Bonilla

The Global Society and the Latino Community: Changing the Americas from Within the U.S

By Frank Bonilla

Introduction

In the fall of 1992, along with two colleagues, Professors Setsuko Nishi and Hylan Lewis, I offered a graduate seminar at CUNY on U.S. Racial and Ethnic Stratification in the 199Os. We set out to cover shifts in the status and social roles of African-Americans, Asians and Latinos in the U.S. since World War II. Taking Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma as a benchmark, we attempted to track internal and external factors associated with changes in the definitions, perceptions and social placement of these groups as reflected in current scholarship and theoretical perspectives.

An American Dilemma makes practically no allusions to Latinos in the U.S. Puerto Ricans and Cubans are absent from the index. The single reference to Mexican Americans describes a study of labor practices in Los Angeles in the 192Os. In workplaces where Mexicans were considered "colored," they worked side by side with Blacks and often had Black supervisors. Where they were considered "white," they worked alongside whites but were rarely in positions of command. Such inconsistencies in the treatment of racially suspect groups were said to be typical of large northern cities at the time. Today census tabulations are careful to point out that "Hispanics may be of any race," and cries of alarm in respected quarters decry the "latinization" of major cities and regions and even call for a "militarization" of the border to cut off illegal entries from the south.

Still, in the wake of victory in WWII, the term colonialism was also absent from the volume's index; imperialism was mentioned only to note the U.S. lack of vocation for international adventure. Nationalism figured only as a fringe or splinter ideology in Negro politics. A major presumption was that immigration to the U.S. after World War II would prove a minor factor in social relations.

By contrast, as we have seen in the last two days, the 199Os debate concerning race and class is now inextricably entwined with gender and ethnicity and embedded in concerns over a broad array of unanticipated contextual conditions and processes. Globalization of the economy and new realities of economic and political interdependence and competitiveness among regions and states now loom large in these discussions. Transnational migration flows not readily harnessed to the economic interests of host or sending countries add new complexities. The ineffectiveness of international pacts and organizations is matched by the internal disarticulation of national and local governments and policies. A breakdown of corporate-labor pacts as well as governmental social infrastructural supports shifts the burden of adapting to economic restructuring and lags in productivity upon the most vulnerable workers -- notably youth, women, recent immigrants and minority urban enclaves. Successive irruption of racial and ethnic violence signal the coming to a head of a new crisis/transition in the production and containment of social inequality in every quarter of the emergent world order.

In the U.S., new demographic realities mandate that any racial or ethnic inquiry --Latino, Asian or African-American -- give a high priority to the particulars of national origin, regional concentration, and the history of incorporation into U.S. society of each sub-group. Attention to detail and the distinctive configurations of each community's experience does not necessarily mean senseless fragmentation but often illuminates historically obscured convergences and systemic features of enduring subordination and strategies of resistance. This 1992 seminar, for example, brought to the surface some commonalities and sustained interactions between Latinos and Asians -- with Puerto Ricans in Hawaii, with Mexicans in California, with other Latino nationalities in the Caribbean and South America. Within the U.S. today, Latinos and Asians are the major driving forces of demographic growth and cultural diversification. Official projections anticipate that the Asian population will more than triple between 1990 and 2020 (from 7 to 23 million) while Latinos, growing from a larger base will only double (from about 23 to some 49 million) but will constitute over 15 percent of the total U.S. 2020 population.

Global Economics and Cultural Equity

The changes adumbrated in the 1992 seminar sketched above brought home the message that events, global in scale, are now reaching into life everywhere.

Unfortunately, it was also clear that those whose normal business it is to tell us exactly what those changes are, the forces driving these transformations, how wide ranging and lasting they will turn out to be, and their implications for "third world peoples' were and remain all over the place on these questions.

