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Oaxaca: Where the Real Indians Are….

[ 48 ] June 17, 2012 | Erik Loomis

Edward Rothstein, last seen at LGM deciding that the state of Colorado actually does have history, drops a real stinker today. Rothstein goes to Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, and tells us why it is so much more authentic and real than listening to Native Americans in the United States tell stories he doesn’t want to hear.

Most of it is almost boilerplate wealthy east coast elite condescenion toward romantic places with brown people, whether it is the Taos School in 1912 or Santa Fe today or places in Mexico that are Santa Fe-esque without all the annoying tourists or whatnot, like Alamos or San Miguel de Allende or Oaxaca. Ooh, everything is so bright. The people are so charming. The food is so hot and spicy. I can buy handicrafts. Etc. Etc.

But the real issue is in Rothstein’s discussion of why indigenous history is so real in Oaxaca compared to the United States:

In the United States, in institutions ranging from the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington to regional natural history museums, the real arbiters of indigenous history these days are representatives of contemporary tribes. They oversee the display of a museum’s tribal artifacts and reshape accounts of the past, in many cases relying mainly on frayed strands of traumatically disrupted oral traditions. And everything is meant to increase self-esteem with promotional banality.

But here, something else happens. When you stand on a flattened hilltop above the village of Atzompa, some seven miles outside of Oaxaca, and look over at a nearby peak, you can glimpse the immense ruins of Monte Albán, a pre-Columbian plaza of breathtaking expanse used for ceremonies and games. Below those ruins, where perhaps 25,000 people lived in the early part of the first millennium, you can make out faint remnants of terraced farming on the hillside. The past is visible in the landscape.

I’d glad Rothstein, as a wealthy white elite, can summarily dismiss the National Museum of the American Indian and every other attempt for Native Americans to tell their own stories because they don’t suit his aesthetic desires as a cultural arbiter. I suppose the Lakota and the Crow and the Nez Perce should have to hold meetings with Rothstein and other New York elites before telling any story that might help them reclaim their past after four centuries of oppression and genocide. I’m not saying that one can’t criticize the NMAI, but it’s galling and near racist that Rothstein has so little sensitivity for the half-millennium of genocide that has created a situation where a lot of Native American peoples are trying to hold on to what they have about their history while telling stories that make modern Americans remember that they are still alive.

Moreover, both in that second paragraph quoted above as well as elsewhere in the piece, he talks about Mexico being superior because he can see state indigenous power on the landscape in the form of ruins. He makes a passing nod to places like Cahokia in the U.S., but those aren’t nearly as cool as Monte Alban I guess. So I’m glad Rothstein is judging indigenous peoples on their ability to construct large buildings. But there isn’t the first attempt to understand why Indians are so visible in Oaxaca today, as opposed to the U.S. Some of it is the ruins of massive structures of course, but there’s also the enormous 4 million pound gorilla that the United States committed systemic genocide against its Native American populations in ways that Spain/Mexico was never able to accomplish. So Oaxaca, traditionally isolated from the center of power in Mexico City, remains majority indigenous today.

And that leads to yet another problem with Rothstein’s piece. Like many Mexican elites and foreign tourists today, he loves the ruins and the Indian culture and the food and the pottery. But he doesn’t seem to care one iota about the poverty in which they live. Being indigenous in Mexico is not just about providing a background for wealthy whites to play out their fantasies. It also means endemic poverty, racism, disease, alienation from traditional cultures due to massive economic pressures unleashed by NAFTA and policies in Mexico City, no recourse to the government, etc. Rothstein couldn’t care less about any of those things, or at least there’s no evidence he even began peeking below the surface of Oaxaca.

Finally, there’s Rothstein’s bizarre decision to conflate Oaxaca’s indigenous past with the Ethnobotanical Garden of Oaxaca. It’s a cool place but it’s not indigenous in the least except that the plants are native species. So maybe native peoples and native plants are all the same in Rothstein’s mind. Moreover, it’s housed not in some indigenous area but behind Oaxaca’s largest Catholic structure, a vestige of Spanish colonialism. But Indians, Spanish, it’s all the same so long as it’s old and Rothstein can have his authenticity sensors stimulated.

Really, it’s good that the Times still employs a museum critic, but Rothstein is about as out of touch with the everything outside of New York City as one can be. And he certainly shows little understanding of Mexico.

