The Latino United States
Juan González, in his classic book, Harvest of Empire, writes, “We are all Americans of the New World, and our most dangerous enemies are not each other, but the great wall of ignorance between us.” Sadly, instead of walls coming down, walls are literally going up. The border is militarized. The tens of millions of Latinos in the U.S. represent an enormous diversity from Dominicans to Bolivians and Salvadorans to Chileans. A fundamental social, political and cultural transformation is occurring way beyond barrios and bodegas, JLo and Marc Anthony, La Bamba and La Cucaracha, and nachos and tacos. Latinos are challenging conventional notions about race and ethnicity, labor and capital, education and language, justice and fairness, and our history as a nation of immigrants. How are Latinos changing the U.S. and how is the U.S. changing Latinos?
Speaker
Ray Suarez
Ray Suarez was host of NPR’s Talk of the Nation. He was chief national correspondent for PBS’ NewsHour for many years. He is the host of Inside Story on Al-Jazeera America. He is the author of Latino Americans.
Orlando Somera –
I’d advise anyone to stay away from the University of Chicago because of the politics and economic dogma it’s given birth to, and, for the longest time, I thought that should include having educated mild-mannered hacks like Suarez, who I thought was not doing a good job representing.
Well, I just had my head handed to me on a plate. This recording of Suarez giving a speech on immigration in Denver is the speech I’ve been waiting for for decades. If even a fraction of its omnibus content makes a dent in the American psyche, he will have single-handedly set right what has been so wrong for so long.
TackyAroma –
I’ve often wondered how to articulate what Mr. Suarez managed to, so eloquently, without sounding like a troll. …More specifically, in the attitude of a descendant of 17th-century English immigrants (Mayflower, Winthrop fleet, later phases of the ‘Great Migration:’ Check, Check, Check), along with African and Native Americans. Scottish criminal transportees rounding up the list, funly on both sides of the family.
…Only after all of whom, there are a couple of 19th-century German immigrants, Very Emphatically, Thank you, bringing up the rear. To paraphrase Mr. Suarez, with only discretely modulated emphasis, you get this kind of ancestral diversity Only, Thank you, if your people have been here …wait for it… Long enough.
…So why are these people of, sorry, but it needed saying, preponderantly generic, 19th-century European immigrant descent so insistent about getting their revisionistically hyperentitled dander up, telling you and me how to be Americans? This is what happens when an entire country becomes historically illiterate. It amounts to infantilization on a national scale. Creating a vacuum, or, rather, a communal. psychic landfill, likeliest to be filled by junk first. …English as our official language? Can the people who advocate this consistently either speak or write in complete sentences?