Flextech

On at least one point there was an early rough consensus -- the economy, the world of work and wealth creation -- has taken on new forms now interconnected the world around. Some people (notably Michael Piore and Charles Sabel at MIT) spoke about a new mode of production taking shape. The "flextech" economy, as it was labeled early on, came with a list of associated buzz words - decentralization, out sourcing, dehierarchization, integration of conception and execution, spontaneous coordination, interchangeable modules, learning systems, and so on. Emanating from Europe, some talked about this as an Italian model. Prototype sites in the U.S. included Massachusetts' Route 128, California's Silicon Valley, and some Los Angeles counties. The emphasis in this instance has been on new technologies, new slants on management, worker participation (e.g., quality circles) but also on locations offering large reserves of unorganized, willing, low wage labor and local governments ready to reward modest capital commitments with generous incentives. Flextech also came quickly to mean very movable, with a short investment cycle or turnover (5-10 years) and even installations scrappable on short notice without major loss. The new mobility of capital was seen as not only regional but transnational in reach.

The Service Economy

A number of sociologists began to talk about a so-called post-industrial economy as flextech made industrial production leaner and various mixes of services became the commanding sectors of national economies. This was again a largely European formulation though certain U.S. regions soon became front runners in this mode. The paths into the post-industrial differ in the mix of services (especially in the role of the public sector), in the impact of restructuring on labor market demand and supply, in the consequences for social stratification and class contention, in the efficacy of state response to the dislocations in employment and income affecting different groups, and in the way political institutions of every kind attempt to cope with these effects. The service economy was early seen as an essentially intra-national phenomenon but soon postulated high-tech took on some of the supra-national mobility features of transformations.⁴

The Global Mega-city

Yet another perspective draws selectively from many sources but emphasizes a world system focus in accounting for the extraordinary growth of a handful of cities as a function of their specialized places or niches in national and world economies. New York, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Mexico City -figure among this array of supra-national urban formations. Each is said to embody a particular configuration of the interplay of transnational, national, regional and local economic, political and cultural forces set in motion over recent decades. The combination of massive in-migration from within each nation and abroad, with a consequent polarization and segmentation of labor demand brings yet another economic adaptation into focus here -- the informal economy and the increased significance of small business, micro-enterprise and other forms of self-employment in filling the gap in labor demand.⁵

Regimes of Accumulation

Most persuasive in this connection is Robert Heilbroner's formulation of a regime change.⁶The regime change idea includes most of the notions of technological, managerial, workplace and market innovations associated with flextech and the service economy. There is more emphasis, however, on ideological and value changes, especially in class relations, implicit in ongoing transnational restructuring. An alleged "Fordist" pact between capital and labor that sustained the earlier mass production regime is said to have broken down in the course of the '70s as strong unions demanded wage increases not matched by productivity gains. The consequences --stagnation or declines in productivity, the deployment of manufacturing, investment inertia, the glutting of local markets, international debt, increased international competition-- have all fed the process that Heilbroner calls the institutionalization of the business class as the universal class. As the distinguished economist, Lady Joan Robinson had warned in the early '60s, the only thing worse than being exploited by capitalists is not to be exploited at all. As the job base shrank and downward pressures on wages intensified, leading working class sectors and their organizations, as Heilbroner and others found, opted to protect their status and pass on the losses in compensation and reductions in the social wage to their less secure workmates -- women, youth, minorities and new immigrants. Heilbroner also emphasizes the detachment of the economy from its traditional political and geographic moorings. Capitals with no enduring commitments to localities or contingents of workers seek to operate in political spaces in which state power also shies away from guaranteeing social infrastructures for the whole population. While the world celebrates "the triumph of capitalism," the social crises visibly in the making over the last two decades may augur a reassertion of state controls or as Heilbroner himself puts it, "a coming meltdown of traditional capitalism."

It is important to keep clear that much economic analysis over this period has proceeded in complacent disregard or direct rejection of any such assertions about fundamental realignments in the relation between the nation-state and the economy or subnational political institutions. While a trend toward internationalization is generally acknowledged, it is not universally seen as a significant disturbance of post-war arrangements. Internationalization, say some, really means only a redeployment of some manufacturing and a few services. Critical areas such as research and development, communication flows and currency markets remain within the firm control of national and international bodies dominated by the more powerful nations. The collapse of socialism only adds to the number of nations in the queue for incorporation into the capitalist international. Foreign investment in the U.S. is still modest and useful, if not essential. There are some questions of competitiveness and national reassertion that need to be addressed but also many opportunities and imperatives for international collaboration and cooperation as the new hemispheric order (read here, most recently NAFTA) is secured in place.⁷

