Re: Political Economy of Mexican Migration to U.S.
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Organization: Concordia University Irvine
Mexican Labor Under Attack
By
Gilbert G. Gonzalez
University of California, Irvine
Written for: International Report
The radical right ascent to power over the past fifteen to twenty
years plays out within a determined U.S. foreign policy to restore
"competiveness" in the face of superpower challenges. Like a giant
corporation that cuts its payroll through layoffs (euphemistically called
'downsizing'), the U.S. economy squares off with the Japanese and
Europeans through slashing social spending in minority areas, lowering
wages for the working class while eliminating labor's legal protections,
seeking cheaper labor abroad through domestic plant closures, and
raising spending for offensive weaponry. Current political trends mirror
the face of imperialism, but this is not new. Throughout the 20th century
empire building has shaped domestic public policy. The poor, the
working class and minorities bear the brunt of policies that secure world
domination for U. S. corporations.
Thus a paradox inherited from the 19th century persists into to
the 21st: the corporate capitalist economy of the U.S. welcomes cheap
immigrant labor, yet that same labor endures systematic oppression.
That paradox conditions the 20th century Latino experience at every
turn. That oppression often rises and falls with economic depressions
such as in 1930s when several hundred thousand Mexican workers and
their families were deported to cut welfare costs. Educational
institutions, on the other hand, perceived the Mexican community as a
'problem' requiring special remedies. Well into the mid-century Mexican
children either attended segregated schools or were excluded by school
board policies. Texas schools denied entrance to half of Mexican
children as late as the 1950s and practiced segregation into the 1970s.
As the century winds down the state threatens to revive that same
oppressive practice. Extreme right-wing nationalists purport to model
public policy on an idealized image of the society at mid-century. On the
other hand, minority communities define that same period as the era of
racial segregation and anti-democracy. That contradiction sets the
stage for the politics of the late 20th century.
Not surprisingly, passage of Proposition 187 in California,
passed by 60% of the total voters, but 75% of the white voters, sent
shockwaves throughout the Latino community of the United States and
crystallized the political issues facing Latinos. The proposition limits
public education, welfare, and medical care to citizens and to legal
immigrants. An estimated 350,000 children would be excluded from
schools by 187. (The law is currently held up in the courts by
challenges on constitutional grounds). Organizations backing the law
used the image of Mexican immigrants scurrying across the border en
masse, bringing crime, disease, drug trade, excessive birth rates, and
dependency on social welfare. For over a century the border and
immigrants have provided politicians with a convenient explanation for
everything and anything that ails the state. Politicians from both
parties
continue to employ the tradition, a staple of the state's political
culture.
Thus the image of immigrant hordes, repeated in speeches by
Governor Pete Wilson in search of the presidential nomination,
resonated with white voters weary of the state's economic depression
and receptive to scapegoating. The deeper message of 187, together
with the rightward political drift supporting 187, is the renewed
respectability for the same racialized educational theory and practice
that served as legitimizing principles for segregating Latino children.
Proposition 187 alone presages the restoration of exclusionary and
anti-democratic schooling reminiscent of the de jure segregation era.
Consequently, there is a clear danger that past gains will seriously
diminish or disappear as a political agenda to restore the subordination
of minority communities moves aggressively into positions of power.
While 187 may not have the authority to mandate segregation, it may
very well be one of the most determined challenges hurled against the
Latino community in their generations-old struggle to construct a
democratic educational system.
