Decolonizing Mexican Americans

The term "decolonization" has become increasingly popular within and outside of academia. It names a concept that seems to be especially useful for those of us of Mexican descent. Statements abound that declare the decolonization of one's syllabus1 or one's diet.2 In 2020, the urgency to decolonize increased, as protestors demanded the removal of Spanish colonial statuary in states including New Mexico, California, and Florida. These demands and proclamations are presented as liberating purges of oppression. European colonials tried to destroy indigenous ways of thinking and living, and decolonization represents the effort to maintain native cultural practices and uproot the colonial foundations of contemporary problems.

The conversations surrounding the term are indeed important. We should consider how our monuments represent our collective values. And although the call to decolonize our diet sounds like it emerges from a desire to return to a mythical pre-lapsarian world free of disease and exploitation, the call ultimately invites us to imagine a world without food monopolies motivated by profit margins instead of nutrition.3 The decolonization of an American literature syllabus entails an effort to dismantle the exclusionary accounts of American identity by increasing representation. During the 1970s, Gloria Anzaldúa underscored the importance of these efforts when she describes how she was "reprimanded and forbidden" to teach Chicano texts because she was supposed to teach "'American' and English literature.'"4  One insidious implication here could suggest that Mexican Americans were not properly American. It stands to reason why, feeling rejected, Anzaldúa would feel like she belonged when watching movies starring Jorge Negrete and reading poems like I Am Joaquín.5

One way of thinking about the term decolonization would highlight its attempts at increasing inclusive representation. The following will provide an example of why these attempts remain necessary. Yet, I will also try to show how these efforts are distinct from those that would address problems of contemporary economic exploitation and poverty. Indeed, these very efforts to increase representation could disable the possibility of solidarity when they insist on irreconcilable differences.6 Even when the calls to decolonize are presented as meaning more than diversify, such calls offer a mistaken way of framing the problems that plague us today.

When used as a lens to study the past and explain the present, the term decolonization too often stipulates transhistorical ideas as history's engines. These ideas, namely the persistence of clashing identities across time, can obscure the material causes, the specific economic and political contexts, of historical change and contemporary problems. These ideas continually separate people into racial groups that do not appear to change substantially across centuries. A description of an identity can therefore become a placeholder for a set of beliefs, thereby eliding fundamental differences and disagreements. Such transhistorical identities are seemingly incapable of cross-cultural understanding and cross-racial alliances based on shared beliefs. This understanding of identity ultimately reaffirms the seemingly stable, biological ground of race as such.

Anzaldúa, for example, does not appear to affirm explicitly the stability of an identity, noting the historical factors that led to the consolidation of the Chicano identity as such.7 "Chicanos did not know we were a people until 1965," she writes, "With that recognition, we became a distinct people."8 But once this identity is realized, it can be projected into the past, such that she can describe how "Chicanos, after 250 years of Spanish/Anglo colonization, have developed."9 And it can be projected indefinitely into the future: "We count the days the weeks the years the centuries the eons until the white laws and commerce and customs will rot in the deserts they've created, lie bleached."10 White men have their politics, beliefs, and practices; we have our own. So long as we maintain what is ours (our language, our practices, our culture), we will survive eternally. The extension of this idea would further suggest that academic methodologies and fields of study are themselves not simply something to learn or disagree with so much as something to oppose because they are not ours.11 Such an account of a normative culture based on one's identity raises questions about how one would know which cultures, stories, and methodologies are properly one's own. What criteria would one use to make such determinations? Do these criteria change over time? If so, how would we be able to connect one set of practices to another separated by hundreds of years?12

Although decolonization trended in 2020, it is far from a new idea. We could study how Mexican American scholars turned to versions of the decolonial idea during the 1970s and how they presented it as a solution. We could identify how this purported solution did not address the specific, changing economic and political causes of economic exploitation. I focus on the rise of the concept during the 1970s, the only decade, as Judith Stein reminds us, "other than the 1930s wherein Americans ended up poorer than they began."13 Just as scholars began advocating for a decolonial diagnosis of and cure for the problems plaguing Mexican American communities, the US was undergoing a fundamental ideological shift. Both Democratic and Republican parties "replace[d] the assumptions that capital and labor should prosper together with an ethic claiming that the promotion of capital will eventually benefit labor."14 The political response to the unfortunate economic realities of the 1970s (including a massive recession, stagnating wages, and lowered productivity) "shifted resources away from manufacturing — the 'tradables' — into finance and housing."15 The assumption underlying this shift was that the investments made in the finance market at the expense of the manufacturing jobs sustaining the working class would eventually benefit that class.

