The Democrat's "Plan B" for immigration reform: same old shell game

Sen. Bob Menendez and some others have floated trial balloons saying the Democrats "Plan B"  for some sort of concession to the immigrant rights movement in the Reconciliation Bill is updating the "Registry Date." 

'Registry' allows immigrants to get legal status 

The "Registry Date" was the mechanism used 100 years ago to straighten out the immigration papers of European immigrants. Basically it said if you had been here since before a given date, you should go tell the attorney general so he could just recognize you as being a permanent resident and give you a green card.

The measure was adopted in 1929, and it was meant to be, and essentially was, a statute of limitation on undocumented status. And over the decades, the date was updated several times ... until it stopped benefitting mostly Europeans.

So the last time the date was moved was as part of the misnamed Reagan "amnesty"  of the mid-1980s; and to this day it remains set in 1972, a half-century ago.

The proposal being floated now is for making 2010 the cutoff. That would in theory benefit a majority of the undocumented, but would not begin to redress the harm of the two-decade bipartisan persecution and  criminalization of immigrants.

There are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of families that have been divided by the Bush-Obama-Trump and now --let's be honest-- Biden criminalization and deportation madness. A registry date change simply ignores the reality of the need to redress that damage.

So welcome as legalization of some --even many-- among the undocumented would be, it is no substitute for a real change in policy.

The Democrat's somewhat disingenuous argument for saying a registry date change fits in a budget reconciliation bill would be that it just updates a deadline for filing a petition for adjusting your status, a mere technicality but --oh happy coincidence!-- it would mean gizillions of dollars flowing into the government because of the filing fee for that petition. So, you see, this is mostly a budgetary measure to raise funds for the feds, like, say, increasing the luxury tax on imported perfume.

The obvious retort is that although disguised as a mere technical change in a deadline, this is in fact a humongous shift in immigration policy. So nice try, but no cigar.

What else should be noted is that the option of updating the registry date has been open since forever to supposedly pro-immigrant Democrats (and yes, to Republicans, too, when there were still some pretending to be pro-immigrant), and they never seriously considered putting it into any piece of must-pass legislation until now, when --oh so conveniently-- the Democrats can shift the blame for it being thrown out on an obscure, unelected official, the Senate parliamentarian. 

So until they prove otherwise, my response to the "Plan B" is that this is just one more three-card-monte con job and I say to Biden, Schumer, Pelosi and their ilk: you bastards, that is one more you owe us.

Who was behind the organizing that turned Georgia Blue?

Georgia's Blue? What's up with that?

A lot of people are scratching their heads and wondering, how did Georgia wind up Blue in the electoral college maps while Texas, North Carolina and even Florida remained red?

In the end, it was over 120,000 doors

There are undoubtedly many factors to take into account, but at least in Georgia, I believe the difference came from two extraordinary women political leaders who inspired the sort of grass-roots, from below organizing work that leads to permanent change.

One is Stacey Abrams, who everyone has heard of, the Democratic candidate for governor in 2018 who established the New Georgia Project (in its various incarnations).

The other is Adelina Nicholls, who almost no one has heard of, and is the founder and executive director of the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights (GLAHR). 

Yes, Stacey Abrams is, in a sense, more significant, for her ties are to the much larger Black community. But as we say in GLAHR, "Aquí estamos y nos nos vamos," we're here and we're not leaving, and this year, we Latinos have made ourselves felt. 

I have not an ounce of doubt: we pushed Biden over the top. Yes, we stood on the shoulders of a giant, the Black community, and proudly so, and so we flipped the state from red to blue. 

It is not a question of who deserves more credit, but of what together we can accomplish.

The activist movement associated with GLAHR [GLAHR itself is a 501c(3) non-profit and was not directly involved in many phases of this] targeted suburban Atlanta's two main (until now) Republican-dominated counties for a sustained campaign beginning with voter registration and culminating with dozens of election defender teams at polling places on  November 3. 

For the Latino movement, the central objective of the overall campaign was not the presidential campaign but knocking out the 287G "polimigra" programs which are authorized by the elected sheriffs of the two counties. 

Key in that was defeating the Republican candidates for Sheriff, one an incumbent, the other the chief deputy of the retiring office holder.

In that, GLAHR made an alliance with activists from SONG (Southerners on New Ground), and people activated by the BLM upsurge this summer. 

Because of Covid-19 and my age (I'm 69), my participation has been limited to the streaming show GLAHR folks do every day, otherwise. I've been mostly observing from the sidelines while this has been going on But these activists conducted a year long campaign and in the decisive phase this fall, knocked on 120,000 doors in Cobb and Gwinnett. If you want to see the biggest vote total shifts in Georgia, go look at those two counties and compare them to 2016.

But of tremendous importance to the Latino community, both counties elected candidates for sheriffs that are pledged to stop 287G, the program that creates a direct pipeline to deportation from a county jail where people can be booked for nothing more than a traffic ticket.

