Browning of America: Fact or Myth

                                                                                 

Clinton's NAFTA helped fuel the Zapatista war in Chiapas

     I was fifteen years old when “they” killed President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. Like most Americans, I grieved, more because he was an Irish Catholic, and the Irish nuns and brothers who educated me talked about him in damn-near saintly language, same as my Mexican-Democrat working-class family, my dad a “union man,” who said he’d have no healthcare, pension, or vacation days without the AFL-CIO. As a child of Mexican immigrants, he was one of the first in his family to be a natural born U.S. citizen.

     My guess is none of us really understood the politics of the day, only that Republicans cut taxes for the rich, while Democrats spent them on social programs for the poor and middle-class. Sound familiar? And that was sixty-two years ago. Talk about “same tired old playbook.” What do you expect when you only have a two-party system -- or I stand corrected, we once had a “two” party system? Now, one of the two parties has morphed into party straddling the “middle,” while, according to pundits, the other side has been hijacked by a “cult-like” figure who refuses to go along with the "system," simply because he didn’t win the last election, and his party, or those remaining, follow him wherever he leads them, his main gripe: immigrants are destroying our country. This from a man who built his wealth on the backs of immigrants. Many undocumented immigrants have claimed to work for Donald Trump, at one time or another, nobody ever once asking for their papers.

     In fact, or so the former president says, from what he sees on television, residents of Springfield, Ohio, are claiming, immigrants are "eating their dogs and cats.” Okay, now, I, and many Americans, can deal with an immigrant-bashing as a political campaign strategy. There is an argument to be made, but eating dogs and cats? Gimme a break. I guess his point is to spread fear in Americans that our country is turning "brown."

     It wasn’t until 1966, after I served in the military with Americans of every stripe and color, I realized America, culturally, was, even then, much wider and broader than I was led to believe in my little sheltered corner of Los Angeles. In Vietnam, how was it one of my close friends was a black kid from the Virgin Islands, Ronnie La Beet, another, Jerry Lugo, from New York by way of Puerto Rico, Jack Brun, a white kid from Arkansas, and Bobby Simmons, a black kid from the Alabama. Then there were Lakota friends from South Dakota, Asians from California, funny speaking guys from the Bronx and lowlands of Pennsylvania, not to exclude Mexicans from Texas who could barely speak English? Talk about a brown America. 

     If a kid volunteered for the military, his legal status meant nothing. Hell, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands weren’t even states, and we drafted their kids, in droves. All of the guys who served, from the hills of West Viginia to fields of Delano, California, all the way to the Dominican Republic, and up to New England, shed their blood, and, sometimes, gave their lives in Vietnam. Nobody questioned their immigrant status. 

     It wasn’t an anomaly. When I talked to my dad about it, kind of jokingly, about all the characters I met in the army, he said it was the same during his time in the service during WWII, in the 1940s. He said he met guys from everywhere, and of all colors and ethnicities. Today, I assume, its ditto for the guys and women who fought our wars in the Middle East. This is the real America, but you’d never know it listening to politicians who rail about the browning of American and the changing culture. What they bank on are voters who haven't seen the "real" America outside their towns and communities.

     We’ve always been "brown," from the time Dutch and English pilgrims meandered about the shores of Plymouth, trading with the native people, who numbered in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, considering all the land that would one day be called the United States. If not for the Iroquois Confederacy, the white strangers from far shores would not have lasted a winter here. Benjamin Franklin saw it. In an essay opening with, "Savages we call them..." tried educating early Americans about the sophisticated culture the natives practiced.

     So, if you’ve never left your neighborhood and travelled the country, you’d never know it. Sure, there are some parts of the country that are more homogenous, “all one color,” maybe like an Amish town in Ohio, not a lot of color there, but drive down through the Rio Grande Valley, it’s still homogenous, but the dominant people are Mexicans, not unlike Pine Ridge, in South Dakota, all Lakota, or towns in Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee, nearly all black, even parts of California’s Orange County, Vietnamese, and L.A.’s Monterrey Park, Chinese and Korean. Put them all together, that’s a lot of color. 

     Maybe that’s why New York, L.A., Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco are such strange places to many outsiders when they first migrate to these cities, where the “browning of America” happens, and often the financial and cultural hubs of the nation, where the newest ideas bloom, from music to technology. Who would think of putting African percussion to American jazz but a Cuban conguero sitting in with Tommy Dorsey or Louis Armstrong? Put together a German accordion, Spanish guitars, electrified by Les Paul and Leo Fender, and toss in a few country voices, and you’ve got the Texas Tornadoes. 

     The thing is we’re so segregated into our own communities, we don’t consider America has always been a brown country. That makes it easy for politicians to spread lies, and I’m not just talking about an opportunist like Trump, who has taken the propaganda to new, and vile heights. Many of them do it, from both parties, and have always done it, pit our immigrant past with our immigrant future. 

     For me, the more I read, and the more I travelled, the more I saw it. America never was all “white,” like many would have us believe, which brings me back to JFK. I recall, after his assassination, Malcolm X made the comment, regarding the president’s death, “The chickens have come home to roost.” If Malcolm wasn’t an outcast before the statement, he sure was after it, in many circles, but I was intrigued. I didn’t get it. What did it mean? 