However, Proposition 187 does not present an entirely new
challenge in that it builds upon enduring features of the twentieth
century Chicano educational experience: lingering inequalities in
achievement and resources, vigorous dissension over bilingualism, and
a persistent, albeit de facto, segregation. A fundamental reform of the
relation of Latinos to public schools has yet to occur. Although
significant gains were recorded in the 40s through the Mendez case,
which declared segregation of Mexican children unconstitutional, and
into the 70s through the Chicano Movement, which demanded
educational democracy, the general features of the early 20th century
experience remain intact. In the current period of radical right ascent
to
power the retention of "inequality in education" on the Latino political
agenda appears as important as ever. Consider that 187 does not
stand alone as it is cut from the larger national political drift
encompassing anti-immigrant legislation, scientific racism as a
foundation for public policy, cultural cleansing via English Only
initiatives, attacks on affirmative action
(remedies for past discrimination in employment and education), among
others. These operate under the umbrella of imperial economic policies,
exemplified in NAFTA-inspired open door investment policies from
Mexico to all of Latin America. Ironically similar trends in U. S.
domestic
and foreign policies were prevalent when segregated schools for
Mexican children first appeared.
Explaining the Latino historical experience requires that we move
beyond discussion of culture and racism to explore the vital role played
by the capitalist political system in arranging "optimal" social
relations
for the sake of corporate profit margins. The recent phase responds to
the collective need to meet the European and Japanese imperial
designs and does not fundamentally change the pattern cut early in the
century. Cheap immigrant labor remains a staple in the productive
process, meanwhile US foreign policy pursues mastery over the world
economies, particularly those of the Third World. Indeed Mexican
immigration defies explanation when isolated from the economic
interventions of U. S. finance, agricultural, and petroleum corporations
"on the entire economic and social evolution of the Mexican nation".
Immigration then is one social repercussion of U.S. imperial economic
domination over Mexico.
Forming a Mexican Community
Contemporary observers concluded that between 1900 and
1930 perhaps a million and a half immigrants settled in the United
States, primarily in the Southwest, resulting in burgeoning Mexican
communities. That migration responded to the demand for cheap labor
by railroad, agricultural, and mining corporations. Settlements followed
the economic development of the region, and thus as the economy
grew dependent on Mexican labor, widely dispersed colonia
settlements formed . In many areas, mechanisms were in place to
develop Mexican colonias to house a ready supply of labor. These
included company towns as well as residential areas segregated by
restrictive covenants to shelter workers and their families. The pattern
of separate communities for Mexican labor mirrored a division of labor
that was segmented largely by nationality. The most physically
demanding and least remunerative labor was reserved for immigrants,
Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos. As the segregated Mexican
communities evolved, the dominant English-speaking community
extolled the virtues of capitalism, individualism, private property, and
the Euro-American way of life, thus shaping the socio-economic
relationship between the two. In no aspect of colonia life, save
employment, was the presence of the dominant community so
fundamental as in education. As the colonia pattern extended, schools
and their practices developed concurrently. As early as 1893 Mexican
schools were founded and by the early century appeared throughout
the Southwest, becoming a routine facet of the public schooling
enterprise. Not until mid-century would that de jure segregated system
be legally dismantled in California; nevertheless, de facto segregation
remained in many regions, especially in rural areas where agriculture
predominated.
Educational Theory and Segregation
The interdependence of monopolistic capitalist regional
development and Mexican migration and settlement synchronized with
the emergence of public education as a major institution for
socialization. As the state's role in socialization deepened, social
theory
positing the natural organic unity of all socio-economic groups took
center stage. Organic theory not only defined the research of the newly
developing fields of sociology, psychology and anthropology, but also
charted the course for public education. That theory, however,
legitimized inequality and social classes, as inevitable, natural, and
therefore desirable from a public policy perspective. It also maintained
that in a society composed of social and economic unequals only a
common political culture established upon a common language could
achieve a functionally organic social unity .
Social classes were considered a natural outcome of each
individual's differing abilities. Consequently, public policy founded
upon
Organic Theory promised to engineer the same natural ordering of
citizens, from rich to poor, from professionals to factory workers, from
literati to laborers. Public schools, then, aimed at socializing the
child to
a highly individualistic hierarchy, to prepare the child to accept his or
her place in that hierarchy, and to train both genders to assume
functional occupations within the capitalist division of labor.
