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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226600840 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 05/13/2019 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Race Relations and Demographic Change
In the world in which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself.
FRANTZ FANON
For decades, our understanding of how immigrants acculturate and accumulate social status in the US has been predicated on the presumption that newcomers must distance themselves from blacks. Since the early twentieth century, immigration and race scholars have argued that immigrants quickly learn American racial hierarchies and adopt prevailing social norms. Toni Morrison, in her 1993 Time magazine piece, "On the Backs of Blacks," wrote that such distancing has been crucial to the Americanization process. From Italians to West Indians, establishing oneself as nonblack has proven key to accessing the housing, employment, and social status systematically denied to African Americans. Moreover, as a competing low-wage workforce, new immigrant waves are doubly incentivized to engage in interminority conflict.
Today's news indicates that little has changed. Conventional wisdom and recent scholarship suggests that Latinos continue to follow previous immigrant waves, in which they engage, at best, in casual distancing from African Americans, and at worst, in blatant anti-black racism. In the 1980s, a series of riots in Miami was attributed to inherent black-Latino tensions after a black man was killed by a Cuban-born police officer. In the 1990s, we looked to Los Angeles and its purported black-Latino "youth wars" to understand gang warfare and the future of racial conflict. And in 2012, when it was revealed that George Zimmerman, the killer of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, was half-Peruvian, scholars and pundits hurried to reexamine the shooting as a case of pervasive black-Latino conflict and Latinos' long-held anti-black bias. Researchers report that blacks and Latinos hold overwhelmingly negative stereotypes of one another; see each other as competition for jobs, resources, and social services; and, indeed, commit violence against each other. As the country becomes more and more Latino, we should expect, from these histories, far more open, race-based conflict among minority groups.
The story of white/Latino conflict is just as well-trod. Anti-immigrant sentiment is hardly unusual, especially in periods of crisis, but anti-Latino sentiment is particularly representative of a kind of "foreign invasion" threatening very core of American culture (see the oft-cited Samuel Huntington book Who Are We: The Challenges to America's National Identity [2004] for an articulation), and it has been a swelling undercurrent of conservative politics for decades. These arguments often point to structural or economic conflicts with other minorities to broaden their appeal and appearance of reasonability, but in this conception, Latinos are largely constructed as an affront to Anglo-American values, social dominance, and the rule of law. In sum, whether political or academic, these frameworks raise the stakes of demographic change.
And so, the sound of alarm bells, chiming out the "browning" of America, has intensified. Over the past several decades, Census takers and demographers have written and rewritten demographic projections, advising that racial change is happening faster than anticipated and, given current rates of birth and immigration, the US may be a majority-minority nation by 2045. Scholars believe this acceleration is driven not only by rapid growth among new minority groups, particularly Latinos, Asians, and multiracials, but also economic change and reverse migration among African Americans (in which blacks are leaving the urban North in significant numbers, reversing the course of the "Great Migration" to move to prosperous neighborhoods in the cities and suburbs of the South and Southwest). Depending on where you live, it may feel like this shift has already happened. Numerous municipalities, from Los Angeles to Charlotte, have already "tipped"; in 2012, for the first time, there were more nonwhites than whites born in the US. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this change is producing panic and political backlash among American whites. As Leo Chavez and Otto Santa Ana have argued, much of their fear hinges on the perception that Latinos in particular are "taking over."
These fears are loosely grounded in social fact: Latinos are now the largest minority group in the US, and more than half of the foreign-born growth in the US population between the 1990s and early 2000s was Latino. Their role in shaping such issues as electoral politics, immigration policy, generational change, and a host of other social concerns is transforming the social landscape. Not only has the Latino share of the population increased dramatically, but Latino populations during this period have also spread out faster than any immigration wave in US history (internal or external),including the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North.
While Latinos certainly continued to settle in traditional destinations, such as California, Arizona, and New York, between 1990 and 2000, we have seen shifts in that same period to new destinations like Georgia, North Carolina, Utah, and Colorado. At the same time, the reverse migration of African Americans to places like Atlanta, Raleigh, and Houston ensures that the South (which, as of 2010, was home to 57 percent of African Americans) retains black majorities among its rapidly expanding minority populations. These population shifts raise important questions about racial formation, immigrant incorporation, and intergroup relations. In other words, the US is changing — what will its emerging racial landscape look like? What will be the on-the-ground impact of demographic change on race relations and state politics?
Treating demographic change like a problem to be solved, however — often by choosing derisive framing likening expanding Latino populations to an invasion, a tidal wave, and in some cases, a Reconquista — not only creates unnecessary political tensions and hostile environments, but also puts new political and social forces, such as the criminalization of Latino immigrants, into motion. These processes, in turn, are also reshaping the Latino population, producing unintended social, political, and economic effects.
