The Latino conversation in 2023: a wish list

This is the season of lists. Here’s my list of things I think we need to be talking about more, if we’re committed to better understanding Latina, Latino, Latinx communities in the United States. Of course, like all lists, this one is highly subjective and reflects my own interests and biases. I’d love to hear from you about the subjects you think need more attention.

1. IMMIGRATION AND THE BORDER. Really, I shouldn’t even be putting these two things together, because immigration happens in lots of places besides the border, and many things happen along the border besides immigration. In fact, I have a chapter in a book coming out in just a few days, called Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past, which seeks to disentangle the border and immigration in order to root out the idea that they’re one and the same; that talking about one is, by definition, talking about the other. But it’s hard to deny that today our attention to immigration focuses on the border because of the thousands of migrants gathered on the other side, seeking desperately to be heard and allowed entry, as well as the legal fight over Title 42 and whether it will be lifted or kept in place. What haven’t we tried to shake up the conversation about immigration? We’ve argued that we need to rise above partisanship and realize that lives and wellbeing are at stake. Liberals and conservatives both make this argument, but in different ways: liberals make the argument in order to humanize the migrants we too often see as numbers, while conservatives living along the border make the argument in order to draw our attention to how their lives are affected, too. In order to encourage empathy, we’ve focused on the so-called push factors that make Latin Americans desperate to flee their home countries—political violence, poverty, climate change, which are, of course, connected phenomena—and risk the dangerous trek across Mexico. We’ve tried to forge compromises where all get something they want, but none get everything they want. We’ve even turned to border art, thinking that the creativity of artists might help us see migrants and the border in new ways, thereby helping us to break the impasse. So, what’s it going to take to change this situation that everyone seems to agree isn’t working for anyone? Or, will we just admit that our broken immigration system isn’t broken after all, and that it’s in fact working quite well for businesses and consumers? When I’m most frustrated, I sometimes think we should just come out and say it: we don’t really care about migrant lives, and, instead, what we really care about is our ability to buy food and clothing on the cheap, to have pretty lawns, and have our children cared for. This would at least be honest, instead of pretending to care about human rights. (I think often of labor leader Ernesto Galarza’s idea that Mexican migrant workers in the mid-twentieth century were ideal economic machines because they could be chewed up and spit out when their work was done; and the movie Sleep Dealer, from Alex Rivera, which visualizes Galarza’s idea through the character of Memo, who hooks into machines at border factories that allow him to control robots at U.S. worksites, so U.S. companies benefit from Mexican labor without the inconvenience of Mexican bodies). Instead, what we’ve got is Title 42 as a substitute for immigration policy.

2. PUERTO RICO’S TERRITORIAL STATUS. Speaking of apparently unsolvable problems … The Puerto Rico Status Act passed through the House of Representatives, but will in all likelihood be voted down in the Senate, if it comes up for a vote at all. The legislation was supposed to represent a grand compromise between advocates of independence and statehood, who both argue that the current territorial status amounts to colonialism. Puerto Rico has been a colony for 500 years!! First, of Spain, then of the United States. Isn’t it time for this situation to end, and wouldn’t any alternative on the table—independence, statehood, or sovereignty in free association—be better than what Puerto Ricans have got now? The status quo is so manifestly unjust, but it doesn’t seem like anything will be done about it. Why not? Republicans will be responsible for this Bill’s failure; they’re the ones who will vote it down in Congress, even though support for statehood—one of the options in the Bill, perhaps even the most popular one—has been in their Party’s platform since 1940. They say Puerto Rico needs to “get its financial house in order” before we can even consider admitting Puerto Rico as a state (this sounds like a parallel to the conservative argument about the border and immigration, that we need to enforce the border before we even discuss a pathway to citizenship). Despite the financial argument, and even though Republicans have nominally supported statehood for decades, I don’t think I’ll ever be convinced that race and equality aren’t the heart of the matter, and that Republicans will never accept Puerto Ricans as the equals of all other Americans. Prove me wrong. There are also millions of Puerto Ricans in the diaspora, and fewer on the island, who want Puerto Rico to become independent. Their movement has always had the support of a comparatively small percentage of Puerto Ricans, which, they say, is the result of the violent repression of activists for independence. Perhaps, although I’m not convinced that other explanations aren’t equally plausible, including that Puerto Ricans on the island aren’t interested in giving up U.S. citizenship, even though its been tainted by enduring injustices such as the inability to vote. What we’re left with is a situation that, like immigration, doesn’t seem work for anyone, but will probably continue nonetheless. Five hundred years of colonialism, 510, 520, 530—how long will it last? Unless, of course—also like immigration—the status quo is actually working for U.S. and Puerto Rican business interests, and that’s why the current territorial status remains in place. Something has to give.