Academicians, educators, and jurists argued for separate
schools as the best means for teaching to the defined abilities of
Mexican children. Theoretically, either due to a cultural or a biological
deficit, or both, Mexican children were incapable of learning at the same
pace and level as the average English-speaking child. During the early
1900s and into mid-century educators were swayed by the leading
psychologists Lewis Terman, E. L. Thorndike, and others who
pioneered intelligence testing for applications in the classroom. On the
basis of intelligence research psychologists concluded that a racial, or
biological, hierarchy naturally distinguished individuals and entire
national groups from each other. The same logic justified imperialism as
the imperative flowing from intellectual distinctions among peoples of
the world. Lewis Terman expressed an opinion held by many an
educator of the time (and anticipated the Charles Murray and Richard
Hernnstein book The Bell Curve by seven decades) when he wrote:
It cannot be disputed, however, that in the long
run it is the races which excel in abstract thinking
that eat while others starve, survive epidemics, master
new continents, conquer time and space, and substitute
religion for magic, science for taboos, and justice for
revenge. The races which excel in conceptual thinking
could, if they wished, quickly exterminate or enslave
all the races notably their inferiors in this respect.
Any given society is ruled, led, or at least molded by the
five or ten percent of its members whose behavior is
governed by ideas. The typical pick and shovel man does his thinking
chiefly on the sensor motor and perceptual levels.
Add a little more ability to think on the representative level and he
may
be able to repair your automobile...Add a large measure of ability to
associate abstract ideas into complex systems and he can design a
new engine, draft plans for a skyscraper, or discover
a curative serum.
The conclusions drawn from nearly 40 intelligence studies
between 1910 and 1950 applied to over 9,000 Mexican children formed
this inevitable consensus: Mexican children were not intellectually
equipped to learn in a racially mixed setting. Perhaps no other technical
or pedagogical device has had such negative impact on Mexican
children. Freely adapting the uncritical methodologies of the time
academics argued that IQ tests were scientific, objective instruments
based on Natural Law, that effectively measured native abilities; they
reached the conclusion that intelligence tests must therefore be integral
to achieving greater efficiency in modern, mass compulsory education.
A curriculum adjusted to the natural intellectual level of each child
could
be designed to ensure an efficient and productive schooling system.
The state's intervention allegedly "leveled the playing field" by
affirming
that the natural inferiority of Mexican children required industrial
education in a segregated setting. Scientific racism, resonating with
Organic Theory and the 1896 Supreme Court ruling that codified
segregation into the law of the land, prescribed the adaptation of
schooling to the bell-shaped distribution of intellectual talent
distinguishing the nation's races and nationalities. The first instance
of
state sponsored affirmative action mandated segregation to meet the
particular innate qualities within the minority communities. For Mexican
children, the linking of tests with curriculum led to more than one-half
of
all Mexican children being classified as educationally or mentally
retarded and placed in slow-learner classrooms or enrolled in
vocational education.
Educators quite consciously considered Mexican culture an
impediment not only to the ability to learn, but a threat to the
political
and economic stability of the nation. Consequently, an overriding
objective, and one which most educators emphasized, was the
Americanization of the child. Thus, the first grades of the elementary
schools were commonly identified as Americanization rooms where a
desired cultural transformation would occur through indoctrination and
the simultaneous elimination of the Spanish language. A system of
rewards and punishments evolved to accelerate the assimilation
process and enhance the pupil's willingness to undergo a transition to
monolingual English proficiency.
This approach compared the culture of the Mexican child to that
of the English-speaking child and derived a fundamental pedagogical
precept: Mexican children are different, and due to a cultural deficit
cannot learn at the same rate as the English-speaking child. Further,
they are not given to "book learning" and therefore require special
educational attention.Whether or not they became English only
speakers, the curriculum continued to emphasize gender-specific
vocational subjects. Boys specialized in auto shop, industrial arts, and
agriculture; girls specialized in domestic training, the predominant work
open to Mexican women. (That liberal paradigm would, thirty years
later lead to the critique of education by Chicano activists.)
