Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America

“The central argument of this book is that U.S. economic and political domination over Latin America has always been—and continues to be—the underlying reason for the massive Latino presence here. Quite simply, our vast Latino population is the unintended harvest of the U.S. empire.”

The author’s thesis emphasizes that Latin American immigration is a direct result of American policy over the past centuries. Rather than scapegoating immigrants for societal problems, the United States should recognize its responsibility for the current situation and work to mitigate the devastation it has caused with sensible, comprehensive immigration reform.

“Of the Europeans who settled America, those who hailed from England and Spain had the greatest impact. Both transplanted their cultures over vast territories. Both created colonial empires from whose abundance Europe rose to dominate the world. And descendants of both eventually launched independence wars that remade the political systems of our planet. That common history has made Latin Americans and Anglo Americans, like the Arabs and Jews of the Middle East, cousins in constant conflict, often hearing but not understanding each other.”

From the beginning, the US and Latin Americans grew and developed side by side. However, rather than supporting each other in their independence efforts, the newly independent United States stayed on the sidelines watching, eager for the opportunity to jump in and take Latin American land for itself once Spain no longer controlled it. Proximity elicited greed and annexation rather than cooperation and support, but the metaphor likening Latin and Anglo Americans to “cousins” implies it does not need to be this way; shared history means that The Us/Them Dichotomy is even less justified than it usually is.

“Popular history depicts that nineteenth-century movement as a heroic epic of humble farmers heading west in covered wagons to fight off savage Indians and tame a virgin land. Rarely do those accounts examine the movement’s other face—the relentless incursions of Anglo settlers into Latin American territory. […] Most U.S. presidents backed the taking of Latin America’s land. Jefferson, Jackson, and Teddy Roosevelt all regarded our country’s domination of the region as ordained by nature. The main proponents and beneficiaries of empire building, however, were speculators, plantation owners, bankers, and merchants. […] To justify it all, our leaders popularized such pivotal notions as ‘America for the Americans’ and ‘Manifest Destiny,’ the latter term emerging as the nineteenth-century code-phrase for racial supremacy.”

Much of American history has been mythologized, perpetuating the narrative around the slogan “Manifest Destiny.” Manifest Destiny referred to the belief that taking land was not greed and aggression bankrolled by “speculators, plantation owners, bankers, and merchants” but instead a heroic venture, ordained and blessed by God.

“Proponents of Manifest Destiny saw Latin Americans as inferior in cultural makeup and bereft of democratic institutions. Our country’s Calvinist beliefs reinforced those territorial ambitions perfectly. Americans could point to the nation’s prosperity, to its amazing new networks of canals, steamboats, and railroads, as proof of their God-given destiny to conquer the frontier. Newspapers and magazines of the day were replete with articles by noted phrenologists like Dr. George Caldwell and Dr. Josiah C. Nott, who propounded the superiority of white Europeans over Indians, blacks, and Mexicans.”

White supremacy has pointed to Anglo American success to justify the concept of Manifest Destiny. The glorious myth allows a powerful narrative of progress to obscure the pattern of exploitation and racism on the part of white America, revealing the tension of The American Dream Versus the American Nightmare.

“Victory in the Spanish-American War and the sudden acquisition of overseas colonies made the nation uneasy at first. True, Frederick Jackson Turner and others were espousing the view that territorial expansion and Anglo-American freedom were inseparable, and most Americans believed that, but occupying foreign lands and lording over their peoples seemed to contradict the very liberties for which the nation had fought its own revolution. […] On the whole, outright territorial annexations ceased after 1898. Wars of conquest, the sanctioning of armed invasions by filibuster groups, the purchase of territories, gave way to gunboat diplomacy and to a more disguised yet far more extensive system of financial domination. Economic conquest replaced outright political annexation, as the region evolved into the incubator for the multinational American corporation.”

The contradiction between the ideals of liberty and the spoils of conquest was hard to reconcile after the Spanish-American War. That contradiction continues into the 21st century. The era of annexation gave way to one of economic domination, in which the United States controlled Latin America to create economic satellites that would support US business. Although the United States ceased to annex lands, in some ways, this disguised power was more devastating, as the reach of US companies had the power to topple Central American governments, installing those friendly to American business.

