¿Somos RUNAFRIBES? The Future of Latino Ethnicity in the Americas
 

By Gonzalo Santos

[Paper originally presented at the XVII Annual Conference of the National Association of Chicano Studies, Los Angeles, CA, March 29 — April 1, 1989. Revised version published in the 1990 book edited by Mary Romero entitled: "Community Empowerment and Chicano Scholarship. Selected Proceedings of the 1989 NACS Proceedings."]
 



 
 
"Debemos dejar de ser todo eso que nunca hemos sido y que no seremos nunca." - Anibal Quijano (1988).

"I am not his-panic, her-panic, or anybody's-panic!" — Alurista (circa 1982)


Lo que hay detras de la etnicidad moderna.

Ethnicity, understood broadly as peoplehood, is as old as history. Ethnicity is different than mere social bonding. As gregarious beings, we know humans have always bonded to lead a social existence, beginning with kinship relations. But conceivably, in the span of human history, the kin-clusters of humans could have simply kept bonding socially into larger and larger socio-cultural units until the entire species became a single socio-cultural configuration, just as, say, other species exist as a single herd or colony. But humans have never gone that far, even under conditions of close proximity. Instead, for reasons of ecological and social adaptation in ancient times, and increasingly in the past few thousand years for reasons of political and economic power, humans have consistently bounded their socio-cultural life as "peoples," aggregating in a myriad socio-cultural units much smaller than the species, "granulating" as distinct "peoples" even within large state formations (e.g., empires) or vast civilizations.

Humans have endlessly conceptualized a we-ness in relation to themselves as the insiders' criteria for "belonging" to a people, while simultaneously ascribing (and frequently imposing) a complementary otherness to their perceived outsiders. That is, ethnicity is historically constructed by collectivities always in relation to other collectivities, a dual social process that, as circumstances change, fastens or shifts the boundaries of peoplehood from the inside out and from the outside in, through consensual or conflictive processes.

Not all relations between peoples have been hierarchical, antagonistic, or competitive. There have been many instances in which relations between peoples were egalitarian, harmonious, and symbiotic.1 But in the 500-year lifespan of the modern capitalist world-economy, almost all the non-European peoples incorporated into its expansionist social system were forced to interact with the Europeans along various patterns of super-subordination, and, as a result, were dramatically remolded. The bitterly contested, constantly evolving, hierarchical patterns of ethnic relations have reflected and partially embodied the natural history of this most peculiar social system, defined and driven by the endless accumulation of capital and the self-regulated market (Wallerstein, 1983; Polanyi, 1957).

Modern ethnicity has served both as a stratifying medium for the accumulators of capital and as an indispensable element in the ideology of resistance by those who have suffered the exploitation and oppression that has accompanied the capitalist processes of production, exchange, and accumulation. Modern ethnicities have not only been invented and imposed from the top down by some dominant groups (mostly European elites) on others (mostly non-Europeans) -- the former redefining themselves in the process -- but they have also been reshaped and reclaimed from the ground up by the latter against the former. In the course of these struggles both the incorporated non-European peoples and the incorporating Europeans metamorphosed dramatically into new ethnic entities, bounded communities of consciousness. These new ethnicities of "race" and "nation," both of which are purely modern socio-political constructs, have overlapped and competed with the older ethnicities based on religion, kinship, language, etc..2

Why were the incorporated peoples outside Europe not Europeanized and simply subordinated by force as exploited workers (wage, slave, etc.)? Why has ethnicity, in all its modern manifestations, been such a central feature of the capitalist world-system?

First, let us look at it from the top down. Marx pointed out long ago (Marx, 1967) that the capitalists could not accumulate capital without somehow tying up production relations with an unequal distribution of the social product, something which in turn would reproduce a system of social stratification. He revealed how the capital-wage relation served precisely as a medium of surplus value creation, social stratification, and capital accumulation. But Marx was wrong in thinking that this relation, in and of itself, was enough of a profit-making dynamo to make capitalism self-sustainable; that so-called "primitive accumulation" was only needed to jump-start the capitalist engine; and that once it got going, the capitalist world-system would self-propel purely on the fuel provided by the surplus produced through the capital-wage relation. Historically, the capital-wage relation was limited mostly to some regions of Europe and North America until fairly recently. It was never on a global scale the main, let alone the sole, medium of capital accumulation. The people-to-people relations of domination have yielded much more surplus to the accumulators, through colonial conquest, slavery, peonage, contract labor, etc.. Ethnic stratification has historically been one of the most essential and flexible forms of social stratification (perhaps the main form) for the world-system as a whole, without which capitalist accumulation would have been a much slower and delimited historical phenomenon.

The actual structures of social stratification outside Europe in historical capitalism were based on the imposition of productive activities on various non-European direct producers, adopting forms of coerced labor that were designed to coincide with hierarchical ethnic social orders defined and imposed by the European accumulators and their politico-military entrepreneurs. These coerced-labor processes and ethnicities were imposed simultaneously, usually with extreme levels of violence and calculated to maximize profits.3 The incorporated non-European direct producers of the plantations, mines and haciendas experienced the crushing of their previous ethnic identities and watched themselves being crudely re-cast to fit the European specifications of "who they were." As Eric Wolf (1982) puts it, the non-European peoples have been treated by the Europeans (and their ethnocentric social sciences) as "peoples without history" or "peoples outside history."

But the indigenous (or transplanted) direct producers, initially subjected brutally to a totally artificial and dehumanizing process of re-ethnicization, at first resisted being stripped of their prior ethnicity and rejected adopting a new one. Eventually, however, they adopted their imposed ethnicity and used it to fight back, to resist their economic exploiters and ethnic oppressors. In time, they re-defined themselves with altogether new ethnic identities, now defined on their own terms, abandoning those imposed from above for ethnicities proclaimed from the bottom.4

Crucial as ethnicity has been in the life of the modern world-system, anti-systemic social science has never succeeded in explaining it other than in a class-reductionist way.5 Ethnic consciousness has been treated traditionally by the Marxist literature as the ne plus ultra of "false consciousness," destined to weaken in the heat of class struggle or as capitalism itself develops (not to mention its extinction in the era of socialism!). The vibrant, enduring, manifold manifestations of contemporary ethnicity (mostly from the bottom-up) under "late capitalism" -- and under "really-existing socialism," -- bedevils the anti-systemic social sciences. Ethnicity, clearly, is not withering away, nor is it just an epiphenomenon of the capitalist class struggle. What has declined is the relative vitality of all top-down ethnicities vis-a-vis the emerging bottom-up ones.

