Nueva York - Diaspora City: U.S. Latinos Between and Beyond

...Mariposa thus gives voice to the sentiments of many young Puerto Ricans, and of many Latinos in general, in their defiance of a territorially and socially confined understanding of cultural belonging...

...Today's global conditions impel us beyond these tidy, nationally constricted views of cultural identity, which might well be referred to as "consumer ethnicities...

...But those passing crazes and that subliminal sense of otherness have become in the present generation a veritable saturation of the pop public sphere, the "Latin" way attaining to a ubiquity and 46NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 46 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICASREPORT ON RACE AND IDENTITY prominence that has converted it into an active shaper of contemporary tastes and trends...

...Neglected, rejected, oppressed and depressed From banana boats to tenements Street gangs to regiments...

...society is fully conditioned by legacies of conquest and colonization, with, on the other hand, immigrant and exile nationalities of relatively recent arrival from varied national homelands in Latin America...

...What the hegemonic, consumer version of Latino ethnicity obscures is that many Latinos are black, especially according to the codes operative in the United States...

...19-21...

...For the fact is that in many inner-city situations there is no such difference and it is not possible to "tell them apart...

...I ain't nooooo different than a Nigger...

...And what is more, while this version tends to racialize Latinos toward whiteness, much in tune with the racist baggage of Latin American and Caribbean home cultures, on the streets and in the dominant social institutions "brown" is close enough to black to be suspect...

...Indeed, in the case of Puerto Ricans this perspective entails not only an emphasis on Afro-Boricua heritages but, because of the decades-long experience of close interaction with African-Americans in New York, an identification and solidarity with American blacks perhaps unmatched by any other group in the history of the "nation of immigrants...

...In the case of U.S...

...Nueva York, New York magazine's momentary interlude as a Latino-focused publication, dwarfs the cultural horizons of Latino experience by postulating its categorical differentiation from blackness, and also by disengaging Latino culture in the United States from its moorings in Latin American and Caribbean realities...

...The "Latin explosion" receiving so much coverage in the United States today, the hyperboles and hypes generated by "la vida loca," is but one index of a pervasive change in human affairs, leaving all of us asking, with Mariposa, "what does it mean to live in between...

...On the contrary, in her signature poem, "Ode to the DiaspoRican," she signals her "pelo vivo" (wild hair) and her "manos triguelias" (dark hands) as evidence of her national identity, and rails against those who would deny it: Some people say that I am not the real thing Boricua, that is cuz I wasn't born on the enchanted island cuz I was born on the mainland...

...No naci en Puerto Rico," she exclaims in the poem's refrain, "Puerto Rico naci6 en mi...

...Cultural expression in all areas-from language and music to literature and the visual arts-typically illustrate fusions and crossovers, mutual fascinations and emulations, that have resulted in much of what we identify, for example, in the field of popular music, as jazz, rock and roll and hip-hop...

...Vol XXXV, No 6 MAY/JUNE 2002 49 Nueva York "1...

...One hundred years after the prophetic ruminations of Jos6 Marti about the contours of "nuestra America," we are now in a position to conceptualize "Am6rica" itself in its world context, and the multiple lines of an "American" identity as coordinates of radical transnational remappings...

...Before you knew it, all New Yorkers, and all America, would be "living la vida loca" on the streets of Nueva York...

...Back in 1999, New York magazine was renamed Nueva York, at least for the week of September 6. The Spanish word on the issue was an eyecatcher for readers of the popular weekly, and attested to the currency of things, and words, "Latin" among the contemporary public in the United States...

...The swelling influx of Dominicans, Mexicans, Colombians, Ecuadoreans and numerous other Latin American nationalities has meant that "Latin New York," for decades synonymous with Puerto Rican, has become pan-ethnic, to the point that Puerto Ricans, while still the most numerous group, have come to comprise less than half the aggregate...

...But the idea of the pan-Latino necessarily implies the trans-Latino, the engagement of U.S.-based Latinos in the composition of cultural and political diasporas of regional and global proportions...

...These marked differences are one reason why Dominican writer Junot Dfaz is skeptical about any and Vol XXXV, No 6 May/June 2002 47 47 Vol XXXV, No 6 May/June 2002REPORT ON RACE AND IDENTITY Nuyorican poet Mariposa...

...Spic...

...The spectacular success stories of the few serve only to mask the ongoing reality of racism, economic misery and political disenfranchisement endured by most Latinos, who moved northward from their homelands only because of persistent inequalities at global and regional levels...

...Voices of Change," New York Magazine, September 6, 1999, p. 29...

...policies and practices on the life circumstances in Latin America and the Caribbean, propel more and more Latinos across the hemispheric divide, and resonate loudly in the everyday lives of all Latinos...

...The fear of an "alien nation"-the title of a xenophobic book on immigration-veils but thinly an even deeper phobia, the fear of a non-white majority...