What has all this to do with Third World cultures and cultural production? Whichever of the foregoing scenarios comes to prevail sets decisive conditions under which the historically marginalized and excluded will have to contest new structures of domination. Some fresh and encouraging people-based perspectives are provided in a recent book, Global Visions: Beyond the New World Order, edited by Jeremy Brecher and several associates. This volume balances hard evidence of the enduring power of traditional "hierarchs," that is, economic and political elites, with moving accounts of leaps in self-discovery, construction of identities and resistance among the world's most oppressed peoples.⁸

Global Visions sharply contrasts what it calls "globalization from above and from below. The project from above, driven by transnational corporations and international financial institutions, all ostensibly under the United Nations mantle, has been producing increased poverty, social polarization, inequality among nations, demographic turmoil, political repression and militarization. The vision from below embraces the idea of a true world community or civil society. It is embodied in a range of international peoples' movements for global solidarity, the rebuilding of community, protecting natural resources, restoring participatory democracy and anchoring these in effective transborder organizations.

The transition from "Global Pillage to Global Village," as championed by a related group linked to the American Friends Service Committee, is grounded in the conviction that the very forces creating a capitalist, individualistic and hierarchical cosmopolitanism can nurture a new sense of "transborder" community and civility among those now mired in subordinate, voiceless statuses in the various orders of economic restructuring that have been sketched above. More is at issue here than the accelerated intermingling of culturally diverse peoples within single nation borders; the reality that only those states and systems that learn to live with their diversity will survive the current transition is being dramatically brought home. Looming baffles over immigration in both the U.S. and Europe now threaten major reversals on this front. Still, the present mobility of capital both requires and promotes an equivalent infrastructure for others in the social order. The increasing need for millions around the globe to anchor their existence in more than one social formation for generations at a time is transforming the very idea of citizenship, human rights, and the role of cultural expressions and identities in sustaining sociability. Progressive solutions lie not in any mandate for individuals to abandon cherished lifeways and identities or to pass up opportunities to enrich these from the multiple sources all now encounter in a normal lifetime. What we are now stretching for; more urgently than ever, are new standards of international responsibility and solidarity.

The Global Society and the Latino Community

Over the last several decades, Latinos in the U.S. have emerged as strategic actors in major processes of social transformation. This new reality -- the Latinization of the U.S. -- asserts itself demographically, politically, in the workplace, in every aspect of day to day life and is driven by forces that extend well beyond U.S. borders. The perception that Latinos are now positioned to share in bringing about change in the Americas from within the U.S. has increasingly taken hold and has sparked renewed interest and specific initiatives by hemispheric governments to cultivate new forms of relationships with emigrant communities.

In mid-December of '94, the Inter-University Program for Latino Research, which I currently head, convened a conference at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center in northern Italy. Scholars, policy specialists, community advocates and cultural workers came together to undertake a comprehensive conceptualization and stocktaking of pertinent research and policy on transnational dimensions of the present condition and promise of Latino peoples. Over the last decade, IUP has promoted a substantial body of research into the significance of the dynamic manifested in the binational and global processes of the major Latino communities in the U.S. -- Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Central Americans. Four themes were highlighted in sessions extending over three days: (1) Emergent forms of global and transnational interdependence; (2) Retro impacts within the U.S., especially in Latino communities, of economic and political restructuring along with their demographic components; (3) Changing concepts and social bases for community formation, citizenship, political participation and human rights as individuals are obliged to construct identities and day to day life in more than one sociopolitical setting and (4) Fresh pathways for entry into international relations and issue oriented social movements and organizations among these highly mobile populations. A primary objective of the event was the formulation of a long term research, policy and organization building agenda interlinking the intellectual and political resources generated over recent years by Latinos in the U.S. with their counterparts in their countries of origin. A very brief sketch of the substantive treatment of each of the conference's four main themes will help convey what was accomplished on this front and some of the common ground between that exercise and the work here over the last three days.