Politics of Desegregation
School segregation did not evolve without protest. As early as
1919, parents challenged school boards to terminate segregation
practices and demanding integrated facilities. Not until the early 1940s
did the protest gather momentum and marshall strength, ultimately
leading to the momentous Mendez v. Westminster decision of 1947,
which overturned the practice of Mexican schools. The Mendez case
prefigured the new constitutional interpretations of the 1954 Supreme
Court decision. The American Council on Race Relations concluded
that Mendez "signaled the opening of a legal campaign to have
segregation declared unconstitutional per se". Nevertheless, and in
spite of the desegregation decisions inequality in education persisted.
Intelligence testing, tracking, an emphasis in industrial education, and
de-Mexicanization, of Americanization, remained earmarks of public
schooling. According to educational theory of the time, cultural
transformation must precede successful school experiences, with
teachers as agents of change. Adhering to this premise, the public
school curriculum continued to emphasize Americanization as the first
step toward academic achievement. Educational policy mirrored
prevalent social theory that attached a stigma to the culture of the
Mexican child, revealed in this statement by Florence Kluckhohn, a
leading anthropologist of the day:
We cannot simultaneously accept the diversity of Mexican cultural
orientations and expect Mexicans to become well enough assimilated
for at least some sizable proportion of them to become successful
Americans. Mexican orientations--in our system--assure very little for
individuals except a lack of mobility and a general lower class status.
In subjecting Mexican children to a cultural cleansing linked to
vocational curriculum, the culturally-based account of educational
inequality prompted a new wave of political resistance. By the 1960s,
the Chicano Movement as a catalyst for self-determination merged with
the politics of class struggle, mobilizing Chicano student activists in a
united front.
The Chicano Movement, much like their predecessors the
Mexican American civil rights campaign of the 1940s, focused on
issues of inequality in education. Chicanos explained inequality upon
institutionalized practices which arbitrarily relegated Mexican children
to
low levels of achievement. Militants turned the tables of educators and
accused the schools of constructing a racial schooling process that
guaranteed unequal outcomes between Chicanos and
Anglo-Americans. The Americanization program failed to convince the
Mexican community that they were, by virtue of Mexican cultural
persistence, the cause of their own socio-economic conditions.
Chicanos, as did African-Americans, Native Americans, and others,
held the schools responsible and sought to reform the schooling
process in the best interests of the Mexican community.In the ensuing
critique of education, the governing culture and theoretical positions
were reversed: those controlling schools were deemed guilty of
fostering inequality in education. Moreover, institutionalized racism, in
the form of intelligence testing, tracking, vocational curriculum, and
Americanization were critically targeted for elimination or reform. The
Cold War and Vietnam constrained policy makers to enact legislation
resolving bitter antagonisms between minorities and the majority
peoples. The U.S. could not allow itself to be perceived as an oppressor
of Third World peoples. Given the Cold War policy objectives of the
time, domestic reforms were unavoidable. Nevertheless, conservative
opponents unconvinced of the need for many of the reforms, waited for
an opportunity to contest the new policies. Before that opportunity
arose, however, significant reforms were enacted, including bilingual
education, decreased emphasis in IQ testing and vocational training,
and most importantly, affirmative action programs to redress historical
systematic discrimination in education and employment.
The oppostition readied a counteroffensive. No sooner were
reforms implemented and their objectives realized than a conservative
retrenchment aimed to roll back progress. Conservatives sounded an
agenda by the early 1970s to re-emphasize the role of the individual
and the marketplace, rather than state intervention, in their
trickle-down
prescription to resolve social inequality. Conservatives claimed that the
marketplace, not affirmative action or bilingual education, propelled
social change. If no social changes occur the cause could only be the
failure of the individual to take advantage of the opportunities
proffered
within the marketplace. State intervention allegedly upset individual
initiative resulting in a reward system independent from merit (i.e. laws
must be color blind). Furthermore, state policy should foster a climate
optimal for corporate capitalist development.
