I learned a great deal about elite institutions from this experience and about what a scholar should not be. I am still grateful to my attorneys for their encouragement and lessons in applied knowledge. Indeed, my universe was expanded through legal research and its application. The second edition was influenced by my own activism as part of the struggle against xenophobia in Arizona and my current fight against the privatization of the university. My book Occupied America was censored and banned from public schools.

My two sons, Walter and Frank, are always in my heart. My grandsons, Joseph, Max, and especially Nick, who no longer has to suffer the insensitivity of this world. The mental health system failed him and he ended the suffering at twenty-six. My granddaughters, Allyson and Cristina. The drive and inspiration for this book came mainly from my daughter, Angela, and my wife, Lupita, who had to put up with a severe loss of quality time and all the stress that comes from writing and struggle. I could not have accomplished a fourth of what I have in the past thirty-three years without Lupita.

Introduction to the Second Edition

The Context of Anything But Mexican

Numbers

Historical context is a matter of framing a particular question in the beliefs, conditions, ideas, and attitudes of a certain point in time. In short it is the setting for the topic, which in this case is the lives of Mexican Americans and Latinos in Los Angeles. The circumstances of these historical conditions are important for understanding a question such as the one posed in Anything But Mexican. This is especially significant in dealing with Mexican Americans, about whom little is known, as they are often pushed off the stage in what passes for a broad perspective. I attempt to be more inclusive but focus on the micro level.

I once mentioned the Bloody Christmas of 1951 in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times in the 1990s. Bloody Christmas is the name given to the vicious beating of seven men—five Mexicans and two whites. It led to the indictment of eight LAPD officers. The event had been fictionalized in the novel LA Confidential by James Ellroy. When the editor questioned my reliability, I responded that it was not my fault he did not know his history. This is symptomatic of the cultural amnesia undermining Latino history.

The first edition of Anything But Mexican was published in 1996, a relatively short time ago. However, because these years were so eventful, and they so dramatically changed the question of Mexican American identity, I decided to revise the book and explore how the explosion of the Mexican and Latina/o populations raised new questions that remain unanswered. For example, according to UCLA professor Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, an immigration expert, the growth of the Latino population has been so rapid that numerically, the U.S. is being transformed.¹ The rise in Latina/o numbers is accompanied by a historic decline in the number of U.S. whites; consequently, blurring of traditional black–white color lines has occurred. According to the New York Daily News, the expansion of the Latino population has tested present American values as well as the adequacy of civil rights laws and the definition of whiteness. A salient fact is that whites have lost their numerical dominance, and the parallel rise of the Latino population has scared the hell out of them.²

The driver of this dramatic surge is the Mexican population that makes up two-thirds of the Latino total. The growth is not caused only by immigration but also by new births. How much this explosion is silently transforming institutions has political implications, but as Suárez-Orozco points out, it is also driving institutional change. An indication of the extent of the change is that the Latino population grew from 22.4 to 35.3 million (57.9 percent) from 1990 to 2000.³ By 2014, Latinos increased to 55.4 million (17.4 percent of the total U.S. population).⁴ Los Angeles County in 2010 had a total population of 9.8 million.⁵ By 2015, the Latino population increased to 48.4 percent of the total; whites were 26.8 percent in the City of L.A.⁶ Latinos numbered 4.9 million, officially outnumbering whites.⁷ In the Los Angeles/Long Beach area Mexicans were 78 percent of the Latino population. Some 72 percent were citizens, 42 percent foreign born, and they were of a median age of twenty-eight. Thus whites for the first time were faced with the reality of being a minority, This has not happened in the 240-year history of the United States. Today Northern European countries are also experiencing the fear of becoming non-white.⁸

Looking for easy answers, xenophobes blame the 1965 Immigration Act: The shift is being driven by the modern wave of U.S. newcomers from Latin America and Asia. Their annual inflow of 650,000 people since 1965, at a rate that’s grown in recent years, surpasses the pace of the last great immigration wave a century ago.⁹ The fact is that prior to the 1965 Immigration Act, Mexicans and Latin Americans were not on the immigration quota that called for national origins. This was so not because White America loved Mexicans but because of labor needs, and also an antipathy toward Asians. According to the Pew Research Center, in the decade from 2000 to 2010, the Mexican-American population grew by 7.2 million as a result of births and 4.2 million as a result of new immigrant arrivals. This is a change from the previous two decades when the number of new immigrants either matched or exceeded the number of births. Mexican-American births accounted for 63 percent of the 11.2 million Latinas/os from 2000 to 2010.¹⁰ Add to this context that the fertility rate among Mexican Americans is 2.5 children compared to 1.9 non–Mexican Latinos, 1.8 for whites, 2.0 for Blacks and 1.8 for Asians. Finally, the median age of Mexican Americans in this country is 25, compared with 30 for non-Mexican-origin Hispanics, 32 for blacks, 35 for Asians, and 41 for whites.¹¹