Although various Latino groups are claiming they did all sorts of things in Georgia, so many thousands of phone calls and tens of thousands of texts, that  I know of, no one else was on the ground in Georgia knocking on doors and talking to people apart from Stacey Abrams' and Adelina's movements. And if you're questioning the reality of what I'm saying about the Latino activist side of this, on this facebook page you can examine the receipts.

And as for South Georgia, the only group that I know of who also did door-knocking GOTV there were the activists from GLAHR's local "Comités Populares." 

Various reports have highlighted the role played by the campaign against Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Maricopa County (Phoenix & metro area) in leading to this year that state going blue.

But people are not aware that the same idea has been followed in Georgia. Which is, of course, no coincidence. Because many leaders of both the Georgia movement and the Arizona movement are part of Mijente, which grew out of the "not one more" campaign aimed at deporter-in-chief Barack Obama in the last years of his administration. 

Some people say that we in Georgia followed AOC's call for "deep canvassing," going out and actually talking to people, and not just buying ads on TV and sending mailings. Others noted that we've been following what Brazilian Paulo Freire taught more than a half century ago in his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

I hope some day soon some progressive national media will come down to Georgia and present to the country a more complete picture of this extraordinary victory.

For the DSA convention: Resolution on orienting to Latinx communities

[I drafted the following resolution for submission to the convention of the Democratic Socialists of America to be held in Atlanta Aug. 2-4. DSA convention rules require 50 signatures from members  for the resolution to be considered, so I urge DSA members who agree with it to sign it. The links to the signature form can be found here on the DSA's members-only discussion board.]  

Whereas: The Latinx community is now the largest oppressed minority in the country, with 18% of the country’s population, some 60 million people, and concentrated among young people. One in five millennials is classified as “Hispanic” by the census bureau; among post-millennials, one in four.

Whereas: The United States has the second largest number of Spanish-speaking people in the world after Mexico, some 55 million people over the age of five. Some 41 million are considered native speakers as that is the main language used in their homes, a number comparable to native speakers in Colombia, Argentina and Spain  itself.

Whereas: Due to a common oppression and modern communications and media, as well as language and common cultural elements, this community has developed a common identity as shown by the immigrant rights protests in the spring of 2006. It was the most massive wave of sustained protests ever, anywhere.

Whereas: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a millennial Puerto Rican woman and democratic socialist, has become by far the single most prominent Latinx political figure in the community and media, which presents extraordinary opportunities to increase the presence and influence of our movement in that community.

Whereas: Addressing the Latinx community in the language most people of Latin American origin or descent use at home is not  just a needed practical measure, but a political statement of utmost importance given the size of the DSA and its presence in national politics.

Whereas: A socialist transformation of the United States is impossible without the massive, militant participation of Latinx working people.

Therefore be it resolved:

1. The incoming National Political Committee is instructed to devote all necessary resources and attention to guaranteeing that a Spanish-language web site of our organization is launched within 90 days after the close of this convention.
2. The web site will have both translations and material directly generated for it under the leadership of an editorial board.
3. The incoming National Political Committee is instructed to initiate the organization of this editorial board.
4. The board should include not just Latinx comrades, but as diverse a group as possible of other comrades, especially those who have a working command of the language, even if not fluency, but not precluding the inclusion of others.
5. In collaboration with the National Political Committee, this editorial board shall also have the additional responsibilities of promoting the development of our work with Latinx communities, establishing relations with organizations based in the community, and promoting collaboration and the exchange of information between Locals involved in this work. 
6. These additional responsibilities are not permanent but a transitional step to the creation by the NPC of a working group or other body focused  on work in the Latinx communities and its issues, or some other modality for promoting and coordinating this activity. 

Black and Latino "identity politics" are working class politics

[The Democratic Socialists of America are holding their national convention in  Atlanta in August, and in connection with the event I've been publishing on my blog various posts related to issues in the DSA.

[This one is from the DSA's national discussion forum. A comrade who described himself as unorthodox in the NYC DSA Afro-socialist caucus and in his branch noted that in a recent election Zephyr Teachout lost the race for attorney general of the state of New York to a less progressive candidate who was Black.

[He said he had posted in response to that outcome that Blacks and Latinos needed to be taught what progressive means. I think some people objected to the wording, but I put that aside to focus on what was behind that phenomenon of Blacks and Latinos preferring a Black candidate over a more progressive Anglo woman, and what it means for the political approach of socialists in the United States.]

I think all socialists and progressives need to wrap their heads around the democratic right of oppressed minorities to political inclusion and representation.

I was born in 1951 and the battles for the right to vote when I was a teenager are seared into my memory. And perhaps because I have lived in the Atlanta for more than 30 years, the blood that was shed and the lives that were lost are very much alive for me. And at bottom, the fight was not just for the right to vote but most of all it was about the right to vote for one of your own.

