Growing up Latino:
‘Whiteness’ defined immigration policy, colored perspective of life, politics for boy from Miami
Alfredo Gutierrez, a former state senator, describes his experience growing up in Arizona, feeling pressured to hide his roots and adopt “White” customs.
There is a willful and profound ignorance regarding the history of Mexicans in the United States. It is with that hollow in mind that I wrote “To Sin Against Hope.”
Miami, Ariz., is where my father was born and from where he was deported. I was born there after he returned from exile with my mother and four kids.
Miami was booming in the ’50s. Mines were operating 24 hours a day, workers lined up at the gates for every shift, and at shift’s end, they stormed, covered with grime, into a town full of bars and churches. And whorehouses. There were three. The biggest one had a gambling hall and the town’s longest bar. I shined shoes, and that was the best place to wait for someone to win big or stroll down the stairs, smile and all, ready for a shine.
My father’s deportation was part of the landscape, a sacrifice Mexicans risked to work the mines, join the union and get steady pay. My father’s grandmother Isabel Luna and her two sons, Estanislao and Jose Maria, rode into Clifton in 1878 on an oxcart from Chihuahua. She met a man, Fidel Samudio, who arrived years earlier and together launched our tribe. But even a history older than statehood would not
protect my father in 1932.
His deportation was a “voluntary departure,” an Orwellian phrase still used by the Obama administration to describe using local police to apprehend undocumented people, hold them in massive private prisons for extended periods and then offering to release them into Mexico if they agree to voluntary departure. The term was invented in the 1930s to support the fiction that only criminal aliens were being deported by the dragnet known as repatriation.
The demand to deport Mexicans and restrict immigration to the “Nordic race” had grown since the adoption of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. In 1921 and 1924, Congress passed quota laws to protect America
from swarthy, disease-ridden Southern Europeans. Agricultural interests ensured that the Western Hemisphere was exempted. Then came the Depression. Quotas were resisted for another 30 years, but the price was indiscriminate deportations.
In the ’50s, we were under extreme pressure to be “White” — ideally, having no accent, never speaking Spanish in the earshot of White people; if confronted about your skin color or surname, conceding you were MexicanAmerican or, better yet, an American of Mexican descent.
In segregated Bullion Plaza School, teachers taped your mouth shut if you spoke Spanish. Your name was “Americanized” — Alfredo became Alfred, Guillermo, William, Federico, Fred. Girls weren’t exempt. Maria became Mary and Rosa, Rose.
Accents led to the era’s silliest exercises in Whiteness. The most ridiculous was round sounds: Open your mouth slightly, form an “O” with your lips slightly extended outward, then speak keeping your mouth in that O shape. It may reduce your accent while sounding like a pretentious fool. In school, it could also get you a whuppin’.
Unbeknownst to the kids, the Mexicano obsession with being White had historical roots. Article IX of the treaty ending the Mexican-American War declared that Mexicans in the territory would be given the “enjoyment of all the rights of citizens of the United States, according to the principles of the Constitution.” It was 1848, when African-Americans were slaves and the country was at war with Native Americans.
The states, which before the 14th Amendment to the Constitution awarded citizenship, conformed to the racial logic of the time. The territorial constitutions of Arizona and California and the constitution of the Republic of Texas restricted citizenship to “white Mexicans.” In time, “Whiteness” became the underlying principle of a civilrights strategy.
The first test of what constituted Whiteness was that of a wealthy Californio. Pablo De La Guerra was called to jury duty but was challenged because, by all accounts, he was dark and appeared Mexican. De La Guerra was stripped of his citizenship and, accordingly, the right to property, vote and even sue his accusers. De La Guerra appealed.
The court restored his citizenship but not because of Article IX. No, it found that De La Guerra was “White enough.” (Interestingly, a century later and decades after courts rejected race as a barrier to equality, Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070 sought to stand the “White enough” standard on its head. The bill authorized police officers to determine, by appearance, that a “reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States.” In plain English, the law authorized the police to determine whether a person appeared “Mexican enough” to detain.)
In time, the civil-rights strategy became the handmaiden to humiliating children who spoke Spanish and blatant discrimination against Mexican immigrants because they replenished the community’s Mexicanidad.
Limiting immigration to Nordics was based on the pseudoscience of eugenics. The influential tome of the time was “The Passing of the Great Race” by Madison Grant. The greatest danger facing America, he argued, was immigration by non-Nordic people. They polluted the stock and debased the morals and intelligence of White Americans.
In Grant’s typology, Mexicans were “race bastards” whose Indian blood would dominate whatever good White blood there is in a mestizo. Grant’s was not a marginalized voice. He was a friend of Presidents Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.
The Pioneer Fund was founded in 1937 at the height of the eugenics craze in America and Nazi Germany by wealthy and influential adherents to encourage the propagation of those “descended predominantly from white persons settled in the original thirteen states prior to the adoption of the Constitution of the United States ... and to support the dissemination of information regarding the problem of heredity and eugenics ... and the problem of race betterment.”
California’s notorious antiimmigrant Proposition 187 was drafted by a consultant to the Federation for American Immigration Reform. During the campaign, it was revealed that FAIR received $1.2 million from the fund. FAIR’s president defended the fund, but when the scandal grew, he abruptly disavowed it.
FAIR is one of several organizations founded by John Tanton opposing immigration reform today. His personal beliefs came to light in a memo leaked to The Arizona
Republic in 1968. “As Whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion?”
Immigration is an important and controversial issue. Most Americans do not subscribe to the views of Tanton or the Pioneer Fund, but the two have overseen the hijacking of the debate by kooks, racists, pseudoscientific eugenicists and Holocaust deniers. A profound ignorance of history makes their exaggerations and falsehoods possible.
It is a profound ignorance of history that makes it easy for Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne to attack ethnic studies for fostering separatism while the irony of not adopting a program to include them in mainstream history eludes him.
It is the consequences of that profound ignorance that compelled me to write “To Sin Against Hope.” Our children should know the journey that brought us here.