Homeland Security, Militarism, and the Future of Latinos and Latinas in the United States

Abstract

My purpose in this essay is to begin to outline the many ways recent developments in the United States affect one sector of the North American working class: the diverse Latino communities in the United States. Let me begin by reminding the reader that what I will be calling the “Latino community in the United States” is in fact a patchwork of heterogeneous groups with distinct identities, histories, and cultural traditions. Latinos are everywhere, no longer limited to the Southwest or New York City; there are Puerto Ricans and Dominicans on the East Coast, Salvadorans and Guatemalans on the West Coast, distinct Cuban communities in Florida and New Jersey, Mexicans along the southern border, and others in cities ranging from Raleigh, North Carolina, to Seattle, Washington. More striking, perhaps, is the fact that more than half (51 percent) of all adult Latinos in the United States are fi rst-generation immigrants (compare this to just a decade ago, when only 22 percent were foreign born and 78 percent were born in the United States).1 An additional 20 percent are the U.S.-born children of those immigrants. Third- and fourth-generation Latinos (a generic term for all groups of Latin American descent) increasingly make for a minority, now constituting only roughly 25 percent of the Latino population. Of those 25 percent, only a fraction identify themselves as Chicano or Chicana, a fact that has cultural and political implications, as we shall see. Put another way, because the fi rst generation is gener