The Latino Metropolis

The Latino Question – Politics, Labouring Classes and the Next Left,” by A. Ibarra, A. Carlos and R. Torres, 2018

This is one of the most recent analyses of the Latino/a question in the U.S. from a Marxist point of view.  It is marred by a certain academic style, but makes basic points in contradiction to identity or ‘intersectional’ views as usually put forward by Democrats, African-American or Latino nationalists, liberals or left-liberals.

It is based on interviews with migrant workers in California’s agriculture areas, co-operative workers in San Francisco and low-wage workers in Milwaukee. Most Latino/a immigrants in the U.S. are from Mexico, secondarily from Puerto Rico, thirdly from the Caribbean, Central and South America.  They remind us that one of the founding acts of the United States besides indigenous genocide and African-American slavery was the conquest of upper Mexico – Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California.

Around 1910, prior to the Mexican revolution, the U.S. started building railroads in Mexico to move produce and raw materials north.  Since that time, though interrupted by the Mexican revolution, U.S. capitalists have used Mexico as an economic colony providing cheap labor, minerals and food.  This is the material root of the migration and production patterns that continue today.  The Bracero labor program that operated between 1942 and 1964, the 1947 Taft-Harley law which crippled union power, the 1986 GATT trade agreement, the 1988 NAFTA agreement and now the present 2020 USMCA all create a depopulated and poverty-stricken rural Mexico while destroying local Mexican businesses in towns.  Even Pemex, the crown jewel of the Mexican Revolution, is now mostly privatized.  Some present migrants actually have parents and co-workers who were in the Bracero program! This is why immigrants have gone to ‘el norte’ for so long.

The authors emphasize the labor and economic issues behind the U.S. government’s chauvinism, illegality and racism towards Latino/as.  Their analysis is based on the EMT – the ‘empire migration theory.’  They also work from Gramsci’s idea of conquering the ‘cultural’ and ideological side of capitalism, which they call ‘cultural political economy.’

They contest pure identity views that are separated from economics, along with ‘critical race theory’ or with ‘intersectional’ views that either ignore class or ignore the fact that all identities are embedded in the capitalist system. It is quite evident that many times the words ‘Latino’ or ‘black’ are merely short-hand terms for low-paid labor.  The terms actually contain class content.  The authors note that there are classes within the Latinx community and lumping them together is inaccurate and stupid.  30% of Latino/a voters voted for Trump in 2016 for instance.  Like the African-American community, there are rich entrepreneurs, small businessmen and professionals whose material interests diverge from the majority of the low-paid proletariat.

Latino/a Warehouse Workers on Strike

Through interviews the authors reveal the value of cooperatives to Latino/as as sources of higher material benefits and as actual democratic spaces.  They delineate the difficulties between minorities in co-ops who need material benefits and mostly European-Americans who see co-ops as more of a cultural process.  The authors’ emphasis on co-operatives is similar to Richard Wolff, as both see them as gateways to a future non-capitalist economy.  However the authors also make the claim that co-operatives challenge the state, which is a stretch.  Their recommendations for practical action outside ideology are limited to co-ops and community and union organizing.

One chapter discusses the ‘cultural appropriation’ of Mexican food in Los Angeles by upscale European-American chefs creating ‘nouvelle cuisine’ while at the same time nearly every restaurant in LA is powered by low-paid Latino/a labor hidden in the back of the house.  The 2006 “Day Without a Mexican,” when millions of Latinx workers stopped working in cities across the country to oppose a reactionary immigration bill, provides a modern inspiration for the authors.  It led to immigrant labor organizations throughout the U.S. and the real possibility of future large-scale U.S. labor mobilizations led by Latinx workers.  The development of Los Angeles as a “Latino Metropolis”’ a Chicano/a one, is one example.  It is producing organizations like Warehouse Workers United within the largest concentration of warehouses in the U.S.   

While the sole focus of the “Latino Question” in the U.S. media is on ICE, the Wall, ‘La Migra’ and 11M unauthorized immigrants, most of the 60M Latino/as in the U.S. are legal in one way or another. The government's intention is to terrorize the whole workforce, as workers of various legalities are deeply connected.  Yet as the joke might go, “you invade our country, we ‘invade’ yours!” A timely and interesting book, but a bit too oriented towards academics.  Nevertheless a good Left addition to the literature and applicable to the present day, not just hazy days past.

Other prior reviews on this topic, us blog search box, upper left:  “Drug War Capitalism,” “NAFTA 2,” “Viva Zapata,” “Frida Kahlo,” “USMCA Fraud,” “The Lacuna,” “Mayans M.C.,” “Pancho Villa Underground Railroad,” “Open Veins of Latin America,” “American Made,” “Building the Commune,” “The Diary of Che Guevara,” “Mariategui,” “Capitalism’s Crisis Deepens” and “Occupy the Economy” (both by Wolff); “No Local,” “Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism,” “The New Jim Crow,” “Living and Dying on the Factory Floor,” “Super-Size Wages!”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

February 14, 2020