The two Reagan administrations not only opened the door to
shameless profit making but also sponsored the weakening or
elimination of civil rights initiatives enacted in the 1960s and 1970s.
Meanwhile, earlier predictions of Mexican economic development failed
to materialize, as depressed conditions and high unemployment forced
many peoples northward where, as before, they were welcomed in
assembly plants, service sectors, agriculture, construction, and the
garment industry. Documented and undocumented immigration alike
rose significantly as the U.S. entered into a post-war recession.
Nevertheless, as the resurgence of migration occurred the anti-reform
retrenchment incorporated immigrant bashing and spawned a political
furor, first, over migrants alleged use of public funds (consuming but
not
paying taxes), and secondly, stopping the flow of immigration from
Mexico.The end of the Cold War further exacerbated the economic
problems and seriously damaged California's economy, indeed nearly
13% of California's jobs were eliminated. By the 1990s the immigrant
issue , now used to explain the economic decline, had grown to
enormous proportions and volatility. No other issue gathered such
attention and divided the nation as the "immigrant problem". The issue
seeped into policy discussions at all levels.
Nationwide Proposition 187 gained the most publicity, however it
was but one of twenty-two bills in the California state legislature
based
on racialized premises. Although 187 and the twenty-two bills focused
on "illegals", in reality the blame encompassed a much broader
population in the popular mind such that legal and "illegal" immigrants
of Mexico, citizens of Mexican descent, virtually all Latinos, and even
Mexico itself, were conflated within the blurred and sloppy logic that is
the trademark of political scapegoating. Pro-187 activists envisioned a
war to keep the U.S. from being overrun by "immigrant hordes": "It boils
down to this", stated the founder of the anti-immigrant group Voice of
Citizens Together, "Do we want to retain control of the Southwest more
than the Mexicans want to take it away from us?"
The revival of immigrant bashing and scapegoating, the demand
for the exclusion of Mexican children, and the calls for cultural
cleansing, coincide with the resurgence of scientific racism. The Bell
Curve by the academics Charles Murray and the late Richard
Herrnstein, embodies the return to academic and political respectability
for racist scholarship, social theory, and public policy. The authors
contend that Blacks are of genetically inferior intellectual ability and
deserve an education suited to their abilities. The book received
widespread publicity and was featured in major journals and TV talk
shows. More recently a national conference brought together scholars
and politicians to discuss the relationship between genetics and social
behavior. The political reaction of the past twenty years carries forward
the tradition of the 'social scientist', Lewis Terman who assumed that
segregation best suited the 'limited' learning abilities of Mexican
children.
As the twenty-first century exits the historical stage free trade
policies will increasingly link the economies of the U.S. and Mexico. But
free trade (i.e. the 'sacred' marketplace) does not, and will not,
mechanically inspire harmonious social relations. One only needs to
examine the short history of the European Economic Community and
the extreme nativistic waves occurring there to realize that trade is not
an "invisible hand" that guides social relations. On the contrary,
according to research analyses the trade pact's structural requirements
will increase the pressure to migrate. As a result of Mexico's policy
eliminating the ejido system massive population dislocations will affect
up to 850,000 families. The unexpected collapse of the Mexican
economy despite (or better, because of) massive infusions of foreign
capital under NAFTA left Mexico bankrupt and on the edge of anarchy.
While Mexico's social and political problems multiply the 'push' to
migrate northward intensifies. Meanwhile continuing economic
re-structuring in the U.S. will increase plant re-locations abroad to
take
advantage of cheap labor in Third World nations, in turn creating short
to medium term unemployment here. The period of economic transition
portends more difficulties for a social situation already on a dangerous
and explosive course. Increased migration, heightened nativism,
increased unemployment mixed with nationalistic and simplistic
explanations for the recession, and the future of social relations in the
U.S. does not inspire confidence. Instead the political trends augur the
rise of fascism.
