Abstract
The Latino Question: Politics, Labouring Classes and the Next Left tackles a significant number of contested issues: power, domination and subordination, racialized ethnicity, class politics, and ideologies in the landscape of American democracy and the Latino population. Authors Armando Ibarra, Alfredo Carlos, and Rodolfo D. Torres unveil the vectors of hidden U.S. power relations with Mexico, challenge the master narrative of push and pull theories of immigration as they explode imperialistic corporate engagements in Mexico, and unravel the “sleeping giant” political pundit metaphor using class analyses. One critical argument states, “The most salient aspect of the ‘Latino’ population is the growing class divisions within it. Thus it is becoming more difficult in these changing political and economic times to speak of ‘Latinos’ as a block or as a singular class formation.” Cultural political economy—and its economic impact on the large and growing heterogeneous Latino group in the United States—is a key focus of the study. Although the book has three authors, one voice is projected in the chapters that take up as their focal point “Latinization, Classes, and Inequality,” with a discussion focused on Mexican peoples’ situated experiences.
There are five major strengths of this intellectual project. First is the compelling synthesis of the robust body of scholarship on Mexican history and economic subordination in understanding and redirecting our rediscovery of class formation and links between ethnicity, race, and class among Mexican populations (native born and immigrant). These formations are illustrated by cogent descriptions of past and current patterns of unionization, social mobility, and contemporary multicultural formations, as observed in Los Angeles. The second strength is the important analytic statements proffered regarding the myth of pan-ethnicity, the vast differences within the Hispanic/Latino category not only by race, ethnicity, and class but by political status—refugee, immigrant, resident, undocumented person, migrant worker, citizen—and the metaphor of the political vote of “the sleeping giant.”
Third, there are striking descriptions of cooperatives and unions, class mobility, and the racialized and class-based patriarchal and subordinate power relations that deny the community autonomy, capital, and authority. These descriptions unveil power relations in existing structural arrangements. Chapter Four makes visible the fact that seemingly good intentions in a capitalist world are often structured to deny those who invest their labor in these efforts the dignity, equality, and autonomy to experience co-ownership and upward class mobility (pp. 91–95). This important theme is further developed in the following chapters, where the authors implicitly argue that the dominant population suffers from a “false consciousness” dilemma created by the nature and logic of capitalism that conceals structural arrangements of disadvantage and imperialism—in particular, with Mexico. Fourth, the narrative case histories and life stories in the book (Chapters 3 and 5) illustrate with clarity what class looks like from the conscious, lived experiences of those who are in the poor or working class. The authors capture class-driven lived experiences of Mexican workers that are sobering, compelling, and disarming.
The fifth and final strength is that the methodological approach of the book is refreshing. It weaves together and draws on rich disciplinary sources from historical moments such as prior migrant patterns, the post-Bracero program, the Immigration Reform and Control Act, and NAFTA; Chicano/a Studies; and multiple political economy theories, including Marxist paradigms, economics, and qualitative community-engaged methods of interviewing and observation. The authors’ analyses offer both a breadth and a depth of critical understanding of the social status location of Mexican–origin peoples in the United States. These types of class analyses are too often eschewed by sociologists, particularly in the aggregating of the experiences of Latinos from over 20 countries into one ambiguous category, exoticizing the “Other,” and the resultant symbolic multicultural discourses (Chapter 6).
The book has some drawbacks: unsubstantiated critiques of intersectional and race frameworks and Chicano scholarship that the authors argue have predominantly dismissed either class or power relations or both; and overlooking race, class, and ethnic differences among Latinos. In the book’s analysis, the principal contribution of intersectionality is the exhortation of co-constituted identities (race, ethnicity, and class) and power relations (disciplinary, interpersonal, and institutional). Moreover, the application of intersectionality is highly embedded in pioneering Chicano/a studies (indigenous identity and class) in discussing labor and class issues in agricultural work, domestic work, and factory work. Acknowledgment that Chicano/a scholars’ work has not been perceived as “worthy of a headliner” or “award-winning scholarship!” also reflects power relations (patriarchy, elitism, and racism) and imperialism exhibited toward the study of Mexican-origin peoples “on the ground” and the scholarship that makes visible these power relations. This is a point unexpectedly missed by the authors. The Latino Question fails to interrogate class, race, and ideological differences among pan-ethnic Latino immigrant groups, which erases and overshadows the larger national discourse on the history of Mexican “push and pull” immigration theories and contributes to the lack of a united political voice. This discourse is an unfinished conversation.
Overall, the authors engage in passionate, provocative, and critical analyses of the power relations between U.S. capitalism, neoliberal rhetoric, and the economic and social well-being of predominantly Mexican peoples. An incisive analysis of the historic relations of production between Mexico and the United States provokes an insistent examination of the role of class in the lives of Mexican-origin peoples, illustrating how disadvantaged class status is sustained by U.S. neoliberal policies. Moreover, the authors make a central argument that the study of racism in contemporary society is integrally linked with the modes of production and power. The authors brilliantly weave together the destabilizing effects of the attack of capital on labor on all fronts, including blocking unionization, outsourcing, deemphasizing collective bargaining, and a stronghold of mostly white union bureaucracy who are beholden to capital owners and their managers.
The history of conquering and subordination and their impact on class, unions, cooperatives, and worker rights is a critical national discourse that illustrates the silences that are maintained in historic accounts. Notably, the case narratives proffer the example of how race, ethnicity, class, and geographic location, mediated by history and power relations (e.g., the unions “selling out”), produce class stagnation and inequality. These arguments are an extension of prior works and advance new knowledge on alternative discourses regarding the lack of social and economic mobility among colonized historic groups, particularly Mexican-origin peoples. Drawing on Marxist scholars, the book argues that as a democracy, the United States is in a neoliberal crisis and openings exist for counterhegemony (p. 115).
Although the description of the economic worker crisis in the United States is accurate, less convincing is the proposed set of solutions—for example, to “change our mode of thinking and being,” find common ground with other social movements (p. 178), and promote grassroots projects seems ephemeral at best in contemporary times in the United States. Concluding with multiple theorizing approaches in cultural studies, genealogy, multicultural appreciation, and challenging identity politics leaves the reader with a lack of clarity on two points. Who are we discussing, Latinos as an aggregate or Mexican-origin groups as Latinos? And how can we produce rigorous scholarship and practice interventions on the politics of class in the United States to affect institutional economic arrangements?
In closing, this is a brave and important book that should be required reading for students in history, political science, race and ethnic studies, and sociology courses to increase their understanding of the “making and workings of America” and the question of “rights of citizenship and belonging of Mexican-origin peoples.”