Oh, did you think you could get the Latino vote just by talking about immigration?

In light of the upcoming presidential elections some people are asking; Who is going to get that elusive Latino vote? That question should be rephrased into; Who is going to get the majority Latino vote?The reason for this distinction should be because Latinos although unified in many ways are not going to all vote the same.Republicans and Democrats alike are actually addressing the needs and concerns of certain groups of Latinos in the United States as defined by economic status, community, and ideals. What is abundantly clear, however is that Latinos are becoming divided even amongst ourselves due to a host of social and economic forces and these forces have cause and effect relationships. We can expound on many of these social constructions, but the two that I think are more important in allowing us to visualize the stratification of the Latino population are assimilation and race.



On the one hand, Latinos are viewed and sometimes view themselves as one big monolithic group. An example of this would be when in 1994, Ana Luz Gonzalez, A Ph.d candidate in urban planning at UCLA at the time, conducted a field study at a center for day laborers in Los Angeles. One of the questions she asked the men in the group was whether they identified themselves primarily by the country of their origin, be it El Salvador or Mexico for example, or if they identified themselves primarily as Latino. The unanimous answer was Latino. The primary reason for this way of thinking stems from the way White-Americans regard immigrants from any country in Latin America and parts of the Carribean as being Hispanic or Latino. Although consolidating such diverse peoples and cultures takes away the uniqueness of each country and shows a blatant disinterest from White-Americans to learn about these differences, it also provides a single homogenous group that can be attacked collectively as "aliens". Latinos are now in the process of losing their national identity in much the same way as many Europeans did before them, however Latinos, as a whole, are falling short of fully being considered "White" Americans.



Yet there is one positive effect of becoming a single group and that is unity. Regardless of where in Latin America Latinos are emigrating from, the common denominators are that the journey is often treacherous and long, the reception in this country is not warm and the cause for the journey invariably boils down to either escape from violence, economic need or both. Some might conclude then that because of these common denominators there would be competition amongst Latinos say from Central America competing with those from the Carribean or Mexico but that doesn't seem to be the case. In fact what we are experiencing is more of a unification process because of common goals and common obstacles in arriving and making a life here in the United States. The realization seems to be that if one of us earns a piece of the proverbial pie, it doesn't mean the other will have a smaller piece but that it may open the door for others of us to have a piece at all. Common goals, obstacles and experiences are the strong ties that bind us. Forming bonds of friendship and family in adversity in spite of a hostile environment gives us strength. Yet there is another subtle commonality that make Latinos become even closer and that is a common language.



I don't think that Latinos are likely to give up Spanish anytime soon because it works to our benefit to retain it. To start off with, Latinos, especially Mexicanos, enjoy a relatively close proximity with our mother countries and as John Micklethwait points out in his article, The United States: The mixture as never before, in The Economist, bilingualism is much easier in the United States due to technological advances in television with regards to being able to see foreign programming. This is coupled with the facts that there are a vast number of Spanish language radio stations and the steady influx of immigrants from our countries, who still speak our native tongue, has not slowed down. Spanish opens doors in our community by creating a sense of trust and familiarity to the point where speaking English is frowned upon in certain social circles. So then how are Latinos becoming divided in the face of such overwhelming solidarity?



Let's take language into account again and we can see that right about the second or third generation it slowly becomes more English and less Spanish. In some instances the Spanish language goes away alltogether, however in most cases we are looking at phenomenohs like "Spanglish" which is a mixture of both languages being used. What this situation illustrates is not only assimilation but the resisistance to it which brings about the fusion of cultures that results in "Spanglish" or tortillas at your local grocery store,(which are sometimes called "wraps" in an attempt to sound less foreign), or the celebration of Cinco de Mayo by Americans who have no idea and the celebration of Halloween by Mexicanos that have no idea as well.



Therefore we now have on the other hand, evidence that shows us that the degree of assimilation is splintering Latinos into groups that are defined by our interests. Our interests being our economic, political and social interests that change with the groups that we move in and out of. A very prominent boundary marker in the United States is race. Some Latinos have wondered aloud whether we will be "raced" like African-Americans have been for so many centuries and with Latinos covering both ends of the color spectrum with everything in between, one can only speculate. What we know for certain is that the expanding definition of whiteness has alot to do with African-Americans not being fully integrated after being here for so long and that the expanding definition of whiteness will be a deciding factor in the fate of Latinos in the United States.



One theory proposed by Jonathon W. Warren and France Winddance Twine in their publication, WHITE AMERICANS THE NEW MINORITY? Non-Blacks and the Ever-Expanding Boundaries of Whiteness, In the Journal of Black Studies, suggests that white people may never become the minority in America and will always be the standard to be compared to. Warren and Twine argue that the definition of white is not static, rather it changes to fit the newly integerated group of people that have been accepted by whites whether by a high rate of intermarriage, physical features, or the economic succes of the group as a whole. Some scholars of whiteness, according to Warren and Twine, have even suggested that whiteness is a void or lack of culture, to be so shapeless and abstract that in order to define it we must compare it to others. Who would those "others" be? When asked what would be non-white, most people answer, "black". This creates a phenomenon I like to refer to as the "blackdrop". What I mean by that phrase is simply that in order to be considered white one of the first, "tests" one must "pass", is to be non-black. Black is an example of what not to be if one is to be accepted as white. Warren and Twine even go as far as to say, "Thus Blacks at least at the national level, serve as the anchor for Whiteness". Therefore if one is to assimilate, the process must begin by distancing oneself from what is considered black and consequently begin flirting with adopting anti-black ideals and ideas. In order to achieve "whiteness" the method is at the expense of African-Americans, so that to become an unhyphenated American, one can simply slip through the "back door into whiteness that is open to non-blacks.



How Latinos are affected by this is not hard to imagine because those Latinos with lighter complexions have been more readily accepted by the mainstream and the ones with darker complexions have been classified as black or black-Latino or black-Hispanic. These divisions just as with African-Americans, have political, sociological and economic consequences. All these factors will affect how individual Latinos vote or if many even vote at all. What seems almost certain is that all Latinos will not vote the same because not all of us fall into the same economic, social and political brackets. Race and color is only one aspect of the lives of many Latinos that causes divisions, however race and color leads to economic and political divisions and those two factors unquestionably affect the way we vote depending on which candidate best serves our needs because after all, it seems that everyone is voting according to their own interests in the belief that it is in the best interest of the country as a whole.