UVA

[ 49 ] June 17, 2012 | Erik Loomis

Updating yesterday’s post that used the firing of Teresa Sullivan, president of the University of Virginia, as a jumping off point for thinking about why we think rich people know how to do everything, the Post gets to the bottom of why Sullivan was canned.

Besides broad philosophical differences, they had at least one specific quibble: They felt Sullivan lacked the mettle to trim or shut down programs that couldn’t sustain themselves financially, such as obscure academic departments in classics and German.

This at the university founded by Thomas Jefferson. I’m sure he never supported the study of classics!

For the all incredible damage they’ve done to the world, one thing we can count on from billionaires is for them to overreach, sucked in by their own hubris and self-importance. And that’s what happened here, to the point that the damage control may be too great for Sullivan not to come back. Although perhaps I’m being optimistic. But at least we are having conversations about the incredibly problematic ways universities are run today.

Again, what do real estate developers, hedge-fund billionaires, and business partners of governors know about higher education? Almost nothing. Probably not more than the average student with a master’s or law degree. But because they are successful capitalists, our society lauds them as having the answer to all our problems. And if there aren’t real problems, the capitalist appointees will make something up in order to pursue their ideological agenda of running our universities in the same manner as their businesses–which have plunged the nation into a 5-year stagnation and left our national standard of living essentially unchanged for two decades while creating levels of income inequality not seen in 90 years. That’s not even to mention the fact that colleges and universities are some of our biggest union-busters, whether it is outsourcing any work that can be privatized, using violence against students protesting for economic justice, destroying tenure-track labor, and slicing apart collective bargaining agreements.

Another point worth making here is the problems with governor appointed Boards of Trustees for public university systems. Because these often operate as prestige positions for big fundraisers, governors, whether Democratic or Republican, name their friends in the business community to them. These positions may seem symbolic, and often were in the past. But they can have a tremendous amount of power over the university systems. Ironically, at the same time as state legislatures are deinvesting in higher education, the Boards of Trustees are using their power with ever-greater authority to force through changes rich business people want to see. Like getting rid of any major that doesn’t directly lead to employment within the capitalist system and in fact might lead students to question society–Classics, German, Philosophy, etc. It’s only a matter of time until they come after History.

Superstition

[ 10 ] June 16, 2012 | Erik Loomis

Good music for a Saturday night. Also, Sesame Street!

The Daily Caller: Copulating with the Dessicated Corpse of Parody

[ 91 ] June 16, 2012 | Erik Loomis

And you thought a wacko interrupting the president was the most embarrassing thing that would happen to The Daily Caller this week.

Not even close.

This is quite literally one of the stupidest things I’ve ever read.

Bryce Harper is a conservative hero. The star rookie for the Washington Nationals has woken up Major League Baseball, and watching it unfold has reminded me of nothing so much as the collapse of the old political paradigms and the inevitable and upcoming rebirth of conservatism in November.

This became clear to me on May 26 of this year. The Nationals were playing Atlanta, and in the fifth inning Harper, with his team leading by two, singled to right. The ball was hit to Braves right fielder Jason Heyward. Heyward strolled up to the ball as if he were walking to the corner for a paper.

Harper promptly headed for second base. Heyward suddenly woke up and fired to second base, but too late.

More than one sports writer has noted that this moment was no small thing for baseball. It was like the part in the movie “Awakenings” when the guy who was asleep for 30 years wakes up.

To me, the play carried even greater symbolic importance. Heyward’s bungle showed a complacency, if not indolence, that Harper threatens to destroy, but it also could be a metaphor for the collapse of the old liberal order. Heyward was like one of those public school teachers who, because they are a union member, can’t be fired and so are relegated to the “rubber room” to sit and read the paper and gather a check for the rest of their lives. Or even Obama, who went from Hawaii to Harvard to the White House and never seems to have had to slide head-first into a base his entire life.

Believe it or not, it actually gets much worse from there!!! Including this gem of a paragraph:

If America is to be solvent and healthy, we cannot keep doing what we have been doing since the Miracle Mets won the World Series in 1969. We have to do things differently, just as Bryce Harper is not playing baseball the old way. Harper is not going to sit back and accept what the status quo tells him to accept (where does he get off stealing home?). And conservatives are not going to expect to retire at age 65 or to send their kids to the college of their choice if it costs $50,000 a year. We are going to adapt. (In a strange way, conservatives are not only like Bryce Harper, but have become like the do-it-yourself punk rockers of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Don’t have a record label? Start your own. Are the old rock groups bloated and sloppy? Boot them off the stage.) Meanwhile, liberals occupy everything so that they can demand — what was it again? Oh yeah, peace. And taxes.