“What propelled our government to assume this role of regional policeman throughout the Caribbean and Central America in the early twentieth century? Some historians argue that prior to World War 1, our leaders genuinely feared that the Germans or other Europeans would establish beachheads near U.S. shores. But even after World War 1 ended and left the United States the unquestioned power in the Caribbean, the interventions continued. […] Whatever the reason for those early interventions, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election to the presidency brought a new approach to Latin America. Overt bullying from Washington and military occupation largely ended. Instead, American diplomats in the region sought to control events through pliant pro-U.S. dictators who were expected to maintain order. The mid-1930s and the 1940s thus became the heyday of los jefes. Except for a few, their names are almost unknown to the US public. But to their countrymen, they represent lost decades so filled with horror and darkness that some nations are only now recovering.”

Although the United States no longer focused on annexing land as the 20th century unfolded, it continued to build its empire in a different way. It sought to protect US investments in Latin America by installing leaders who would respect US business interests. These strongmen were not protective of human rights, but this was not a concern of the United States. The fear of hostile nations near US borders, especially during World War I, drove some policies; after this, fear of communism contributed. However, even with no aggressor, the US has sought to control neighbors to protect the financial interests of the United States.

“Despite our de jure citizenship, the average North American, whether white or black, continues to regard Puerto Ricans as de facto foreigners.”

Although Puerto Ricans are American citizens, they have no voting representation in Congress; further, the colonial/commonwealth status of Puerto Rico has created a welfare dependency in Puerto Rico. The author states that Puerto Rico needs to be able to reclaim its ability to control its destiny: “Only through genuine decolonization can the second-class limbo Puerto Ricans experience finally end” (310).

“The third generation of Puerto Ricans, those who came of age in the late 1980s and early 1990s, found themselves crippled by inferior schools, a lack of jobs, and underfunded social services. They found their neighborhoods inundated with drugs and violence. They grew up devoid, for the most part, of self-image, national identity, or cultural awareness. They became the lost generation.”

The author wants to trace the far-reaching effects of the “harvest of empire,” which has resulted in Latin American immigration to the US. As immigrants came to the United States as a direct result of repeated American interventions in Latin America, the consequences of such movements do not end with the first generation arriving in America. This quote depicts the third generation of Puerto Ricans as adrift and rootless in the disintegrating cities of the 1980s, cut off from their home culture of Puerto Rico and also cut off from participating in the American dream.

“Mexican Americans, meanwhile, face a frustrating identity problem similar to that of Puerto Ricans. They are both native-born and immigrants, pioneers and aliens, patriots and rebels; no matter how far back some may trace their ancestry on our soil, they are still battling to emerge from the obscure margins of official U.S. History, still clamoring to be fully recognized and understood, as we will see in the following story of one pioneer Mexican American family, the Canales clan of South Texas.”

Many Americans don’t realize how far back Mexican Americans can trace their roots in the US, especially in the American Southwest. However, despite Mexican Americans’ long lineage in this country, they also have a long history of being pushed to the margins of society as their land was seized and they were treated like second-class citizens.

“But World War II did something else. It transformed the thinking of a whole generation of Mexican American men who served in it, just as it did to Puerto Ricans. More than 375,000 Mexican Americans saw active duty in the U.S. armed forces, many in critical combat roles. […]

When the war ended, the Mexican American veterans returned home to much of the same discrimination and racism they had left behind, only this time they refused to accept it.”

After fighting for the United States in World War II, many immigrants had the confidence to demand their rights rather than continue to suffer discrimination silently. In the American Southwest, Mexican American veterans staged protests to demand equal treatment. This political awareness soon spread, as Mexican Americans began exercising their right to run for political office as well. However, for the most part, “the cry for equality and respect from the generation of World War II went largely unheard, and segregationist policies against Mexicans persisted into the 1960s” (104).

“Many of the militants regarded Garza as too accommodating to the white establishment. Their attack against him divided entire families, including the Canales, and the bitterness engendered by those battles remains to this day.”