This book unravels the tangle of social relations that demographic panics about Latinos have created through an ethnographic account of community change in the southern city of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Like other cities in the Southeast, Winston-Salem changed rapidly in the 1990s and 2000s, moving from a nearly perfectly biracial middle-class town of blacks and whites, to a tri-racial city.
When I embarked on this project in 2007, I was certain that I might gather insight into how race works among new Mexican immigrants, particularly in places where they encounter blacks and whites in equal numbers. I looked to Winston-Salem as a natural experiment in racial formation and race relations, where large numbers of whites and African Americans were increasingly joined by significant numbers of Mexicans, as well as some Central and South Americans, and Puerto Ricans, including large minorities of Latinos with significant African ancestry.
From my research and discussions with scholars and experts in the US, I knew that many Afro-Mexicans were migrating from the coastal regions of Veracruz, Oaxaca, and Guerrero to settle in North Carolina, as well as in Santa Ana, California, and in Georgia. In my preliminary research, I learned that Winston-Salem was a key destination, and so I embarked on a study that would examine these new settlement patterns.
My thinking at the time paralleled Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's Latin Americanization thesis, in which phenotype would matter most. I expected darker-skinned Latinos to ally with African Americans, while light-skinned Latinos would see themselves more closely aligned with whites. In other words, rather than band together as a single minority group, Latinos would distribute along an existing racial hierarchy, complicating our ideas about Latino integration and race relations, but not necessarily race itself.
I spent four months in coastal Mexico learning about Mexican racial frames, ideas of blackness in Mexico, and the contradictions of racial ideology at the local, national, and transnational levels. I also investigated the causes and motivations for new migration streams, attempting to unpack why so many Mexicans were now departing for the US from all over the country to settle in places not traditionally known as receiving centers for Latinos. When I arrived in Winston-Salem, I fully expected to apply this knowledge to the case city's racialized patterns.
What I found, though, is that Winston-Salem — along with the rest of North Carolina — is more of a natural experiment than I could have anticipated. I overestimated the predictive value of existing intergroup relations theory to explain a particular case and underestimated the importance of the interplay between demographic change, racial politics, and local context in shaping racial identities. Instead, I found, as Brian Behnken argues, black-Latino relations are not a zero-sum game — either conflictual or collaborative. Rather, like all social relations, they are complex and dynamic, mediated by social context and changing over time. Nor are race relations simple dyads. Rather, they are constructed relationally. In the case of Winston-Salem and its surrounding communities, rapid demographic change (often leading the rest of the country) and shifting longstanding black-white dynamics were at work, but the region also experimented with social and political solutions to that change, ranging from integrative policies like translation services to punitive agreements between federal immigrant enforcement agencies and local sheriffs.
Instead of being shaped by shared phenotype, I uncovered that Latinos' ideas about race were largely constructed from their social experiences of discrimination and political shifts, as well as relationally, through both their encounters with, and understandings of, the racialized experiences of blacks and whites. In other words, as decades of racialization research has highlighted, phenotype does not have a linear relationship to race-making. While phenotype certainly matters, race-making is a far more complex set of social and relational processes that allow the assignation and adoption of race at both the individual and social level that can shape intergroup relations in unexpected ways.
In this book, I tell the story of contemporary Winston-Salem through the eyes of its new Latino residents. It has been tumultuous. They have been welcomed, un-welcomed, and then partially re-welcomed, in a relatively short period. I show that, when demographic panics set in among white residents, Latinos experienced a fundamental shift in their racialized minority identity and toward political alignment, rather than conflict, with their southern African American neighbors. The contributions of this book are at least two-fold. First, it uncovers solidarity between Latino immigrants and African Americans based in common experiences of racialization that fly in the face of standing theory. Second, it helps pinpoint the formal mechanisms and informal interactions that engender this positive, collaborative, two-way relationship.
While focused on one community, The Browning of the New South also makes the case that this outcome not only is being repeated across cities and states throughout the country, but also is a significant deviation from how we have understood Latino identity and politics, as well as interminority relations, for generations, and has important implications for racial meanings and politics. In other words, I show how fearing a new majority-minority has, in fact, led to it.
* * *
In the fall of 2008, I drove the 30 minutes down Highway 40 from Winston-Salem to neighboring Greensboro, North Carolina, where a two-day conference was scheduled on black-brown relations in the Piedmont Triad area. Both cities had experienced rapid and recent increases in the number of Latinos residing in their cities and surrounding communities — a six-fold rise since the 1990s. For weeks, civil rights activists, church leaders, educators, students, community members, and union organizers from Greensboro, Winston-Salem, and other surrounding communities had planned this gathering to discuss and organize, with the explicit purpose of forging positive relationships between African Americans and Latinos. Coming together for two days in a local Baptist church and community center, African American and Latino church leaders, organizers, and community representatives spoke to nearly 300 participants about the similar conditions faced by black and Latino communities. They shared, we were told, problems with gangs, poor schools, employment, institutional discrimination, violence, and exploitation, and they would come together as a minority community to resolve these shared challenges.