The replicants

Commenting on the classic film Blade Runner (1982), set in Los Angeles in 2019, the BBC wrote, There has certainly been a language shift in Los Angeles, most notably a doubling of the number of Spanish speakers (those who speak the language at home) in the past thirty years from 1.5 million in 1980 to 3.6 million in 2010 (including Spanish Creole).¹² Missing was the fact the Mexican population spread throughout the city and the county. East Los Angeles, the heart of the Latino population in L.A., was 96.7 percent Latino in 2016.¹³ At the same time Mexicans comprised the largest ethnic group of Latinos—31.9 percent of the City’s population. They were followed by Salvadorans (6 percent) and Guatemalans (3.6 percent) of 3.8 million Angelénos.¹⁴ The Mexican has had a continual presence that dates from 1781.¹⁵ Its importance is that it embodies the collective history of generations of Mexican Americans representing different classes, rates of assimilation and acculturation, and a somewhat collective memory embodying the immigrant experience as well as those who had never seen Mexico but identified as Mexicans.

Los Angeles is where movies are made, one of the most liberal sanctuaries in the United States. The comedian Chris Rock said of the Mexican presence in L.A., "But forget whether Hollywood is black enough. A better question is: Is Hollywood Mexican enough? You’re in L.A., you’ve got to try not to hire Mexicans. Rock added that while it’s the most liberal town in the world, there’s just an acceptance that there’s a slave state in L.A. There’s this acceptance that Mexicans are going to take care of white people in L.A. that doesn’t exist anywhere else. I remember I was renting a house in Beverly Park while doing some movie, and you just see all of the Mexican people at 8 o’clock in the morning in a line driving into Beverly Park like it’s General Motors. It’s this weird town."¹⁶

Reinforcing this image, according to the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, more than half of Latino students in California attend intensely segregated K-12 schools, which have a white population of 10 percent or less. Fifty-one percent of California’s Latino population is segregated, the second highest in the United States.¹⁷ Since 1994, Statewide, the proportion of K-12 schools that are ‘intensely segregated’ has more than doubled from 15 percent in 1993–94 to 31 percent in 2012–13.¹⁸ Latinos attend schools with more than two-thirds poor students, contrasted to whites and Asians who in the majority attend schools with a majority of middle-class students. The mammoth LAUSD comprises 653,826 students, of whom 73.5 percent are Latino; 9.3 percent White; 9.2 percent African American; 6.0 percent Asian; 1.2 percent multiracial; 0.4 percent Native American; and 0.4 percent Pacific Islander.¹⁹ An estimated 70/80 percent are of Mexican origin; 10 percent of the LAUSD are undocumented. The size of the undocumented population makes it a target for ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). However, the schools are insulated by a sympathetic public and students who have formed a collective historical consciousness. Consequently, the LAUSD has taken a stand against immigration raids and voted to make all of its schools a safe zone.²⁰ This collective consciousness has been reinforced over time, highlighted by the massive Chicano School Walkouts of 1968, and climaxing in the 1994 and 2006 Latino student walkouts in protest at U.S. immigration policies.²¹

The size of the Mexican compared to that of other Latino populations has also made it a target of predictive policing. According to some social scientists, criminality is innate and predictable, popularizing the notion that trends can be mapped, i.e., that anticipating future crime trends and even predicting which individuals are likely to become delinquent will soon be possible.²² Predictive policing is part of today’s popular culture thanks to the popularity of TV shows such as CSI (Crime Scene Investigation). American political and xenophobic campaigns have exploited and abused this mindset. In a world where opinion has become fact, Mexicans become dangerous replicant humans—realizing a dystopian future, set in 2019 Los Angeles. Humanized robots are believed to be taking over society. As with Chris Rock’s Mexicans who perform the labor, society lives in fear of being superseded by replicants. In present-day life, the identification of the replicant is confused by downplaying its identity. Mexicans are no longer Mexicans, but blurred by innocuous labels of Hispanic or Latino.