I have no expectations of good work from any conservative outlet in 2012. But even expecting this to be awful, I was completely blown away. I mean there is no way that the greatest comedy writer in America could create a parody of the conservative worldview better than this.

….In comments, Kathleen notes, “It would have been better if he said, “Heyward strolled up to the ball as if he were a young buck sidling up to the checkout counter to purchase T bone steaks with food stamps”. SEK said more or less the same thing. Showing that because my first impulse is to look for class bias, I can sometimes miss the obvious racism.

Why Do We Think Plutocrats Know How to Run the Nation?

[ 63 ] June 16, 2012 | Erik Loomis

Siva Vaidhyanathan has a good piece at Slate about the absurd firing of University of Virginia president Teresa Sullivan. Despite widespread support from the university community, Sullivan was canned last week for reasons that remain unclear, but seem to revolve around her not bringing in enough powerful billionaires to consult about the changes she planned. This made them mad, one in particular. Peter Kiernan, hedge-fund billionaire and big time contributor bragged in an e-mail (watch the reply all button!) that he engineered her firing, evidently because she didn’t solicit his opinion. This can happen today because states have so deinvested in public schools that philanthropists write huge checks that universities rely on to survive.

But there’s a deeper issue here:

Kiernan, who earned his MBA at Darden and sent his children to the university, has been a longtime and generous supporter of both the business school and the College of Arts and Sciences, where I work as a professor. Earlier this year he published a book called—I am not making this up—Becoming China’s Bitch. It purports to guide America through its thorniest problems, from incarceration to education to foreign policy. The spectacle of a rich man telling us how to fix our country was irresistible to the New York Times, which ran a glowing profile of Kiernan and his book on Feb. 29.

At some point in recent American history, we started assuming that if people are rich enough, they must be experts in all things. That’s why we trust Mark Zuckerberg to save Newark schools and Bill Gates to rid the world of malaria. Expertise is so 20th century.

Like many of the problems of today’s world, I chalk this up at least in part to the triumphalist nature of extremist early 21st century capitalism, where the world’s last secular ideology goes almost completely unchallenged. Without an articulated alternative to capitalism, the combined power of money, politics, and media conspire to present a three-part message–business has the answer to all of our problems, government is a problem that must be eliminated, and corporate titans are powerful because they are the most deserving and smart and thus they can solve societal problems if we only listen to their sage wisdom.

Of course, some Americans have always wanted to put its capitalists on a pedestal. The difference between the past and present is that there used to be organized movements of working-class people who completely rejected this absurdity. Today, corporate propaganda is so overwhelming with corporate dollars owning both political parties and corporate media fawning over their masters that organized opposition is limited. The extremist nature of modern capitalism has destroyed unions, moved jobs overseas, and left average Americans suffering from the betrayed dreams of unemployment, underwater mortgages, and unmanageable debt. And while a half-decade of economic stagnation and corporate malfeasance combined with Occupy Wall Street to help challenge the endless media message that our capitalists are godlike figures, we’ve only just begun pushing back against two decades of this corporate messaging.

And thus we allow Bill Gates to create education policy and billionaires to order university presidents fired.

If We Want a Better Blogosphere, Forbes Should Hire Better Bloggers

[ 69 ] June 16, 2012 | Erik Loomis

Adam Ozimek says something really stupid:

Amidst this conversation, host of PBS’s Democracy Now!, Amy Goodman, repeated a highly misleading talking point, contributing. It’s a claim you’ve probably seen it a hundred times before, that the wealth of the six Waltons, who own Walmart, is greater than the wealth of the bottom 30%. It sounds astounding, and it is a true fact. But it is also highly misleading. The fact is meant to tell you something problematic about the Waltons’ wealth, but in actuality it tells you almost nothing about their wealth. This is clear if you consider that Amy Goodman herself almost certainly has more wealth than the bottom 30% of households. In fact everyone on the Up With Chris Hayes panel probably has more wealth than the bottom 30%.