Anderson (1983: 12), for example, described the appropriation of nationalism by the anti-systemic movements in this way:

[S]ince World War II every successful revolution has defined itself in national terms ...and many "old nations" once thought fully consolidated, find themselves challenged by "sub"-nationalisms within their borders - nationalisms which, naturally, dream of shedding their sub-ness one happy day. The reality is quite plain: the "end of the era of nationalism," so long prophesied, is not remotely in sight. Indeed, nationness is the most universal legitimate value in the political life of our time. The post-colonial and post-revolutionary "new nations" have also found themselves increasingly challenged by "sub"-nationalisms.6 But besides these national and subnational anti-systemic ethnicities, "transnational" (continental or regional) ethnicities have played an ever-increasing important role. Examples of the latter are the pan-African movement (worldwide and in Africa), the pan-Islamic movement (and its pan-Arab subset), thirdworldism, latinoamericanismo, and indigenismo.

Furthermore, in this era of global eco-crises (produced by the flawed developmentalism of both East and West) purely interhuman communication is giving way to a new discourse between humans and their world; and that, in turn, is helping millions of people to re-define themselves and to challenge the underlying assumptions behind their historically exhausted ethnicities, especially those generated and imposed from above. For the first time since European modernity "disenchanted the world" (Todorov, 1985), there is a growing, world-wide, environmentally-centered, "one-world" sense of peoplehood. The 1989 Minamata Declaration,7 to give but the most recent example, calls upon all anti-systemic peoples' movements to set out to achieve in the twenty-first century the historic construction of a global "transborder people." This new conception envisions combining the rich diversity of peoples with a global eco-centered peoplehood. It summons us to abandon the deep anthropocentric perspective embedded in all modern ideologies, right and left, and to value equally all life forms and life processes on Earth (Schell, 1982).

What do all these ethnicities have in common? They have all sprung from the bottom-up in the last half-century or so, initiated by the anti-systemic peoples' movements of the worldsystem. A credible social science must account for their existence in its theory as well as explain their historic specificities and potentialities. Neither pro- nor anti-systemic social science are anywhere close from reaching this point, the former enchained by Eurocentrism and structural functionalism, the latter crushed under the weight of decades of dogmatic thinking.

What is happening to the people's sense of peoplehood? On the positive side, perhaps what Chicano poet Abelardo Delgado (1978: 3) calls the "yo si, tu no-ism," of the hierarchical ethnic, class, and gender orderings of the modern world-system is slowly giving way to a newly-found "yo si, tu tambien-ism" of a new world-system, currently in gestation and yet to be established. There is much evidence that suggests that the worldsystem and the eco-system are ever-more dangerously at odds in their fundamental logics. No historical social system can long last that way. The new tolerance for thriving ethnic diversity is tied in the end to a new tolerance for ecological diversity.

We are witnessing, in sum, the simultaneous historic recovery (re-invention?) of the harmonious, symbiotic, and egalitarian relations some of our indigenous ancestors held among themselves, and between themselves and their world. ¿No sera que nos estamos re-indigenizando, a pesar de que creiamos que eso era irreversible?

Lo que paso y debe pasar en latinoamerica

From the sixteenth century to the end of World War II, the interstate system8 facilitated the evolution of various continental patterns of ethnic stratification, through the wholesale conquest, colonization, and domination of the indigenous inhabitants of vast territories of the planet. Enormous colonial caste societies developed, all ideologically based on the newlyinvented, top-down racial ethnicities -- such as the historical invention of the "Indians" (or "Reds"), the "Africans" (or "Blacks"), the "Asians" (or "Yellows"), and the "Europeans" (or "Whites"). The "races," initially mere absurd European constructs, evolved into social phenomena, historical entities. Degrading labels were indeed adopted to condemn to the same subordinated status millions of non-Europeans.9 The Europeans changed, too: from being Christian vassals of this or that lord, they became "Europeans," and "Whites."

Consider the case of colonial Spanish America. As Spain conquered the New World, the ethnic transformation of conqueror and conquered was dramatic. The Spaniards imposed on the New World peoples a simplistic but overarching racial ethnicity to distinguish them as the conquered from themselves as the conquerors. Those they conquered were now supposed to be "indios."10 They themselves became gente de razon. The category of "indio" artificially lumped together an estimated 90 to 112 million people who belonged to hundreds of completely different social systems and cultures, ranging from "Stone Age" band societies to "High Civilizational Systems." Nevertheless, their universal subjugation to the same Spanish-identified "people," and their transformation into a single gigantic class of disposable slaves and servants, had nothing artificial about it.11 Nor was there anything artificial in the sudden transformation of the commoner Spaniards arriving in the New World as de facto masters over any indigenous person or collectivity they encountered. The Spaniard was automatically admitted into a privileged, ethnic, group.

Indian consciousness, a new Indian identity, emerged as the colonial social order of castas was put in place. The indigenous peoples of Spanish America began to act as modern Indians, both in their acts of submission and accommodation and in their acts of resistance. Wherever large concentrations of Africans developed in the New World the same phenomenon occurred,12 even though Africans in Africa, then constituting a rich civilizational mosaic (Wolf, 1982: 195-231), would not develop an "African" consciousness until after the 1880's, after Africa was almost completely carved-out into European colonies.13

The casta structures of racial stratification that paralleled the sharp class stratification of the colonial agrarian and extractive societies outlived the nineteenth century republican period (the glory days of the Criollo export-oriented land oligarchy). They continued throughout Latin America, overlapping nation-building efforts, well into the twentieth century.14 The vast mestizaje helped to sublimate racial into national identity, a metamorphosis that truly began to take place with the advent of the Mexican Revolution, but it eroded racial stratification slowly and only partially.

Today, 500 years after the conquest, no people or ethnic group in Latin America is the same. The Indians went from the condition of original peoples, with their own singular cultural attributes, to that of anodyne Indians, ever more detached from their original culture and forced to assimilate to the general population of the country where they live. Nonetheless, they continue being Indians, given their self-identification and their resistance to full assimilation, and because the people who mistreat them considers them Indians.15

Ribeiro (1982: 9) distinguishes between two main categories of Indians today: the myriad of tiny, isolated, and endangered indigenous villages, or microetnias, clinging to life by adhering to communitarian traditions, and the still great demographic blocks of Indians from areas of high pre-Colombian civilization, the macroetnias. Seen until recently only as campesinos, the macroetnias increasingly see themselves as oppressed peoples with aspirations for full autonomy, quite outside of, or even against, the assimilationist schemes for "developing" the nation-states in which they are embedded. Given the extreme oppression these groups still endure, Ribeiro sees a latent tendency toward "veritable inter-ethnic wars." To avoid them, he calls for the establishment of a "Latin American Federation" in which the indigenous peoples can "reconstruct themselves as authentic cultures so they may flourish again as autonomous civilizations." This programme can easily be expanded to include Latin America's groups of African ancestry.