From the vantage point of the present, we should not be
surprised to find that the era of de jure segregation in Chicano history
is our era too. School segregation, legitimized by scientific and
cultural
racism, appears not to have run its full course and currently impacts the
politics of educational democracy. However, unlike the past struggles
for equality, the present political atmosphere, darkened by 187 and all
that it represents, requires a broad political front. Activists in the
campaign for 187 cast the net wide, demonstrated in this statement by
a leading figure in the Stop Immigration Now organization: "I have no
intention" she said, "of being the object of 'conquest' by Latinos,
Asians,
blacks, Arabs, or any other group of individuals who have claimed my
country". In the final analysis, it is not only the Latino community
which
is 'suspect': in the 1980s 'welfare queens', the Black 'underclass', and
Black criminality captured the media's image as the African American
threats to society. Indeed force is now the favorite mode to deal with
the problems that beset the African American community as the 'three
strikes and you're out' law (three felonies and the offender receives an
automatic 25 year prison term) affects Blacks far out of proportion to
their numbers. In Los Angeles county Blacks ,who are 10% of the
population, constitute 84% of all "three strike" convictions. In many
states from one third to one half of Black males are either in prison,
paroled, on probation, or in cusstody. Presently non-citizen immigrants,
regardless of nationality (although Asians are usually the scapegoat
here) are targeted for exclusionary legislation limiting such things as
unemployment insurance. Recent proposals to reform immigration law
recommend reducing the numbers of immigrants by one fourth. Other
proposals are more drastic by seeking toreform the Constitution by
limiting citizenship to those born of US citizens.
The working class is not immune to the assault on civil rights.
Labor unions, farmworkers and flight controllers, as examples, faced a
steady erosion of their power through government hostility during the
Reagan era. Less publicized than other components of the Contract
With America is the attempt to "reform" the Fair Labor Standard Act of
1938. Gingrich and company are busy seeking ways to eliminate the 40
hour week, overtime pay, and worker compensation, changes that
corporate America embraces enthusiastically. Presidential aspirant
Senator Dole recently supported English-only activists signaling the
placing of the language issue on the national agenda. English only
proponents fear a multi-lingual society alleging that bilingualism leads
to
social conflict. By implication immigrants comprise a cultural albatross
around the neck of the nation.Arguments such as these were
commonplace throughout the era of segregation, more often than not
reflecting notions of racial supremacy and legitimizing policies for
ethnic cleansing. As the trend continues, the very foundations of a
democratic order may well become the next suspect in the eyes of the
radical right wing.
As we look back upon the 100 years since the Supreme Court
pronounced the Plessy Doctrine which codified the existing race
relations into the 'law of the land' we can find no evidence of any
fundamental change in the nation's social relations. Recent Supreme
Court rulings on civil rights bolstered respectability for the main
premise
of that doctrine: legal equality is now immune to the effects of
segregation, racism, and poverty. The Right argues that the "playing
field' is level and that only the capacity of individuals to play by the
rules
of the game differ. No matter whether a child is born and raised in an
inner city ghetto, a rural barrio, or a Newport villa, equality of
opportunity, i.e. the level playing field, is universally available.
Under
such circumstances state intervention to assist an African American
from the inner city unfairly discriminates against the rich.
Notwithstanding the ugly racism of Mark Furhman or the supremacist
ideology of the many armed militias across the US, the Court considers
these mere aberrations particular only to individuals. Thus, in the
Court's view racism no longer impinges on the "playing field" because it
is individualized and therefore not a social factor requiring remedy. The
reasoning behind the on-going offensive against civil rights legislation
reduces 400 years of state racism to inconsequential individualized
prejudices. Should we be surprised at the bold behavior of the extreme
nationalists and race supremacists? After all, the nation's leadership
speaks out of both sides of the mouth: on the one hand they claim that
racism no longer shapes social relations, but on the other they whip out
the race card at every opportunity. Proposition 187 stands squarely in
the center of the nation's political discourse.
--- 1996 International Report. Vol. 13 No. 3 (December)
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