Latino Americans Read online

  ALSO BY RAY SUAREZ:

  The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration

  (FREE PRESS, 1999)

  The Holy Vote: The Politics of Faith in America

  (RAYO/HARPERCOLLINS, 2006)

  INCLUDING RAY SUAREZ

  The Oxford Companion to American Politics

  (OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2012)

  What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs

  (NEW VILLAGE PRESS, 2010)

  Social Class: How Does It Work?

  (RUSSELL SAGE FOUNDATION, 2010)

  Brooklyn: A State of Mind

  (WORKMAN PUBLISHING, 2001)

  About Men

  (POSEIDON PRESS, 1987)

  THE 500-YEAR LEGACY THAT SHAPED A NATION

  RAY SUAREZ

  A CELEBRA BOOK

  Celebra

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA), 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com.

  First published by Celebra,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA)

  Copyright © Ray Suarez, 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  CELEBRA and logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA)

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Suarez, Ray, 1957–

  Latino Americans / Ray Suarez.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-101-62697-9

  1. Hispanic Americans—History. I. Title.

  E184.S75S83 2013

  973’.0468—dc23 2013015502

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  For my children—

  Rafael, Eva, and Isabel—

  three of my life’s greatest joys

  CONTENTS

  Also by RAY SUAREZ

  Title page

  Copyright page

  Dedication

  TELLING OUR STORY: AN INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER 1

  THE CONVERGENCE BEGINS (LA CONVERGENCIA COMIENZA)

  CHAPTER 2

  SHARED DESTINIES . . . MADE MANIFEST

  CHAPTER 3

  AT WAR: ABROAD . . . AND AT HOME

  CHAPTER 4

  I LIKE TO BE IN AMERICA

  CHAPTER 5

  WHO’S “IN”? WHO’S “OUT”? WHOSE AMERICA?

  CHAPTER 6

  WHERE ARE WE GOING? (¿ADÓNDE VAMOS?)

  ACKNOWLEDGMENT

  Students at a “Mexican School” in Texas, 1950s. CREDIT: THE DOLPH BRISCOE CENTER FOR AMERICAN HISTORY, THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

  TELLING

  OUR STORY:

  AN INTRODUCTION

  THIS STORY is different from other conventional histories you may have read. For an author, recounting a story of one people in a particular place at a particular time is challenging enough, but this book sets out to tell how numerous peoples, from regions and continents flung across the globe, came together to become one people.

  The Latino Americans come from Europe, Africa, Asia, and from the ancient nations of this hemisphere. They are the offspring of Spain’s New World Empire. They arrived in the United States by jet aircraft this morning; they crossed a dusty, empty stretch of desert just yesterday; or long years after arriving here to work, they raised a right hand in front of a federal judge and swore to renounce all other allegiances to any other country. And most important, alongside those whose American story is a recent one are the generations of Latinos whose families have been in this country far longer than there has been a place called the United States, even longer than the arrivals from the British Isles who would go on to invent the United States.

  They . . . we . . . are all those things at once. We are at once a new people on the American landscape and an old and deeply embedded part of the history of this country and continent. The Spanish names of saints, heroes, captains, and kings dot the landscape of much of the country . . . all the way from “the flowery place,” Florida, at the southeast corner, to the San Juan Islands just off the Canadian border in sight of British Columbia. Because restless Americans have steadily moved south and west since World War II, shifting the population away from the Northeast and Great Lakes, millions more Americans unwittingly speak Spanish every day, heading into a Luby’s luncheonette in El Paso, “the pass,” sitting in traffic in San Diego, “Saint James,” or taking that third card in hopes of hitting twenty-one in that “snow-covered place,” Nevada.

  At its height when the nineteenth century began, the Spanish Empire stretched from the islands scattered at the mouth of the Caribbean to the southern tip of South America, up through the Andes and the western Amazon to the continent’s northern coast, through the slender arm of Central America to the vast landmass of Mexico and into North America, including at various times all or part of the territory of twenty-three U.S. states. The first European language heard in these vast territories was Spanish, the first Christian prayers followed the Roman Catholic rite, and the earliest surveys and land titles were granted to Spanish families.