The reserve labor pool

A reserve army of labor is a concept in Karl Marx’s critique of political economy: Capital.²³ Marx said that this reserve army was a basic characteristic of capitalism. It consisted of unemployed, part-time workers, subsistence workers looking for full-time employment, temporary workers, as well as individuals not reported in employment statistics. It included prisoners and the disabled.²⁴ The function of this pool was that it allowed the market system to function profitably by keeping costs down. Mexico has, to a large extent, played this function since at least 1880, with the building of the transcontinental and the Mexican Central railroads.²⁵ The dependence on Chinese labor and its exclusion in 1882 was followed by draconian immigration acts in 1917, 1921, and 1924, increasing the demand for profitable Mexican labor. As Chris Rock observed, the laborers are invisible—coming after dawn and leaving before the sun sets.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Latinos will account for three-quarters of the growth in the nation’s labor force from 2010 to 2020. Latinos have a higher labor force participation rate than other groups; in 2010 it was 64.7 percent for whites and 67.5 percent for Latinos. From 2010 to 2020, Latinos are expected to add 7.7 million workers to the labor force. Statisticians predict that the available labor force will decrease by 1.6 million. Immigrants will insure growth and make up the difference, adding 1.5 million workers. The losses are expected in the manufacturing and federal government sectors where the replicants are concentrated.²⁶

Mexico, because of its size and proximity, is the U.S.’s principal reserve labor pool. The CIA Factbook lists the Mexican population at 121.8 million,²⁷ making it the second-largest country of Latin America. However, it is not always going to be a vassal of its northern neighbor. Demographers point out that if Mexico had continued to grow at its 1960 levels it would have a population of over 186 million. The population did not decline because Mexico became less Catholic; it declined because fertility rates fell. Population growth slowed because fertility declined from 8 children born to every woman, on average, in 1960 to 2.9 in 1999 and 2.4 in 2009.²⁸ This reduction is linked to increased urbanization and female education. With female education levels rising, the fertility rates declined. This change worries some, since it is not known whether Mexico will be able to meet its growing labor needs.²⁹ Brazil, a developing nation, has crossed the threshold to majority-minority status; a few cities in France and England are near, if not past that point.³⁰ Suárez-Orozco observes: The American experience has always been a story of color. In the twentieth century it was a story of the black–white line. In the twenty-first century we are moving into a new off-white moment.³¹ It remains to be seen if Americans can handle not being white.

The chickens come home to roost

U.S. imperialist policy has worked across economic borders to insure American hegemony in the hemisphere. The most important of these borders is the dividing line separating the First World from the Third. People migrate north to the United States because they need work, and because of civil turmoil in their home nations. The U.S. history of intervention in the region has contributed to the push. From 1954 to the near present, the United States based its authority on national security and the Eisenhower Doctrine, according to which a Latin American country could request American economic assistance and/or aid from U.S. military forces if it was being threatened by armed aggression from another state.³² Eisenhower singled out the Soviet Union as a threat authorizing the commitment of U.S. forces to secure and protect the territorial integrity and political independence of such nations, requesting such aid against overt armed aggression from any nation controlled by international communism. The Doctrine and the CIA-sponsored overthrow of Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala (1954) set the template for what happened with the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile (1973), the fall of Anastasio Somoza in 1979, and the Central American Civil Wars of the 1980s. These three events prompted the migration of hundreds of thousands of Central and Latin Americans to the United States. Indeed, U.S. intervention was a major cause for instability in the hemisphere.

Middle America was further destabilized by the North American Free Trade and the Central American Free Trade Agreements. David Bacon shows how NAFTA caused displacement of Mexicans and their forced migration al norte. NAFTA also caused a displacement of small farmers who were unable to compete with U.S. subsidized corn.³³ Moreover, the Mexican economy experienced the negative shock of the peso crisis due to the failure of the trade expansion promised by NAFTA. Poverty and inequality were aggravated. While the number of skilled laborers increased, most women and new entrants were relatively unskilled workers.³⁴

