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.

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[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.]

For Bernie, but against a DSA 'independent expenditure campaign'

[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. And although I was a signer of the initial Socialist Majority Caucus statement, this article represents only my own views.]

What does it mean "for" Bernie but "against" an independent DSA campaign for him?

• I am for DSA members (and all working and progressive people) supporting Bernie's candidacy and joining his campaign.
• I am against the DSA having our own "Democratic Socialists for Bernie" effort separate from Bernie's campaign, which is the approach outlined by the DSA's National Political Committee in "Part 2. Initial Bernie 2020 Campaign Plan Proposal" of the endorsement procedure it adopted.

The problem is that DSA insisting on having "an independent political identity" that is "centered around core demands of Sanders’s platform — not merely the candidate himself" contradicts the most important, core message of "the candidate himself" which he communicates by having just three words in the headline of the home page of his website: "Not me. Us."

You might think: that's just a tag line to recruit volunteers: the sign-up form is right there. But I think it has much greater political significance.

Bernie stressed in his campaign launch, as he did in 2015-2016, that his is a class campaign: it defends the interests of working people. That's why he wouldn't accept backing from corporate PACs or lobbyists four years ago, and why he kept emphasizing his average donation was $27. And he adds that should he win, he cannot make the changes, only we can through our own movement of working people to carry out a "political revolution." In other words: "Not me. Us."

The central message, which should be our central message as well, is that working people need to come together into a united class movement. 

Saying, "our message is: come together as a class. And that is why we are running a separate campaign and urging people to join our splinter pro-Bernie campaign" makes absolutely no sense.

DSA members who were part of leadership discussions and the NPC campaign proposal itself present the reason for having our own "independent expenditure campaign" as mostly a legal question, and even the use of that term reflects the approach.

I think the issue should be examined first exclusively as a political question. We should decide what approach makes sense politically, and then figure out implementation, including legal technicalities. That is completely missing from the NPC's document.

For me, the main consideration is what has been happening in  this country over the last decade. I maintain that it is an elemental movement by working people to cohere as a political force, as the "class for itself" that Marxist literature refers to. 

This tendency among working people to come together politically is a qualitative change from the situation that had prevailed since the 1950s McCarthy era until this decade, when the Occupy movement raised the slogan: "We are the 99%!" Occupy was the first time in many decades that there was a clear expression of class political consciousness by millions of working people and moreover coming strictly from below.

Since Trump lost the election and became president, the DSA's growth has been one of the main visible signs of this gathering subterranean force that is transforming American politics. People who were moved to do something would Google "socialism" or "democratic socialism," get directed to our web site, and the most conscious and committed would join.

Almost certainly, that has stopped for the time being. As things stand, people are going to go to Bernie's web site to sign up for and contribute to his campaign instead. I want to be with them, not in our separate more-socialist-than-thou effort.

And look at the practical side. By doing our own independent canvassing, we contact the same people the official campaign has already talked to, which is not just wasted effort but counterproductive. And it creates an impression of disorganization that rubs off on the candidate.

There is also the issue of message discipline. We can say whatever we want as an individual or a DSA member, but not when you're knocking on doors for Bernie. Because you will be perceived as part of Bernie's campaign, and if that's the way you're going to be perceived, then you also have to speak and act on that basis. 

Using a different name like "democratic socialists for Bernie" doesn't solve the problem. Most people will see that as a branch of Bernie's campaign, and therefore, we have no right to step beyond the usual latitude other Bernie canvassers have. 

And that being the case, the "independent political identity" of "our" Bernie campaign is going to come across as simply an opportunist use of Bernie's campaign to promote our group.

Then there's the idea that the DSA is going to "take it to a higher level" because we're going to tie the Bernie campaign to local housing justice efforts or many other issues. But the most important way to do that is to take these  issues to the other Bernie activists as we rub shoulders with them doing campaign work. If we have our own canvassing, tabling, etc., that means we have to stay away from Bernie's people doing the same thing, and then we're not going to be in contact with those other activists.

It is a sectarian blunder to insist on having our own "independent political identity" by having an "independent expenditure" pro-Bernie campaign. It isn't a legal question. It is a political question. Our DSA political message is for working people to come together in a class movement, and Bernie's campaign is the immediate vehicle for doing it.

