A decade ago, when I lived in South Florida, it was fascinating to observe how much nationalist rivalry and prejudice there was among Latinos. To generalize, the Cubans, who were at the top of the power hierarchy, were despised by immigrants from other Latin American nations, who had their own intra-group rivalries. The idea that the Latino community was any sort of united front was a fantasy -- and often, the community broke down among nationalist lines, with rivalries from the old countries dictating rivalries among immigrants in the new one.
Andy Sywak writes the following today:
Working on a construction crew back in college with a few workers each from Mexico and Guatemala, I was amazed at the animosity between the two groups. They would joke, not good-naturedly, about how much cheaper the prostitutes were in the neighboring country or how stupid the other's politicians were. I traveled in Central America a few years later and found the same thing.
Sywak cites this recent report in the LATimes on how Latino immigrants to Los Angeles feel pressure to adapt to the Mexican ways of the dominant Latino group in the city, while others fiercely resist.
On a related note, at the Dallas Ideas Festival this weekend, I heard Marcos Ronquillo, a Mexican-American lawyer who had voted for Obama, talk about how thrilled he was that Obama had won, but how also it needs to be acknowledged openly that there is a stark black-brown (that is, black-Latino) divide in this country. These things tend to get glossed over or dismissed by black and Latino politicians, who don't want to do anything to undermine ethnic solidarity in progressive causes. On the Dallas County school board, blacks and Hispanics are at each other's throats (whites are minor players). It will be rather interesting to see how ethnic politics in the US develops in the Age of Obama.
Thoughts?
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This kind of conflict doesn't happen when come here to be Americans, like my family did a while back...
Oh, cripes. My comment was just banished into the ether by Beliefnet's little demon un-helper monkeys, who apparently didn't like my version of the garbled text we now must reproduce to prove we're human. In my case, I think it proves that my eyes are going . . . .
Always copy your post before trying to send. Do as I say, not as I do. : (
This thing hates me. This will be try number four.
Trying again . . . Maclin, I agree this has gone off on several bemusing tangents. But the interesting thing about such discussions is what it demonstrates about our different presuppositions, and how we use the same words but still aren't on the same page.
For instance, David J. White--I know that conservatives feel deep suspicion of the word "gender." They like to maintain that either it's just a synonym for "sex" or else it's meaningless. I think you'd be hard pressed to prove that was in the mainstream of usage, though. Here's what the World Health Organization had to say about it:
Gender refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviour, activities and attributes that a particular society considers appropriate for men and women. The distinct roles and behaviour may give rise to gender inequalities, i.e. differences between men and women that systematically favour one group.
Sex differences are those primary and secondary characteristics that are visible to the eye, and thus subject to optical illusion. (Such as the oft-referenced notion that women are bad at math because they've been given a distorted idea of how long eight inches really is.) Gender distinctions are the kinds of distinctions referred to above--those that Jesus (like me ; ) ) chose to disregard, and to which Paul may have been referring in Galations. I hope this clears things up for you. I really wish you had not used that phrase, "optical illusions" in such a context. It's created some disturbing mental imagery. . . .
I don't see this as being any different from previous waves of immigration.
We don't have 'waves' of immigration right now, we have a constant flow. The last 'wave' of immigration was stopped deliberately by the 1924 immigration act. We need something similar again.
Night Train is 100% right. Read Federalist 2.
While we're telling anecdotes, I once had a Kenyan roommate in college who hated Nigerians. He would gleefully point out, for example, that Kenya made more money from oil than Nigerian despite the fact that Nigerian has oil and Kenya doesn't.
He's also the reason I don't call black people 'African-American', cause he hated that. He wasn't 'American', and he thought it the height of arrogance to just randomly assume he was was an American simply because he was physically in America and had dark skin. And he considered himself Kenyan, not 'African', which he insisted didn't really exist at all.
He also said that black people 'finding their roots' by mixing up traditional African dress and religion and stuff made as much sense as me dressing up in random medieval clothing and studying the Norse gods. (I am of English/Irish descent.)
Of course, he was also completely insane and slept twice a day, for three to four hours, which drove me insane too. I don't think that has anything to do with him being Kenyan, though.
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