For a full debunking of this claim see Tim Worstall or Felix Salmon, but what you mostly need to know is that almost 25% of household have zero or negative wealth. So anyone with any positive wealth has more than them. Around 37% of households have $12,000 or less in total wealth, so it seems fairly likely that Amy Goodman is worth more than the bottom 30%. This fact is entirely about the wealth at the bottom tail of the distribution, not the top tail. As the story is told by Goodman and others it implies that the opposite is true. This may not be a lie, or a literally false claim, but it is completely misleading and decreases rather than increases understanding.

If Amy Goodman wants the media to be better and less post-truth she should start by doing a better job herself. In this moment she contributed to the problem.

Ozimek continues his seemingly life-long project of obfuscating poverty and actual human suffering behind adherence to his version of the field of economics. There are obviously many ways to measure wealth. Total wealth might be one way, where you do have a lot of Americans with negative assets. And I guess you can then equate the Walton heirs with Amy Goodman and then say that leftists saying bad things about the media are full of it. Or you could measure wealth by earned income from salary, investments, etc., which would note that the Waltons have more money than god, or, more specifically, than the bottom 30% of the population. To note this would suggest that there was a problem with extreme wealth in the midst of growing poverty, but Ozimek has no problem with this. A far greater crime is Amy Goodman saying the media doesn’t tell the truth about poverty. And in Ozimek’s case, she’s right.

Another Ozimek greatest hit was saying that Mark Bittman fell into “self-parody” when he blamed restaurant corporations for paying their workers terrible wages, no sick days, vacation pay, etc. Asking “why should the bill falls on employers,” Ozimek uses the same semantic outrage as against Goodman, challenging his definition of the word “sustainability” rather than discuss Bittman’s points.

And then there’s my very favorite recent Ozimek piece where he makes fun of Chris Bertram for suggesting that unions could help prevent sexual harassment of immigrants at work, instead pointing to what really gives workers protection: “a competitive labor market.” Ah yes, the problems of agricultural labor is because the government has too big a role in regulating it!!!

Charge It to the Marx Card

[ 66 ] June 15, 2012 | Erik Loomis

Given the complete dominance of capitalism in early 21st century life, why not turn Karl Marx into a symbol for capitalist excess and the modern exploitation of the working-class through the indebtedness created through a credit economy.

Honestly, I kind of really want this.

Vagina Vagina Vagina Vagina Vagina Vagina

[ 19 ] June 14, 2012 | Erik Loomis

Republicans in the Michigan Legislature are more than happy to stick government way up a woman’s vagina. But if a state legislator Lisa Brown actually says the word “vagina” on the floor, she must be silenced:

Brown’s comment prompted a rebuke Thursday by House Republicans, who wouldn’t allow her to voice her opinion on a school employee retirement bill.

“What she said was offensive,” said Rep. Mike Callton, R-Nashville. “It was so offensive, I don’t even want to say it in front of women. I would not say that in mixed company.”

Brown’s comments were published in Thursday’s Detroit News.

Majority Floor Leader Jim Stamas, R-Midland, determined Brown’s comments violated the decorum of the House, said Ari Adler, spokesman for the Republican majority.

“If I can’t say the word vagina, why are we legislating vaginas?” Brown asked Thursday at a hastily called Capitol press conference. “What language should I use?”

Brown noted “vagina” is the “medically correct term.”

“We’re all adults here,” she said.

See, the Republican legislators actually aren’t adults. And there is the problem.

Gin and Vodka

[ 134 ] June 14, 2012 | Erik Loomis

It’s time to restart LGM’s War on Vodka. One of the main generals in this war on inferior spirits is the heroic and delicious gin. A new front has opened:

Ah, gin. Brisk, peppery gin. Once, it epitomized summer elegance. It was the cool-breeze component of martinis and gimlets, rickeys and slings, fizzes and Collinses. It was the soothing tonic that helped the quinine go down. It was yardarms and pastel sunsets.

Then the ground trembled and the sky darkened. Along came the devil, I mean vodka, and gin was forsaken in favor of — What? No flavor? No aroma? No character? Well, that’s vodka for you: a bland, neutral cipher. Gin’s cocktails became vodka’s cocktails, championed by those who ought to have known better, consumed by the masses who had no idea what a martini was, much less a yardarm.

….

These efforts have been modestly successful, though they have done nothing to slow vodka’s ascendancy. According to the Distilled Spirits Council, a trade group, sales of vodka in the United States have risen steadily to around 62 million cases in 2011, from about 39 million in 2002. Sales of gin, however, have been static, hovering around 11 million cases a year. The one area of encouraging growth has been at the highest end, in the super-premium category, which was up 24 percent in 2011 compared with in 2002.

