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Posted on
11/16/2006 4:32 PM EST
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Wedging of racial identities
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Part 2 of 3
Roberto Lovato
During a recent trip to San Antonio, I visited the Alamo and found among the thousands of tourists throngs of young cadets and soon-to-be deployed enlisted personnel and their families. Many of the cadets were, like the young fighter on Military Drive, local kids from decaying neighborhoods with decrepit schools whose faculties the New York Times reported were “filled with men and women who served in uniform for 20 years or more.” With romantic battle pictures of Davy Crockett hanging nearby, I asked some of them what they were seeking there just before being sent to Iraq and Afghanistan. Whether Latino, Black, or white, the young men and women answered my question in much the same way that Tejano helicopter pilot and U.S. Navy Captain Ron Sandoval did: “The Alamo ties it all together. It galvanized Texans in their fight for independence from México. A lot of us are here now to draw inspiration as we get ready to go to Iraq. It (Iraq) seems like a no-win situation. But that’s what they thought about the Alamo.”
Especially interesting is how Sandoval, a U.S. citizen of Mexican descent, sees the Alamo and Iraq as part of the defense and expansion of American freedom. His perspective positions him in a manner similar to that of Mexicans and Mexican Americans depicted in the most recent -- and more politically palatable-Alamo movie, which opened on Good Friday when I first visited San Antonio in 2004. The national media covered the pyrotechnics and star power of the gala opening more than the capture earlier that day of a local man who had set fire to five gas stations owned by Muslim and South Asian immigrants.
Mexicans in the most recent Alamo movie were divided into good Mexicans, who fought with Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie and other “heroes” (some local Mexicans view them as slaveholding elites who were the vanguard of a historic land grab), and bad Mexicans, who, on promotional posters lie in the shadows of the glowing, golden-white walls of the Alamo. In the current context of war, conquest and assimilation framed as a “clash of civilizations” by Bernard Lewis, Samuel Huntington and other national security ideologues, the racial wedging of “good” and “bad” Latinos at the Alamo still exercises enormous cultural and political power. Its imagery supports, those who champion wars of defense against domestic others while providing a symbol for those supporting the more expansionist imperial project in places like Iraq.
Post 9-11 wedging of racial and political identity like that found in the streets and tourists traps of the Alamo city is, with some important distinctions, only the most recent rendition of the narrative of U.S. history as the history of necessary wars, inevitable conquests and civilizing assimilation in the fight of “good” against “evil.” Such events are, according to this narrative, divinely designed to realize the American Exceptionalism.
We can find the wedging of racial identities as early as the establishment of the English colonies in New England. During conflicts like King Philip’s War, the New England uprising of indigenous peoples in 1675, for example, we find the distinctions between “good Indians” who allied with the colonists and the “bad Indians” who fought them. We also find these dynamics present during the 19th century when Manifest Destiny informed and rationalized the need for wars requiring the extermination of Indians and the pillaging of Mexican lands in the name of a higher good.
Semi-religious symbols like the Alamo were cultivated in response to the growing cultural needs created by the hemispheric land and power grab justified by Manifest Destiny, which provided the ideological foundation for the invasion of México and the beginnings of U.S. politico-military domination west of the Mississippi -- and south of the Rio Grande. The United States’ drive for dominance in the hemisphere in the 19th century marks the start of a Latin identity defined, in part, by the comparison, contrast -- and clash -- with citizens, especially white citizens, of the country that decided to assume the name of the entire continent. Latinos in and outside of the United States became Other, often “bad,” Americans. And the tradition continues.
Not far from the white walls of the Alamo, Mexican and other Latino immigrants are again being cast as the anonymous “bad guys” as they run up against the political, physical, and psychic borders of the U.S. immigration debate. As the Bush Administration and the Republican Party continue their steady spiral downward, they have done what Bill Clinton and other politicians have done in times of crisis: declare war. Viewed from this perspective, the election year focus on immigrants serves the same function as the Iraq war in terms of keeping the populace on war footing, this time against the “invaders” denounced on billboards in San Antonio and across the country.
In what is not so much a coincidence as it is an urgent political necessity, the Bush Administration and the Republican Party have, in their desperation, taken the frame of war and applied it to the issue of immigration. Witness Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.) who set the tone of recent hearings of the Subcommittee on International Terrorism and Non-Proliferation by remarking that Homeland Security officials report that “Al-Qaeda has considered crossing our Southwest borders,” and “It may already have happened.”
Royce went on to offer a laundry list of post-Cold War bad guys: “Drug cartels, smuggling rings, and gangs operating on both the México and U.S. sides are increasingly well-equipped and more brazen than ever,” he said, adding “some border areas can be accurately described as war zones. These border vulnerabilities are opportunities for terrorists.”
Such enemy-making statements-and policies-have deepened the racial and political effects of the national security culture on Latinos. It is no coincidence that just as the war in Iraq has fallen in public opinion polls, the Bush Administration and the Republican Party have framed the immigration debate as a military issue. As in Guantanamo, the government grants multi-million dollar no-bid contracts for immigrant super-prisons to Halliburton. Like Royce, other Republican leaders including Rep.Tom Tancredo (R-Col.) and Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.) regularly apply terms like “invaders,” “terrorists,” and other post-9-11 tropes to immigrants who were previously framed by the “criminal” tropes of the war on drugs; and like President Bush in his Global War on Terrorism, “Minutemen” have built a cultural-political movement around the idea that immigrants are “invaders” who need to be defended against.
Roberto Lovato is a New York-based writer with New America Media. This article was supported with an award from the Independent Press Association’s George Washington Williams fellowship.
© 2006 HispanicVista.com, Inc.
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