But the opposite has been happening. Between 1900 and 1950 a period of transition to U.S.-sponsored "modernization" and the beginnings of industrialization occurred, stimulated by U.S. direct investments and state policies of "economic growth towards the inside." An optimist desarrollista nationalism from above emerged which sought state-sponsored capitalist economic development.16 All aspects of "traditional society" were looked upon as retrograde, including indigenous culture and social organization. Vast urbanization and massive migration flows to the United States accompanied the rapid economic growth. Modernization brought spectacular wealth to a few, heightened living standards to the new de-ethnicized, Americanized, urban middle classes, while it brought "modern poverty" and "modern repression" to the majority.17 After a failed experiment with import substitution in the 1960s, Latin America's economies became internationalized and ever-more subordinated to the core of the world-economy. When the world economy entered into a deep contraction period in the midseventies, Latin America's economies began to collapse. The developmentalist illusion crashed in the 1980s. In its wake, the colossal disparities of income and living standards between different classes and ethnic groups stand as a grotesque monument to modernization.

Politically, after the Cuban Revolution stood up to the then world-hegemonic U.S. state, Latin America experienced a wave of fascist regimes and U.S.-sponsored wars of counterinsurgency. In the 1980s the large-scale repression has continued, but it has been surgically applied (e.g., Central America, Grenada).18 The upshot of the large-scale intra-national and international migratory flows produced by the macro-economic dislocations and the political upheavals of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, has been the radical transformation of the ethnic identities of large numbers of Latin Americans, who resurrected an anti-systemic, antiimperialist latinoamericanismo not seen since the days of Bolivar.

Unfortunately, the latinoamericanismo of the last few decades has not gone far enough, despite its great contributions to the world's anti-systemic movements. It has not yet gone deep enough into the historic consciousness of the continent, an identity glossed over by the wild rush to a "modernity" instrumentalized by both the capitalist accumulators and their anti-systemic opponents into una modernidad que negaba y niega lo indio y lo africano. For true equality, a new framing ethnic identity must emerge, one which casts aside the old obsession with perpetuating European ideological roots for all our thoughts, or with defining them in relation to the latest European intellectual trends. And it must break with the "modernization" visions imported from the United States which are counterfeit and inimical to our social health. Now that Latin Americans know their political size, they must discover their ethnic depths. The project is nothing less than to meld the still-strong Latin American transborder ethnicity with the visions of the indigenous peoples of the New World and Africa, and to metamorphose the blend into a new sense of modernity: una nueva vision de lo que somos, o debemos ser, para dejar de ser lo que nunca fuimos y no vamos a ser jamas.

But we must be clear on the dual nature of ethnicity. Today, the anti-systemic movements and the ruling classes use and dispute among themselves the nature and political direction of Latin American ethnicity. These two opposing poles of latinoamericanismo contend in a continent where the vast majority of modern-day Indians and Blacks, and to a lesser extent Mestizos and Mulattos, have never ceased to be acutely impoverished and denied true social, economic, and political equality with the descendants of the various Euro-Americans that have settled in Latin America. The elites of the latter continue to dominate, successfully hidden behind the national identities and the halfhearted latinoamericanismo they constructed from the top down in the last century-and-a-half. The fraud of "racial democracy" has been sustained up to the present and needs to be exposed. Recovering lo indio y lo africano will therefore involve a fight along ethnic and class lines.

That being said, the new anti-systemic movements of Latin America ought to reconsider the names that imprison our peoples more than describe them. Insofar as the terms "indio," and "negro" are erroneous, fraudulent European labels that hide the dehumanization of people, they ought to be discarded for others. They don't describe people as much as they describe the peoplelessness of people. "America Latina," on the other hand, is a purely Criollo/oligarchic term that sustains a Europeanized, colonized vision of us manufactured in the core of the worldsystem. The name "Latin American" denies our Indian and African roots and glosses over their tragic history. The recovery of Latin America's historic time and vision necessarily will involve constructing socially a new social conception of ourselves, inventing a new name to reflect our indigenous roots, and envisioning the liberation of hundreds of millions of dispossessed and exploited peoples of the continent. To remain a misnamed people is a sure sign of being a lost, disempowered, and defrauded one.

We will continue to have a transborder ethnic identity in Latin America, but the question is which one it will be, the one endlessly promoted from the top down, hegemonic today, or the one constantly struggling to emerge from the bottom up? To denote the latter, I propose the adoption of the term RUNAFRIBE. RUNA stands for the indigenous peoples of the continent, for it means "people" in Quechua, the still living but ancient lingua franca of the Andean civilizational system.19 AFRI stands for Africa, signifying the African presence and impact on the hemisphere. RIBE stands for the Caribbean. IBE stands for Iberia, and finally, E stands for Europe as a whole. More important than the name of a new ethnicity from the ground up, of course, are the social movements that can make their goal the implementation of a new vision of continental liberation. A new sense of peoplehood must accompany those movements, if and when they arise again.20

Lo que hay detras de lo "hispanic" y lo "latino" en los Estados Unidos.

In the United States, as elsewhere, ethnic groups are studied ontologically, as objects essentially immutable in historic time, provoking endless discussions on whether they "are" something or the other, instead of looking at what they are becoming.

Currently, some assert that Chicanos and Puerto Ricans in the mainland United States are "Hispanics" or "Latinos," while others argue that they are two distinct "minorities" who just happen to speak the same "foreign" language. A better approach is historical sociology, which asks process-centered questions. How, why, and in what context, for instance, were these and the other U.S. ethnicities historically produced and reproduced? How and why have these ethnicities changed in time? What informs and contributes to their evolving sense of peoplehood, and how does their current experiences of oppression and their visions of liberation affect it? Are they converging into broader ethnicities and who supports and who resists this convergence, and why? I attempt a preliminary exploration of these questions below.

Long before the convergence of Chicanos and Puerto Ricans as Latinos, Euro-Americans, Indians, and Blacks converged separately but simultaneously as racial ethnicities. They were constituent parts of a brutal racial order disguised under the facade of a rational, modern society. In the United States, from the earliest colonial period, the northwestern Europeans erected a structure of ethnic stratification based on the same invented racial ethnicities-from-above that their Iberian cousins to the south used. But the U.S. social structure was much more rigid because it did not recognize the intermixing of the Europeans with the other "races," not even as castas -- processes which, although unacknowledged, went on anyway on a fairly large scale. The EuroAmericans in the U.S. forged instead a "dual society" (Ringer, 1983) consisting, on the one hand, of a "People's Domain" under the full protection of the law and open to all European immigrants and their presumed "untainted" offspring, a democratic domain that functioned as the proverbial melting pot of "White Americans," and, on the other hand, of the extra-legal, sociallyisolated domain of the "tainted others," the "inferior races."