  Mexico in the early years of independence from Spain. This 1837 map shows the vast extent of Mexican territory, including all of what is now the southwestern United States from Louisiana and Arkansas west to the Pacific Ocean. Above what is now California lay the vast Oregon Territory, under joint occupation of the United States and the British Empire during the 1830s. CREDIT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  Like the British Empire, the Spanish Empire had a shifting, often cruel and exploitative relationship with the hundreds of nations and peoples already in place when it arrived. Ultimately, however, the history was different in British and Spanish America over long centuries. This is not to minimize or underplay the horrifying tales of genocide, expropriation, and involuntary servitude brought to its enormous empire by the Spanish crown, but only to note that the two stories are different. As the British Empire and its successor governments in the United States pushed Native Americans west from the Atlantic seaboard until there was no more room left to push them into, the descendants of the Maya, Aztecs, and Incas remain very much present in their home countries, fully represented in the gene pool of the people who have come to the United States from the rest of the hemisphere in the last two centuries.

  You cannot understand more than fifty million of your fellow Americans without knowing this history. More important, you won’t be able to understand the America that’s just over the horizon if you don’t know this history. Latino history is your history. Latino history is our history.

  The bright lights are scanning the yard. The sirens are wailing in the night. Worried guards with flashlights make their panicky rounds. This is an intellectual prison break. Too many Americans have been taught a siloed American history. The core narrative, the story at the hea
rt of the story, is a grand procession of white guys on white horses, with the “others”—black Americans, women, religious and ethnic minorities—confined to their own separate areas. This book insists that the history of more than fifty million Latinos in the United States is your history too, no matter where in the world you or your ancestors came from.

  Massive proimmigrant demonstrations filled the streets of American cities in 2006. CREDIT: STEVE SCHAPIRO/CORBIS

  We Serve Whites Only. CREDIT: THE DOLPH BRISCOE CENTER FOR AMERICAN HISTORY, THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

  Our country is changing. Latinos are in the same moment among the newest and oldest kids on the block. Juan Ponce de León was tramping around Florida in the sixteenth century and made it part of the Spanish Empire for centuries to come. Today, Spanish-speaking newcomers are inheriting and revitalizing Florida’s twenty-first-century culture, and many Floridians are ambivalent about those changes. That is part of our story too.

  In more than 235 years since the Declaration of Independence, an essential truth has often been overlooked by the generations who look on anxiously as new immigrants arrive by air, sea, and land. The United States has constantly been transformed by immigrants, and it has transformed them too. Immigration anxiety is fueled when too much attention is paid to the first part, and not enough to the second. Talk to anyone who has come to live in the United States from somewhere else in the world. With each successive year they are in our country, these immigrants become less a part of the place they came from, and more of an American.

  Keep that in mind as you read this book. The situation in schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, on TV, in the armed forces, in church—in all the places that make the country what it is—breathtaking change is under way. At some point in the 2040s, a slim majority of Americans will trace their ancestry to people who arrived in this country from someplace other than Europe. For the first time in centuries, people who descended from the European empires that captured the continent, and people who descended from the generations of immigrants from Ireland, Germany, Italy, czarist Russia, and places large and small between Dublin and Moscow will be a minority of Americans.

  Yeah. It’s a big deal for people in the old and new majorities alike.

  By the conclusion of this book, you should be thinking about the United States, its history, and its people in a slightly different way. There are now so many ways to get cozy with a book—with ink on paper or in dots of light on dark on the screen of an e-reader or sitting behind the wheel of your car listening to a recorded text. However you consume this work, I haven’t done my job properly if you don’t say (and regularly), “Hey, I didn’t know that!”

  This book is a handbook for getting a better perspective on that next America. There’s going to be some stretching involved, and getting used to new ideas. It’s going to be fascinating. It’s going to be exciting for some . . . and uncomfortable for others.

  Let’s begin.

  The Alamo under siege by Mexican troops. CREDIT: BETTMANN/CORBIS

  THE

  CONVERGENCE

  BEGINS

  (LA CONVERGENCIA COMIENZA)

  EVERY NATION has an origin story. It’s the story they tell themselves, about themselves, to understand who they are.

  Americans are no different.

  In many ancient civilizations, the origin story ties a people so intimately to the land that they are made out of it, molded by a creator from the literal soil of the place. The Japanese, the Menominee Indians of the Great Lakes, the Yoruba of West Africa, all have creation stories that tie the people and their history directly to the land. There is no memory of another place. In their telling, they have existed along with the land, and had no life apart from it.

  Americans are very different.

  Our origin story has to bring almost all of us from someplace else on the planet. So where does the story of the United States of America begin? Some of you might say Plymouth Rock, the spot on the damp New England shores where the Pilgrims are said by tradition to have come ashore from the Mayflower in 1620.

  Others might say Jamestown, some six hundred miles to the south, where in 1607 Englishmen in search of fortune, not fleeing religious persecution, began probing the sandy inlets and started spinning gold from tobacco.