Again, splitting from the main campaign structures to promote uniting in Bernie's campaign makes no fucking sense.

"Independent" of Bernie's campaign is the wrong political message. Our political message should we that we want all working people to join together in Bernie's campaign.

The "political identity" we want to promote is not the ideological one of "democratic socialism" but the class-based movement to carry out a "political revolution" that Bernie is projecting. That is the next step towards creation of a working class party.

But isn't it a contradiction to have a workers party gestating in the oldest bourgeois party in the world, the Democrats?  Absolutely. It is a total mess. Especially in the most important point: establishing a clear and universally recognized distinct identity as a political force.

But we don't get to choose whether politics should have evolved in this way. The fact is, it has. And it is not the role of Marxists to simply denounce the contradiction, but instead to work in and through it to a resolution.

The DSA's National Political Committee majority should suspend implementation of its national campaign proposal, and instead prepare a discussion for the convention. It needs to prepare a document motivating its idea of an "independent political identity" and an explanation of what this entails.

It should also organize  to bring other views, especially those of other comrades in the leadership who oppose the majority proposal, to the membership.

Whether and how to relate to Bernie 2020 will be the most important practical political question before the convention.

Discussing and deciding this democratically is not something that will just happen. It has to be thought through and organized, beginning with bringing out the different viewpoints and options; finding the ways to bring them to the membership as a whole; and getting as many DSA members as possible engaged in discussing and choosing among these options. That is the National Political Committee's real job right now.

Using a favorable vote for a Bernie endorsement as authorization for what I and other Bernie supporters reject as a sectarian approach, and one that was never discussed beyond the NPC, would be an undemocratic usurpation of decisions that properly belong to the membership and the convention, and a tremendous disservice to the task of figuring out how to organize a mass, democratic, socialist political movement for the 21st Century in the United States.

--José G. Pérez

The question facing the Democratic Socialists of America: What Are We?

[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 discussion articles here. This is the first.]

What is the DSA? That is the key issue for our upcoming convention.

No it is not a joke, or a trick question. I am totally serious: what is the DSA?

Because a group with 4,000 members is double the size of one with 2,000 members, and one with 8,000 four times as large.

But a socialist group that goes from 5,000 to 60,000 members in three years is a qualitatively different phenomenon. We didn't "recruit" (convince to join) even a few percent of the new members. They came to us. It is not as simple as saying that we are growing: we are being grown.

In the last three years, the DSA has been completely transformed, but from the outside. It was done to us. And there is every indication that this is continuing and will continue.

The standard explanation is that Bernie popularized the democratic socialist brand and when Trump won the Electoral College it was like, "oh shit -- I better do something."

It's as if Bernie was the pipe pointing in the DSA's direction and Trump's gaming of the Electoral College inherited from slavery was the opening of the valve. But that's not enough. You've got to have water, and not a trickle. It has to be a lot of water under a lot of pressure to give somebody a soaking like the one we’ve gotten.

I believe what has been going on in this country is that working people are developing class political consciousness, groping their way towards cohering as a political force. We are both a part of that movement and a product of it.

I’ve been active politically since the late 1960s. And until this decade, there had never been a working class movement worthy of the name in the United States.

By that I mean a grass-roots movement of working people who identify as such, comparable to the Black movement or women's movement. I specifically do not mean the (mostly ossified) "organized labor movement" inherited from the 1930s.

Think about it: for decades there has been mass consciousness about the need to fight sexism, racism, ableism, etc., but nobody talked about "classism." People got denounced for "playing the race card" but not for "playing the class card." Gays were accused of practicing "identity politics" but who ever heard a criticism of workers as such for indulging in "identity politics"?

That absence of the working class as a self-and-other recognized political force changed in 2011. The Occupy movement with its central slogan, "we are the 99%," was the first time in decades that there was a mass expression of at least rudimentary class consciousness.

And look at the polls from the fall of 2011 that asked about Occupy and its issues. The movement immediately had the sympathy and support of tens of millions of people, and all it had done was to raise the flag of the working class and copy that old movie Network by shouting, we're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore.

The next big national development was Bernie’s campaign.

In a few weeks in the summer of 2015, Bernie went from being dismissed with a patronizing smile to becoming a serious candidate and then a rock star that filled to overflowing the largest venues holding many thousands of people.