In the mid-nineteenth century, inspired by the rapid ethnic amalgamation of a large number and variety of European workers in the United States, Marx and Engels wrote in their Communist Manifesto (1975: 56-57),

The working men have no country... National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto. The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster.

A rosy internationalist prophesy, but, as they missed the whole picture, flawed: the voluntary Euro-American amalgamation process they observed in the U.S. corresponded to the coerced amalgamation of the vast diversity of non-Europeans cast as "inferior races." This dual process represented an immense social leap upwards for the huddled masses of peasants and workers initially brought to the New Republic from Europe as cheap labor pools. Once they shed their older ethnicities, the immigrants could henceforth claim White-skin privileges and superior status over all the other, non-White peoples, and even claim their lands if found within the expanding state boundaries of their newly adopted "nation-state."

Initially, the abolishment of European indentured servitude corresponded to the establishment of African chattel slavery. Afterwards, the "only" adoption fee the European immigrants had to pay was that, before they were unleashed on the so-called "frontier" as settlers, they had to go through the proletarianization stage of working for wages in the East-coast manufacturing centers.21 Given that the political economy of the new country was (outside the slave-master relation) based on the cash nexus, wage work was the only way the peasants from Europe could raise the needed cash to pay for transportation to the ever-receding Western frontier. They also had to pay for the militarily "cleared" homestead land, the high land taxes, food and supplies, etc.. Most Euro-American immigrants proved more than willing to gamble with wage labor for a while -- they had little choice. Many did make it to the frontier to become farmers on lands still soaking with Indian blood, but many stayed entrapped in the East, adding sediment upon sediment of "free" labor to the burgeoning manufacturing urban centers. A few even made it as entrepreneurs, quickly learning to exploit the labor of subsequent immigrants.22

The trajectory of the "non-Europeans" was quite different. Chicanos and Puerto Ricans, our concern here, came into being as "U.S. oppressed nationalities" in 1836-48 and 1898, respectively. Their processes of national and state formation were interrupted when they were territorially annexed as a result of predatory wars launched by the same expansionist core state.23 Far from amalgamating with the Euro-Americans, they were considered "nonEuropeans" in partial fallacy and, until recently, were excluded from the "American Creed" as were all other "mixed breeds."24 The national and the racial elements thus coexisted from the very beginning in the social construction of these ethnicities. To complicate matters more, both peoples continued to be affected dramatically by immigration flows to and from their respective "homelands," something which resulted in being stereotyped and mistreated as purely "immigrants," despite many generations of U.S. residency. That is, the experience of xenophobia has also forged these ethnicities.

In the 1970's, as a result of this complicated history, Chicanos were said by some to constitute an "oppressed (or submerged) nation,"25 or an "internal colony."26 The Chicano people were deemed, from this point of view, to possess the right of national self-determination, the right to secede from the current Anglo-dominated state and establish an independent new state.27 Chicanos (and the Southwest) were seen by others as the "occupied portion" of a "divided nation" which ought to be re-united to Mexico.28 Still others insisted that Chicanos merely "belonged" to the most oppressed stratum of the multinational U.S. working class, and whose main struggle, therefore, should be the class struggle, either in its reformist29 or in its revolutionary variants.30 Others, finally, maintained that Chicanos were an assimilating U.S. "ethnic minority," whose main struggles should center on their democratic civil rights as "American citizens;" it followed that their struggles should be channeled through the electoral process, and that their goal should be cultural selfdetermination - bilingualism, biculturalism - and socioeconomic opportunity. Equivalent positions existed for the Puerto Ricans.31

But these heated debates of the 1970's have been increasingly preempted in the 1980's by the widespread labelling of both groups as "Hispanic," and by treating them, as well as all other Spanish-speakers in the U.S., as generic constituents of a single "ethnic minority." Besides being a complete falsification of history, the really important questions are: Is this current "Hispanization" of Chicanos and Puerto Ricans also a falsification of their present ethnic dynamics? If so, how long will it take this "falsification" to become a historical reality?

The Puerto Ricans began their great migration to New York after World War II, only to be entrapped there as a cheap labor pool32 at the same time that U.S. capital expanded to "offshore" facilities (including Puerto Rico itself). The War on Poverty, Great Society programs, affirmative action, and the civil rights legislation of the 1960's passed them by because they were recent arrivals and had no political clout.33 Almost half of the Puerto Rican people left the island in the last four decades, and although they initially concentrated in New York, they eventually began to move to other states. By 1980, half of the two million Puerto Ricans in the mainland had dispersed to other states, away from New York (Moore & Pachon, 1985: 56-58). But their condition did not improve, and actually deteriorated from the bottom levels of the previous three decades. With the exception of the Native Americans, they are now the worse-off ethnic group in the U.S..34 They have been hit hard by the macro-structural shifts of the economy, by the shrinking and segmented labor markets, and by other social structures of ethnic stratification. The contraction of the world-economy of the 1970's and 1980's has prolonged the half-century baptism of fire the Puerto Ricans have endured in the mainland.

If Puerto Rico was one of the first off-shore production sites for U.S. capital, northern Mexico became the close second. Since the 1960s, millions of Mexicanas have gone to work in the U.S.-owned border maquiladoras for ten times less than comparable Anglos working on the other side of the border, while millions of other Mexicanos keep working at worse wages for U.S. agrobusinesses, producing winter vegetables and canned foods for the U.S. market.35 As Mexico began to feel the dislocations produced by a contracted world-economy in the mid-1970s, yearly twodirectional flows of millions of Mexicano undocumented workers across the border became commonplace, far exceeding the legal Mexicano immigration numbers (Sassen, 1988: 63). Over a million are deported every year,36 so that the new long-term Mexican residents in the U.S. live, as Cockroft (1986) puts it, as "outlaws in the promised land."37

Given the still prevalent structural exclusion of most Chicanos from the primary sector of the economy, the large immigration waves, and the pattern of segregated barrios, the level of ethnic identification between Chicanos and Mexicanos continues to be extremely high in the border region, and only less as you move away from the border. Chicano-Mexicano identity and ethnicity is strong and dynamic, and because it is historically grounded, it will not disappear soon.38 It will merely adapt, as it has for half a millennia, to the dehumanizing, uprooting, stratifying processes of the capitalist worldsystem.39

Just as with the Puerto Ricans, significant diffusion of Mexicanos and Chicanos extends throughout the United States. As both groups have migrated, they and other Spanish-speaking peoples have met and begun to live, work, and struggle together. Their common oppression is the historico-material basis for the militant Latinismo that has re-appeared in the U.S. after a prolonged half-century dormancy.40 The various groups developed an awareness from their grassroots political action of being a Latin American people equally-but-separately subjected to brutal national dismemberment, severe social dislocations, unrelenting racial discrimination, continuous cultural oppression, and widespread poverty and economic exploitation. They have begun to adopt an umbrella ethnicity, calling themselves Latinos, in Chicago, in San Francisco, in New York, in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. This is a new ethnicity emerging from the bottom up.

