THIS IS NOT A COUNTRY OF IMMIGRANTS
"I'm not from here / but neither are you
Nowhere at all / a little everywhere ”
—Jorge Drexler, en Movimiento
June 25, 2020. For decades, the romantic and misleading idea that the United States is a country of immigrants has been fueled. It is time to question and dismantle that myth. This is not a country of immigrants. At least not voluntary immigrants millions of them. This country has been built by the hardworking minds and hands of people from many parts of the world. That is a truth that is supported by its own evidence. What we cannot sustain, in a generic and thoughtless way, is that the more than 330 million that make up this country are here because their relatives or themselves, at some point in history, freely chose to come as immigrants. And, of course, the Anglo-Saxons of America, who still make up the majority of the population, do not include or perceive themselves as immigrants but as the founders of the country. For them, immigrants are the others.
But the country's nearly 7 million indigenous people are not immigrants. Their lands were taken from them by European invaders and colonizers, who massacred millions of them, in what Ward Churchill, professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado calls the most “vast sustained genocide in history.” The rest were subjected to living on reservations, where they survive with high levels of poverty, health problems and alcoholism. The more than 43 million African Americans are also not immigrants. Their ancestors were brought in as chained slaves and crowded into stinking ships and then sold to English masters who exploited them on their large estates. A significant part of the wealth that was accumulated from the exploitation and forced labor of slaves between 1525 and 1866 is one of the foundations of the current wealth of the United States. As we know, a large majority of the descendants of those slaves continue to live in the same conditions of contempt, oppression, poverty and lynching danger as 400 years ago.
Of the 60 million Latinos / Hispanics / Chicanos in the United States, a significant number cannot be considered immigrants. Mexicans have been here since the times of the Spanish colony 500 years ago. They were already here when the USA invaded northern Mexico and eventually seized (through the forced Guadalupe Hidalgo Treat of 1848) what are now the states of California, Texas, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Arizona, Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming. States where Spanish was the language of a large part of that territory along with the languages of the natives. Puerto Ricans are not immigrants. The United States turned Puerto Rico into a colony when it was taken from Spain in the war of 1898. Then it gave them citizenship so that they could send them as soldiers to fight wars that had nothing to do with them.
Cubans, Dominicans, like millions of Central and South Americans are not immigrants. Many of them are descendants, or first or second generation, of people who sought refuge in the United States as a result of the political and economic turmoil caused in large part by the intervention of the United States in those countries in the past and present decades. Millions of them are refugees, not immigrants. And similar stories can be told of people from China and other Asian countries, the Middle East and other parts of the world.
Perhaps the first masses of northern Europe were immigrants who were greeted effusively by the statue of liberty in Manhattan, at a time when documents were not required to enter this country. For millions of African Americans and Latin Americans it was never and has not been a party to come to this country, but a fight. The result has been the world's most diverse mosaic of ethnicities, languages, and cultures. A mosaic of iniquities and unequal inequalities, where white supremacism, driven by savage capitalism, is the controlling and oppressing force of the rest of the population. It is this mosaic of intelligent and hard-working people from all over the world that has fundamentally built a prosperity that is neither in their hands nor under their control. The American dream (another myth that projects this country as a kind of human ideal) is always an elusive image for the vast majority. Now, if we want to put it in other terms, we are all immigrants. We are all in perpetual motion, in a world that, as Ciro Alegría said, is broad and alien. With a gruesome number of supremacists who assume it is broad and belong to them.
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This week I recommend two books: Crux. A Cross-Border Memoir, by investigative journalist Jean Guerrero. A memory about the history of his father submerged from a time here in what some identify as schizophrenia, and that in the eyes of the narrator begins to be seen as a deeper worldview that intertwines the ancient cultures of Mexico with the present chaotic on the United States-Mexico border. Another book that I recommend is Cuentos salvajes, by the Venezuelan Ednodio Quintero. This volume of more than 500 pages is presented as the collection of all his stories published so far and allows us to see the evolution of the writer from oneiric and fantastic prose to a more realistic narrative connected to the Andean universe. In Spanish.
A COUNTRY THAT CAN NO LONGER BREATHE
June 1, 2020. Dawn dawns, and one wishes that the world were no longer once and for all the same as yesterday. Dawn is breaking, and in dozens of cities across this country millions of people have spent the night in double confinement: quarantine and curfew. This double anomaly emphasizes the drama of a world whose natural and social forces have long pushed for radical change. In the last long months the only tiresome, painful news was that of the anonymous or named dead, but all of them lonely, who accumulated in the hospital morgues in this country, first in the virus as in so many other things . Suddenly, on May 27, the slow and ruthless lynching of George Floyd, arrested allegedly for trying to buy cigarettes at a store with a fake $ 20 bill, changed the narrative and once again brought us face to face with the horror of the most ancient of its plagues: that of rampant racism that runs liquid through the veins of this nation from its colonial origins.
A teenager recorded the 8 minutes and 46 seconds in which police officer Dereck Chauvin smashed Floyd's neck with one of his knees while staring impassively at the cell phone recording his crime. His arrogant attitude sums up the centuries of slavery, oppression, mass incarceration, and unpunished murder to which governments and North American justice have subjected the black population (and Latinos, indigenous people, other minorities, and numerous countries of the world) .
What Chauvin, and the other two policemen who also crushed Floyd's body against the asphalt, did not expect, were the repercussion that his crime was going to have. Nor did Tou Thao, the fourth policeman who stood up, kept an eye on him so that none of those who witnessed the lynching came close. Floyd died shortly after in an ambulance took him away dying. A few hours after his death there was a social outbreak across the country. Suddenly tens of thousands of people of all ethnicities and conditions in many states of the country - and especially young people - forgot about the coronavirus, of confinement, of the imminent risk of contagion, and took to the streets in a spontaneous movement of rage, pain and solidarity with the Floyd family and with the black population in general.
The protests have continued to grow in the five days that have passed since the murder, taking the course of a social uprising that has not been seen in the country for decades. The social satiety is much greater now, because we live under the pandemic of a racist and autocrat president who is the brutal and unmistakable expression of contempt and oppression against defenseless and vulnerable minorities. In the midst of a deadly pandemic (one of the symptoms of which is that those infected cannot breathe), people have shown by taking to the streets to demand radical change that the most dangerous virus they face is white supremacy.
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Today I want to recommend AN AFRICAN AND LATINX HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES (available only in English) written by professor of history and director of the Oral History Program Samuel Proctor of the University of Florida. It is one of the most lucid, current and indispensable texts to rethink the knowledge of the true history of the United States from the perspective of blacks and Latinos fighting for social justice and equality for more than 400 years. Ortiz says, “I have written this book because as a scholar I want to make sure that no black or Latinx student ever has to be ashamed of who they are and where they come from.”