by Agustin Lao-Montes

Center for Ethnic Studies

Borough of Manhatta Community College, City University

of New York

   In his testimonial book A Puerto Rican in New York,  Afro-Boricua socialist activist Jesus Colon remembers  a 1930 meeting of cigar-makers where they made fun of an anglo newspaper's definition of the group as "Latin".  Of course, that was before the Hollywood musicals of the inter-war period launched the slogan that "All Latins are from Manhattan", but the working-class Cubans and Puerto Ricans of his circle identified a

classicist connotation in a nomenclature which clashed with their anarcho-syndicalist sensibilities.  For us today, the idea of a latino/a identity in New York appeals more to the common sense.  However, in this presentation, I will try to move our analysis of "Latin New York", beyond this common sense.  For this, I will divide the presentation in three

parts.  First,  I will postulate some key theoretical questions and historical analyses,  then,  I will introduced a discussion of the production of latinidad in New York City, and to close,  I will suggest some political questions and scenarios.  Because of time contraints, I will be brief,  schematic, and hopely provocative.

       The problematics of Latin American/Latino identity should be traced back at least to the emergence of the capitalist world-system in the Eurasian long sixteenth century,  marking the rise of the west,  and the invention of the Americas.   As  Enrique Dussel and Anibal Quijano had argued,  this conjuncture of European conquest and capitalist expansion, constitutes the matrimony between modernity and coloniality.  America became the new world,  the future of the West,  and a key laboratory for modern notions of identity.  Thus,  modern racial and cultural classifications (like Black, Mulata, Mestizo, Indio, White),  and the very categories of the modern self (race, nationality, ethnicity,  gender, sexuality) were coined in the colonial encounter betrween Europe and the others.  As we know,  the peoples who now are classified as Amerindians composed a vast array of difference at the moment of the conquest,  and the peoples who now belong to the African continent and diaspora were perhaps even more diverse before the imposition of the institution of chattel slavery.   Hence,  it is  in the relationship between the subjugation of diverse forms of labor to capital ,  to the classification of  non-european peoples as "lesser races",  that we can find the first genealogy of the identities we are analyzing.  The global vocation of capital,  combined with the universalistic pretensions of the West,  in an endless search for labor and markets to exploit,  and peoples and places to "civilize" and dominate.  This entailed an unprecedented process of classifying, measuring,  naming, and mapping the world, whose occidentalist

cartographies are still largely with us.

       Until the 18C, what today is Latin America and the Caribbean was known as "Las Indias Occidentales"  or the West Indies.  Creole elites created the idea of "Hispanoamerica" to differentiate themselves from the "peninsulares".  The precarious processes of national-formation which followed the independence wars were founded in nationalist ideologies which combined a regional ideal of pan-national unity (La Patria Grande),  with the national organizations of wealth and power (La Patria Chica).  In these

national and regional spatial organization of domination and exploitation, colonial hierarchies based on the exclusion of subaltern Amerindian and black masses persisted intact.  Nationalist discourses, though based on ideologies of alleged racial democracy,  helped to hide racial and sexual economies of domination and exploitation.  American nations, which as Ben Anderson acurately observes, were the first modern nations,  reproduced inequalities of race, class,  gender,  and sexuality in their nationalist imaginaries which represented the emerging elites as the heirs of the west, and in the huge gaps of income, power, and recognition between the westernized ruling sectors and the subaltern classes.

       The idea of Latin America itself,  is attributed to a Frenchman in the conjuncture of the Napoleonic invasion of Mexico in the 1860s.  This notion of Latin America is coined in the context  of the competition with the pan-Americanism of the emerging U.S. empire as articulated in the 1823 Monroe Doctrine: "America for the Americans".  The division of the Americas between the "colossus of the north" and the "neighbors in the South" will

be a keystone in the rise of Pax Americana with the incorporation of half of Mexico in 1848,  and the "winning" of Puerto Rico and Cuban in the Spanish-Cuban-American war of 1898.   This marks the opening of a contact zone of unequal transits and flows of peoples, capitals, and bullets between Uncle Sam's Heart of Whiteness and the so-called Caribbean backyard.  Also,  a larger field of empire began to be constructed between

North and South,  characterized not only by capitalist and inter-state competition,  but also by conteding occidentalist and modern projects as exemplified in the contrast between Rodo's idea of America Latina as the inheritor of the sublime spirit of Greco-European classicism,  and Teddy Rossevelt's notion of the U.S. as having the Manifest Destiny of implanting virile civilization in the allegedly uncivilized "lesser races" of the

South.