About a decade after NAFTA, and ignoring its lessons, the United States pushed the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). This bound five Central American countries (Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua) and the Dominican Republic. Like the North American version, CAFTA does more than eliminate tariffs and trade barriers. Despite American and Central American trade union opposition, that organized a mass social mobilization against the deal, it passed into law in 2005. George W. Bush hailed it in unguarded terms: People have got to understand that by promoting policy that will help generate wealth in Central America, we’re promoting policy that will mean someone is less—more likely to stay at home to find a job. As expected, transnational corporations and their government allies made the most of CAFTA and the rights it gave them. They flooded international trade arbitration tribunals, especially the World Bank’s International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). The summer of 2014 saw large numbers of children and families fleeing poverty and violence in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. CAFTA operated much like NAFTA to maintain U.S. hegemony in Central America, the War on Drugs, and the dumping of gang members expelled from U.S. cities on the fragile infrastructures of countries recently at war. As a result there are a massive number of children at the gates of the United States.³⁵

March 1, 2016 marked ten years since the United States’ free trade agreement with Central America and the Dominican Republic went into effect in El Salvador. CAFTA ushered in a decade of deteriorating economic conditions for working people, major new threats to the environment and national sovereignty, and the further unraveling of rural economies. President Tony Saca from El Salvador’s right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) was the first president in Central America to ratify and implement the Bush administration’s major trade policy initiative.

Similarly, the War on Drugs and the dumping of thousands of gang members have destabilized the region. Streams of refugees in search of stability will continue to brave the hardships of traveling through Mexico to reach El Norte. The following chart shows the population of each Latin American nation and its distance from the United States. These variables give a clue to where future immigration will come from. It is similar but different than Mexican immigration. The Mexican migrant just had to step across the línea (line). The arrival of people who, to Americans, look and sound like Mexicans promises to greatly impact the Anything But Mexican identity.

Sources: Marc Becker, History of U.S. Interventions in Latin America, yachana.org

Latin America population

Sources: CIA Factbook, cia.gov; distancefromto.net

Let us focus on Mexico: the Mexican population is young. Four percent are older than sixty-five, 34 percent are under fourteen. In contrast, the United States is old: 14 percent are over sixty-five. Seventy percent of Mexicans live in overpopulated cities. Rural poverty has reached desperate levels, made worse by the North American Free Trade Agreement and the crisis in Mexico accelerated by neoliberalism. According to World Bank data, in 2010 61 percent of people in the Mexican countryside lived below the national rural poverty line; more than 15 million people out of a total rural population of around 25 million. Events in Mexico are taking on more significance since the 1980s, and should be considered alongside the fact that the population in Mexico numbers 121,736,809; and Mexican-origin people in the United States come to another 35 million. The population of Spain is 46.4 million.

The city of the angels

The City of the Angels is the hub of a vast number of Latinos, encompassing Los Angeles (the largest concentration) and Riverside-San Bernardino (the fourth largest). The top ten cities of Latinos have populations of more than 1 million, and Latinos are the largest minority group in each.³⁶ Mexicans are the largest Latino origin group in forty-nine of the top sixty metro areas, accounting for 95 percent or more of the Latino population in eight metro areas in the top sixty.³⁷ The Latino population growth peaked in the 1990s, when annual average growth reached 4.8 percent. In the second decade of the new millennium it dropped to 2.2 percent, largely due to the weakening of pull factors following the 2008 recession. The growth slowdown affected Mexico in particular. Changes are taking place in L.A. that foment shifting identities based on class, generation, and location. No one really knows where the white ball in the roulette wheel will land. For example, Mexicans and other Latinos are working-class. Just twenty years ago, most lived in selected enclaves near the civic center. Today, about 4.6 million people—57.3 percent of L.A.—are not enjoying even a ‘modest but adequate standard of living,’ according to the Economic Policy Institute, which adds that 57 percent can no longer afford to live in Los Angeles, not enjoying even a modest but adequate standard of living … 67 percent of kids in L.A. are living in families below the basic budget threshold.³⁸

Los Angeles resembles the City of San Francisco that once enjoyed a measure of control over the city’s planning. The Mission District, heart of the Latino community in the City, is being redeveloped. (As Latinos say, people are being removed.) Its strong, often racialized identity is turning hipster, and a rapid transformation of the space has swallowed up Mission Dolores. As in Los Angeles, the mass excavation of the bulldozers has given way to gentrification. The Bay Area Rapid Transit and other transportation routes engulf the Mission, erasing its character. It is an insidious plan that appears to be pushing out the poor to make way for trendy artists. Tragically, Mexicans and Latinos number among the gentrifiers.³⁹

Guillermo Gómez-Peña, a Chicano satirical performance artist, writer, activist, and educator, recently captured the transformation of San Francisco. He begins his essay: Dear Ex-local artist, writer, activist, bohemian, street eccentric, and/or protector of difference … Imagine a city, your city [San Francisco] and your former ‘hip’ neighborhood, being handed over by greedy politicians and re/developers to the crème de la crème of the tech industry. This includes the seven most powerful tech companies in the world. I don’t need to list them: their names have become verbs in lingua franca; their sandbox is the city you used to call your own. Guillermo laments the new order: As your community rapidly shrinks, so does your sense of belonging to a city that no longer seems to like you. You begin to feel like a foreigner and internal exile: freaky Alice in techno-Wonderlandia; the Alien Caterpillar who inhaled … You become an orphan.⁴⁰

Can Americans handle not being white?

