Transforming Citizenship: Democracy, Membership, and Belonging in Latino Communities
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Transforming Citizenship: Democracy, Membership, and Belonging in Latino Communities
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781628950014 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2014 |
| Series: | Latinos in the United States |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 278 |
| File size: | 741 KB |
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Transforming Citizenship
Democracy, Membership, and Belonging in Latino Communities
By Raymond A. Rocco
Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2014 Raymond A. RoccoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62895-001-4
CHAPTER 1
Framing the Question of Citizenship
Membership, Exclusionary Inclusion, and Latinos in the National Political Imaginary
It's great now that they're calling Jose Antonio a hero. But when he was up crossing the border they called him a wetback.... In my mind, he was a hero when he chose to leave the streets. The rest is just politics and window dressing.
—Bruce Harris, Director of Casa Alianza, in "From Illegal Immigrant to Marines, Soldier's Death Spotlights Immigrants"
Whatever their legal citizenship status, and however many generations of American citizens they can trace in their ancestry, Hispanics/Latinos in the United States are liable to be treated as foreigners.
—Iris Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference
On Wednesday, April 2, 2003, The U.S. Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services awarded citizenship status posthumously to two young Latino immigrants, Jose Garibay and Jose Gutierrez, who were serving in the Marines and were killed during the first few days of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The official reason given for bestowing citizenship was that it was meant to reward them for losing their lives in the service of "their" country. However, given the rise in anti-immigrant sentiment during the last few years, and the charges that Latino immigrants in particular have undermined the "American way of life" and drained our resources, and that the 37,000 noncitizens in the military pose a problem of "dual loyalty," these events presented an awkward situation for the government. Is it possible that the granting of citizenship was intended to reconcile the tension inherent in the fact that non-citizens died while performing duties normally associated with the highest loyalties of citizenship? Clearly citizenship has no meaning for these two Latinos now, so granting it to them posthumously was a symbolic act addressed to appeal to a national audience. Immigrants do not enjoy, to use T. H. Marshall's notion of citizenship, "full membership in the community" (Marshall 1950), so making Garibay and Gutierrez citizens posthumously appears to be a way to rectify what may seem to some as an unfair, perhaps even unjust situation, i.e., that these two were willing to risk their lives for a country that limited their ability to participate fully in its major institutions. At the very least, the action highlights the complex question of how the relationship between citizenship, identity, and the meaning of "belonging" to a political community applies to Latinos in the United States. But it is important to point out that the complex of issues concerning Latino membership and citizenship highlighted by this situation is not limited or relevant to only Latino immigrants. While foreign-born Latinos represent roughly 40 percent of that population, a majority of Latinos were born and raised in the United States. However, although there is great emphasis in the current period on the large number of recent immigrants, what cannot be ignored is that the history of Latino communities in the United States has been a long, complex, and diverse one in which the level and type of social and political membership of Latinos has been contested in various spheres of political and civil society—e.g., in the legal, economic, social, and cultural institutional sites of the society. The "place," role, and institutional access of Latinos have been regulated and controlled through various institutional means and sites, such as treaties, court cases, legislation, labor-market policies and practices, and informal practices in civil society, and it is through the combined effects of these mechanisms that the level of Latino inclusion in U.S. institutions has been determined, and the effective citizenship status of Latinos defined. It is precisely this framing of the dimension of inclusion and exclusion that is the basis of Marshall's concept of citizenship, and it suggests that the study of Latino citizenship can provide a particularly useful lens for understanding the complex, multidimensional history of Latinos in the United States.
While I return to the issue of how to address this condition in the final chapter, let me clarify at the outset the basic purpose and framing of my study. This history of Latino marginalization and the relationship to citizenship can and has been interpreted in widely varying ways. What is distinct about my approach is that I view citizenship here as primarily a strategy for Latino empowerment. Adopting a Gramscian perspective, I consider citizenship as a key element of the changing regulatory parameters of hegemony, i.e., the combination of force and consent through which the structure of privilege and unequal relations of power are enforced. But my emphasis here is on examining how the struggle for citizenship can become the site of a counterhegemonic politics, i.e., a form of politics that challenges and seeks to transform that system of domination. While I engage the legal and social dimensions that are normally the focus of citizenship studies, my claim throughout the book is that a reconceptualized notion of citizenship can provide the basis for a set of political strategies that converge around the issue of exclusion and marginalization. Since the latter have been defining characteristics of the Latino experience in the United States, using citizenship as a generalized notion focused on the full range of practices and mechanisms of inclusion, and the relationships between them, could form the foundation of a counterhegemonic ideology and practice.