Gonzalez traces the descendants of the Canales clan from the 19th to the 20th century. In the 19th century, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo made the Rio Grande the boundary between the United States and Mexico, dividing families north and south of the river into two separate countries. A different sort of divide happened in the 20th century, this time over politics, as part of the family favored more radical political solutions to help Mexican Americans and another part of the family favored more moderate solutions.

“The Cuban refugees were warmly welcomed during the 1960s and 1970s by a nation caught up in the fever of the Cold War. But that welcome changed almost overnight in 1980, as television news started to broadcast pictures of the Mariel boat people. More than 125,000 Cubans entered the country during the four months of the Mariel flight. The new refugees, America realized, were no longer from the island’s elite. They were largely poor, black, unskilled, and in some cases mentally ill or dangerous felons. Fidel Castro, according to some reports, took the opportunity to rid himself not just of dissidents but of criminals as well.”

This quote shows the contradictory nature of immigration—America welcomes certain immigrants at certain times and then changes its tune. The arrival of the Mariel refugees sparked the third national wave of anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States. Notably, the second wave took place from the 1890s-1920s and paralleled the creation of anti-Black Jim Crow laws. The author points out that anti-immigration and anti-Black racism often go together, and here, they intersect in the prejudice against Black Cuban immigrants.

“‘Here, take this rope and hang her,’ her grandmother Ramona told them, an old picture of dictator Trujillo still on the wall. ‘I don’t want any Communists in my family.’”

Trujillo’s devastating 30-year rule in the Dominican Republic not only resulted in widespread torture and killings but also thought policing. No one was allowed to admit to subversive thoughts against Trujillo. There were spies everywhere, to ensure this conformity. Big Brother could take the form of a friend, a coworker, a daughter, or a husband. Even after Trujillo was dead, the power of his dictatorship was such that Romana and many others were still loyal to Trujillo’s memory; Ramona even chooses him over her own family, who dared to question his legacy. The author implies that cultural propaganda and groupthink are problems in the US as well, where they often manifest as racism and xenophobia.

“At first, the Carter White House tried to work with the Sandinista revolutionaries, but that all changed when Ronald Regan was elected president the following year. Reagan immediately authorized the CIA to arm, train, and finance many of the former Somoza soldiers and henchmen into the infamous Contra army. For the rest of the 1980s, the Contras and their CIA directors pursued a hit-and-run of sabotage and terror aimed at destabilizing the new government. The covert war was overseen from the Reagan White House by Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and was conducted from bases in Honduras and Costa Rica. While the Reagan and then the Bush administrations intensified the war and sought to isolate the Sandinista government internationally, the number of Nicaraguans fleeing their country kept growing.”

The illegal Iran-Contra sales used to benefit the anti-communist Contra rebels in Nicaragua show how far the American government was willing to go in its crusade against communism. Despite the long reign of terror committed by the Somoza family and the Contra rebels who supported them, the American government still chose to support the Contras with illegal weapon sales to destabilize the Sandinistas—the popular political choice of the Nicaraguan people. The Reagan administration’s actions in Nicaragua directly led to refugees fleeing their own homes in increasing numbers to seek safety in the United States, another example of US imperialism coming home to roost.

“That same year, a right-wing death squad assassinated San Salvador’s archbishop Oscar Romero (1980), a fierce critic of the Salvadoran junta, and several months later, four American Catholic nuns and lay workers were raped and killed by government soldiers. Those killings signaled to the outside world that the violence in Salvador had spiraled out of control. Instead of denouncing a government that would permit such atrocities, the Bush and Reagan administrations, believing that the country’s oligarchy was the only reliable anti-Communist force, rewarded that government. Washington quickly turned El Salvador into the biggest recipient of American military aid in Latin America. Seventy percent of the record $3.7 billion the United States pumped into El Salvador from 1981-1989 went for weapons and war assistance. As the number of weapons in the country escalated, so did the numbers of Salvadorans fleeing the devastation those weapons caused.”