Circa 1980 I was speaking at the University of Michigan. I had a nice-sized audience, but unlike those in Los Angeles I could not generalize their ethnicity. This happened to me a lot when I traveled outside the Southwest. After the talk, an attractive young lady approached the podium and waited for me to autograph books. When I finished, we struck up a conversation. She told me that she was from Michigan and that she had just been released from a mental sanitarium. Curious, I asked her what had happened. She told me that she was brought up by a very nice couple who were nevertheless racist, and would express those sentiments that she internalized. One day she learned that she was adopted. She’d always felt different; she had dark brown hair and brown eyes and a perpetual tan. The parents finally told her that her birth parents were Mexican, and her world came apart. According to the young lady, she could cope with being Mexican, but could not cope with not being white. Over the years I have heard similar stories; I have frequently heard Mexicans vehemently insist that they were white. Their pain was eased by calling themselves Hispanic. They grabbed on to the illusion of being Americans, being exceptional. What my friend Dr. Rudy Rosales calls the Illusion of Inclusion.⁴¹

1

Whose America?

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Introducing Chicano L.A.

In May 1993 I visited students staging a hunger strike on the UCLA campus. They wanted the university to establish an autonomous Chicana/o Studies department. On the way home my eight-year-old daughter, Angela, tearfully asked her mother why everyone couldn’t be the same. It was hard to be a Mexican; people didn’t like her father because he was Mexican; they didn’t give him a job because he was Mexican; and now her friends were starving because they were Mexicans. It was too hard to be Mexican! At an early age, Angela was learning that Los Angeles is a great place for Mexicans, as long as they caress their sombreros.

Although things have gotten better for the middle class, for a long time it was an insult to be a Mexican in this city. Until recently, for example, Mexican food was called Spanish, although it is one of the few things Mexican almost universally accepted by Euroamericans today. The neon signs at some of the most-established Mexican restaurants, like El Cholo, reputedly L.A.’s oldest, even today advertise Spanish food. This preference for the European reappears in L.A.’s public relations as the city fathers promote a mythical Los Angeles in which cultural borrowing and harmony are the rule. That myth includes the fantasy of a romantic Hispanic—read, European—past of dons and ranchos. That tradition is acceptable to Euroangelenos; the Mexican reality is not. So we find Los Angeles welcoming King Juan Carlos I and Queen Sofia of Spain to Los Angeles in October 1987.¹ When I asked Bea Lavery, an aide to then Mayor Tom Bradley, what significance the trip held for Latinos, she replied: That’s what the trip is all about. After all, she added, Felipe Neve discovered Los Angeles. A statue of King Carlos III, who granted Los Angeles its first charter in 1781, was moved from MacArthur Park to El Pueblo Park for the royal visit. This allowed the king and queen to pay homage to their Bourbon ancestor in the place considered to be the city’s original center. While there, they walked Olvera Street—a piece of Old Spain in Los Angeles. If they so desired they could have eaten traditional Spanish food like tacos and tamales and listened to Spanish mariachi music. Totally ignored was the fact that Neve and the Spanish did not discover Southern California, any more than Columbus discovered America: they invaded it.

Mexican acceptability in Los Angeles varies according to the Mexican’s appearance and socioeconomic status. White Angelenos² often stumble when asking people if they are Mexican, seeming surprised when the answer is yes. Almost apologetically, the questioner responds, with a smile, Oh, you don’t look Mexican!—as if that were some kind of compliment. Euroangelenos love French accents (they’re sexy), and Central European accents like Henry Kissinger’s (they sound so intelligent); on the other hand, they find Mexican and other Latino (or Asian) accents hard to understand. Minerva Pérez, a former KTLA-TV anchor, described how during her tenure at the station she irritated some viewers by simply pronouncing Spanish words properly, including her own name: "I got resistance to my Mexican ways from viewers and management … It took me by surprise, because