This issue takes on added significance in the contemporary period because of the rapid and extensive growth of Latino communities during the last three decades. Projections based on the 2010 Census suggest that the size and dispersion of Latino populations, and the key role they play in several sectors of the economy, mean that they have become a major, integral part of U.S. society. In the last decade alone, the numbers of Latinos grew 42 percent; there are expected to be well over 50 million when the current census count is determined, and they are projected to constitute over a quarter of the national population by 2050 (Passel and Cohn 2008; Passel, Cohn, and Lopez 2011; Motel and Patten 2013). Not only has there been a dramatic increase in the size of the Latino population, but significant Latino communities have developed in states that had virtually no Latino presence a short time ago. Latino restaurants, stores, churches, soccer leagues, home associations, as well as celebrations of holidays such as Cinco de Mayo are now a basic part of small towns in Georgia, North Carolina, Iowa, Kentucky, and throughout the South. In places like Ames, Iowa, the Mexican Independence Day parades of the 16th of September are as visible and significant as those on the 4th of July. So it is clear that this population will have an ever-increasing effect on determining what kind of society the United States will become. This is particularly clear when one looks at the fact that 20 percent of schoolchildren and 25 percent of newborns are Latino. When combined with statistics that show that Latinos between sixteen and twenty-five have a dropout rate of 17 percent, almost twice as much as African Americans and nearly three times that of whites, this portends an alarming future of even greater fragmentation, lack of opportunity, division, and inequalities, with all the ills and costs that these conditions entail.
It is important to note, however, that while these dramatic increases in the size, rate of growth, and spatial dispersion of Latina/o populations have played a fundamental role in transforming the configuration of political, cultural, spatial, and economic characteristics and relations of many of the important urban regions in the country, they are part of a much wider, complex set of processes of global transformations and restructuring embodied in a broad variety of institutional strategies, policies, and practices at both the regional and international levels (Smith and Feagin 1987; Sassen 1988, 1992, 1994, 1996a,1996b, 1998, 2000, 2001). While the causes of these large-scale reconfigurations are multifaceted, one of the key factors that has been both cause and effect of these changes is the massive and rapid increases in the level of nonwhite migrations from Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean to the major cities of the United States and Europe. These more recent immigrant arrivals come from non-European cultural, social, and racial contexts dramatically different from those of the places they have settled. But this is not entirely new. Differences between Latinos and the rest of the population in the United States have existed throughout the history of Latinos in the country. However, because of the conditions that I have reviewed here and the much greater prominence and presence of Latinos throughout the United States, this new reality, and the economic and political conditions of Latino communities and their capacity to become full and equal members of society, has to be a national concern and not treated as a "minority" issue.
This disjunction or "difference" has generated a qualitatively different set of political issues and alignments, including the contestation of established notions of rights, responsibilities, obligations, entitlements, the relationship between the cultural and political realms, and identity. All of these are exactly the concerns that characterize the broader debate about the meaning of, and criteria for, societal membership and national belonging, and an ongoing, contested reexamination of the parameters of citizenship (Isin and Wood 1999; Isin 2000). However, while the specific parameters and context within which this has taken place may be recent, the marginalized position of Latinos—the difference they represent for the dominant institutions and majority white populations—has been part of the relationship between the latter and Latinos from even before the annexation of a significant part of Mexico. This difference has been a fundamental reason for legitimating and justifying the forms of discrimination and exclusion that have been a constitutive characteristic of the Latino experience in this country. Thus the struggle for inclusion, to become full members in Marshall's sense, has been a continuous, formative aspect of Latino history, and in this sense, the struggle for inclusion has been a struggle for full citizenship, with full and equal membership in all areas of societal institutions. My study is in effect an attempt to extend the discussion about the best ways of accomplishing that goal. However, I argue that achieving this is difficult within the parameters and functioning of the current citizenship regime because it is based on assumptions and normative beliefs that cannot easily or readily accommodate Latinos. Consequently, my study proposes that the explicit struggle for full incorporation needs to be organized around a concept of citizenship much more inclusive than that of the current regime. But this does not and cannot take place in a vacuum, and has to be situated within the larger context of the strengths and weaknesses of different political strategies that might be adopted in pursuit of attaining full membership.
There are different ways of framing this issue of inclusion that focus on distinct aspects. Because I will be looking at the ways in which quotidian practices within civil society and other informal spheres can be the basis of demands for inclusion, the relationship between those spheres and the notion of a public sphere is particularly salient. As is well known, Habermas introduced this idea as a way of examining how public opinion and forms of practices outside the sphere of the state are important for the development of a democratic populace and society (Habermas 1989a). But the basic idea has been modified by a wide number of scholars who have adapted it to their particular concerns and foci. There is an overlap with many of the studies of civil society as a site of transformational politics, but as Craig Calhoun (1993) has pointed out in great detail, they are not exactly the same. Part of my analysis will follow Calhoun's caution and focus on the relationship between certain types of practices in civil society and how they become activated as part of the public sphere as citizenship-rights claims. However, much of this literature focuses primarily on behavior or practices that occur within organizations or formal associations. Much less emphasis has been placed on studying other forms of informal practices that develop particularly in marginalized communities, and that play a very important role in how groups develop political ideas and perspectives. The latter eventually are what enter into the public sphere and represent a different mode of participation in that arena. The complex relationship between civil society, the public sphere, and rights claims to citizenship as full membership is one of the major aspects of this study. However, while I will engage the theoretical discussion of the intersection of these dimensions, I will also attempt to connect it to and ground it within the empirical conditions and real-life political experience of Latino communities.