And I know this very well because my community, the Latino community, faces the same problem. We are 10 percent of the state population. We have two of the 180 members of the state House of Representatives. We have no Latinos in the state Senate. We have all-white apartheid regimes in places like Dalton, which are half Latino, more when you include Blacks and Asians, and in the world’s chicken processing capital Gainesville, just an hour from Atlanta. And two of the four large counties in the core Atlanta metro area with about a million people each are both majority-minority but have all-white governments and until 2018, white Republican-dominated legislative delegations (that changed in one of them, Gwinnett, in 2018).

The Latino adults in Georgia have been overwhelmingly undocumented and that has turned the Latino community as a whole into the victim of a new system of de jure discrimination, the same idea as Jim Crow although the details are different. For a quarter century we have been used as a punching bag and scapegoats by white politicians. Now the U.S.-born children of the undocumented are coming of age. And just like the Blacks vote Black, sometimes with an assist from us, Latinos are going to vote Latino, and get help from our African-American sisters and brothers.

And you might say, but your Black and Latino politicians are just as bad as the white ones. And I’d respond, first, so what? Our people have as much of a right to fuck things up as white people have done. And second, it’s not true. There are no whites getting lynched, no white churches getting bombed, no white people being deported back to Europe, not even are white people being disproportionately incarcerated. Nor are we going to exclude them from any political representation, like they did to us.

And suppose you were to run a white DSA member against one of the two Latinos in the state legislature, Pedro “Pete” Marín, a moderate democrat (he describes himself as pro-business and a fiscal conservative, although socially liberal). I’d vote for Pete Marín, and I don’t care if it was Eugene V. Debs himself who was the DSA candidate. Because Pedro stood up and fought for our community against every single anti-immigrant bill that has been proposed in our state legislature.

And when the big wave of Latino immigrant rights protests took place in 2006 Pedro was there – not just at the demonstration for the photo-op but at the planning meetings where no reporters were allowed (well, except for two: me and a Chicana sister who worked for the AJC).

And if endorsing Debs came up at my DSA chapter I’d oppose it, explaining his would be a racist campaign. – not because Debs was a racist, which he was not, but because politics is not about speeches or programs but about the clash of social forces. And in that District a white candidate running against Pedro would simply be a re-assertion of white supremacy. If Debs won, it would be a demoralizing blow to the Latino community and would encourage the racists.

You might say “you’re letting identity politics overwhelm class politics.” But what I’m telling you is this: the movements of Blacks and Latinos in the United States are the most acute expression of class politics.

You say you lived in France, then study Frantz Fanon; you’re in the Afro-socialist caucus in New York, learn from Malcolm X; you read Spanish, read Che and Fidel.

And if that doesn't convince you, find Engels’s fight with the English in defense of the rights of the Irish in the First International, or Lenin’s report to the Second Comintern Congress on the national and colonial question.

On the now-dissolved Spring Caucus: Latinos, the DSA and intersectionality

This post was written looking forward to the DSA convention. Although finished, I had not made it public, unsure as to whether it would further complicate an unfortunate situation where some caucuses had been formed prematurely, leading others to also form caucuses in response. Now with the just-announced dissolution of the Spring Caucus, the situation has changed.

I joined one of the counter-caucuses to Spring, the Socialist Majority caucus. And a related reason for not posting this article is that Socialist Majority had decided that, as a group, it would limit itself  to presenting our own vision for the DSA as a multi-tendency organization, and not a critique of other viewpoints. 

"The Call" announces the dissolution of the Spring Caucus

So it had not discussed a lot of the ideas presented in this article, and, frankly, I would have been against the caucus or the DSA adopting them as such; at this stage of its development, the DSA should remain open and inclusive of many currents, including those of comrades who disagree with me, such as the authors of the two documents I criticize below.

How to achieve the unity necessary to maintain an organization? Striving to come to agreement on a concrete program of actions against the exploiters of working and oppressed peoples who rule this society. And these actions don't all necessarily have to be cast from the same mold. One of the fallacies of many groups in the 20th Century Left was a tendency to say that theirs was the one "correct" action or tactic in response to a given problem or situation. But on the contrary, I think what history shows is that a multiplicity of tactics is valid, and their impact can be not just additive but compounded. 

In their dissolution statement, "Setbacks and New Beginnings," several former Spring Caucus members say that among the "significant and unresolvable disagreements" among Spring's members was "how best to relate to anti-oppression mobilizations and demands," which was precisely the subject of my commentary. For that reason, I feel it is right to post my criticisms now, even though were I to write the article afresh, it would be different, as I hope it is now just a question of  discussion of strategic visions and not a subject of action by the organization. Below is the post written before this change.