       Since the mid 19C,  New York City had been an epicenter of this developing regional space, which after 1898 became a historical "contact zone",  a multidimensional borderland where Puerto Rican and Cuban colonial subjects will confront the conditions of coloniality both in the U.S. mainland and the antillean islands.  Indeed,  New York as both place of dwelling and imaginary space of self and otherness,  is a primary referent

in the very constitution of narratives of Latin-American-ess. Revolutionary leader and anti-colonial intellectual Jose Marti,   produced his influential distinction between "our mestizo America" and the U.S. "the other America" , while living in New York,  a city for which he felt an ambiguity,  of being seduced by the technological wonders of its modernity (like the Brooklyn Bridge), at the same time that repulsed by  feelings of

alienation, and romantic nationalist longings for organic community and nature.  Thus,  since the 19C,  New York became an important site for the production of "Latin American identities".

       After 1898,  New York became the second most  populous city in the world.  It became the prime world city of immigration, a leading international financial center, and the largest manufacturing enclave in the North American Continent.  The legendary city of the skycrapers, came to embody in its built environment,  the cityspaces of empire.  The multiple bridges and tunels facilitated a formidable system of domestic and international transportation and communication, which consolidated New York as the main U.S. capitalist city,  at the same time that converted it in a paradigmatic text of modern urban landscape.  As Walter Benjamin called Paris the "capital of the 19 Century",  New York can be named the capital of the 20th Century.  As such, it became a magnet  for all sort of migrations (political, sexual,  cultural, tourist) from the south.

Colonial labor migrations of Cuban and Puerto Ricans where the principal ones.  When Jesus Colon organized the cigar-makers as part of his activity in the Communist Party of the Popular Front,  the Liga Puertorriquena e Hispana had already proven their leadership.  The struggles against discrimination  dramatized in the Harlem Riots of 1937,  not only exemplify the prominece of Puerto Rican-ess, but also demonstrate an oppositional political meaning of that particular notion of "lo hispano".

        As the U.S. became the hegemon of the capitalist world-economy, close to a million Puerto Ricans moved to New York City,  the first massive air migration in modern history.  This great Puerto Rican migration to the metropole in the 1940s and 50s,  converged with the solidification of  New York as an imperial city.  Imperial elites an institutions housed in New York, like the Council on Foreign Relations and U.S. Multinational Corporations,  were certainly among the most influential actors in local,

national, and global affairs.  At that point,  New York based cultural industries and institutions, like Broadway Theaters, the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, the "New York Intellectuals",  Modern Dance Companies, and a highly developed Museum and Performance System, gained enough symbolic capital to compete in the marketplace for high culture of the first tier system of  western world cities.  Entertainament through show bussiness and mass mediated culture, the cultural commodity of the great American city,  was New York's comparative adavantage.  New York became the main locus for the production of U.S. dominant ideologies, as well as a key center of imperial political and economic planning.

       Thus, the rise of New York as an imperial core city,  not accidentally coincided with the emergence of Puerto Ricans as  key representatives of the new urban threat,  dangerous dwellers of the deep darkness,  located in the inner heart of the changing city.  The same neo-colonial order of things that championed development discourse as a means to re-energize western modes of domination,  advocated urban renewal as vehicle of progress in  cities.  The discourse of the ghetto, and the very idea of the slum, matured in that period.  El Barrio, or Spanish Harlem, was made into a key signifier of the ghetto, both in the booming social sciences,  as well as in governmental and mass mediated knowledges. Parsonian theories of deviance and urban ethnographies,  converged with

fictional and journalistic writing,  and with film,  in naturalized representations of Puerto Ricans as filthy, lazy, oversexed, unintelligent, uncivilized, and the like.   A colonial dynamics of insecurity, hardship, and displacement,  came to be exercised in the oscillation between segregation and gentrification, between inhabiting a racialized space of colonial otherness, and being legal aliens in the promised land.  As the ideology of urban decay and the imagery of the city as an unruly place populated by dangerous others progressed, a political rationality of policing increasingly became common sense within the ruling and middle strata.

       However,  the cultures of the city's subalterns created alternate symbolic economies and competing narratives of self and community.   In the 1950s the making of the barrios unleashed the underworlds of violence, drugs, and discrimination chronicled in Piri Thomas novel Down these Means Streets,   at the same time that  it served as a stage for the production of solidarities,  popular cultures, and social movements.  A significant

trait  is the common historical locations of Black-Americans and Puerto Ricans in terms of jobs, residence,  and racial subordination.  This corresponds to common cultural creations such as the Do-Woop in the 1950s up to Hip-Hop culture since the 1970s.  This also allow us to understand the emergence of political coalitions of a different nature such as: the late 60s revolutionary nationalism of the Black Panthers and Young Lords, the creation of Departments of Black and Puerto Rican Studies in the City University of New York,  and organization of a New York State Black and Puerto Rican Legislative Caucus in Albany.  The 50s was also the era of the Mambo,  a Cuban musical genre that became a dance style in New York from where it was internationalized through the cultural industries (music, film,  radio, show-bussiness,  ballroom dancing and performance).  The very notion of a "Latin American popular culture",  corresponds to the emergence of transnational cultural industries (like radio) with publics in different places identifying with genres like tango and bolero,  which are at once national, regional (Latin American) and transnational (Latino/a).  In New York,  the mambo was a common denominator for what Hollywood was calling "Latins from Manhattan" (primarily Cubans and Puerto Ricans),  and a medium for taking "Latin Culture" to the centerstage of citylife.  The Palladium dancehall,  the home of the mambo,  became a multiracial space of

transculturation through the pleasures of style and the erotics of dance.

