I loved
this book. My only thing to change is that it would be longer. Harvest of Empire provides a very unique
look at the phenomenon of Latino immigration to the United States and shows how
much of it was caused by the USA’s own policies, which many Americans now
regret, as evidenced by the entire Donald Trump presidency to this point.
Gonzalez analyzes American intervention in Latin America from the Monroe
Doctrine to the Panama Canal all the way through NAFTA. The book really goes
through a full explanation of how Latinos came from being a relevant group in
America, to disappearing (at least from Anglo view), to reemerging as the
nations predominant ethnic and linguistic minority. The book is very well
organized into roots, covering the basis of American interventions in Latin
America that would weaken those countries, branches, covering the different
groups of Latino immigrants to the USA, and Harvest, the results of the
inclusion of Latinos in the USA. This book is very, very critical to
understanding the history of the United States. Below are the questions I tried
to answer.
What is the “Harvest of Empire”?
The
Harvest of Empire is the thesis of Gonzalez’s book and refers to the idea that
the United States is reaping what it sowed decades and even centuries ago. This
is to say that the policies of political intervention, economic domination, and
cultural diffusion have led to countries with weak governments, dysfunctional
economies, and cultures that look often to the United States as a beautiful,
wealthy paradise. As a result, the people of Latin America will certainly try
to move to the United States.
Is the rise of Latino immigrants going to lead to
Spanish-language supremacy?
No. The
book discusses the fact that Latinos are unlike any ethnic group that came to
the United States due to their language. Unlike Italians, Irish, Germans,
Russians, and Swedes, Dominicans, Mexicans, Cubans, and Colombians (among
others) share a language. This makes them into one cohesive group that we often
refer to as “Hispanics.” However, most Latinos in the United States feel that
learning English is necessary to living a good life, and even Latinos outside
the country feel the same way. This means that while they may not abandon
Spanish, they are extremely likely to adopt English.
How was the colonization by England different than that by
Spain?
In
short, the English invested more in their colonies while the Spanish focused
more on exploitation. While the English sent families to the Massachusetts Bay
Colony, the Spanish sent single men in armies to South and Central America.
This resulted in Spaniards having children with native women and African women
who came as slaves, however, instead of treating everyone equally, they created
an underclass of non-white peoples who suffer to this day for the color of
their skin. They had a rate of illegitimate births close to fifty percent, much
higher than anywhere in Europe. The English Colonies largely avoided this in
the more prosperous North, though it certainly occurred in the southern
colonies.
As a
result of this racial disparity, White Spaniards rarely did any hard labor, and
became, much like the White property owners in Virginia and other states in the
South, moneyed landowners who exploited the rest. In the northern states, all
did work and created a more durable, egalitarian society.
As the
two regions developed, the Spanish mayorazgo
made a family’s landholdings legally indivisible, handed down to the eldest
son. Because properties could be added together but not split, mergers of older
estates combined to increase and never decrease the holdings of the wealthiest
landowners. In the English colonies it was completely different. Over there
people would buy and sell property in a free market, keeping things more fair
and also creating a new economy based on real estate sales.
In many ways the Spanish colonies are very similar to the
old South of the USA, but the northern states set the English colonies apart.
They had public education among the congregational churches while the Jesuits
were removed from the Spanish colonies, along with the education they provided,
in 1767.
“Latin
America,” as the author writes, “became a land of social inclusion and political
exclusion.” While English America developed strong and diverse economic and
political systems, it remained racially intolerant. The racial intolerance of
both regions affected each one greatly. However, if you decide you absolutely
must be a racist bigot, it is better to be one in a country without many of the
people you hate. After all, what motive did white Latinos have to build the
public education, infrastructure, and institutions of the countries they lived
in? “Of 13.5 million people living in the Spanish colonies in 1800, less than 3
million were white,m and only 200,000 of those were peninsulares, born in Spain.”
The men who rebelled against Spain were in constant fear of 80% of their own
population, a condition that was not present in the USA at anywhere near the
same level. They were racists and saw no value in their darker-skinned
co-citizens. In the United States, or at least in the North, racist whites built
all of those public systems because they felt that they were building them for
white people. Both English and Latin America were significantly damaged by
racism of the white, European-descended peoples and continue to hurt themselves
with racism. Only by defeating racism can any of the “New World” countries gain
prosperity.