*  *  *

[A Convention of the Democratic Socialists of America will be held in Atlanta at the beginning of August. As part of the lead up to the convention, I will be publishing some articles discussing issues before the convention. This article is in response to a current in the organization previously known as Momentum and Socialist Call and their official statements.]

I. The Latinx people disappear

An experiment: Take Spring’s “Where we Stand” and “Our strategy for 2019.”

Copy-paste those into a word processing program.

Search for “Latin” which will also pick up Latinx, Latino, Latina, latinoamericano. Follow up with Hispanic, Chicano, Spanish, Mexican, or any other term that refers to my community.

No mention: not a single one.

Officially, we are 18% of the U.S. population. We are 21% of the millennials. We are more than 25% of the post-millennials. People from Latinx communities make up 17% of the labor force.

This is not just about the Latinx community. Do the same sort of search for Blacks and you will come up with one mention in the two documents. Read the documents and you will see that women and other oppressed sectors are treated the same way.

For the Spring Caucus, racial, national and gendered oppression are mostly tricks by the ruling class.

Capitalism stokes racial, national, and gender oppression to keep working people divided and to justify exploitation. And by creating an intense competition for jobs, housing, and decent schools, the capitalist system pits workers against each other and makes prejudiced ideas seem plausible.

This is the most primitive sort of class reductionism. What does that term mean? It means that all other axis of oppression and exploitation are seen as springing from and being at the service of the extraction of surplus value from wage workers.

That is what is behind the caucus’s blindness to the working class as it really exists. The documents instead talk about an imaginary class made up of generic workers stripped of things like race, nationality, gender, age, legal status, etc.

II. Intersectionality

That sort of narrow, workerist vision affected various socialist groups in the 1960s and 1970s.

But against that view a new understanding began to emerge spurred by the actual movements of oppressed peoples and specific struggles: the Black movement as it developed out of and beyond the Civil Rights movement, the feminist movement, and so on.

In 1977, a group of Black feminists that had been working together for several years as the Combahee River Collective published a statement that presented an understanding of exploitation and oppression that today is now referred to as intersectionality.

The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives.

The Spring Caucus approach is a negation of intersectionality. As a result, they either reject the independent movements of specially oppressed people or consider them unimportant.

As part of our vision of winning a truly free society, socialists are committed to ending all forms of oppression. To reach this goal, we strive to build a united multiracial working-class movement.

This idea --that the instrument that is necessary for change is this "united multiracial working-class movement," is repeated time and again throughout their texts.

In the context of a document that does not even mention the word Latinx or any possible synonym or substitute, the inescapable conclusion is that the “united multiracial working-class movement” is counterpoised to existing Latinx movements and organizations.

III. The Latino Immigrant Rights Movement

One of the most advanced expressions of class (political) struggle in the United States has been the Latinx immigrant rights movement. It has a dual character because it is both a proletarian class movement and a Latinx national (“ethnic” or “racial”) movement. This video shows you at a glance that intersectional character of the movement. [The video has translations if you click the closed captioning button].

The video is from 2011 from a struggle we waged in Georgia against an anti-immigrant law. Five years earlier, in the spring of 2006, a mass movement of Latinos mobilized millions of people in cities all over the country against HB 4437, popularly known as the Sensenbrenner bill after its chief sponsor, which had passed the House and would have made it a felony to be an undocumented immigrant or associate with undocumented immigrants.

The Spring Caucus makes a passing mention of the 2006 protests as part of one of its token lists of causes it supports, oppressions it opposes, and issues it relates to:

The last dozen years, from the giant immigration marches of 2006 to the nationwide protests against police brutality in 2014 and 2015, have shown that hundreds of thousands of people can come together in the streets to fight oppression. These protests have opened Americans’ eyes about citizenship rights and police brutality. DSA should also support campaigns such as defending Roe v. Wade, to convict killer cops, and for immigration rights.

Notice that the protagonists of the immigration marches, the Latinx communities, are simply disappeared through the use of the passive voice. Also gone is an understanding of what the movement is about, substituting instead “citizenship rights” and “immigration rights.” I’ll let other comrades address the “police brutality” issue.

Close examination of these documents confirms that the Spring authors do not seem to understand the immigrant rights movement, because the central demand of the movement, legalization of the undocumented, is completely absent.

But that must be the central demand for a reason: The real policy on the ground of the U.S. Government is not to deport the “illegals” but to keep them here but illegal, bereft of rights, so they can be superexploited and used as a club to undermine the rights and drive down the wages of all workers.

So why the deportations if not to get rid of the “illegals”? To enforce the status of the undocumented as an inferior caste.

IV. The undocumented and classwide demands

The Spring comrades write:

[W]e prioritize the fight for broad classwide demands — such as healthcare, education, jobs, and housing — that benefit all working-class people and that can therefore galvanize the largest numbers of people to fight in their own self-interest. Demands such as Medicare for All would also disproportionately benefit oppressed groups and reduce the competition for resources that gives rise to prejudice among working people. Such demands, when achieved, would curtail the power of oppressors, including abusive bosses, despotic immigration agencies, profit-seeking insurance companies, and racist landlords.