The Sanders campaign had an extremely sharp class edge, not just in "fight for $15" or "Medicare for all," but in the $27 shtick. That said this campaign is the property of the working people -- PAC money and the corporate control that comes with it not allowed.

And Sanders insisted in every speech that he could not change things. Only we could do so. This movement was of the working people, by the working people and for the working people.

The spectacular growth of the DSA is a third moment in this evolution, after Occupy and Bernie. It is built on what Bernie accomplished but could be viewed as even better, because it is an ongoing organization that is not focused exclusively on elections, but participates in all sorts of political struggles to change the government and its policies.

But despite that, we are clearly qualitatively inferior and it is not simply a numerical issue of members but of being rooted in our class. We are not even in the same universe as what Bernie accomplished.

This elemental, almost subterranean motion toward working people cohering as a class is the underlying force that powered Bernie's campaign, transformed the DSA and is continuing to do so.

We have to stop thinking simplistically that we are going to act on the process, to shape and mold it any way we want. We are in it and of it and it is going to do a lot more to us than we are going to do to it. And the nature of the process also tells us where it is taking us: towards a mass party of the working class.

So what comes next? First, understand. We cannot make the DSA other than what it is.

I had just turned 18 and graduated high school in the first week of June of 1969 when a couple of weeks later, the 100,000-member Students for a Democratic Society blew itself up in a fight between three factions at a convention in Chicago. Each had different plans to transform SDS into something new: nobody thought it was adequate as it was

Three months later, in September 1969 when I started college, there was nothing left but scattered chapters that tried to keep on functioning (but failed) and a couple of rump national groups fighting over the name.

As it turned out, SDS could not be other than it was, because it was an expression, an outgrowth of a social movement, a radicalization among young people that was sweeping the world.

The same is true of the DSA. We are the product of a much broader process. We cannot radically change what the DSA is today nor stop it from being pushed further in the same direction. Trying will certainly destroy it, and for the same reason SDS was destroyed.

Those SDS factions were trying to transform SDS from a broad expression of a social movement --the student movement-- into a sect.

I don’t use the word “sect” as an insult, but as Marx used it, to describe a certain type of group, one defined by an ideology; with the analogy being to religious denominations, with the term applicable to all denominations, not just especially outlandish ones, which is the more common, everyday use of the word “sect.”

A party is not a sect but an expression of the political motion of a social sector (like a class). Generally, its ideology -- program-- is defined by the movement that it springs from.

And there can be no doubt that DSA has now been transformed into a party-type organization in this sense. We are growing because we are part of a much broader movement that pushes people our way. And for every person that's gone to our web site and signed up there are probably three or four that have thought to themselves, "I should do that," but somehow never got around to it yet.

And this socialist sector is but a small part of the much broader class movement.

Thus we need to think differently about the DSA.

While our growth is being propelled by outside forces, only we can organize it. The challenge is to do so in a way that does not contradict the way we are growing.

DSA today is a push by the most advanced, already socialist members of the working class to come together as the most solid contingent of the working class political movement that is emerging.

Consolidation of the DSA as a political instrument of our class should be the central focus of our convention.

--José G. Pérez

The Latino Immigrant Rights Movement and the Revolutionary Left (2006)

I wrote this on April 11, 2006, right after the massive wave of immigrant rights protests all over the country the day before. Although in form it is a polemic against socialist groups that consider themselves to be the "vanguard" of working people, the main reason to republish it now is the analysis of the class forces and dynamics of the March-May movement. Like everything else I wrote at the time, it was under the pen-name "Joaquin Bustelo." 

Los Angeles, March 25, 2006

It's very interesting seeing that comrades who often seem to have all the answers for Latinos everywhere else in this continent have so little of substance to say in analyzing the biggest mass movement in many decades when it explodes onto the political stage of their home turf.

I say the biggest in many decades, but just by demonstration size alone, you'd have to say the biggest mass movement the United States has seen. EVER.

When was there ever a demonstration of a million people in Los Angeles? One of half a million in Dallas? Of nearly 100,000 in Atlanta? When was there ever a series of scores of protests in one month like we have seen since mid-March when Chicago broke the dam?