...Latinos who are neither primarily Spanish-speaking nor of the Catholic faith...

...Typically, awe and fascination mingle with a sense of foreboding, an alarmism over the imminent threat Latinos are perceived to present to the presumed unity of American culture and to an unhampered control over the country's destiny...

...His latest book is From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity (2000...

...The rampant "racial profiling" and waves of police brutality are directed against both African-American and Latino victims, with no color distinctions of this kind playing a role...

...But beyond that, it is certainly a spurious sociological exercise to conjoin in one unit of discourse Puerto Ricans and Mexican Americans on the one hand, whose position in U.S...

...Spic...

...In our own times, Latino youth find themselves in tight league with young African-Americans in forging the constantly shifting currents of hip-hop and other expressive styles...

...The interdependence of old and new "homes," the constant bearing of U.S...

...This article was originally written for the catalog of the exhibition "Territorios Ausentes" (Absent Territories), Casa de Ambrica Museum in Madrid, January 2000...

...Wat is seldom mentioned in the celebrations of Latino identity is the most consequential V of the "erasures" involved in pan-ethnic nam- ing-the relation of Latinos to blackness, and to African-Americans in particular...

...Most obviously, they take for granted the sociological equivalence of the various "minority" groups, in this case Latinos and African-Americans, as though a diverse set of immigrant and colonially conquered populations occupy the same historical position, and constitute the same kind of collective association, as a group unified, within the United States, on the basis of their common African ancestry and history of enslavement...

...Yet social experience tells us otherwise...

...market...

...In a similar vein, the spoken word artist "Mariposa" (Maria FernAndez) objects to being called a "Latina writer," as present-day literary marketing would group her, reminding her audience that "I myself feel more in common with my sistahs [African-American women writers] than with, say, Chicana poets like Sandra Cisneros or Lorna Dee Cervantes...

...Yet Mariposa does not consider this intense affiliation with African-Americans to stand in any conflict with her Puerto Rican background...

...society...

...popular culture at a pitch unprecedented in the protracted history of that continental seduction...

...Not only are the featured Latino celebrities treated as interchangeable in their collective background, but in the entire issue no mention is made of Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic or Colombia except as potential extensions of the U.S...

...explain "why Jennifer Lopez, Puerto Rican Day parade marshal, girlfriend (maybe) of Puffy Combs, inspired by Selena, aspiring to be Barbra Streisand, and owner of America's most famous backside, might be the celebrity of the future...

...Such calculations, however, beg more questions that they answer when it comes to assessing the cultural and political relations that prevail in contemporary society...

...l The most obvious of these erasures for Diaz, aside from the internal differentiation among the varied "Latino" groups, is the reality of racism-being called a "spic" and reacting to that denigrating denomination...

...Spic...

...Visibility is of course not new to the "Latin look" in American pop culturethink of Carmen Miranda, Ricardo Montalbdn or Desi Arnaz--nor is the Latin "flavor," the salsa y sabor, a new ingredient in the proverbial melting pot, be it musical, sexual or culinary...

...This Latino "double consciousness" among Puerto Ricans and other Caribbeans goes back generations, in intellectual life to the contributions of Puerto Rican collector and bibliophile Arturo Alfonso Schomburg during the Harlem Renaissance, in music history at least to the 1940s with the beginnings of Latin jazz, and in literature to the writings of Jestis Col6n in the 1950s and Piri Thomas in his 1967 novel, Down These Mean Streets...

...But beyond those direct geopolitical ties, awakened cultural heritages and congruencies also engage Latinos in more abstract but no less pronounced diasporic affiliations, notably transnational indigenous and "Black Atlantic" trajectories of identity formation...

...And rare is the Latino kid who hasn't been called a spic...

...The theme of Nueva York, after all, was "The Latin Explosion," those words emblazoned in bold yellow and white lettering across the half-exposed mid-section of Jennifer Lopez...

...Even the obvious commonalities like language and religion, for example, turn out to be deceptive at best in light of the millions of U.S...

...And this without mention of the next sleeping giant: The "brown peril" is soon to be eclipsed by another "yellow peril," as Asian-Americans are poised to outnumber both blacks and Hispanics by mid-century...

...cuz my playground was a concrete jungle cuz my Rio Grande de Loiza was the Bronx River cuz my Fajardo was City Island my Luquillo, Orchard Beach and summer nights were filled with city noises instead of coquis and Puerto Rico was just some paradise that we only saw in picture What does it mean to live in between...

...I'm a Nigger...

...Visibility, though, can do as much to obscure as to illuminate, particularly when it remains so preponderantly concentrated in the image making of the commercial culture...

...Of course African-Americans, like all other groups, have long differed along class, gender, color, regional and other lines, but the seams in the Latino patchwork stand out as soon as we go beyond the media hype and wishful census counts and undertake comparative analysis of any rigor...

...As these instances show, present-day social identities press simultaneously in varied directions, linking individuals and groups along lines that would appear mutually exclusive according to their representation in commercially and ideologically oriented media...