I. Global Interdependence

The four presentations on this theme highlighted the complexity of the interlocking patterns of change involved in emergent forms of interdependence between the U.S. and Latin America -- the movement of capitals, modes of industrialization, trade, migration, and growing inequality over recent decades. The interplay between the fluidity of movement across political boundaries and the continued reassertion of regional and community controls over economic processes situates Latinos throughout the hemisphere in strategic positions to define and assert new interests, identities and voices in economic and foreign policy. Clearly, a highly touted show of unanimity with respect to a broad array of reformist strategies embraced by Latin American presidents at a Miami Summit of the Americas two days before the Bellagio meeting belied the objective indeterminacy of the outcomes of these measures and the potential roles of social actors not represented there. This tension between the premises and projections of those committed to specific "neo-liberal" policies and those wishing to withhold judgment while further inquiries proceed surfaced repeatedly.

II. The Reconfigured United States

Parallel processes of restructuring within the U.S., some directly tied to transnational dynamics, are shaping the modes of incorporation of Latinos into the work force and other institutional domains. National origin weighs markedly in these adaptations via the formation of networks, enclaves, shared social capital and distinctive forms of social performance. At the same time, growing inequality is reinforced by institutionalized exclusion, selective incorporation, and heightened hostility against newcomers. Extensive recent research documents variants of these phenomena among the principal Latino populations and similarly situated communities. Evidence has been mustered as well on the defensive empowering strategies brought into place by Latinos over the last few decades that now position them to responsibly claim a place in the policy making apparatus at every level. The centrality of Latino Studies in this connection and the linking of these intellectual resources to the challenges of theorizing and analyzing global and hemispheric charges was a salient point in this part of the discussion.

III. Community, Identity and Civil Rights

As noted above, diaspora communities closely identify themselves along national origin lines while political demands call for or seek to impose overarching Latino identities. The tensions between community processes and the structures available through which people can participate in politics are particularly complicated. Added to these realities is the fact that interactions between homeland and host country events reach directly into the lives of most Latinos. Events as diverse as the 1994 Chiapas uprising, peace processes in Central America, aftereffects of the implementation of NAFTA, Proposition 187, changing patterns of border crossings and their policing, changes in refugee and immigration law -- must all be addressed in terms of their human and legal dimensions. There are few analytical, practical, and ever fewer legal constructs with which people can both understand and act upon these disparate and often conflictful relationships. Conventional models of assimilation deal with only a narrow segment of these problems.

This panel brought together community organizers, lawyers, human rights advocates, artists, and academics from the humanities and social sciences to discuss these issues. The encounter was encouraging and productive. The successful integration of these perspectives foreshadowed at the conference should prove a distinctive feature in the forthcoming volume and videos.

IV. International Dialogue

Sharply contrasting views of the conditions and prospects for more inclusive and productive international dialogue more responsive to human needs and rights surfaced in these sessions. On the one hand, an optimistic vision substantially fed by the outcome of the still fresh Summit of the Americas in Miami emphasized recent advances toward full democratization of formally elected governments, accompanied by commitments to government reforms, renewed social initiatives, and a revitalized partnership between the U.S. and Latin America. However, detailed treatment of the Cuban instance as well as emergent "bottom up' perspectives articulated by labor unions, feminists, environmentalists, and human rights advocates documented persistent inequalities and the limited progress being made in advancing popular interests in the transnational setting despite the increasing activity of non-governmental organizations. In addition, an overview of competing models for regional integration and development (European, Asian, and Western) found them all to be in serious trouble, especially in their capacity to deal with persistent and growing inequality and popular discontent. These conclusions were not seen as discouraging but as a reaffirmation of an already shared vision of the complexity of the task ahead and its long term character. Yet, with speakers present on the cutting edge of labors on all these fronts, realistic grounds for mapping a Latino strategy through this maze of contradictions would seem to be within reach.

Changing the Americas from Within the U.S.