       The idea of a U.S. Latino identity is very much related to the new social movements of the 1960s.  In the 1960s,  a vernacular anti-colonial politics was born out of the trenches of the U.S. inner city.  In the southwest,  the term Chicano was coined by Mexican-American youth movements to signify a politicized identity,  making claims for social justice and cultural autonomy.  Their slogan "Viva la Raza" was translated by salsa orchestras into "La Raza Latina".  In Chicago and New York,  a Puerto Rican youth organization called The Young Lords,  defended "Latino unity" between Chicanos and Puerto Ricans,  as part of a coalitional strategy of "conquered peoples" against world capitalism and U.S. imperialism.  The Young Lords raised the flag of "latinidad" in the context of the struggle for the decolonization of the ghettos and in favor of Puerto Rican

independence.  In this particular universe of discourse,  "latino" stood for a defense of our "Afro-Indio" heritage, against Eurocentric racist definitions of identity such as the Hispanophilic officialdom in Romance Language Departments, and Latin American elite racisms.

       The demographic growth and diversification of people of Latin American and Caribbean descent in New York City, which had been in crescendo since the late 1960s,  corresponds to the process of globalization characterized by increasing interpenetration and unequal flows of capitals,  commodities,  communications,  movements, ideas, and

peoples.  As a world city,  New York became increasingly "caribbenized" and "latinized" with diverse migrations, and with the concomittant establishment of multiple connections with Latin America and the Caribbean. In this context,  the production of  "latino"  and "hispanic" identities, arise from different institutional sources,   and articulate distinctive

narratives of "latinidad" and "hispanidad",  associated with contending ideological projects and political agendas.  The governmental manufacturing of the notion of the "hispanic" as a census category was criticized by many as an attempt to pigeon-hole an ocean of differences (ethnic, national, racial, local),  but embraced by others as an opportunity to define political constituencies for state bureacrats and to justify funding.

Labels such as "latino" and "hispanic" also began to serve as identifiers of "markets" and "clienteles" for the selling of products,  the election of politicians,  and the development of social service bureacracies.  The aesthetization of ethnicity and the commodification of culture,  in the local culture industries of New York,  re-converted "Patria" in the 1990s

(the name of Marti's magazine) into a yuppie restaurant, "the home of the nuevo latino".  Media mediations in the production of a "latino" and "hispanic" identity,  weaved transnational connections,  as exemplified in Univision's message for millions of people throughout the hemisphere " Para estar al tanto del acontecer mundial,  los hispanos sintonizan univision" (To be aware of what happens in the world, Hispanics tune the Univision Channel).  Univision announcer Jorge Ramos' description of Bill Clinton's town meeting transmitted via satellite from Argentina  to all the spanish-speaking world, as an example of "democracy in the global village", where "Latinidad" and "Hispanidad" was represented by clean-cut, lily-white middle-class young Latino/a professionals from different locales in the U.S. and Latin America,  exemplifies the match between imperial multiculturalism and corporate latinamericanism.

           The category  "latino" has several sources and narratives,  and can invoke different ideological articulations,  but is important to observe that  one of its main referents is the replication of the Latin American civilizational and racial other of the U.S.,  inside the national territory of empire.  The construction of latinidad, as a juxtaposition and

Amalgamation of national, racial, and ethnic definitions,  expresses the overlapping, unstable, and ambiguous character of these categories,  at the same time that it indicates the translocal/transnational character of the subjects in question.

       For those dwelling in the lowest echelons of the social ladder, latinidad can refer to a common experience of marginal labor,  ghettoized residence,  discrimination, bad schooling and health services,  and police abuse.  Thus,  for subaltern sectors,  latinidad can be one of the names of a racialized form of otherness,  for instance in their engagements with the criminal justice complex,  as well as with the central spaces  and dominat institutions of the white city, where they just visit as janitors, messengers, domestic workers, or perhaps as as burglars.  This lived experience frames a developing cosnsciousness of latinidad within subaltern sectors as a racialized form of identity and difference.  Of course, the moral economy of the inner-city is characterized by a complex and contradictory dialectic between solidarity and self-violence,  pan-ethnic sharing and nationalistic conflict. These cultural sensibilities can translate into social movements like the one organized by families of those brutalized and murdered by the police,  politicized illegalities (like the Latin Kings, one of the main targets of policing in New York),  and an infinity of forms of resistance from youth seizure of central night space in the village, to acting-out and having an attitude.

