Latino Politics in America

   John Garcia begins with a 2006 protest against an anti-immigrant Bill (not designed to be anti-immigrant, but the de-facto outcome would be) that would set harsh penalties for entering the country illegally. Since the biggest source of immigration to the USA is Latin America, such a Bill would have a tremendous bearing, and not a good one, on the Latino demographic. The author defines Latinos as a people that share language, cultures, habits, values, and while subgroups exist, he focuses on the ties that bind.

    Garcia uses two maps of Latino population in the USA to illustrate the shift. In one map, the majority is in Florida, Texas, the Southwest, and New York. But in the map that shows population growth, the concentration in the Southeastern states. In the chapter on Culture & Demographics, he shows how Argentines and Continental Spanish are the wealthiest, while Latinos from Honduras and Guatemala are on the bottom. This isn’t surprising to me, because Argentina has a notoriously well-educated population and most Argentines are of German or Italian origin.

    As far as political organization goes, Garcia doesn’t find much of it until late. In the Rust Belt, Latino workers would simply have joined whatever labor unions represented their industry. There were some earlier groups, like the LULAC in Texas in the 1920’s, and the Little Schools program of the 1950’s, which worked to improve the English skills of preschool-age kids. Most of these groups were benevolent societies, rather than political ones on par with the NAACP. When the mass deportations occurred in the Great Depression, there was little support for Latinos in the media, no Mexican-American version of the NAACP or CORE to speak out on their behalf. In Florida there have been many Cuban-American lobbyist groups, but their interest is strictly for the benefit of Cuban refugees.

    Garcia makes good use of charts in this book, because a lot of the issues discussed here are regional. The biggest concentration of Latino immigrants is obviously in the areas closest to Mexico, and these states will be effected the most through immigration reform. Though not mentioned in this book, there was an earlier one called Lone Star State which delved into the subject of Latino politics. According to that book, Texas is no longer the right-wing Republican state it had been when George W. Bush was governor. With an increase in Latino legislators, there has been greater advocacy for peoples’ rights in education, health, social services, and criminal justice reform.