Felix M. Padilla, the foremost student of Latino ethnicity in Chicago, reports (1985) that Latino ethnicity is situational, mostly at the city level of politics; that it happily and easily coexists with the much more core national-origin ethnicities of the Puerto Ricans and the Chicanos; and that it springs from the leadership of the community organizations and anti-systemic movements of these peoples. This is a clear example of an emerging anti-systemic pan-ethnicity constructed from the bottom-up by the locked-out peoples Anderson alluded to. And it is happening in the U.S. wherever Central Americans, Chicanos, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Colombians, and other Latin American groups are suffering from the same persistent, structural conditions discrimination, exploitation, and prejudice.

This new ethnicity is not merely reactive, it is creating an affirmative culture of great beauty and vision. Totti (1987), describes the accelerated rise of Latino culture in New York City (the music of Ruben Blades, the poetry of Laviera [1984]). Totti also notes the accelerated rate of Latino intermarriage, the stronger commitment to Spanish as the Lingua Franca of Latinismo (retaining English for "external" communication), and, most importantly, the increasingly stronger political alliance between Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. Padilla (n.d.) has demonstrated how Salsa music is clearly developing as a cultural expression of Latino cooperation and reality, and how the lyrical content of Salsa music is fostering and spreading the idea of Latino consciousness and unity. Politically, De la Garza (1988) reports the increasingly stronger electoral muscle of Latinos, citing 2,950 currently elected Latino officials in six selected states, including one governor, four state executives and 117 state legislators, half of whom are Chicanos. All of them meet regularly to hammer out the "Latino agenda."

What explains these phenomena in a larger context? What is happening to the United States as we approach the end of the century is that the "non-Europeans," the non-peoples of "American History," until recently denied by law -- and still denied de facto -- full and equal access to all the spheres of the "People's Domain," are turning around the old tactic of the melting pot, previously used by the Euro-Americans, and using it in their own way: they are voluntarily engaging in a partial amalgamation, one that does not "melt" or erase their historical diversity, but one more akin to a big canasta de fruta, full of many flavors and healthy to the body and soul, evoking Delgado's "yo si, tu tambien-ism." The Latin Americans in the United States are creating their Latino pan-ethnicity that way. But this is by no means an original invention. It is merely traversing the same path already traversed by the African-Americans, the NativeAmericans, as the Asian-Americans. These are all equivalent panethnicities.

In the last few years, the processes of the world-economy have become so integrated that state boundaries have begun to dissolve. The "nation-states" are becoming more and more irrelevant and unable to cope with the globalization of everything, including productive activities, markets, environmental and economic crises, communications, culture, etc.. The previous functions of the interstate system are being rapidly transferred to a vastly transnationalized and oligopolized interenterprise system.41 As Polanyi (1957) prophesied, the institutions of the self-regulated market are imposing on society the commodification, bureaucratization, and de-politization of all aspects of social life, endangering in the process "human life and its surroundings." The market mentality is supplanting the highly imperfect ideologies of popular democracy and state sovereignty with the new emphasis on efficiency, unlimited consumption, and absolute managerial power. The private is swallowing the public in front of our very eyes and on a global scale. It is, therefore, not strange that ethnicities begin to be conceived, prefabricated, and marketed in federal bureaus and ad agencies.

In the core of the world-system, ethnicity is becoming internationalized as well. The European Common Market countries will practically fuse, finally, in 1992. The Pacific Rim region, the new axis of the world-economy, is generating an extranational entity encompassing China, Japan, Korea, and others. An "identity" is bound to follow. The United States is beginning to promote the idea of a North American Common Market made up of itself, Canada, and Mexico. The Canadians have already become, for all practical purposes, fully incorporated, preempting the divisive English-French internal tensions. The Mexican economy has become incorporated for the most part already, but Mexicano immigrants have not yet gained free access to the U.S. labor market, quite the contrary, nor has the Mexican Government dared to publicly endorse the U.S. plan. But merger is not even necessary for Latino ethnicity to spread. According to Sassen (1989), New York City and Los Angeles have become "world cities." They are "nodes of control and management of the global economic system." Latinos make up vast pools of cheap labor there, locked in a downward spiral as the two cities prosper. Who can still argue that the deteriorating condition of Latinos in the U.S. is a purely domestic issue, with purely domestic causes and effects?

Where is this leading? Will it dissolve in time? Will the "dual society" persist along its traditional European/nonEuropean line of cleavage? Assuming sharp ethnic stratification continues in the U.S., will Latinos seek broader alliances with Indians and African-Americans to effectively defend themselves from their common, persistent oppression? And in doing so, will Latinos recover their own true ancestral roots, Chicanos recovering their Indian roots and Caribenos their African roots? Is it hard to imagine Latino ethnicity eventually linking up with the other non-European ethnicities in the U.S., giving rise to a People of Color pan-ethnicity? Can the hierarchical structures of ethnic stratification in the United States only be metamorphosed in this way and by these peoples? Isn't this the real class struggle, at the broadest level, in the United States? What about the Latinos in Latin America? Indeed, they nurture the U.S. Latinos with immigrants and with their deepening latinoamericanismo. Could it be that, eventually, the U.S. Latinos and the Latin Americans will meet on a new plane, the plane of a new historic vision? Will it prove necessary to have unity of consciousness and of action in this entire hemisphere, as well as in the other continents, to finally overcome the immanent class and ethnic stratifications of the modern worldsystem?

Such metamorphoses will only happen as a result of struggle with power, ideological and physical, as Frederick Douglass foresaw. The infant ground-up pan-ethnicities are already engaged in a deep struggle for life against the ideologies promoted from above by the media outlets, state bureaucracies, and other elites of all types and colors. Witness the hemispheric resurgence of the most fanatic Christian obscurantism (the fundamentalist evangelicals), the resurgence in national chauvinism (patrioterismo), reckless militarism, hedonism, and consumerism. On top of all that, the anti-systemic pan-ethnicities have to contend as well with the parallel, pro-systemic ethnicities manufactured from the top-down to define us ahistorically, to channel us back to our place, to co-opt us. In the case of the Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and other U.S. Latinos, I am referring, of course, to the pre-fabricated pan-ethnicity of the Hispanic.