     Some might interpret it as “You reap what you sew.” Then, that’s like saying, JFK deserved what he got. How could that be? Is that what Malcolm meant, or was his comment more nuanced, open to interpretation? Maybe it wasn’t really about JFK, at all. Maybe it was more about what he represented. If JFK was president, then, didn’t he represent our nation, just like Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and all the other presidents? Was Malcolm saying more, something deeper, about the U.S., and not even talking about one man? Was he talking in symbols? 

     I thought back on Smedley Butler’s statement, “War is a racket.” Butler, a Marine general, won two medals of honor, wrote a memoir pretty much stating that, as a Marine, he was a “hitman” for U.S. business interests around the world, participating in the invasions of weaker nations, terrorizing and killing innocent people, all for the purpose of stealing their resources for our growing country. 

     Starting in Cuba, in 1892, across to the Philippines, to China, and back to Mexico, around 1914, where he led the invasion of Veracruz, and since Mexico didn’t have much of an army, his Marines slaughtered hundreds of innocent Mexicans, old men, women, and children who took up whatever made a good weapon to help fight off Butler’s Marines, all justified under the banner of the U.S., to keep Mexico’s ports open to American trade. Butler believed that was a medal he didn’t’ deserve. 

     Military conquest isn’t my point here. Countries have been invading and conquering other nations since the beginning of time, but what historians began to notice was that after any conquest, the decimated country is left with hungry people, often left without homes and livelihoods. What do they do? Where do they go? Most, get on boats or take to the road and migrate as refugees to the conquering countries. 

     It happened in Britain and France, colonialists to many subjects throughout Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Since the late 1800s and into the 1900s, even, today, in the 21st century, whether through direct invasion or proxy wars planned by agencies in our government, Butler’s arguments still seem to be hold true, “War is a racket.” 

     After years of wars in the Philippines and Latin America, immigrants from those countries flooded into the U.S. During the Mexican Revolution of 1910, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans left their homes and settled in the U.S. Even though, the U.S. didn’t fight in the war, directly, many of its policies towards Mexico helped initiate the war. American mining interests poured money into the federalist government, led by Porfirio Diaz, while U.S. bankers supported the rebel forces of Francisco Madero, offering each side money and weapons. Without this support, who knows whether the war would have ever taken place. Maybe those immigrants, like my own grandparents, refugees of the revolution, would have stayed home, where they said they were always happiest. 

     After our military exploits into Santo Domingo, Dominicans began heading here in droves. I heard one U.S. sportswriter explain to his American readers: the reason so many Dominicans, Cubans, and other Latin Americans fill the ranks of major league baseball today is because they picked up the bats, balls, and gloves the U.S. marines left behind after they invaded and occupied those countries. 

     Our support of wars, or our participation of coups, in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala didn’t only destroy economies but ruin farmers, it created multitudes of refugees. Where do those people go? They come here, crossing treacherous jungles, like the Darien Pass. 

     After our wars in Southeast Asia, Vietnamese and Hmong came here as “boat people,” to escape communism. Iranians arrived here by the thousands after we assisted in overthrowing the Shah in Iran. In 1990’s Mexico, Clinton pushed through his NAFTA plan, which helped U.S. corporations more than it helped Mexican farmers. A steady stream of Mexicans began heading north to the U.S. border once their farms couldn’t complete with U.S. agriculture. They’re still coming. Now that Gaza and the West Bank are pretty much being flattened, where will the Palestinian refugees flee when they find their homes no longer exist? If history holds true, most will come here to join their relatives who fled, years earlier, during the 1980s Israeli-Arab wars. Have the chickens come home to roost?

     My point isn’t to say any of these wars is right or wrong. I will keep that to myself, but I am saying, our wars have consequences, and they leave behind refugees who need to survive. Track the route of refugees and where they migrate during and after ours wars abroad, you’ll find many come to the U.S. It’s been that way through the last hundred and fifty years. Once here, immigrants, legal or otherwise, spend their lives working in the worst, most dangerous, low-paying jobs. 

     Some Americans demonize them or use them as political pawns. Who knows how many undocumented immigrants were buried after the covid pandemic, when they worked, often without proper protection, as we hid away safely in our homes. At the time, we called them, “essential workers,” nice name, when we needed them. Afterward, they became "immigrants" again, "rapists and murderers", their heads on the chopping block as meat for politicians' rhetorical rants, a convenient place to place blame for all the corruption and poor decisions made in Washington, in both parties. 

     So, I wonder, when Malcolm X claimed, after JFK’s death, that the chickens have come home to roost, did he blame the president’s death on our country’s political machinations, sinister plans abroad to overthrow democratically elected governments, unjust wars against weaker nations, or covert operations that go way beyond what any of us can ever imagine? My guess is if we put an end to these policies, immigrants might just stay home, where most of them say they prefer, instead of traveling hundreds of miles, only to sit on a border not knowing whether they will even be allowed to enter the promised land.