One would have hoped that it would have provoked a more thoughtful response than whipping up leaflets calling for a $15 minimum wage that one of the non-Latino sectarians on the Marxism list proudly boasted about having distributed at a Los Angeles demonstration. (That's what I love about ultralefts: millions of immigrants stage marches for dignity and these comrades immediately reduce things to bourgeois economist trade-unionism, imagining that by adding one or two zeros to be bureaucracy's nickel-and-dime demands, that have somehow taken it to a higher level and imbued it with revolutionary content).

Because the situation cries out for applying the tools of Marxist analysis to orient ourselves. And this is what I believe flows from such an analysis:

There is no task more urgent than drawing together WITHIN the Latino movement a militant, uncompromising, legalization for all left wing. And on the terms of the issues posed by this movement itself, not with demands parachuted in via ultraleft leafletters, whether of the $15/hour minimum wage or the "drive out the Bush regime" variety, which I saw here in Atlanta huddled at the edge of the Monday rally intensely discussing whether or not they should hand out their leaflets and circulate their petitions, because a couple of the younger women comrades were telling an older male that they just didn't feel comfortable doing that there.

Trying to recruit to overwhelmingly white, or even strongly multinational left groups can easily become a DIVERSION from and an obstacle to the immediate, urgent task of cohering a left wing within this movement. It is a secondary priority that should take a back seat, and if you're unsure on just how to do it right, wait. Because seeing a movement like this develop and immediately trying to recruit out of it, without being able to offer those you seem to attract any real analysis, understanding or perspective for this concrete struggle is, in my view, opportunism.

And even the groups that have tried to engage with the movement on its own terms seem unable to really understand even fairly basic things. For example, I saw at one of the protests on TV that there were quite a few printed placards calling for "Amnesty" signed by, if I remember right, ANSWER.

Amnesty is not a word much of the movement is putting forward, it hasn't caught on, and for a very simple reason. Amnesty implies you've done something wrong. And Latino immigrants don't feel they've done anything wrong. It isn't something that's been a big discussion in the movement, it's just a word that hasn't caught on because it doesn't express the sentiments people have. It doesn't "feel" quite right. Legalization, full rights, that's the sort of way people in the movement tend to speak about this.

The enemies of the immigrant rights movement have tried to frame the issue in terms of "amnesty," and if for no other reason it is sometimes also used. But for them, it is a part of their very conscious campaign to frame the issue in terms of what to do with these millions of "criminals," these "illegals."

So while I appreciate the sentiments of the radical group that put out the amnesty placards, I would urge them to stop. I suspect they don't understand the character of the movement or the feelings of its participants.

Why is "Sí se puede" the most commonly heard chant on these demonstrations? It isn't a demand, and on its face, it could mean anything. Yet it obviously means something very important to the MILLIONS that have now awakened to political life and struggle. Try to *understand* the actual movement just as it is.

Then there's the Troops Out Now Coalition, which appears to have unilaterally issued a call for a May 1 rally in Union Square in New York. If that is the case, then this must be rejected as rank opportunism. This is the sort of arrogance that has had such disastrous results in the antiwar movement. And when dealing with a Latino movement, this idea that a non-Latino group should be calling rallies and controlling the stage undermines the very core character of the movement itself. Whatever the intentions, it is a direct attack and challenge to the integrity of the movement.

I'm sure there are all sorts of problems in the Latino immigrant rights movement in New York. We have them here in Atlanta, despite having had a better start in cohering a genuine left wing of the movement than many other areas. Mostly white or even strongly multinational left groups should get it out of their heads that they can somehow "intervene" and solve the problems of leadership of this movement. They can't. And their trying to do so will only complicate things further. The movement as a whole, and especially its radical wing, needs solid reliable allies, not attempts by outside forces to substitute themselves for the leadership that must emerge from within the community. All such attempts are not only doomed to fail, but run the risk of undercutting the process of the formation of a leadership from within the movement itself.

These sorts of issues highlight the importance of having a solid, grounded class analysis and Marxist understanding of what is going on. An understanding especially of the *national* character of the movement and the *nationalist* sentiments that drive it is essential--and there seems to be a fair bit of NOT even seeing this going around--, but that is not enough. You have to understand the actualsocial forces, class forces that find expression in and through this upsurge in the community and how they interact with broader forces.