Martha Gimenez (1988) has exposed what is behind this statesponsored label for our peoples: it originated as a statistical construct hatched in the federal bureaucracy for the initial specific purpose of using it in the 1980 U.S. census, but with profound long-term political implications.42 Among other things, the Hispanic label includes all Spaniards -- never oppressed in the New World -- as well as all members of the (mostly EuroAmerican) elites of Latin America that happen to migrate to the U.S. every time there has been the slightest popular unrest among "their" historically dispossessed masses (i.e., their vast "minorities," in the North American sense).43 Now these elites are welcomed to the U.S. as a "protected class," eligible to receive affirmative action benefits! And all this generosity towards the privileged occurred at the same time that the U.S. systematically denied entry to masses of Central American refugees victimized by the U.S. war of counterinsurgency there, the very people who ought to qualify for U.S. aid.

As Margarita Melville (1988: 78-79) put it, referring to the "Hispanics" that have come to the U.S. from Batista's Cuba and Somoza's Nicaragua:

The people who have remained in Cuba and Nicaragua have more in common with Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans than with other Latin Americans, in terms of their ethnicity and self-perception vis-a-vis Anglo Americans ... Exiles from Cuba and Nicaragua and upper class Central Americans tend to participate in competitive ethnicity in the United States. On the other hand, refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala are escaping persecution of landed elites, and their ethnic interface is one of colonial ethnicity. These Latin American elites have never ceased to be, for the most part, ethnically and politically indistinguishable from their Euro-American relatives in the United States. Furthermore, as Gimenez (1988) points out, Hispanic ethnicity covers up (and promotes) the long-standing Latin American "brain drain" of qualified Latin American professionals, whose employment is routinely used to pad affirmative action figures in the U.S. atthe expense of the historically oppressed U.S. ethnic groups. Add the bonus of getting "instant" professionals and other highly educated adults paid for by their country of origin. This practice resembles the old colonial racket of Indian land "traded" with the European immigrants for their wage labor without informing the Indians. Except this time, both the Euro-American workers and the real "minorities" are left out of the deal. That is not customary in the U.S. racial order, and the Euro-Americans are bound to react strongly against the whole theory and practice of "race-specific" programs and entitlements, non-European immigration, affirmative action, etc..44 The White backlash has begun, and racial tensions are bound to increase.

Finally, of course, the label Hispanic is meant to gloss over, dilute, and suppress the much stronger national ethnicities of Chicanos and Puerto Ricans. It obfuscates the historic roots of their condition as oppressed people, and it conflates the cultural diversity of these groups into an amorphous mass. Hispanicization reduces the sense of heritage to only the Spanish in our cultures at the expense of the other roots, thereby promoting a brittle, shallow, commercialized, malleable identity.

We will not remain the same. Either we re-make ourselves or we will be re-made by others. Ethnicity is not a static attribute; it is a contending arena of dynamic social relations that "crystallize" in an identity, a sense of peoplehood. The "internal" battle is not between the Latino, Chicano and Puerto Rican ethnicities, for they are essentially anti-systemic, complementary, mutually-reinforcing ethnicities a la Lalo Delgado. At most they merely manifest dynamic tension. The fight to the death is between the "Hispanic" ethnicity from the top-down, on the one side, and Latino, Chicano and Puerto Rican ethnicities from the bottom-up, on the other. Our sense of peoplehood is at stake.

The class and ethnic struggles of these decades have been, in part, a struggle between names and their sponsors. The names contain either the seeds of liberation or the seeds of alienation. Which side our intellectuals take now on this question will be crucial to the next stage mobilization. ?Como nos vamos a mover? The Latino artists already took sides, precursors of social change as artists usually are and much more so than our social scientists. They are not waiting for others but are helping to forge the new Latino culture, with their ear close to the people. The community leaders tend to be divided on this question depending how close to the ground and how far away from Washington they are. The academic intellectuals, including the students, have shown to be more confused, more vulnerable to the siren song of "Hispanic opportunity" or, in the opposite direction, to the attractive myths of immutable ethnicity (ultra-recontra-superChicanismo); but they are also much more exposed to "Latinization" as they combat racism in higher education, as they protest U.S. policy in Latin America, as they meet the refugees.

Who we are and what we become is, in fact, a central issue of not only our peoples, but of all humanity. It is an issue intimately tied to the nature and dynamics of the five-centuryold social system that has engulfed us all. Ultimately, the commodification of everything has to stop somewhere and the socialization of everything begin anew. The resurgence of all forms of ethnicity in the world-economy is just one more selfprotecting mechanism of societies stripped much too much of their social purposes, which is life itself, not profit. Ultimately, the endless accumulation of capital is not life-sustaining. One or the other will have to go. In that struggle, we will have to re-invent ourselves over and over again. Today Latino, tomorrow RUNAFRIBES, perhaps in time comunidad mundial.

Endnotes

1. Roughly five hundred indigenous, environmentally specialized, actively trading, differentiated peoples ("tribes") apparently coexisted in this way in California in the last one thousand years before the European expansion into the New World, (Coe, 1986: 79-81). Many more examples from ancient history can be found in Wenke (1984). back

2. Modern nationalism, the most "modern" of ethnicities, has its genesis in intra-European rivalries, but the inventing (and imposing) of modern racial ethnicities occurred mostly outside Europe, usually initiated by the European upper classes, but not always. Bonacich (1972) convincingly argues that in the case of the non-European immigrants to the U.S., the subordinated European classes and their descendants initiated antagonistic ethnic stratification processes against the non-Europeans, against the wishes of "their" capitalists who were always hungry for cheap labor. The fault line between "top" and "down" groups, therefore, shifts in historic time and space, but has generally tended to be defined, until very recently, on a world-system scale, by the dichotomy "European/Non-European" much more than by social class. The same may be said of the United States, although not of Europe, where the reverse is true. See Wilson (1980) for the classic argument of "the declining significance of race" in the recent period of U.S. history. back