How did NAFTA affect Latino immigration to the United
States?
In
short, NAFTA made it much easier for capital to flow across bothers but not so
much for people (at least in any legal way). Factories in the United States
moved across the border to Mexico, and the Mexican workers at that factory soon
learn that they can move to the United States for better wages. To quote the
book, “Each day, the worker devours the Spanish-language magazines and
newspapers that are easily available in the cities and which glorify life in
the United States. The worker quickly learns she can earn ten times the salary
she gets in the maquila doing the same job in a factory across the border.
Eventually, filled with her new consciousness and disgusted with her dead-end
shantytown existence, the worker saves up the money to pay a coyote and risks
the trip to El Norte.” Because managers considered Mexican men harder to
control, they hired as many women as possible, who had rarely worked outside
the home before, therefore doing nothing to solve the unemployment problem in
Mexico, so the push factor remained, driving migrants to the United States.
Capital
flowed to Mexico in massive waves, as US, Canadian, and European banks poured
in more than $30 billion, controlling the financial sector. While in 1997,
foreign firms controlled just 16% of Mexico’s banking assets, by 2004 that
number was up to 82%. Just two banks, BBVA Bancomer (owned in Spain), and
Banamex (owned by the American Citigroup), controlled 48% of all banking
assets.
Miscellaneous Facts and Good Quotes from the Book:
- “The occupation turned the country and the city of Córdoba into the Western world’s premier center for the study of science and philosophy, while the fighting engendered a hardened warrior ethos in the hidalgos, Spain’s lower nobility. It was those hidalgos who later rushed to fill the ranks of the conquistador armies in the New World. The wars provided vital practice in colonization, with Spanish kings gradually adopting the practice of paying their warriors with grants from land they recovered in battle. Finally, La Reconquista reinforced a conviction among Spaniards that they were the true defenders of Catholicism.”
- “By the late 1500s, a mere century after the Conquest began, scarcely 2 million natives remained in the entire hemisphere. An average of more than 1 million people perished annually for most of the sixteenth century, in what has been called “the greatest genocide in human history.” On the island of Hispaniola, which was inhabited by 1 million Tainos in 1492, less than 46,000 remained twenty years later.”
- “90 percent of the Indian population was gone within half a century of the Puritan landing on Plymouth Rock; the Block Island Indians plummeted from 1,500 to 51 between 1662 and 1774; the Wampanoag tribe of Martha’s Vineyard declined from 3,000 in 1642 to 313 in 1764; and the Susquehannock tribe in central Pennsylvania nearly disappeared, falling from 6,500 in 1647 to 250 by 1698.”
- Peach trees were introduced to the Americas by the Spanish.
- In the United States, for instance, the first federal census in 1790 reported that “free coloreds” were less than 2 percent of the population, while black slaves were 33 percent.40 The same proportion of free blacks to slaves was roughly true in the British, Dutch, and French Caribbean colonies. But the opposite trend prevailed in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, where free blacks or coloreds outnumbered slaves, with perhaps 40 to 60 percent of free blacks able to purchase their emancipation outright.41 The viceroyalty of New Grenada, which included Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador, had 80,000 slaves and 420,000 free coloreds in 1789.42 Cuba had 199,000 slaves and 114,000 free coloreds in 1817.43 By 1872, free coloreds composed 43 percent of Brazil’s population, outnumbering both pure whites and black slaves.
- Simón Bolívar traveled the United States in 1806
- While 25,000 Americans died in the Revolutionary War, 600,000 died in Mexico and Venezuela lost half of its nearly one million residents. The book doesn’t give me the number for all the countries, but the wars were much bloodier in Latin America.
- “By the time Díaz was overthrown, U.S. investment in Mexico totaled $2 billion. Led by the Rockefellers, Guggenheim, E. H. Harriman, and J. P. Morgan, North Americans ended up controlling all the country’s oil, 76 percent of its corporations, and 96 percent of its agriculture. The Hearst family, whose newspapers and magazines routinely lauded Díaz, owned a ranch with a million cattle in Chihuahua. U.S. trade with Mexico, which amounted to only $7 million in 1860, jumped tenfold by 1908. By then, the United States was consuming 80 percent of Mexico’s exports and supplying 66 percent of its imports.”