The output of the new, small distilleries amounts to no more than a trickle. Like so many in the cocktail renaissance, many of them have rejected vodka as hopelessly square and dull while embracing gin as complex and distinctive. Perhaps, too, they have a historical appreciation for gin, just as the cocktail connoisseurs embraced the nearly forgotten rye whiskey and, in an earlier generation, craft brewers resurrected moribund styles of beer.

There probably are other theories for the decline of the United States. But the increase in vodka consumption from 39 million cases to 62 million cases a year in less than a decade is as good as any I’ve read.

I look forward to the vodka drinkers among you complaining about this. But note that you are inferior human beings.

Guerrero

[ 13 ] June 14, 2012 | Erik Loomis

Jonah Keri with a very nice piece on the apparent end of Vladimir Guerrero’s career. My own Vlad memory primarily consists of watching him hit not one but two impossibly long home runs off Jamie Moyer. The last great Expo, though Scott might have something to add to that.

Labor Notes

[ 22 ] June 14, 2012 | Erik Loomis

Lot of stuff going today.

1. We know that America’s plutocrats want to return the nation to the Gilded Age. It turns out that Mexican plutocrats feel the same. Such as Carlos Slim. The world’s richest man has some brilliant ideas on how to make people’s lives miserable:

The world’s richest man has urged struggling nations to lift workers’ retirement age to 70 and privatize as many infrastructure assets as possible to help shore up their economies, Mexican press reported on June 12.

Moreover, countries should have people work until they are older to reflect longer life expectancy rates, Slim reportedly said. He noted the ideal work schedule should be 10-11 hours three times per week for people over 60 to allow them to have more days to “innovate, create and cultivate themselves.”

Slim added the current retirement age was established “when jobs were more physical and people died at 60, but now we live until 85 or 90.”

Old people should work an 11 hour day to cultivate themselves! Just like children in coal mines needed to work 14 hour days to learn a work ethic!!!

2. In southern California, a new labor organization has popped up to give warehouse workers some representation. Called Warehouse Workers United, it is organizing at Wal-Mart, the most anti-union corporation in the country. Wal-Mart’s response–hire a young woman to pretend to be a USC journalist wanting information on bad labor conditions and then spy on the workers! Very classy!! From WWU:

For months warehouse workers have been asking to meet with Walmart. There have been many opportunities to sit down with workers: Last year the state issued more than $1 million in fines for labor violations at warehouses where workers move goods for Walmart, UCLA conducted a study about the risky working conditions inside the warehouse, Cal/OSHA issued more than 60 violations totaling more than $250,000 in Walmart-contracted warehouses and workers at a Walmart-contracted warehouse filed a class action lawsuit that documents awful working conditions including working 362 days a years with no break and no overtime. Last week when Walmart had the chance to talk about real issues affecting Latino workers in Southern California it instead sent “Zoe,” a fake reporter. A spy. Our door is open. Walmart can change this industry and create thousands of good jobs and improve the quality of life in Southern California, but first it has to come out of hiding.

3. Speaking of Wal-Mart, workers at one of the company’s seafood suppliers went on strike June 4 to protest working conditions they describe as “slave labor.” These are temporary workers on H-2B guest visas who live in rat-infested housing and work 24 hour shifts with no overtime. The seafood supplier’s general manager is also the head of the Crawfish Processors Alliances, an industry group lobbying to fight against increasing pay for H-2B guestworkers. No doubt Carlos Slim would call these 24 hour shifts an opportunity for these workers to cultivate themselves.

4. I have tut-tutted Mark Bittman for looking down at the poor when it comes to food. But he did some very good work yesterday giving publicity to ROC-United’s new National Diners’ Guide to help consumers patronize restaurants that don’t treat their workers terribly. Of course, virtually every major fast-food chain pays their workers very little. A few however, such as Five Guys, actually provide sick days. More here.

5. President Obama continues to pay off labor for its support of his political career by negotiating secret NAFTA-style free trade agreements with Asia. A leaked document shows how nasty this is. As UE’s Chris Townsend states, “This is what happens when you get an administration that is pretty much in the lap of corporate America.” I’m glad we’ve reached the point where labor doesn’t even get a say in helping modify trade agreements to make them slightly less bad for American workers.

6. Thousands of AT&T technicians under CWA representation walked off the job for a 1-day action in Nevada and California because the company is trying to crush their union. The best represented members of the American working class the increasingly fewer unionized workers at AT&T and Verizon and they are target #1 among private sector unions for American corporations.