But here’s what it would really mean for the undocumented:

Health care? Medicare for All is a great idea. Give them your social security number, get your Medicare card. Except the undocumented don’t have social security numbers, not that are any good, and the law prohibits giving public benefits of any kind to the undocumented. Yes, the principles do say including the undocumented, but that is cold comfort if you get deported because you were driving to the doctor's office without a license.

Free college tuition? Guess what. The undocumented are barred from the top five public universities in Georgia. And in all the rest, they have to pay the exorbitant rates international students are charged. And I don’t think anyone is proposing free tuition for students coming from China, India or Great Britain. So it wouldn't apply to undocumented students either.

We get the right to have a job? Wonderful! Too bad that it’s a crime to hire us.

Housing? OK, but what use is it if you are constantly threatened with arrest and deportation, even just for driving a car, or nothing at all? What good is your house then?

“Class wide demands” don’t have the same meaning for the undocumented nor for the Latinx community as a whole, which is intimately intertwined with its undocumented sector.

If “won” without the legalization of the undocumented first, they would reinforce the status of the undocumented as an inferior caste by broadening the privileges of the “legals,” which in that context are more correctly seen as privileges not “rights” because they are denied to a whole class of people.

V. A caste system of legalized discrimination

But even if each demand has an “including the undocumented” rider, the fundamental problem remains which is the caste system that has now been incorporated into the U.S. white supremacist social, political, economic and legal structure.

It might be true that a movement powerful enough to win these class-wide demands would be powerful enough to win legalization for all. But it will not happen unless the legalization of the undocumented becomes a major demand of the entire movement.

This means directly confronting and defeating racist and xenophobic sentiments in some sectors of the working class. The logic of the Spring Caucus approach seems to be to avoid this fight as much as possible.

"Equal” treatment of communities that have been treated unequally is not equality; it is the continuation of inequality. That’s why affirmative action (the Brits have an even better name for it: positive discrimination), is absolutely essential to really begin reversing inequality.

But in the case of the Latinx community, we don’t yet have even formal equality. And that affects not just the undocumented, because even if you’re “legal,” your wife, children, lover, cousins, parents, coworkers and neighbors might not be.

Especially alarming in the passage I quoted above is the prettification of racism by making excuses like, “the competition for resources … gives rise to prejudice among working people.”

White supremacy is not a “prejudice.” It is a system that creates that reality on the ground. People don’t think Latinos are inferior because we compete for resources. They think so because this white supremacist society in fact keeps Latinos in an inferior position.

“Prejudice among working people” is the ideological reflection of the material facts on the ground and an essential component in enforcing the inferior status of the Latinx communities.

VI. The DSA and the real world

It is unfortunate that the Spring Caucus does not even try to present a cursory analysis of what is going on in the United States. If they had done so, they could not possibly have missed that the issue of immigration and the legalization of the undocumented is a central political issue. It even frequently overshadows all others in the mass media's daily news cycle. And it certainly is so for Trump.

The DSA has to relate to politics and live in the real world.

In that real world, immigration is a topmost political issue and the Latinx community is at the center of it.

The United States has created a new, Jim Crow-like system of legal discrimination and denial of basic human, civil and political rights. It has been mostly implanted over the two decades since Bill Clinton’s “Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996.” That law, in addition to authorizing what is now often called Trump’s Wall, set up the current legal regime of systematic discrimination and persecution.

Talking about working class unity in the United States is pure fantasy unless that system of legal discrimination is smashed. The Spring Caucus betrays no understanding of this political imperative.

--José G. Pérez

[José G. Pérez @JG_Perez is a long-time activist in the Latinx immigrant rights and socialist movements. His primary focus has been journalism. He is currently producer and co-host of a daily two-hour news, analysis and call-in show on the progressive Atlanta-based, Spanish-language Internet broadcaster Radio Información, and a member of the Atlanta DSA.]

From the archives: notes on the development of a Latino identity (2005)

The original version of this essay was written for members of the U.S. socialist organization Solidarity and subscribers to the Marxism email list moderated by Louis Proyect. I signed it with the pen-name Joaquín Bustelo, as, at the time, I was employed by CNN and thus barred from publicly expressing my own personal point of view – a very striking illustration that American "freedom of the press" exists only for those who happen to own one.                                                                                                                    –José G. Pérez

The most popular show in television's first decade: a Latino
band leader married to an American redhead

When I was growing up in the 1960's, there was a lot of talk about "WASPs" being the dominant group in the country. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. You don't hear the term used much anymore because reality has changed -- it was changing even then.

