From Latin Americans to Latinos: Latin American immigration in US: the unwanted children

Forum on Public Policy: A Journal of the Oxford Round Table, Spring, 2007 by Ana Morana

"Migration is a one way trip. There is no "home" to go back to". Stuart Hall (1)

"Minorities and majorities emerge explicitly in the process of developing ideas of number, representation, and electoral franchise in places affected by the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century, including satellite spaces in the colonial world [...] But minorities do not come preformed. They are produced in the specific circumstances of every nation and every nationalism. They are often carriers of unwanted memories of the acts of violence that produced existing states, of forced conscription, or of violent extrusion as new states were formed. And that is because minorities are not born but made, historically speaking. [...] So, rather than saying that minorities produce violence, we could better say that violence, especially at the national level, requires minorities." Arjun Appadurai (2)

Modernity and Globalization: the Simultaneity of Non-Simultaneous Realities. It can be said that the upside of globalization is that central cultures are impacted, almost cannibalized, by their own policies. Starting with modernity, we have to remember that it was always a central project for the West which, according to Marshall Berman and other theorists, not only implies the promotion of modernization and the technologization of central and local markets. Modernity also includes the ideology of progress. In some places of the world, it became a political ideology in the second half of the nineteenth century, especially in the case of the Argentine Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and his famous dichotomy of civilization and barbarism. The author chose this dualism to show the need that Latin American new republics had to face in order catch up with the central powers (Europe and eventually the US). According to the Argentine writer, teacher, politician, and president of his country, progress was the main value and a necessary achievement. In those days progress meant several things: modernization, democracy, the development of urban societies, the advancement and acquisition of new technologies, liberalization of markets and extended education, among others values.The project of modernization also involved the welcoming of masses of immigrants to Argentina. That aspect of modernity was supposed to enrich the culture and economy of the New World with the old wisdom of the European spirit, especially from those immigrants from the north of Europe. But instead, Argentina received poor immigrants mostly from Spain and Italy, along with Eastern Europe, Russia, and the Middle East. In late 1800s and early 1900s the results of such ideology sometimes were different from what the provincial writer and teacher imagined.

Early modernity started in the sixteenth century with scientific and geographical discoveries, the ascension of capitalism, urban societies, and new philosophies and perspectives in religion. America was the main discovery of those times, and cultural diversity emerged as an enormous challenge. The industrial revolution represented the second stage of modernity, and along with the empowering of a new social class, the bourgeoisie, it also represented a new stage in terms of the opening of markets and the need for natural resources. Again, the challenge of diversity showed up when the progress of colonialism made clear that those areas rich in resources also carried within new peoples, cultures, and languages.

Around the nineteenth century central Western societies realized that one of the consequences of modernity was the progressive although problematic implementation of the process of democratization. It came along with the development of a very powerful mass media, the presence of a middle class that grew strong, and all that was accompanied by the development of social behaviors such us consumerism. As Marshall Berman puts it:

   The maelstrom of modern life has been fed from many sources: great
   discoveries in the physical sciences, changing our images of the
   universe and our place in it; the industrialization of production,
   which transforms scientific knowledge into technology, creates new
   human environments and destroys old ones, speeds up the whole tempo
   of life, generates new forms of corporate power and class struggle;
   immense demographic upheavals, severing millions of people from
   their ancestral habitats, hurtling them halfway across the world
   into new lives (Berman, 1982, 2).

These phenomena affected the majority of Western countries from the beginning of modernity until the present day, in a process that evolved into new formulations at every stage. From the beginning of the sixteenth century until today, the advancement of modernity was closely connected to capitalism, and movements of migration and diaspora are also an important part of globalization. In cases of problematic economies, these processes of relocation overseas act as safety valves in poor countries, which are not able to afford social crises (Trigo, 2003, 55).