        The post-industrial city left more than 40% of African-americans and Puerto Ricans males out of formal employment,  and thousands of  women of color stigmatized as welfare queens. The discourse of the underclass localize racialized tropes of vagrancy and criminality in the abject space of the ghetto. Systematic marginalization from work,  and the experiencing of  educational and social welfare institutions as disciplinary agencies, correspond to a govermental rationality largely based on taming and policing subaltern classes.  In this deeply socially split and hyper-racialized public space,  the imagery of risk haunts the political unconscious, and fear becomes  a generalized structure of feeling.  What Mike Davis describes as the "fortress city" becomes internalized as common sense.

       For many of the racialized subaltern subjects who inhabit criminalized locations,  the urban regime guided by  political rationalities of police and security,  translates into a daily experience of racial violence,  incarceration,  police brutality, and racialized sexual harassment.  The long-term experience, and the currrent exacerbation of the physical abuse and murder by the New York City Police Department of people of Hispanic Caribbean and Latin American descent (mostly Domincan and Puerto Rican),  reveals the most dramatic expressions of the urban regime of class and racial domination.   The emergence of social movements for racial justice and against police brutality who define themselves as "latino" (like the Latino Coalition for Racial Justice and Police Plaza

Mothers),  indicates the grounding of this notion of latinidad in the particular contexts of the urban regime of racial governmentality,  at the same time that it invites us to think about the relationship between this articulation of "latino identity",  and other sources, narratives, and domains of that category of identification.

    In the present period of globalization in which the geographies of imperial domination had been disseminated,  de/reterritorialized,  and dispersed,  world cities become key centers of imperial domination, and because of this,  also spaces  where emerging political rationalities and oppositional movements take place.  Cities become places where particular claims of citizenship are made, as well as distinct definitions of belonging and community.   In New York,  diasporic social and political movements demonstrate against the military crushing of the general strike in the Dominican Republic,  at the same time that  they organize a vigil to protest the killing of Manuel Mayi by the New York City Police Department, and mobilize undocumented immigrants to vote in the school board election. Transnational communities of Mixtecs Amerindians organize a Benito Juarez Society for mutual aid and self-help in New York and Oaxaca,  at the same time that Honduran, Guatemalan,  and Belizean Black Caribs (Garifuna) organize a black movement in Central America and the Bronx.  Thus, in spite of the relatively fragmented, and dispersed character of these socialities, they are significant agencies in the contestation of power both in the urban regime, as well as in other national and local spaces.  These sort of actors diversify the constituencies and cultures of the cities, challenging dominant narratives of citizenship of the nation and of the city,  decentering the politics of race, and pointing toward a re-definition of American-ess.

          However,  I propose that for this political scenario to advance beyond a hegemonic liberal-corporate multiculturalism,  it will have to develop strategies for the decolonization of power.  This involves questions of social justice and radical democracy.   The political matrimony of  what Nancy Fraser  will call "the politics of justice" and the "politics of difference" correspond to the contestation of the two axes of the coloniality of power: capitalism and western domination.  The articulation of distinct but entangled spheres of power,  and the relational nature of domination and exploitation,  can provide the onto-historical gounding for the possibility of a coalitional politics. The key question is how to rethink decolonization beyond nationalism or

abstract universalism,  at the same time that we can conceive and enact  a politics of global reach grounded on the particularities of location.

             Chicana Feminists frame the decolonization of the social in terms of what they call "the politics of location", which refers to a complex relationality of genders, sexualities, races, classes, etc., within multiple and contradictory  struggles against domination and exploitation.  In Foucault's terms this involves the search of power without domination.  From the standpoint of coloniality, this means a deconstruction of Modern/Colonial master categories of the Self (Nation, Race, Ethnicity,  Gender, Sexuality) and a creative engagement with an open process of transforming subjectivites and decolonizing inter-subjective life-worlds.  In the same note, I will like to finish with a quote from Anibal Quijano:

"  I think that this separation  [between the debate on identity in Latin America today and the struggle since the sixties to change our reality is a split that] does not lead anywhere, it's a dead end.  The premise is that there is an identity that we have to discover or recognize.  Identity,  we should rememeber, is a process, a project, it's a historical movement.  And I consider that, in this sense, it isn't in any way possible to define an identity because no utopia of identity has any future if the utopia of liberation is detached from it.  I think that...this specific crossroads between the utopia of identity and the utopia of liberation...Is truly. The legacy of all societies that have been constituted ...in relation to colonial domination."