In the 1930's and early 1940's a steadily growing American ruling class consensus emerged that a whole bunch of folks who until then had been "not quite white," if I can so express it, would become "white." They decided to largely tear down the distinction between the "WASPs" and the "white ethnics."

World War II, the postwar GI Bill, and then the 25-year economic boom gave a tremendous impetus to this trend as did the need to cohere the U.S. population against the "International Communist Conspiracy" in the first 15 or 20 years of the Cold War.

Fred Feldman (who is Jewish and I think was born in the early 40's) wrote recently on the Marxism List that when he was growing up, his family was very conscious that they were becoming "white," acceptable, of equal social standing with other "ethnics" and these European "ethnics" were achieving roughly equal status with the WASPs.

Latinos were most decidedly included in this "whitening" policy. Darker-skinned ones would, of course, continue to be considered Blacks and treated as such, but European-descended "white" Latinos were just the most exotic variant of a spectrum that included Poles, Jews, Italians, Russians and so on. (I'm not sure if Germans or Irish had achieved equal status by then, but to the degree they hadn't, they, too, were included).

You can see that from the popular culture at the time. Zorro as a Robin Hood of the American West. West Side Story. But most of all, "I Love Lucy."

That was the most popular show in the 1950's, television's first decade as a mass medium. And it was a light domestic comedy centered on a Cuban band leader who was married to a white American redhead. And they even had a baby together. And it wasn't a specifically Cuban thing, because after the Cuban Revolution, Ricky Ricardo suddenly became "Mexican." (Whether white privilege was also meant to be extended to the recognizably indigenous descendants who make up the big majority of the Mexican and Chicano people is, of course, another question.)

Think about that. Back then, in the 1950's, the America of McCarthyism and white supremacist resistance to segregation, in the midst of a wave of terrorism against Black folks, what some people today would reject as "miscegenation," was considered a perfectly good theme for light entertainment to sell laundry detergent and washing machines with.

The Democrats in 1960 even had so-called "Hispanic" Viva Kennedy committees. And, fittingly enough with this broadening of "whiteness," Kennedy was an Irish Catholic.

It should be remembered that around 1960, Latinos were a very small percentage of the population concentrated in five states of the Southwest and a very few cities on the Eastern seaboard, mostly in the greater New York metro area, with small populations in a couple of other industrial centers like Chicago and Detroit.

That the trend towards Latinos becoming "white" stopped at some point is obvious and that it had to do with the 1960's, the anti colonial revolution, etc., is also pretty obvious. But a more basic reality undergirds this. I think "non-white" status nowadays generally flows from imperialism and follows the patterns of imperialist domination. The people who trace their roots to "third world" countries --colonial and semi-colonial countries-- by and large get second-class (or worse) treatment here.

In the United States, it is difficult to understand this because of the deeply entrenched paradigms of "race" and "color."

The U.S. started out as a European (mostly English, but not just) colonial-settler state. It developed and prospered to a large degree thanks to the expropriation and genocide of native peoples and the genocidal enslavement of Africans. The social construct of "race" grew out of, and helped to justify this system.

It is important to understand that U.S.-style hereditary "race" is an entirely and exclusively political and social category without any grounding in genetic or evolutionary science.

The most genetically diverse human population is that of sub-Saharan Africans, generally posited by "race" thinking  as being a relatively homogeneous group in its genetic inheritance as opposed to the more diverse Europeans or Asians.

In reality, the opposite is the case: there is a greater richness in genetic variation among so-called Black people than there is among the rest of the human population put together.

So why do "all Black people look alike?" Because evolutionary pressure changes skin pigmentation very quickly within a given population. Black skin protects those living in the tropics against sunburn and skin cancer caused by exposure to the sun.

People from Latin American don't necessarily fit very well into the "color/race" American social constructs and stereotypes. Latinos identify on the basis of factors like language, culture, history without any necessary "color" or "race." One of the leaders of the Latino immigrant rights organization in Atlanta, for example, is as "white European" as one could want, but nobody in Latino movement circles thinks of him as anything but Mexican and Latino although all his genes and even his last name come from Poland just a generation ago.

In the 1960's, there was, AFAIK, no self-identified generically "Latino" movements anywhere in the United States. The movements were (for moderates) Mexican-American or Puerto Rican-American; for radicals Chicano or Puerto Rican. New Mexico was an exception, but only terminologically: the long-standing Mexican-descended community there often self-identified as "Hispanos" but that was recognized in the movement as just the local name for Chicanos.

Despite that, anybody from any Latin American country who lived in an area where these movements were active was always welcome and the radicals from other Latino backgrounds would usually join whatever the majority group was. I remember well some Puerto Ricans who were leading activists in the Raza Unida Party in Oakland, California -- especially one couple of a "white" man with blue eyes and a Black woman.