The absolutely all-encompassing character of this movement in the Latino communities is the result of a confluence of class forces that is not likely to last.

You have the overall neoliberal drive for world domination, redoubled with a vengeance after 9/11, which breeds and emboldens white supremacist forces; and from that, the aggressiveness and inroads and victories scored by the nativist wing of the Republican Party, the offensiveness of racist hatemongers like CNN's Lou Dobbs and so on.

But you also have the divisions within the Republicans between the more mainstream corporatists (Bush-Cheney) and right wing demagogues (Sensenbrenner-Dobbs-Tancredo), the pusillanimous continuous caving in by the "liberal" democrats and the stampede for cover from the "mainstream" DLC Democrats (with honorable exceptions, and more from the Congressional Black Caucus than the "Hispanic" Caucus, it must be admitted); and within it all the ACTUAL ruling class expressing its class interests by hiring and sheltering undocumented workers by the MILLIONS.

And you have this mass of Latino immigrants, both documented and un-, but especially the undocumented, pushed out of their own countries by the same neoliberal offensive that is attacking them here, who for years have been beat up and denigrated as "illegals," as job-stealing, welfare-cheating, diseased-carrying, school-budget-busting, terrorist sub-humans. Who are hired to build roads and then denied the right to have drivers licenses. Who prepare the food served on airplane but are not allowed to board them.

But within the Latino community, you have something else, you have middle-class and even some small capitalist layers. Usually subservient to their master's voice, THIS layer has moved, partly as a result from their own status as Latinos --including having been undocumented (in Atlanta we have a couple of ex-"illegal" millionaires), partly from the pressure from below, from their own workers, friends, and family, but also and very importantly from their own *class* interests.

Stalin says in the famous 1913 Bolshevik pamphlet on the national question that the heart and soul of the nationalism of the bourgeoisie is their home market. That is the same here, even though it manifests in ways which the Bolsheviks couldn't have imagined (and even though I disagree with the Bolshevik 1913 position of reducing the national question to just the interests of the bourgeois forces).

What has made this a MASS movement is the media, and most of all the radio. And what made it possible for all these DJ's and radio personalities to go all-out for the movement is that despite their middle class status, they are also, almost to a person, immigrants, and immigrants who came here as adults (very few people can work in Spanish-language media at a professional level, just from a language point of view, unless they were educated in Latin America: otherwise their Spanish is too "foreign," too corrupted by English). But also, because their bosses did NOT tell them to lay off, on the contrary, they egged them on. And their advertisers ALSO didn't complain, but said "right on" to the brothers. (And overwhelmingly they are "brothers" -- there are very few women DJ's).

Frankly, what Nativo Lopez of MAPA told Lou Dobbs is the God's honest truth: if you had to name one person who was responsible for uniting the Latino community, that would be Sensenbrenner. The vicious, racist "Latinos have no rights the white man is bound to respect" bill he pushed through the House in December convinced bourgeois Latinos and middle layers that their trust in the fundamental capitalist rationality of U.S. politics was misplaced in this case. And if youlook at the bill, it is simply the legal framework for a pogrom.

In desperation, these traditionally "moderate" forces have turned to the Latino working class, and to the tactics associated historically with the working class movement, marches and rallies, economic boycotts and –in essence-- strikes.

And in doing so they have unleashed a proletariat worthy of the name. One that realizes that it must not "permit itself to be treated as rabble," one that instinctively feels that it "needs its courage, its self-confidence, its pride and its sense of independence even more than its bread." One that calls its events marches for dignity, not marches for amnesty.

The interactions of this Latino proletariat with the other social classes isn't as straightforward as people might think. This is not exactly "class against class," it is much more *complicated.*

One of the untold stories --there must be thousands of them by now nationwide-- of the Latino movement here in Atlanta is that when we held the day without immigrants protest here on March 24, a lot of the union members at a big commercial laundry walked out from the plant and crippled production. I know the head of that plant's local. She is undocumented, a mother who is supporting children she left with their grandparents back in Mexico that she hasn't seen for years because the

border crossing has become too dangerous and she can't risk her job.

A higher up in her union went to bat for the workers, and got them all off with a verbal warning. They were also negotiating significant participation by workers from that plant in the Monday protest, although I don't know the outcome of that.