That’s a lot of labor news. There’s more but I’ll stop here for now.

The Meaningless of the Term “Latino”

[ 95 ] June 14, 2012 | Erik Loomis

Jamelle Bouie has an excellent article arguing that progressives’ dreams of a demographic majority with the rise of the Latino population is a chimera. Progressives have a vision that endless Republican racism will combine with the growth of people from Latin America to propel a rejuvenated Democratic Party into a period of dominance. That’s pretty problematic, as Jamelle shows. There’s no question that the majority of peoples from Latin America will remain Democrats for the time being, but the future is murky. First, there are plenty of Latinos who are already Republican or who might be if the current iteration of the Republican Party wasn’t dominated by mouth-breathing white supremacists. Second, there’s no guarantee that Republicans will continue to be the white man’s party three and four decades down the line, although this is possible. The most likely possibility is that certain sections of the Latino population will simply become white and accepted into the a modified Republican narrative about race, class, and America.

This has profound implications. If whites are the “mainstream” of American life, with overwhelming representation in politics, business, and culture, then intermarriage with Latinos and Asians has the potential to bring those groups into the mainstream as well. Put another way, the wildly popular comedian Louis C.K. is understood to be white, even though his father and grandfather are Mexican and his first language is Spanish. More important, his children will be perceived as white, despite their Latino heritage. In effect, C.K. and others like him are expanding the definition of “white.”

To Pantoja, this bears a strong resemblance to the pattern of the 19th and early 20th centuries, when the U.S. saw massive immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. “Latinos seem to be on a similar trajectory as Italians,” he says. “At the turn of the century, the Italians were seen as a stigmatized minority group that could not be assimilated into the American mainstream.” It was common to describe Italians as “dark,” “swarthy,” and—in language that also has characterized African Americans—prone to crime and poverty. But as Italians rose out of working-class professions and joined a burgeoning middle class, they and other “nonwhite” immigrants assimilated. Eventually, the New Deal, along with unions, service in World War II, and the G.I. Bill, brought Italians fully into American life.

The politics of Italian Americans changed with their shifting status. As the party most identified with immigrants, Democrats gained an early lead with Italian Americans; they formed a key part in Franklin Roosevelt’s victorious coalition and proved crucial to Democratic successes through the 1960s. But as Italians became fully assimilated, and Democrats championed the rights of racial minorities and women’s rights, the balance shifted. By the 1980s, Italians would join most white Americans in voting Republican.

A similar path might emerge for Latinos. Initially outsiders, they form a bond with the political party that most identifies with their concerns. As they move into the mainstream, those concerns become less salient, and their political preferences become identical to those of whites’—less dependent on their racial or ethnic traits than on factors like education, wealth, and geography.

Yes indeed. Many ethnic groups have become “white” over the centuries–Irish, Italians, Poles, Jews, etc. Each of these groups was seen as suspicious upon their arrival to the U.S. and found shelter within a more welcoming Democratic Party. Eventually, each became broadly seen as white and at that point, various other factors helped drive them to a greater or lesser extent into the two political parties. There is no reason this won’t happen for broad sections of the Latino population.

And that gets to another issue: that the term “Latino” has almost no value. What do Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Guatemalans, and Mexicans have in common? For that matter, one can ask what Spanish-speaking Mexicans from Durango have in common with Mixtec or Zapotec-speaking Mexicans from Oaxacans, a group that makes a up a major chunk of Mexican migration in some areas of the United States? Not a whole lot, sometimes not even language. It’s really rather insulting; it’s like saying that all the immigrants from eastern and southern Europe in the 1910s were the same thing. And maybe a lot of Americans saw them that way, but we know now that was pretty racist.

Terminology around race is tricky. My understanding of Latino is that it came out of immigrant political activism in the 80s and 90s as a way to get around the more offensive “Hispanic,” although I could be wrong about some of the details. But as the Latin American population has grown, the term has served as an easy way for “whites” to talk about this growing group of immigrants without paying much attention to the particulars. It has covered up the incredible diversity of peoples entering the United States from the south and blocked understanding of how immigration is changing the United States. We’d be better off getting rid of it and instead start talking about Mexican voters and Guatemalan voters and Colombian voters. They aren’t the same now and they certainly won’t be the same when some of them start becoming white and others don’t.

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