Visiting Puerto Rico on assignment for the Militant newspaper, I met with leaders of pro-independence socialist student groups who I found out years later were Cuban; one of the most prominent figures in the independence and student movements of those years was singer-songwriter Roy Brown, who had been born in Miami in 1950, his father an Anglo, his mother Puerto Rican, grew up in both countries, and radicalized --as a Puerto Rican-- in New York when he was 17.

This fluidity of identity flows from another reality, which is that in addition to many specific "national questions," there is also a national question of Latin America as a whole.

Or, if you don't want to think in terms of "national questions," think just that there are different peoples, like the people of Cuba, Mexico and so on; but all of them form part of the people of Latin America as a whole.

This is not an arbitrary creation like "the people of all the countries whose names start with the letter 'U.'" This is a self-identity that goes back centuries based on geographic, historical, cultural and other factors, but not on "race" or "color." And in the past century it has been re-enforced by an increasingly common adversary/oppressor, U.S. imperialism. Thus Latin Americans speak of "La Patria Grande" [the big homeland, Latin America] and "la patria chica" [the individual country].

As martyred Chilean President Salvador Allende said, «Soy un hombre de América Latina, que me confundo con los demás habitantes del Continente, en los problemas, en los anhelos y en las inquietudes comunes.» ("I am a Latin American man who blends into the other inhabitants of the Continent with common problems, desires and concerns.")

José Martí's Cuban Revolutionary Party had a Puerto Rican section that was the main organization of Puerto Rican patriots at the end of the 1800's, the two islands being Spain's sole remaining colonies in the New World. That's why the flag of the two countries is the same, with only the colors switched. Puerto Rican poet, patriot and feminist Lola Rodriguez de Tió, who also penned the original words to La Borinqueña, Puerto Rico's national anthem, wrote in those years, "Cuba y Puerto Rico son de un pájaro las dos alas. Reciben flores y balas en el mismo corazón." (Cuba and Puerto Rico are, of one bird the two wings. They receive flowers and bullets in the same heart).

Dominicans played mayor roles in leading the Cuban insurgents in Cuba. (A half century later, in the 1940's Fidel and some friends were active in a movement to overthrow U.S.-backed dictator Trujillo: this has always been a two-way street.)

The dream of all the great Latin American revolutionaries was to create a giant republic South of the Rio Bravo and the Florida Straits, at least of the Spanish-speaking nations.

The Cuban revolutionaries around Fidel when they took power viewed that as the beginning of a Latin American revolution, and exactly 45 years ago [1960] were holding a congress of youth and students in Havana under the banner, "Make the Andes the Sierra Maestra of Latin America." (And none worked more for this than one of Cuba's greatest national heroes, the Argentine Ernesto Che Guevara).

And Latin American unity is very much a central tenet of the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela today.

Within this broad Latin American national question you have the specific questions of individual countries, Bolivia's sovereignty, for example. And within that question you have the question of the systematic political disempowerment for 500 years of the big majority of what is now Bolivia, the indigenous peoples. And in the Caribbean basin you also have the legacy of the enslavement of Africans.

It is not at all predictable from some formula how these national questions within national questions will all shake out, nor when. And the struggles that emerge around this, the defeats and victories, will have a tremendous impact on the consciousness of Latinos in the U.S. for the foreseeable future.

Right now the trend in Latin America is "Bolivarian" -- towards integration, Latin American unity, especially on the Left. The thinking is fairly straightforward. It is much easier to imagine a federation of several socialist countries being able to defy the U.S. than a single smallish country like Venezuela or a couple of countries like Venezuela and Cuba.

This is re-enforced by globalization, and it is notable that the most important media initiative of the Venezuelan Revolution is an international news and information channel to counter the imperialist CNN called TeleSur which just began to broadcast. And that is a partnership between people in Venezuela and several other countries, very much with the idea of creating a Latin American Al Jazeera.

If you look at domestic (U.S.) Spanish language local and national TV news, you will see that it is very heavy on news from Latin America --with the emphasis on one or another specific country in local news varying from market to market, depending on the makeup of the local population. The weight of Latin American political developments on this sector of the U.S. population is growing as the development of technology over the past 20 years has tremendously reduced the cost of communications.

The political and social weight of immigrants in the overall Latino population is growing, with a massive net influx of perhaps a million people a year (both legal and undocumented). Latinos are now settling in many more states, notably those in the South with better economies (TN, GA, NC, but not SC, for example).

These immigrant flows are scrambled in terms of national origin. Just recently the board of a Latino group I'm a part of had breakfast at a Mexican restaurant in a strip mall owned by a Cuban where we discussed tactics to defend Mexican and Central American immigrants with a legislator of Puerto Rican origin while a Uruguayan waitress served us breakfast cooked by Guatemalans.