You would think the reaction of the plant management would have been to immediately fire everyone involved in what was in essence a wildcat but you would be wrong. The plant management and company involved have been more lenient because, of course it's in their interests not just to keep their workers relatively happy, but more fundamentally, because it's in their interests to keep their workers period. And what the laundry capitalists see as their right to exploit this labor is under attack, and from their point of view the action of these workers in defending their staying in this country is a defense also of the right of the laundry bosses to exploit them.

I suspect the compañeras who led and took part this action did not necessarily think this through in such explicit terms to figure out whether they could get away with it. They acted on instinct but mostly driven by the attacks against them from the politicians, which as they see it, leave them no choice but to fight back, and now that the opportunity to do so has presented itself, they are willing to take risks to do so.

It is important to *understand* the various class forces and interests in play to orient yourself in this movement. There is on the organized socialist left very little understanding, and in what's being

reported, there is quite a bit of arrogance.

The movement that has erupted is clearly and beyond any possible confusion a *national* movement, a multi-class movement by oppressed people against their oppression as a people. Very significantly, it is a NEW movement. There has never been a generically Latino movement before. This is a product of the evolution of the last 30 or 40 years, the huge continuing immigration and the development of a "national" (meaning Latino, as opposed to nationwide) media in Spanish. I went over some of the factors leading to the development of a generically "Latino" (as distinct from a specifically Cuban, Puerto Rican, Mexican or Chicano) national identity several months ago in a paper I think I posted to this list (as well as others) and can send to anyone who is interested.

But this "Latino" movement is also an expression of the national movement of Latin America as a whole, of the collection of Balkanized nations that are slowly waking up to the reality that they must become a single nation because that is the only way to deal with the problem they all share, U.S. imperialism.

I don't mean to imply by this that there hasn't also been a rise in specifically Chicano (or Mexican, or Mexican-American) nationalist sentiment as a result. Quite the contrary, the signs are everywhere of

a big upsurge in nationalist sentiment of the main immigrant nationality groupings. But as comrade Evo Morales and the Bolivian indigenous movement teaches, the nationalism of the oppressed is fundamentally *different* from the nationalism of the oppressor in this regard. "No es excluyente" – it doesn't exclude. You can be indigenous, and Guatemalan, and Mesoamerican, and Latin American, and a part of the Third World, a person of color.

Being white (Anglo) in the "American" sense is completely different. That is an exclusive identity, that's the whole point to whiteness, white supremacy. As Malcolm X put it, in the United States "white means boss."

And because it IS a national movement, the right approach is to support the national-revolutionary forces, the coalescence of a left wing in the movement that can become over time a proletarian wing of the movement, especially as it vies for leadership with bourgeois and reformist forces.

Now, in a direct sense this is NOT a job for Anglo comrades, except insofar as it affects their general political stance in terms of propaganda and alliances. Comrades from other oppressed nationalities can perhaps play more of a role, but even then, overwhelmingly, this can only really be done by Latino militants and activists. That is the real challenge, to cohere the left wing that ALREADY exists as scattered activists in this movement, and especially the fresh forces coming forward.

It is a pressing, urgent task. The conditions of this upsurge cannot last for a long time. The *class* interests of the Latino proletariat and other forces coincide only in part, and most strongly in the negative: against criminalization of immigrants, against the Sensenbrenner bill.

But when it comes to what people are for, or at least willing to settle for, it is a different matter.

All sorts of forces were willing to support the phony "compromise" cooked up by that gusano Mel Martinez a week ago and accepted by Kennedy and the Democrats that would have divided the undocumented between those who could PROVE they'd been here more than five years and the rest that couldn't and had to go back to Mexico and get "legally" readmitted.

This is the most important dividing line between the emerging revolutionary-national forces, proletarian in all but name, and the bourgeois forces: legalization for all or for some.

Another very important issue intimately tied up with this is the guest worker program. The revolutionary national forces are all for letting "guest workers" into the United States -- provided they get the same rights everyone else gets when they move here, specifically, permanent residency and U.S. citizenship under the same conditions and timetables as, say, a Rupert Murdoch.