Ironically, the growing perception that Latinos and other minorities in the U.S. are destined to play an increasingly proactive role in U.S. foreign and domestic policy crystallized in the very decade, the '80s, that dealt them the most serious material setbacks since the 1930 depression years. Characteristically, perhaps, this new potential manifests itself just as the practical instruments for positive policy interventions confront critical challenges that have manifestly thrown the national and international policy establishment into disarray. Latino claims to enhanced readiness and practical capacity to responsibly enter these policy domains must be seen against the backdrop of authoritatively declared crises in the social and natural sciences and their pertinence to policy formation. The disjuncture between social scientific endeavors and technocratic policy management is pervasive and especially so for new voices seeking to legitimate historically ignored perspectives. Thus, the call in 1992 by a Gulbenkian Foundation commission for a comprehensive "restructuring of the social sciences" signaled widespread concern regarding the bounds of traditional disciplines and distinctive scientific "cultures." "Scholars," the commission noted, "feel dismayed at the state of the social sciences, but very little is being done collectively to change the situation. 10

This is a far cry from the reigning mentality some three decades ago. Daniel Bell, speaking for a National Commission on the Year 2000 then confidently declared that there was no foreseeable economic or political challenge in what remained of the century that the U.S. economy and political structure could not resolve. More recently, however, he has come to see the work of essaying projections into the next century as akin to "lighting a small candle in the middle of a hurricane to see if there is a way out."¹¹

This form of discourse has now reached new heights and has penetrated the natural sciences. Today, physicist Murray Gell-mann, holder of a 1969 Nobel award and currently probing the dilemmas of reconciling the adaptive strategies of human communities with those driven by natural evolution on a planetary scale, dramatically echoes the imagery evoked by Bell Immanent contradictions in the adaptive schemata of the biosphere over some four billion years are, in his view, now poised to converge destructively in a not too distant future with cognate processes of human adaptation over some 100 million years. Speaking of a recently launched Project 2050 seeking to map paths toward "sustainable" development in the coming century, that is, a future in which both human communities and the natural environment may prosper, he has this to say. "We are all in a situation that resembles driving a fast vehicle at night over unknown terrain that is rough, full of gullies, with precipices not far off. Some kind of headlight, even a feeble and flickering one may help to avoid some of the worst disasters."¹²Cited in the Bellagic setting, this vision had a special resonance.

The Gell-manns among scientists, of course, see poverty-stricken, tropical nations as prime scenarios for the unfolding in the decades immediately ahead of this apocalyptic vision. In this light, they can construe ongoing debt swaps between the U.S. and Latin American nations that include some provisions-for environmental measures as "planetary bargains."¹3 However, equally pressing planetary bargains remain to be undertaken within the U.S. and especially in communities along the U.S.-Mexico border and in major cities across the country where Latino peoples have emerged over the recent past as the most segregated and most subject to environmental hazards.¹⁴

Of course, less abstruse forms of growing U.S.- Latin American interdependence have been widely acknowledged for some time. What has remained obscure are the implications in terms of U.S. policy of these recent transformations, especially with the successive changes in U.S. national administrations. The point here is the emerging realization that there is now no clearly framed U.S. policy toward Latin America and that whatever stances are improvised will depend much more on how the U.S. manages its own internal social crisis. Abraham Lowenthal, a seasoned Latin Americanist and Executive Director of Inter-American Dialogue has stated the matter forthrightly: "...the single greatest factor that will define U.S. - Latin American relations in the decade of the '90s will be whether and how the U.S1 confronts its own economic and political agenda."¹⁵

Should these insights prove accurate, they add to the conditions set to draw significant contingents of U.S. based Latinos into social contentions across national boundaries. The limited gestures toward democratization that have been a part of more than a decade of neo-liberal economic reform in most of Latin America have done little to cushion the harsh impact of deepening absolute poverty and undiminished inequality and even less to muster hopes and popular support for reforms by government decree.¹⁶ The inefficacy of traditional left and labor organizations in present circumstances seems also to have set in motion a combined movement of ethnic, gender and regional resistance partly modeled on and readily linked with its counterparts in the U.S.

"As ethnic and gender demands come into Latin America's social consciousness, positive outcomes can fortify the future of tridimensional alliances (ethnicity, gender, class) on a basis of equality. ...From this communal point of reference, and in association with a set of political commonalities, movements can become transnational indeed. It is in this communal space where there are clear bases for creating transcommunal cadres as answers to transnational attacks.