  This country was not just a creation of the British Empire, however. There were five hundred nations in North America before a European ship ever dropped anchor off the Eastern Seaboard. Once Europeans started coming over in ever greater numbers, the territory that is now the United States became home to many colonies.

  The Dutch made their way up the Hudson River and settled in the breathtakingly beautiful valleys of what is now Upstate New York. At the mouth of the river, Dutch farms and trading houses spread over the tracts of land around the great harbor that became New York City. The Swedes tried to make a go of colonization in parts of what is now Delaware and Pennsylvania. Even the Scots, before becoming part of the United Kingdom, attempted to plant colonies in what is now Maritime Canada, New Jersey, and the Carolinas.

  France’s North American empire stretched across a vast and rich swath of the continent many times the size of the parent country, including what is today half of Canada, and the U.S. Midwest, Great Plains, and Pacific Northwest. In the far northwest, the expanding Russian Empire pushed east, crossing the Bering Strait, colonizing Alaska, and moving down the coast of what is now Canada’s British Columbia toward what would one day be Seattle. The Russians began to probe even farther south to what is now northern California.

  Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. The Spanish explorer was one of a handful of survivors of a sixteenth-century Spanish expedition that set out from what is now the Dominican Republic and headed west through the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico, Texas, and Mexico. He wrote detailed accounts of his wanderings and later made extensive journeys through South America. By the time of his death he had seen more of the Spanish Empire firsthand than anyone. CREDIT: COURTESY PALACE OF THE GOVERNORS PHOTO ARCHIVES (NMHM/DCA), 071390

  The Genoese sailor sent west by Ferdinand and Isabel of Spain, Cristoforo Colombo in Italian, Cristóbal Colón in Spanish, and Christopher Columbus in English, made multiple trips to the Caribbean, and began four centuries of Spanish presence in the hemisphere. Looking for “Cathay,” China, he began the creation of an enormous New World empire for Spain.

  The empire belonged to Their Most Catholic Majesties the king and queen of Spain. Pull out a map and take a look at South America, where Spain’s possessions included virtually all the continent outside Brazil, all of today’s Central America and Mexico, and all or part of Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Oregon, Utah, Nevada, Wyoming, Colorado, and Idaho, North and South Dakota. At its height in the last years of the eighteenth century, Spanish territory stretched as far north as the southern lands of what are today the prairie provinces of Canada, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan.

  So where does the story of the modern United States begin? On Plymouth Rock, sure, but not just there. . . .

  In Virginia, sure, but not just there. . . .

  It turns out there are many candidates for the origin point, a place to visit like the coasts of Virginia or Massachusetts and say, “It all starts here.”

  Forty-two years before the men of the Virginia Company of London began to pound the fort at Jamestown into place, and fifty-five years before seasick Protestant refugees stepped onto dry land from the Mayflower, a Spanish sailor named Pedro Menéndez de Avilés dislodged French Protestants from their settlement on the Florida coast and established St. Augustine.

  The Florida city is today the oldest continuously occupied European city in the United States. From 1565 to 1821, St. Augustine, San Agustín, was a Spanish-speaking city. As European empires fought their wars in the New World, the Florida city lived under different flags, but it was essentially a Spanish place fo
r three centuries. The next time a tense local controversy breaks out in Florida over the use of Spanish, take a second to recall how much longer that tongue has been at home in the state than that relative newcomer, inglés.

  Across the face of this vast continent, the empires moved and probed and jostled and searched. They spent more than two centuries moving their frontiers toward each other, and fighting wars over the bountiful land. The boundary lines shifted and crossed, and eventually disappeared. By the mid–nineteenth century, as the dust cleared from the Mexican War, the shape of the modern continental United States emerged. What had been French and British and Spanish territories now flew under the flag of the United States.

  But I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

  • • •

  IF YOU WALK out of the church of San Esteban del Rey on the Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico, it will take a moment for your eyes to adjust to the intense sunlight. Your skin will immediately mark the extreme change from the cool and intensely colored interior of the church to the blast of dry heat rising from the tiny plaza at the edge of the pueblo. A vast valley falls away from the lip of the steep mesa where the Acoma Pueblo stands perched on top.

  You can see for miles in every direction. The dry, scrubby landscape dominated by brown and gold and flecked with green stretches out from where you stand to the mountains in the distance.

  The Church of San Esteban del Rey, Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico. Built in the 1630s by native people under the direction of a Spanish friar, the church still stands on a butte in central New Mexico. The Acoma Pueblo was the scene of a battle between Mexican settlers and Acoma Indians that eventually led to the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, the single most successful act of resistance of European rule by Native Americans. CREDIT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS DIVISION, DETROIT PUBLISHING COMPANY COLLECTION