But in addition to that, we have now a new reality in the United States that developed in the last decades of the 20th Century. Because we have had for some time Hispanic communities of greatly mixed national origins, there is also a growing layer of young Hispanics who are the product of marriages between Cubans and Puerto Ricans or Mexicans or Colombians, whose primary national identity, so to speak, isn't specifically Mexican or Guatemalan but Latino. And even those whose parents may trace their roots back to the same specific country have grown up in this mixed environment.

In this sense I Love Lucy's "Ricky Ricardo" should probably be remembered as the first "Latino" because although identified as a Cuban for most of the show's run, the allegedly "Cuban" culture that was projected as his went from Carmen Miranda fruit hats (Portuguese-Brazilian) to Uruguayan/Argentinian tangos (there's a huge brawl with both countries claiming to have originated it) to Mexican Mariachi music. And, of course, the genuinely Cuban stuff was very heavily African.

You also have a phenomenon, especially in the long-established Puerto Rican and Dominican ghettos, of Latino Afro-Americans. I don't mean Black Latinos who identify with their African heritage, I mean people who identify both as U.S. Blacks and as Puerto Rican or Dominican.

In this field of increasing cultural cross-fertilization and multiple identities, you have political and social factors operating.

The change in the atmosphere of the Latino communities over the past five or six years has been palpable. At the end of the 90's no states had implemented the federal diktat to deny drivers licenses to undocumented immigrants. The full force of the federal cutoff of social services to immigrants of the 1996 Clinton-Gingrich immigration reform act had yet to be felt. You had the usual nativist rants from the yahoo right, but the Republicans had gotten their fingers burnt with Prop. 187 in California and were a little more circumspect. The economy was booming. And the undocumented population was thought to be only a few million.

Now the community feels besieged. "Dred Scott" laws and state constitutional amendments are pending in quite a few states, I think 13 by the latest count. These are sweeping pronouncements whose effect is to say the undocumented are not persons under the law, they have no rights that anyone is bound to respect.

And the idea is already being applied without being approved. In a couple of towns in one northern state, several Latinos have been arrested for "trespassing" for just being there, being out in the streets. In Georgia there are a couple of counties and townships that have made fines (to be more precise: forfeited bail money) for driving without a license significant sources of revenues.

In Michigan right now, the cherry and other fruit crops are in crisis because immigrants have been too scared to come to that state where ICE --the new name for la migra-- has been very active especially against the Arab community but also impacting the Latino community because a lot of us look "Arab."

The big change of course, was 9/11. But this happened to coincide with the application of the Clinton-era decision that social security numbers would be required to get drivers licenses (supposedly to track down "deadbeat dads" who weren't paying child support). It went into effect in October of 2000, but many states were late in complying, and when they did, the post-9/11 ID requirements for airplane and rail travel compounded the issue. From the point of view of Latino and other immigrants, the United States is a country with a strict internal passport regime, one in which it is difficult, even dangerous, to travel using a common carrier.

But there are other changes as well. Everything I see and read suggests that the huge immigrant wave unleashed by NAFTA (which ruined the corn-growing peasantry in Mexico and with them much local commerce, artisans and so on; as well as coincided with the closing of maquiladora plants as the capitalists shifted production to Asia) hasn't subsided and may well be accelerating. And there's not just Mexicans and Central Americans crossing the border, tons of people have come here as tourists and stayed. In Atlanta the increase in the southern cone population is palpable since the Argentine economy cracked up. And there's a ton of people coming daily from countries all over the Pacific rim.

In Georgia, nearly 15% of births are now to Hispanic women, nearly 20% to immigrant mothers. Nationwide around 22% of all births are to Hispanic mothers and 23% of immigrant mothers. Officially there are 44 million Latinos now, unofficially, 50 million is probably a better estimate. This demographic tsunami in quite palpable and visible in the "hyper growth" states of TN, NC and GA, and the turbulence and dislocations such a massive population shift causes are being manipulated by right-wingers with the aid of the media in the post-9/11 political climate.

The impact in the Latino community is to tend to drive it together because, frankly, the racists don't care what kind of "spic" you are. As far as they're concerned, everyone who is recognizably Latino or even "foreign" (Third World foreign, white brits are o.k.) by their features, name, manner of speech, dress or self-identification is part of an "alien invasion," part of a "reconquista."

The intermingling of populations of different national origins is leading clearly to a cultural cross-fertilization and an emerging "Latino" or "Latin American" culture and identity which mixes with the similar phenomena that arise from globalization in Latin America as a whole.

Thus, in places like Georgia, the self-identification of the leading activists, and their branding of the movement, is very much "Latino" and not exclusively or narrowly Mexican (the now dominant national origin group). And U.S.-Spanish language and Hispanic-aimed media overwhelmingly speak in terms of Latinos and Hispanics when referring to the community and population and in self-identifying, if for no other reason than that this broadens their potential reach and audience.

How all this will play out in the end is anyone's guess. But this is some of the background and current tendencies as I see them.

Joaquín