In a stunning display of indifference to the killings of the Catholic clergy and so many Salvadorans, the US government instead rewarded those who permitted such atrocities with weapons and money. The US supported the El Salvadoran junta to avoid the perceived threat of communist leadership. After Castro’s success in Cuba, the US would do anything to prevent the further spread of communism during the Cold War, even if meant siding with killers.

“Throughout the early part of the century, Guatemalan presidents faithfully protected the interests of one landowner above all others, the United Fruit Company. […] Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA director Allen Dulles convinced President Eisenhower that Arbenz had to go. The Dulles brothers, of course, were hardly neutral parties. Both were former partners of United Fruit’s main law firm in Washington. On their advice, Eisenhower authorized the CIA to organize ‘Operation Success,’ a plan for the armed overthrow of Arbenz, which took place in June 1954. The agency selected Guatemalan colonel Carlos Castillo Armas to lead the coup, it financed and trained Castillo’s rebels in Somoza’s Nicaragua, and it backed up the invasion with CIA-piloted planes. During and after the coup, more than nine thousand Guatemalan supporters of Arbenz were arrested. […] For the next four decades, its people suffered from government terror without equal in the modern history of Latin America.”

In the cases of El Salvador and Nicaragua, the goal of the US was to contain communism. In the case of Guatemala, the main goal was to protect the financial interests of transnational companies, especially the United Fruit Company. Guatemalan presidents had faithfully protected this company and its policies, but a popular uprising brought Juan Jose Arevalo to power. Jacobo Arbenz Guzman succeeded Arevalo. These presidents did not protect United Fruit. Instead, they instituted reforms that sought to give the power back to the people. One of Guzman’s reforms was Decree 900, which ordered the confiscation of lands not in cultivation, including United Fruit’s land, which was to be divided up among the landless. Rather than allow Guatemalans to determine their own laws, the United States stepped in to overthrow the Arbenz government, leading to a murderous regime that had killed 20,000 Guatemalans by 1976. Gonzalez writes that ‘[t]he dead and disappeared reached 75,000 by 1985” (138).

“From the first days of construction, the white American supervisors created a racial apartheid system that dominated canal life for half a century. The centerpieces of that system were separate racially based payrolls, a ‘gold’ category for white American citizens and a ‘silver’ one for the West Indians. All benefits were segregated according to those rolls—housing, commissaries, clubhouses, health care, schools for children of workers.”

While many point to the Panama Canal as an engineering and technical marvel, glorifying the expertise of the engineers who designed it, the thousands of West Indian workers who comprised the surplus of the construction crew of the canal are often overlooked. After the canal was built, many of these workers could not afford to move back to the West Indies, so they remained in the canal zone to work with the maintenance crew. They were subject to a rigidly segregated caste system that canal zone administrators had transplanted from Southern US plantations, where many of them had come from. These administrators created a Jim Crow system thousands of miles away from the South.

“In the Centro Civico, Héctor Méndez had launched classes to provide guidance to new immigrants who wanted to set up businesses. But everywhere the Méndez brothers went they began to notice how suspected drug traffickers were trying to legitimize themselves by infiltrating the few honest organizations. […] In the summer of 1991, Pedro Méndez accused one of the new immigrants who had joined the Centro Civico, Juan Manuel Ortiz Alvear, of using a false identity in the United States to hide a criminal record back home. […] He and his band had the entire neighborhood living in fear.”

In the chapter on Colombia, the author shows that the drug cartels that had ravaged Colombia were able to reach beyond Colombia’s boundaries into the United States. Even when Colombian immigrants tried to set up new lives in the United States, they could not escape the deadly drug business. Drug dealers also immigrated to Colombian communities in the United States to escape Colombia’s government crackdown on drugs, and this created tension and suspicions between immigrants. Once the police ramped up efforts against the criminals, “Colombians in this country could breathe a little easier, and the Colombian diaspora ceased being an aberration within the wider Latino immigrant saga” (163).