To not develop such trans-communal cadres for the 21st century is to risk a weakened, divided and conflicted marginalized general population confronted by a well-united ruling social bloc that is actually quite demographically diverse but which is separated by class and privilege from the rest of the America[s]."¹⁷

As noted earlier, in these pages I have drawn on a group research effort extending over the last ten years. This sustained and multipronged undertaking developed under the auspices of the inter-University Program for Latino Research, a consortium of university based research centers now numbering nine. We have been seeking to chronicle in a critical spirit the structural processes and active interventions within and outside U.S. Latino communities that have produced the complex of challenges and opportunities for resistance and constructive action in social policy that have been sketched in the foregoing pages.

ENDNOTES

1.The course outline (U.S. Racial and Ethnic Stratification in the 1990s, Sociology U859.10, CUNY Graduate Center Fall, 1992) is available from the author. See also Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma New York: Harper & Row, 1942.

2. See Rebecca Morales and Frank Bonilla eds., Latinos in a Changing U.S. Economy. Newbury Park CA; Sage Publications, 1993. Also Paul Ong, ed., The State of Asian Pacific America: Economic Diversity, issues and Policies, Los Angeles, CA: Leap Asian Pacific American Public Policy Institute and UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1994. See also U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, P23-183, Hispanic Americans Today, U.S. Government Printing Office, Wash., D.C., 1993 and U.S. Bureau of the Census, Minority Economic Profile: 1990 Census, Congressional Affairs Office, Wash., D.C., 1993.

3. Michael Piore and Charles Sabel, The Second industrial Divide, New York: Basic Books, 1984.

4. Bennett Harrison and Barry Bluestone. The Great U-Turn: Corporate Restructuring and Polarization of America. New York: Basic Books, 1988. Also T.J. Novelle, Beyond industrial Dualism, Boulder, CO: Westview, 1987.

5 Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton, NI: Princeton University Press, 1991.

6. Robert Helbroner, "Reflections: The Triumph of Capitalism, The New Yorker, 64, (1) 1989: (98-1O9). Also his "The Coming Meltdown of Traditional Capitalism," Ethics and International Affairs, New York: Vol. II, 1988. Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, 1988.

7. W. Baumol, 'Is There a U.S. Productivity Crisis?", Science, 243 (2891), 611-615.

8. Jeremy Brecher, John Brown Childs, and Jill Cutter, Global Visions: Beyond the New World Order. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1993.

9. Armando Rendon, "Latinos: Breaking the Cycle of Survival to Tackle Global Affairs," in Chris F. Garcia, ed., Latinos and the Political System, Notre Dame, IN.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987.

10. Newsletter, Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems and Civilizations, State University of New York at Binghampton, No. 17, August, 1992.

11. Daniel Bell,"The World and the U.S. in 2013,' Daedalus. 116, 3:1-31, 1987. See also his 'The Year 2000 - the Trajectory of an Idea,' Daedalus, 96, 3: 631-651, 1967.

12. Murray Gell-mann, The quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex, New York, W. H. Freeman and Company, 1994, p.366.

13. Ibid., p. 337.

14. Paul M. Ong and Evelyn Blumenberg, 'An Unnatural Tradeoff: Latinos and Environmental Justice,' in Rebecca Morales and Frank Bonilla, eds., Latinos in a Changing U.S. Economy: Comparative Perspectives on Growing inequality (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1993 See also T.J. Lueck, 'U.S. Study Finds Hispanic Minority Most Often Subject to Victimization." New York Times, 11-13-91: R1.

15. Abraham F. Lowenthal, 'Los Estados Unidos y America Latina en un mundo nuevo,' Norte-Sur: La Revista de las Americas, 2, 1, Junio-Julio 1992.

16. William C. Smith, Carlos H. Acuna, and Eduardo A. Gamarra, eds., Latin American Political Economy in the Age of Neoliberal Reform: Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives for the 1990s, (New Brunswick, NI: Transaction Publishers, 1994)

17. John Brown Childs, "Preliminary Notes for the Utilization of Gramsci in Strategizing Race/Ethnicity/ and Political Progress in the Late 20th Century United States.' Santa Cruz: Chicano-Latino Research Center, UCSC. Working Paper, 1993 oiled in Susanne Jonas and Edward J. McCaughan, eds., Latin America Face the Twenty First Century: Reconstructing a Social Justice Agenda, (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994)