...Place of birth and immediate lived experience are not wholly definitive of cultural identification, which in this view has more to do with political and social experience, and with personally chosen ascription...

...The Nuyorican actress, singer and pop idol was surely "Miss Nueva York"-and remains so two and a half years later: Her shapely body, a large crucifix dangling suggestively above her conspicuous cleavage, provided the cover image, and the feature article, entitled "La Vida Lopez" (calling Ricky Martin to mind), set out to Juan Flores is professor in the Department of Black and Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College and in the Sociology Program at the CUNY Graduate Center...

...3 The "new Nueva York" is rich with these innovative cultural possibilities, and as the newfound home of so many people from so many Latin American countries it now serves as a seminal ground for the rethinking and reimagining of America...

...By 1999, then, it was high time that New York become Nueva York, and that its burgeoning population of Spanish-language background be given its day in the glitz...

...Spic...

...But the Latino avalanche has given birth to the "sleeping giant," a demographic and cultural monster whose immense commercial and electoral potential has only begun to be tapped and who, if roused, could well upset some of the delicate balances necessary to the prolongation of the "American Century...

...What is more, there is no discussion of the massive migrations from those home countries, nor of the historical relations with the United States which have generated modem migratory movements, as the transnational origin and setting for the very presence and position of Latinos in U.S...

...Hardly a week passes without still another media special, and hardly an area of entertainment and public life-sports, music, movies and televison, advertising, fashion, food-is by now untouched by an emphatic Hispanic presence...

...In Nueva York in particular, where the prevalent Latino presence and sensibility remains Caribbean, this counter-position to blackness is often disconcerting at best, and among many Puerto Rican and Dominican youth the response has been to reaffirm a sense of belonging to an African diaspora...

...3. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993...

...Collectively, and as a reflex of broader social experiences, this demographic reality and this conjoined cultural history put the lie to any wedge driven between Latino and black life and representation...

...While the Latino con- cept does generally indicate otherness, "people of color" and non-white, the history of social categoriza- tion has selectively equivocated on the issue, and many media representations allow for, or foster, a sense of compatibility with whiteness...

...In a frequently cited poem, "NiggerReecan Blues," the young Nuyorican writer Willie PerNACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 48REPORT ON RACE AND IDENTITY domo addresses once again the interracial dilemmas first articulated by Piri Thomas 30 years earlier, and concludes with the dramatic lines: 2 I'm a Spic...

...Differences along the lines of economic class and educational and entrepeneurial capital are striking, as are those having to do with issues of race and national cultures...

...To mollify the fears of an invasion from south of the border is the consolation that at least their presence does not involve dealing with more souls of more black folk...

...The unspoken agenda of the new Latino visibility, and of the imminent surpassing of African-Americans as the largest minority, is the ascendancy of a non-black minority...

...Since the publication of Nueva York, Latino fever has been gripping U.S...

...The Latino community is if anything a process rather than a circumscribed social entity, and its formation entails complex and often converging interactions with other, purportedly "non-Latino" groups such as African-Americans and American Indians...

...2. Willie Perdomo, Where a Nickel Costs a Dime (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), pp...

...An integral component of this nervous prognosis, repeated with mantra-like predictability when public discussion turns to the "browning of America," is the identification of Latinos as the counagenda of the new :he ascendancy of a k try's "fastest growing minority," the group whose numbers are on pace to exceed that of African-Americans as early as the end of the first minority, decade of this new millennium...

...No different than a Nigger...

...Latinos, celebrity status and ceremonial fanfare is clearly one of those mirages, effectively serving to camouflage the structured inequality and domination which accounts for their diasporic reality in the first place, and deflecting public attention from the decidedly unceremonious and unenviable social status of the majority of Latino peoples...

...the Latino face shown for broad public consumption, whether it is Daisy Fuentes, Keith Hernandez or Chita Rivera, tends to be decidedly from the lighter end of the spectrum...

...Underlying this spectacular cultural ascendancy are of course major demographic and economic changes, which have resulted in the incremental growth and enormous diversification of the Latino population in the United States, such that nearly all the Latin The unspoken a! American and Caribbean Latino visibility is t countries are now present in substantial numbers in non-blacl many settings, especially in the global cities of Los Angeles, Miami and New York...

...Discrimination in educational opportunities and in the criminal justice system, for example, is what unites Latinos beyond the multiple cultural variations, along with the strategies developed to confront these social inequalities...

...all ethnic generalizations, stating about "Latinos" that "I'd rather have us start out as fractured so we don't commit the bullshit and erasures that trying to live under the banner of sameness entails...

...By the early 1990s New York Newsday titled a lengthy supplement "The New Nueva York," and with that phrase encapsulated the momentous increase and dramatic recomposition of the city's Latino community since the 1970s...

...This is a nightmarish place," Dfaz concludes, "for people of color...