“Hispanic political leaders who fully grasp this demographic transformation, and who refuse to fall into the ever-recurring black-white divide on racial issues or to be taken for granted as a preserve of the Democratic Party, will succeed in turning the Hispanic voter, along with the growing number of Asian American voters, into the basis of a new interracial coalition, or Third Force, in American Life. Such a Third Force movement would seek to build a genuinely multiracial, multiethnic civil majority. Its aim would be not just getting more people to vote, but getting them to participate actively in social and civic institutions, creating space and voice for citizens of all races and ethnic groups.”

Gonzalez hopes for a new coalition that will drive 21st-century American politics, made not only of the various Latinx immigrant groups in this country but other marginalized groups as well. By combining their political power, they will be able to stand up to corporate America’s “drive to achieve more profit from fewer and fewer workers” (196). Like the Rainbow Coalition of the 1980s, such a force would redefine traditional Black/white, Democratic/Republican politics. By reaching out to those traditionally alienated and on the margins of society, this “Third Force” would allow more and more citizens to find their political voice.

“The more that U.S. corporations, U.S. culture, and the U.S. dollar penetrate into Latin America, the more that laborers […] will be pulled here, and the more that deteriorating conditions in their own homelands will push the migrants here. This push-and-pull phenomenon creates an irresistible force, and a constant stream of migrants heading north.”

The US has created conditions that both pull workers (the labor needs of US businesses) as well as push them (deteriorating conditions in their home countries, often as a direct result of US interventions). These two forces will continue to drive immigration until a new harvest is planted with “prosperity more equitably shared” (224).

“‘They are teaching a radical ideology in Raza, including that Arizona and other states were stolen from Mexico and should be given back,’ Horne said. ‘My point of view is that these kids’ parents and grandparents came, mostly legally, because this is the land of opportunity, and we should teach them that if they work hard, they can accomplish anything.’”

As Arizona’s education commissioner, Tom Horne enforced the law written in May 2010 that “the teaching of ethnic studies in [Arizona] public schools would be curtailed […] [and that any] school district providing [such] courses […] would lose 10 percent of its state education aid” (234). Horne wants to focus on teaching the dominant narrative of the American dream—if one works hard, one can achieve in “the land of opportunity.” He wants to erase the more uncomfortable narratives that run through American history and contribute to the central thesis of this book. The history of annexing territories, including the territory that would later become Arizona, created “American citizens by force” (227). Multicultural education seeks to preserve the culture and language of a diversity of citizens who have a diversity of experiences.

“A culture’s music, song, fiction, theater, and popular lore […] comprise the narratives by which a people understand the best of themselves, their place in the world, their identity. But over the course of civilization, culture became attached to specific nations and states, and at least since the time of the Greeks, those attachments have led to classifications, often antagonistic notions of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ of superior and inferior societies, thus turning culture into another weapon by which the strong dominate the weak.”

Gonzalez’s focus on the arts in this chapter highlights the power of art to create both mirrors and windows. By working as a mirror, art creates a reflection of experiences that allows people to feel validated and connected to the social fabric of society. By working as a window, art allows people to look out on the experiences of others, building empathy and understanding for other points of view. However, when people label only certain experiences as “culture,” they limit their ability to learn about others and themselves. This elevation of only certain cultures and narratives is another form of “empire” building and allows only certain groups the power to tell their stories.

“It is difficult for Americans to grasp the immense dislocation and fracturing of Mexican society that has resulted from NAFTA—harder still to imagine that our government’s trade policies have actually accelerated the exodus of Mexican workers to our own country. Supporters of the trade accord after all, promised it would bring general prosperity to the three partner nations and would reduce the flow of immigrants from below the Rio Grande.”

Looking beneath the slogan of “free trade,” Gonzales argues that free trade is anything but free and, in truth, has enormous costs. By flooding Mexican markets with US goods, NAFTA hurt Mexican small businesses and workers. When US factories moved south of the border, wages became a race to the bottom, and violent crime increased. In addition, factories no longer had to adhere to environmental or safety rules, resulting in reckless abuses. The drug war escalated, as well, because “thousands of the country’s peasants [could] no longer make a living from growing beans and corn because of the competition from cheap U.S. grain imports that began with NAFTA. Drug traffickers [were] increasingly luring many of those farmers to cultivate illicit crops instead” (272).