We *reject* a new Bracero program. Latino bourgeois forces especially are basically okay with a new bracero program, which is essentially an attempt at a continuation of what has been the real U.S. immigration policy --letting immigrants in, but with second class status, as "illegals"-- in a more controlled way and under a new name (what the Latino capitalists object to in the whole drive by the ultrarightists is moving Latino undocumented immigrants from second class status to no status whatsoever, and possibly driving them out of the country. Latino bourgeois forces object because it undercuts the markets many of them rely on as well as increases their legal risks for exploiting this labor).

I should make clear here that when referring to Latino capitalists, I'm referring mostly not to the odd individual like the Hispanic head of microprocessor company AMD, but rather to those whose businesses revolve around the community, at least to a large extent. This includes, in a sense, even some large Anglo-owned businesses, who, for example, own community media, but whose Latino executives in charge of a radio or newspaper have been given sufficient autonomy to respond to this situation. And those executives would be among those who I'm referring to).

Nor is this strictly speaking just small capitalists, it involves some significant forces in the bourgeois world, such as the Mexican and Venezuelan TV monopolies behind Univision.

From this it should be clear why grouping together a broad left current within the immigrant rights movement around a few essential points is the central strategic priority TODAY. Because the multi-class alliance with these bourgeois forces is unlikely to last. There will either be a new rotten compromise cooked up when Congress reconvenes in a couple of weeks, OR the Democrats will decide this is a great club to beat the Republicans over the head with, reject all compromises, and seek to divert the movement into purely bourgeois electoralism, urging us to compromise our demands THAT way, by subordinating them to getting "friends" elected.

That electoralist line is one that *excludes* the overwhelming majority of participants in the movement, not just the undocumented but legal immigrants also who don't have the right to vote. On average, it takes about two decades for half of the immigrants admitted in a given year to become citizens, and many never do. So it will be harder to divert this movement into electoralism. But you could already see the effort being made, especially in the speeches at the Washington, D.C. rally.

The left instead will want to keep the heat on for legalization for everyone, and for expanded working class immigrants in the future being treated the same as bourgeois immigrants, in other words, for Latino immigrants being treated the same as white immigrants.

There is a need for the most conscious working class Latino fighters to IMMEDIATELY fuse with --not multinational revolutionary groups--but the most advanced and grass-roots-based and oriented wing of the ACTUAL movement in their localities, and to start coordinating and building ties between those forces in different localities.

Four points can serve as an initial platform or program for this left wing.

A) Legalization for all; a "road to citizenship" on the same conditions as all other immigrants.

B) Yes to massively expanded normal immigration from Latin America on the same conditions as all other immigrants; no to a new Bracero program;

C) The Latino community and especially the immigrants must own and run this movement; YES to support from Black and white and non-profit and trade union and political party (even Republican) allies, NO to non-Latino control over our destiny and our movement.

D) For continuing with the campaign of massive public protests.

In the medium term (in this case, months, not days or weeks) the revolutionary left needs to do a lot of hard thinking. Historically, the idea of recruitment to left groups out of these sorts of movements has not resulted in building strong revolutionary organizations in the United States but rather to isolate and fragment the leadership of the social movements. The kind of political movement that needs to be built is one that is more like the MAS, that serves to bring together the leading militant of the social movements rather than scattering them into a half dozen narrow sects.

There is a need for a new political space where leading activists can begin to discuss and think through the strategic challenges that are posed as the actual movements develop. There is no chance the currently existing organized socialist groups can be that space, there is no room in them, neither socially, culturally nor politically. The discussion (or lack of it) within this list and I believe also within the organized groups shows that the tendency of the socialist left is to have way too many answers and way too few questions.

Of particular importance is that this new space make possible the REAL leading participation of militants from the oppressed nationalities and especially women. If you go to myspace.com, and look at the videos of the student high school walkouts from all over the country that have been posted there, the very strong impression you get is that the majority of the leadership and participants in the movement are young women. And that is certainly true of the overall immigrant rights movement in my area, where women are the central core of leaders and activists.

The traditional Left has a very serious problem of reproducing the patterns of power and privilege from broader society. The forms of the meetings, the style of discourse and debate, the emphasis on the production of literature accessible really only to a very few in a movement like this, all of that needs to be re-examined in a self-critical spirit. And the practice of left groups that are overwhelmingly not Latino coming into this movement with their own sectarian leaflets and agendas with which to mold and shape the actual movement needs to be self-critically examined from this angle also.

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