- The first major settlement of Puerto Ricans outside of Puerto Rico was Oahu, Hawaii.
- To build the Panama Canal, 150,000 West Indians went migrated to Panama, whose population had been just 400,000 people beforehand.
- During the Great Depression, every Latin American country except for Haiti defaulted on its loans.
- WWII had a big impact on Puerto Ricans, who fought at a disproportionate level during the war, maing them feel that they deserved all the rights of citizenship.
- Ybor City was created as a company cigar town by Cuban emigres in 1885.
- From 1952-1980, the only way you could get asylum in the United States was by claiming to flee from Communism and nothing else.
- In the riots after the Rodney King murder, there were more Latinos arrested in LA than African Americans.
- “That tranquillity was shattered on April 9, 1948, with the assassination of the charismatic Liberal Party leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitan. The murder so enraged his supporters that mobs attacked and burned Bogotá in the worst urban riot in Latin American history, leaving two thousand dead and millions in property damage. That touched off ten years of brutal civil war between Liberals and Conservatives, a bloodletting so horrific that all Colombians simply refer to it as La Violencia. No one knows how many died. Estimates range from 180,000 to more than 200,000, making it far more devastating, given Colombia’s size, than the U.S. Civil War. Death squads, called pájaros, roamed the countryside on orders of the landed oligarchy, butchering any farmer suspected of being a Liberal, while guerrilla bands of Liberal Party supporters targeted the biggest landowners.”
- “Between 1973 and 1979, according to one study, those who said they planned to return to Cuba if Castro should be overthrown plummeted from 60 to 22 percent.”
- “Thus by 1995, the mayoralty in four of the country’s largest cities—New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia—had passed from a liberal or moderate black incumbent to a more conservative white leader. In each case, Hispanic voters shifted in significant percentages from the previous black mayor to the new white candidate, and each time the argument of those who switched sounded the same: “We weren’t treated as equal by the black leaders.” Meanwhile, the failure of Jesse Jackson to expand his Rainbow Coalition through a third presidential campaign in 1992 left the movement organizationally adrift at the national level. Even as the number of black and Hispanic leaders in Congress reached a record number, the cohesiveness of the alliance fractured, especially as black voters along with whites grew increasingly uneasy about the country’s population of Hispanics and Asians. In November of 1994, for instance, a majority of black Californians voted for Proposition 187 to cut off all public benefits to illegal immigrants. Thus, the Rainbow Coalition was dead as a vehicle for a new progressive alliance by early 1995, even though Jackson never officially declared its demise but simply folded it into his old Operation PUSH organization.”
- “The major problem is that those contributions are unevenly distributed between federal and local governments. In New York State, for instance, immigrants, the bulk of them Latinos, made up 17.7 percent of the population in 1995, earned 17.3 percent of total state personal income, and paid 16.4 percent of total federal (including Social Security), state, and local taxes. The problem was that 69 percent of those taxes went to the federal government, while only 31 percent remained in local coffers. A similar study in 1990–1991 of illegal immigrants in Los Angeles County overwhelmingly showed that they contributed $3 billion in taxes, but 56 percent of the money went to Washington, while the local costs of dispensing health care, education, law enforcement, and social services to the county’s illegal immigrant population far surpassed the immigrants’ contributions.”
- Mexican illegal immigrants, who are from 3-10 percent illiterate, tend to be more literate than average Mexicans, who are 22 percent illiterate.
- The USA is the fifth-largest Spanish-speaking nation in the world with 41 million speakers of the language, following Mexico, Spain, Argentina, and Colombia.
- On the first US Census in 1790, 8.7 percent of Americans spoke German as their first language.
- Louisiana’s second governor, Jacques Villere, spoke no English and always addressed the legislature in French.
- Loopholes in the US federal tax code have led more than 110 of the Fortune 500 companies to plant subsidiaries in Puerto Rico.
Gonzalez, Juan. Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in
America (Kindle Locations 1306-1310). Penguin Books. Kindle Edition.
No comments:
Post a Comment