Neoliberalism and the Structuring of Latino Politics: Membership, Incorporation, and Citizenship
One way to accomplish this connection is to preliminarily ground the discussion of this relationship by recognizing that at the most general level, there are two modal types of political strategies that are available for advancement toward the goal of full membership and citizenship. One is the traditional path of electoral politics, and the other I would identify as a community-based, often oppositional approach. These are not mutually exclusive and should be seen as two poles on a continuum, and groups often adopt a coordinated strategy that draws on both approaches. The electoral approach is based on the traditional ideology that the defining characteristic of democracy is based on the right to vote for elected representatives. Groups can promote their interests and affect public policy by mobilizing effectively to cast their votes for candidates who in theory can be replaced if they are not responsive to those concerns. This process becomes visible every two years at the federal level in the United States, and throughout the year at the local and state levels. The limitations and weaknesses of this approach as a strategy for groups with a history of being politically marginalized is that almost by definition they are not likely to be able to gain greater inclusion systemically using the very process from which they are marginalized. One of the characteristics of the electoral system as it actually functions is to maintain the structure of privilege of the status quo, as the history of elections and the legislative process demonstrates. The tactics and strategies for resisting demands for change are nearly endless, but the reliance on gerrymandering, voter fraud and suppression, intimidation, and misrepresentation are well known.
For the last few decades, as elections approach, attention to the role of Latinos in the electoral process increases accordingly. This is a familiar pattern, not only in the popular media, both English and Spanish versions, but also among mainstream academics and political organizations. The format and framing of these works represent a continuation of the approach adopted by the numerous studies that have documented the growth and behavior in the Latino electorate, particularly since the early 1990s. These concerns focus on turnout, partisan loyalties and attitudes, pending or ongoing policy issues, elections or electability of Latino candidates, identifying local, statewide, and national elections in which Latino voters have the potential to be the "swing" vote, etc. While there are differences among researchers in their assessment of the degree of success or failure of these efforts, the underlying assumption of the vast majority of these studies is that the electoral process in the United States has the potential to promote the "interests" of Latino communities. Yet there are few efforts to link the functioning of these electoral processes to the broader characteristics and tendencies of the structural context within which these take place, and that may in fact circumscribe and limit the possibilities for addressing the broad and differing range of concerns that the many sectors of a very heterogeneous Latino population confront on a daily basis. Thus while we have a considerable amount of research on Latino electoral patterns, there is much less that attempts to situate these within an analysis of the potential effectiveness of the electoral process. The result is a truncated and limited view of Latino politics. While Latino electoral behaviors and trends are an important set of phenomena, they do not occur in an institutional vacuum, and they represent only one dimension of Latino politics, which encompasses a much broader terrain defined by the multiple levels and forms through which Latinos seek to promote their collective interests and affect the policies and practices that have a direct impact on their lives. A wide range of actions are undertaken by Latino community and neighborhood groups, CBOs, nonprofit organizations, home associations, immigrant-rights groups, student organizations, labor groups often linked to domestic and other nonunionized service sectors, and professional organizations to advance their concerns and to affect policies and practices of both state structures and institutions of civil society within which their daily lives are carried out. The kinds of actions undertaken, and policies promoted, by these types of groups and organizations imply a normative concept of Latino politics that is based on achieving full incorporation in all spheres of U.S. society and that views electoral behavior as an indispensable but also limited mechanism for pursuing this goal. It is this dimension of full incorporation, then—rather than any particular pattern of electoral behavior—that should be the measure of success and effectiveness of Latino politics. What is most often missing from works that focus on and emphasize the primacy of electoral activity is a sustained and detailed discussion of how electoral behavior is linked to this more fundamental question of incorporation, which is not the same as "political engagement." The implicit operative assumption seems to be that the increasing number of Latino voters will somehow translate into policies that will meet the variety of needs in these communities. But this overlooks the fact that despite the very significant increase in Latino elected officials, the record of responsiveness to Latino concerns is mixed at best. This is because this approach ignores how the structural features of the economy limit the reach of the electoral system and restrict the parameters of a policy agenda that can be pursued.
(Continues...)
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