3. Wallerstein (1974: 38,87) asserts that the specific mode of labor control called wage-work, per se, is not what defines capitalism, but production for the endless accumulation of capital, and that historical capitalism required the simultaneous "development of variegated methods of labor control for different products and different zones of the world-economy. [e.g., slavery, serfdom, tenancy, peonage, yeoman farming, wage-work, etc.] ... A moment's thought will reveal that these occupational categories were not randomly distributed either geographically or ethnically within the burgeoning world-economy" [my emphasis]. The opposite point of view (the so-called "mode-of-production" school) reduces the domain of capitalism to the areas where the capital-wage relation predominates, and hence, locates its historic origins in late eighteenth / early nineteenth century class-stratified Northwestern Europe. It therefore cannot avoid completely missing from its field of vision the large-scale, well-articulated structures of capitalist ethnic stratification the same European elites built outside that region for centuries as part of the division of labor of a single world-economy. This is, in my opinion, the cardinal error that accounts for the many flawed Marxist analyses of nation, race, and ethnicity. back

4. Noel (1968: 170), quoting Shibutani and Wan (1965: 202, 212), describes the process of consciousness-formation among newly created subordinated ethnic groups: "Consciousness of shared fate is essential to effective unified action but it generally develops only gradually as the members of a particular social category realize that they are being treated alike despite their differences. `People who find themselves set apart eventually come to recognize their common interests,' but for those who share a subordinate position common identification usually emerges only after `repeated experiences of denial and humiliation.'" back

5. The pro-systemic social sciences tend to treat all non-dominant ethnicities as "aberrant," "irrational" phenomena, or as stubborn remnants of "traditional society" doomed to disappear as capitalism breaks down all barriers. Dominant ethnicities (e.g., "Anglo-Saxon Culture"), on the other hand, are idealized as virtuous and modern, glorified as the true standard of peoplehood under "enlightened capitalism." Other scholars examine ethnicity completely abstracted from the historical social system it is embedded in, focusing instead on the individual, on genetics, or on "human nature." For a thorough critique see Geschwender (1978) and Santos (1989). back

6. Eric Hobsbawm (1977: 13) noted over a decade ago that the "Marxist movements and states have tended to become national not only in form but in substance." The post-Marxist democratic movements and states that burst on the world stage in 1989 have the same ethnic character, but, as Helene D'encausse (1989) predicted long ago, with a vengeance: old feuding sub-nationalisms have resurfaced and are now rampant in Eastern Europe and the U.S.S.R.. Today the partydocratic socialist societies are caught by surprise by the resilience and double-blade nature of ethnicity. Tomorrow it will be globalizing capitalism's turn. back

7. On the Summer of 1989, 120,000 Japanese and 280 representatives from grass-roots movements from 33 countries, met in Japan in a series of 16 international conferences and festivals, all under the theme of "People's Plan for the 21st. Century" [PP-21]. At the end of it, participants met, drafted, and approved the Minimata Declaration. See PP-21 (1989). back

8. The modern states did not appear or develop in isolation from each other, but, from the beginning of their territorial and political incorporation to the modern world-system, have belonged to a geo-political system that is itself vertically stratified, namely, the interstate system of core, semi-peripheral, and peripheral states. For how the "cycles" of the interstate system relate to the "cycles" of the interenterprise system, see Arrighi (1986), Bousquet (1980), Bergesen (1980). back

9. For an in-depth study of these structures in the colonial New World, and an explanation of the remarkable differences in the treatment of the indigenous peoples of North America and Spanish America, see Santos (1988a). back

10. The Portuguese denoted the wide variety of indigenous peoples they found (and sought to enslave) in Brazil as Negro da terra, to distinguish them from the other (African) enslaved peoples brought to the same sugar plantations in Brazil. See Lockhart (1983: 198). back

11. In the course of less than a century of Spanish rule, an estimated ninety-five percent of the indigenous population in the conquered areas disappeared, through slaughter, slave labor, or epidemics (Sanchez-Albornoz, 1974: 32-37). back

12. See Thompson (1987) for the entire New World, and Aguirre Beltran (1972, 1985) for colonial and contemporary Mexico. back

13. See Rodney (1974), Murphy (1972) and Babu (1981). back

14. For an in-depth critique of the myth of Brazilian "racial democracy," see Fernandes (1969). See Morner (1967, 1970) and Harris (1964) for Latin America as a whole. For the genocide of the Amazonian peoples see Bodard (1971), and for the ethnic conflict in contemporary Peru see Quijano (1980). back

15. Just as with Indian-ness, African-ness and White-ness are much more a socio-cultural phenomenon than a racial one in Latin America, with dramatic shifts in the "boundaries" from place to place. Be that as it may, Martner et. al. (1986: 141) project that by the year 2000, the total anticipated population of 535 million Latin Americans will be made up of 28 million Indians, 64 million Blacks, 176 Whites, and 267 million Mestizos. But Tannenbaum (1947: 8) noted long ago: "The identification of the mulatto as white, and the tendency to speak of the Negro as being whitened out in Brazil, make most contemporary statements misleading." In the same vein, Ribeiro (1982: 10) states: "[T]hose of us considered "White" Latin Americans are actually Mestizos with more indigenous blood than European." This means that a significant fraction of the 176 million "Whites" are "whitened" Mestizos and Mullatos. back

16. Cardoso & Faletto (1972) and Jenkins (1987). back

17. Not to mention "modern ecocide." See Evans (1979) for the disastrous impact the alliance of the multinational corporations, the repressive state, and local oligarchy have had on Brazil. back

18. For a poignant expose of sham democracy in Latin America in the 1980's, see Petras (1986). back

19. There are a number of reasons why I chose this particular indigenous word: the Andean world produced, perhaps, the most advanced civilizational system in the Pre-Colombian New World (Keatinge, 1988), certainly the largest, geographically. Quechua was then and is now the Lingua Franca of that region. Perhaps the Andean World produced, as Quijano (1988) claims, not just a profoundly appealing way of life in the past, but still contains a vital but unrecovered vision of the future as well, with its large-scale reciprocity, its sense of time, and its sense of joy in collective solidarity. The word is the indigenous Andean peoples' word for collective self-identification still used today, a self-name untouched by any European influence. Furthermore, the fully-deserved, notorious reputation of chauvinism we Mexicanos have in Latin America convinced me to look outside Mesoamerica for a word to substitute for "Indian." Finally, the word RUNA happily ends with an "a," allowing me to place the African root next, leaving the European root appropriately to the end. back

20. This emphasis on names is hardly irrelevant or frivolous. It may be instructive to follow the phonological and orthographic battles the Chinese waged along with their other battles. In the mid-nineteenth century, the opening of China to the Western World led to the brazen corruption of Chinese names and sounds to fit European tastes, in tandem with the total subjugation and practical dismemberment of the country itself by European imperialism. In the early 1970's and in a matter of months after the Chinese, now a world power, re-opened their country to the West, they demanded the Western world to adopt their orthography and phonology for all Chinese names. "Peking," for example, was to be spelled "Beijing" thereafter. The Western countries quickly complied, despite longstanding usage of the previous terms. Perhaps the difference in treatment was due to the fact that by the second time around China had recovered its sovereignty and had accumulated 30 years of national construction and ethnic selfrespect. Notice how now that the Chinese are having serious internal problems, "Peking" has begun to reappear in the Western print media. back