Throughout the conference, spirits were high and participants were energized. They chatted over sandwiches, listened intently to workshop speakers, and eagerly participated in group exercises. Not once were the motives for the gathering questioned. At the end of the conference, all the participants gathered in the sanctuary. Though this closing exercise marked the end of the long days of meetings, workshops, and lectures, the participants stuck around. They formed a rippling oval around the outer perimeter of the church sanctuary, circling around the pews to make space so that all participants might join hands. The two pastors leading the gathering — one African American and one Latina — asked everyone to cross their arms and join hands. Once each hand held another, participants were asked, one by one, to pledge their commitment to black and brown unity by stating "esta cadena no se romperá conmigo" or "this chain won't break with me" — however they felt most comfortable. As the last pledge was spoken, the participants all joined the pastors in a rousing version of "We Shall Overcome," a gentle sway undulating the unbroken circle.
This event was one in an ongoing series of meetings between blacks and Latinos in the Piedmont triad area of North Carolina, and is one of several efforts to cultivate an alliance between them across the state. Black and Latino civic leaders have made a concerted effort to create a discourse about shared minority experiences and mobilize as a coalition. Indeed, it was this same group that played a key role in rallying black and Latino workers in the Smithfield poultry plant strikes two years earlier and in protests at town halls later that year against the Greensboro Sheriff's plans to sign on to the 287(g) program.
The meetings also represented a seemingly counterintuitive process at work in communities across the country. African American and Latino leaders are working diligently and systematically to develop partnerships and coalitions, reaching out to each other as minorities with a shared political agenda, through the lens of their own experiences and a shared commitment to protecting and expanding civil rights. Throughout the South, alliances and coalitions are emerging. In October 2011, the Alabama NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) joined the Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice to collectively oppose the passage of Alabama's controversial anti-immigrant legislation, HB 56, and worked together to pressure the state to repeal HB 56 alongside restrictions on voters' rights. Wade Henderson, the African American president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, was one of the first to denounce the law, noting that it was designed to "terrorize the state's Latino community." Other local African American leaders have called it a "Juan Crow Law," comparing it to Jim Crow in both letter and spirit. This hardly suggests that interminority relations have been uniformly resolved, but it certainly indicates that black-Latino coalitions are not only plausible, but, in the South, viable. Importantly, these leaders' efforts not only shaped intergroup relations, but also had an impact on Latino identity formation as pan-ethnic, racialized, and part of a shared nonwhite majority.
So why hasn't existing research indicated that such shifts toward a Latino minority consciousness and politics might arise? From what scholars have written, we would expect that, throughout the Southeast and other new immigrant destinations, Latino newcomers, like the generations of immigrants before them, would distance themselves from blacks and seek to identify with and see themselves as closer to whites. But in Winston-Salem, I saw immediately that Mexican migrants identified with and saw themselves as closer to blacks. Conventional wisdom and academic scholarship tell us that black-brown conflict is pervasive; on the ground, the situation looks a lot different.
The Southeast, long underexamined empirically and overtheorized symbolically in social science literature, has served as a kind of symbolic boundary for the US. Not unlike racial formation practices that situate blacks and whites as racial opposites or position migrant mobility against an invisible, unassimilable black underclass, the South functions as a regional foil. As Zandria Robinson argues, scholars and other commentators frame the region not only as distinct, but also as the opposite of the rest of the nation. This framing of the South hinges on a kind of mythical past that is alternately backwards, unsophisticated, provincial, and patently racist, as well as timelessly genteel, warm, and simple. Indeed, Robinson describes how the South has "often served as a repository for national illness, quarantined, sealed off, and punished in order to maintain a national façade of progress and morality."
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
1 Introduction: Race Relations and Demographic Change 2 Open Doors: Race and Immigration in the Twentieth Century 3 Closed Gates: The Rise of Local Enforcement 4 Racializing Mexicans: New Latinos 5 Making Minorities: The African American Embrace and Minority Linked Fate 6 The New South: New Minority Coalitions and White Retrenchment 7 Conclusion: Making Race: Conflict and Color LinesAcknowledgments Appendix A. Methodological Note: Race Work and Positionality Appendix B. Interview Questions Appendix C. Key Terms, Organizations, and Policies Notes References Index