3. WHAT NEW MOVEMENTS WILL BE LED BY LATINO YOUTH? As we all know, Latinos are younger than other Americans. About half of all Latinos born in the United States are under the age of 18; and the average age of Latinos is under 30, whereas the average age of Americans in general is 38. Political consultants always remind us of this fact when they argue that Latinos will become increasingly powerful in American politics. That day always seems to be just over the horizon, but it seems clear that Latino youth did, in fact, show up to vote in the 2022 midterms in larger-than-expected numbers. What engaged them this time around, and how will community organizations, national non-profits, advocacy groups, and political parties keep them engaged? Latino youth have led the movement in support of DACA recipients. They’ve also led movements for climate justice. Conservative Latino youth, led by figures such as Abraham Enriquez, who flock to summits organized by Turning Point USA, give Republicans hope that Latino youth aren’t lost to them. Latino youth are also an important part of the future of education in the United States. Between 2010 and 2020, the Latino percentage of the K-12 student population increased from 22 to 28, even though Latinos represent only 18 or 19 percent of the U.S. population as a whole. Meanwhile, the “White” student population decreased from 54 to 46 percent, and the Black student population decreased from 17 to 15 percent. It is encouraging that, in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center, Latinos represented 20 percent of all college students in the United States—a share slightly larger than their share of the population as a whole. A significant majority of them are female; in 2020, there were 2.02 million Latina undergraduates, and 1.32 million Latino undergraduates. This could lead us to wonder whether the Latino political divide by gender is part of the educational divide among American voters in general. Daisy Contreras and others at PRX’s The World started a project on Latino youth in 2020 called, “Every 30 Seconds,” referring to the fact that every 30 seconds a young Latino turns 18 yo; I wish this project was ongoing, and that there were more like it today.

4. LATINOS AND RACE. We’ve known it for a long time, but the leaked audio of L.A. City Council members making racist remarks made it unavoidable: we need a new conversation about Latinos and race, and the racial identity of Latinos. It needs to be more complicated than the idea that there are Black Latinos and White Latinos, which hardly captures all of the ways that Latinos understand their identities, especially their Indigenous heritage. We also need to abandon mestizaje as defined by early-twentieth century race thinkers in Latin America, such as José Vasconcelos—and later embraced by Latina/o/x writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Gregory Rodriguez—even as we recognize the undeniable reality of racial mixture as a key component of Latino racial identity. Is there such a thing as Latino identity—or American identity, or any identity—without mixture? Maybe I’ve been reading too much about human evolution and how groups have moved around and collided with one another for many millennia, or maybe I’ve been too seduced by the findings of DNA testing, but it seems to me that we all need new understandings of race that emphasize mixture and reject purity. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Andrew Curran made this argument in a recent NY Times op-ed. This doesn’t mean that we should ignore the real power differences and economic, health, political, and social disparities created, in part, by what scholars have called racial capitalism and settler colonialism, but I think these will be seen as even more manifestly man made once we articulate better, more nuanced understandings of Latino racial identity—as anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, for sure, but also as something more mixed than white. This new understanding will allow for the messy reality that Latinos have been discriminated against at the same time that we’ve discriminated against others. Writers like Lorgia García Peña, Tanya Katerí Hernández, Juliet Hooker, Paul Joseph López Oro, María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, and Simón Trujillo, are already actively engaged in this conversation. I’m not sure that we have the exact same perspective, or that they have the same perspective as one another. But check out their work. It’s really important.

5. LATINO POLITICS. I’ll be brief here, because I’m sure I’m beginning to try your patience. Because of the 2020 election, many analyses between 2020 and 2022—perhaps too many—focused on the Latino shift toward Republicans. Media attention to that result made sense to me, since it was the more surprising and newsworthy of possible outcomes. Then, after the 2022 midterms, the picture became more mixed. Latino Democrats were quick to claim that Latinos moved back into the Democratic camp. Latino Republicans, meanwhile, were quick to cite victories in Florida, one district in South Texas, and parts of Central California, at the same time that they pointed to exit polls showing something closer to a 60-40 split nationally, rather than the 2 to 1 historical norm. I think that this more mixed picture is actually a good thing for Latinos, as I’ve written here, since it means—or at least I think it should mean—more curiosity and attention to Latinos. Political analysts have noted that presidential elections and midterm elections are really different (in terms of turnout, who the electorate is, and what sorts of issues get highlighted by particular campaigns), which gives me great pause about drawing any sort of conclusion from 2020 and 2022 about what could happen in 2024 and beyond. As a historian, I hesitate to draw a conclusion about 2020 and 2022 for another reason: over the past 50 years, at least, Latino support for Republicans has swung between, say, 25 and 40 percent, and in this sense the shift between 2016 and 2020, and between 2020 and 2022, fell within the historical range. It seems to me that the focus on Latino realignments is part of our broader tendency these days to understand things only in terms of waves and wild fluctuations, when, in fact, things might be more stable than that. Let’s revisit this again if the Latino split remains 60-40 for a few more election cycles, or, especially, if Latino support for Republicans begins to creep a little north of 40 percent nationally, and maybe even reaches 50 percent nationally. That would be notable, and, in the meantime, both parties, depending on how much or how little they invest, will have a lot to do with how this story turns out. Two particular stories that could help us see which way the wind will blow: 1) After seeing what happened in Florida, will Democrats reinvest in a state that they seem to have given up on in 2022, and will Republicans try to nationalize what happened in the Sunshine state, where, somewhat surprisingly, the majority of non-Cuban Latinos also supported Republicans; and 2) how will the incredible diversity of the incoming cohort of Latinos in Congress—a Mexican American mechanic and gun-owner from Washington who thinks we should hire more police, and progressives from Austin and Orlando who basically want the opposite—reshape our understanding of what Latino politics is all about, and where in the country it happens (hint: everywhere Latinos live)?

Here and elsewhere, in 2023 I—along with many other scholars, journalists, policy makers, writers, and others, who’ve already begun the work—plan to dive into each of these subjects and many others. I think they’ll help us arrive at a deeper understanding of who Latinos are and could become. Thanks again for following along with me, and please let me know what you think!