21. The Euro-American capitalists learned to use the frontier as a "carrot" to attract labor, as an essential two-stage mechanism in the corification of the United States. Artificial barriers were erected to force the poor immigrants to work for a wage for a medium-term period in the East-Coast productive sites. Without these barriers the capitalists would not have been able to exploit these immigrants in the factories and plantations for long, defeating the whole idea of using immigration as a source of labor. See Marx (1967: 766) for the famous example of the Australian planter who "lost" all "his" workers to the frontier for lack of such barriers. back

22. Some immigrants, like the Swedish, had the resources to "skip" the first stage and go directly to the West. Others, like the Irish, were deliberately sent to the frontier to serve as a buffer between the Indians and the English settlements. See Ringer (1983); Nash (1982); Morgan (1975); Pearce (1988); Jennings (1976); Axtell (1985); Jordan (1968); Berkhofer (1978); and Santos (1988a). back

23. For the study of Chicano and Latino ethnicities, see Padilla (1985), Keefe & Padilla (1987), and Mirande (1985). For Puerto Ricans in the mainland U.S., see Rodriguez (1989). The Cuban and Central American cases are not discussed in this paper. See Santos (1986) for an explanation of what made the new North American republic succeed in attaining core status, while the other new republics of the rest of the hemisphere were increasingly peripheralized. back

24. When half of Mexico's territory was forcibly annexed by the U.S. in 1836-1848, and Puerto Rico was swallowed in 1898, the rigid structures of ethnic stratification enforced by the EuroAmericans in the United States were as rigid as ever. The flood of the mid-century gold rush precipitated the last great westward expansion of the "frontier." The U.S. had gained core status and was now deeply contending for hegemony with Britain in the Pacific and in the New World. But the New Republic was a cauldron of racial antagonisms, leading to the Civil War, and, as the frontier vanished, of violent class-struggles between the increasingly proletarianized Euro-Americans and their EuroAmerican capitalists. The two processes were not unrelated. See Bonacich (1972) and Wilson (1980). back

25. See League of Revolutionary Struggle (1979), and its predecessor, August Twenty-Ninth Movement (1976). back

26. See Almaguer (1971; 1975), Barrera (1972; 1979), and Flores (1973). For a good critique of Chicano internal colonialism, see Almaguer himself (1976). back

27. A variant is to claim Chicanos should struggle for "regional autonomy" in a socialist United States. See October League (1975). back

28. For a working-class version of the divided-nation thesis, see C.A.S.A. (1976). back

29. This has been the consistent position of the Communist Party (USA). See their pamphlet, (circa early 1970's). back

30. A good example, which although focused on the AfricanAmerican case is meant to include all other nationalities in the U.S., is in Revolutionary Communist Party (1977). back

31. Cf. Puerto Rican Socialist Party (1975), Resistencia Puertorriquena (1973), Corretjer (1977), Committee in Solidarity with Puerto Rican Independence (1979), Taller de Formacion Politica (1982). back

32. See Bonilla & Campos (1982); Campos & Bonilla (1982); and Bonilla (1985). back

33. Arrighi (1984) claims that during the New Deal Era the workers employed in the primary sector of the economy acquired immense "workplace bargaining power," or WBP, due to the generalization of "Fordism." This power consisted mainly of the ability to sabotage the expensive and complex machinery and to drastically reduce the "throughput production quotas" of the modern production processes without having to resort to class organization. The Euro-American male workers, who traditionally held the primary-sector jobs, used their power to secure high wages and benefits and to exclude women and non-Euro-American workers from this sector. This reinforced the pronounced ethnic and gender stratification in the United States. After World War Two, to counteract the workers' WBP, the U.S. capitalists began to transnationalize their investments and production activities "offshore" on a global scale. They also coopted the unions by using union contracts to contain wildcat activity and guarantee stability. The result was that in the last two decades, as millions of jobs were exported abroad to cheap Third World labor markets, the situation of the Euro-American workers deteriorated. Nevertheless, a disproportionate amount of the women and people of color in the U.S. have remained in the lower rungs of the segmented labor market, unorganized or locked-out of employment altogether. The now-defunct New Deal "social contract" never uplifted them. back

34. Median family income in 1986 for Puerto Ricans was $14,584, as compared to $19,995 for Chicanos and $30,231 for "non-Hispanics" (Schwartz, 1988). See also Moore & Pachon (1985), and Borjas & Tienda (1985). back

35. See Fernandez (1977); Burbach & Flynn (1980). back

36. Moore & Pachon (1985: 55) report 4.5 million Mexicanos were deported in the five-year period 1976-80, and in the eighties the yearly rate of deportation has stayed over a million every year. back

37. The population of Chicanos and Mexicanos in the United States doubled in the 1970's, and by 1987 there were 12 million more in the United States (from just 3.5 million in 1960) (Schwartz, 1988). back

38. Arce (1981: 188) states: "Chicano identity continues to be predominantly Mexican, in spite of national government, media, and academic infatuations with labels such as `Chicano,' `Hispanic,' and `Spanish-speaker'." back

39. See Santos (1988b). back

40. Exactly 51 years ago, the Guatemalan revolutionary and labor organizer Luisa Moreno, led the Puertorriquenos from Harlem, the Cubanos from Tampa, the Mexicanos from the Southwest, and many others, into forming a class-conscious, militant, Congreso de los Pueblos de Habla Espanol, the precursor of today's national Latino organizations and coalitions. See Camarillo (1987) and Acuna (1988: 235-239). back

41. These world enterprises are ever-more immune from the dictates of any single state, they internalize ever-larger commodity, financial, and labor markets previously open to competition, and they are aggressively pursuing the further internationalization of all production processes. back

42. See Choldin (1986), for a revealing account of the actual process of re-designing the Latino count for 1980. In it, Choldin proudly acknowledges the "co-optation" goal that the federal agencies sought to achieve by involving the militant Latino organizations in the design process, conceding the political nature of the enterprise. back

43. The term "minority," as used in the United States, makes "minorities" of the Black South Africans, or Black Brazilians, or Indian Bolivians, or Indian Guatemalans, all vast numerical majorities in their countries. It is another sham promoted by the real minority of the world-system: the European rulers and accumulators. back

44. For a racist call for the large-scale importation of trained European "instant adults" and the closing of Asian and Latino immigration, see Wattenberg (1989). back
 

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