As I will show in what follows, as the country's major political parties abandoned the working class, Mexican American scholars promoted the psychological benefits of decolonization based on similar assumptions concerning eventual material gains. As the American economy experienced a fundamental shift, the effects of which are felt to this day, Chicano scholars posited a utopian horizon wherein Chicanos would own and manage their own institutions and maybe even help elect a Chicano president.16 Because they framed the problems facing Chicanos as resulting from white elites wanting to subjugate Chicanos (by excluding them from institutions and failing to recognize their culture), the scholars could posit inclusion, ownership, and cultural pride as the solution. In this view, what is good for the Chicano CEOs will be good for the Chicano workers because they will all share a culture that unites their interests. But it is not clear how these Chicano-owned institutions would solve the problems that arise from the market. We are in a position today to assess whether the assumptions of the 1970s were accurate — assumptions also evident in the trickle-down theories of the Reagan 1980s as well as the deficit reductions, trade deregulation, and CEO earnings increases of the Clinton 1990s. As we assess the ideas circulating now, we should consider whom these ideas serve, whom they do not, and what other ideas we could propose instead.

The Uses of Decolonization

2020 presented a renewed opportunity to study how racialized identities have been formed variously in history — and to what ends. Decolonization speaks to this analysis through what Antonio Gramsci in the early twentieth century called hegemony.17 Gramsci described how a society's culture circulates stories and images that present social norms as if based on common sense. These narratives naturalize social hierarchies and perpetuate the status quo, a dynamic that is insidious insofar as it convinces oppressed people that their inferior status is natural and deserved.

During the 1960s, Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961) made the analysis of hegemony especially relevant to African nations under colonial rule.18 Fanon urged colonized Africans to rid themselves of the demeaning images and ideas circulated by colonizers. Although he was careful to argue that his insights were historically and contextually specific, Fanon's insights nevertheless reverberated throughout the world.19 Just to give one example, in his influential history Occupied America: The Chicano's Struggle Toward Liberation (1972), Rodolfo Acuña argues, "Chicanos in the United States are a colonized people."20 Citing Fanon's A Dying Colonialism (1959), Acuña describes how "the Chicano was conditioned to accept his caste."21 Even when the political and economic conditions are radically different, for Acuña, Fanon's insights concerning the psychology of culture could be tied to important history lessons concerning Mexican Americans' status and their need to decolonize their minds.

Following Acuña's lead, we could consider how, in the sixteenth century, the detractors of Bartolomé de las Casas's advocacy for the protection of Native Americans justified the violence against the indigenous "on the grounds that they were not human."22 For this human/nonhuman distinction to work, there needs to be a recognizable Spanish identity based on an identifiable selection principle. We could jump back a century and note how during the fifteenth century, the "Purity of Blood Statutes" provided one possible grounding for this identity: "pure" "blood." So even though Spanish Jews converted to Christianity out of fear of persecution, they and their descendants were nevertheless considered Jewish "conversos" and thus unable to participate in government, attend university, or join the military.23 With the concepts of pure and impure blood, it does not matter what one believes when one has a certain kind of ancestry, and this ancestry (this "blood") will be used to justify one's privilege or disenfranchisement.

Although we would have to leap across centuries and rely heavily on the phrase mutatis mutandis, we could identify how the continued valuation of certain physical features perpetuates tired Eurocentric racialized hierarchies. And we could consider how in the US, popular forms of entertainment could be understood as aiding an economy continuously in need of cheap labor via racialization. Popular genres could legitimize the selection mechanisms that determine which types of bodies will provide this labor byreducing human beings to their useful bodies. In too many romantic comedies — just to select one genre whose predictable conventions have the affective power to reaffirm social hegemony — Latinx characters appear as housekeepers, custodians, and silly sidekicks. Watch The Proposal (2009), about a Canadian immigrant named Margaret (played by Sandra Bullock).24 Notice the skin color and temperament of the "lazy, entitled, incompetent" character whom Margaret fires (played by Aasif Mandvi) and compare them to that of Margaret's boss with the large corner office (played by Michael Nouri). Notice the features of another character (played by Oscar Nuñez) whom the credits name "Ramone" — instead of Ramón. Listen to how this character speaks. Ask why he has that particular accent.

"Ramone" has at least four different part-time jobs; his unexpected reappearance throughout the movie functions as a gag. (He works there too?) And when he demonstrates his attraction to Margaret, his infatuation is meant to elicit our laughter. (He has a crush on her?) This movie about a successful Canadian immigrant includes another type of immigrant, who has traveled from somewhere south of the US border all the way to Alaska in search of work. This movie is fictional, yes, but why does this character appear so recognizable? Why is his unfortunate life presented as somehow funny? He probably must maintain multiple part-time jobs because he does not earn a living wage (not to mention health care, housing, and job security). The audience is invited to laugh as Margaret is told to "Smack his ass!" Of the many jobs he has, he is the only stripper in town. His gyrating body is for rent.

A romantic comedy's formulaic conventions could reaffirm the existing social hierarchy by aligning the audience's generic expectations to a society's racialized, gendered social roles.25 Such narratives make it seem as if the productive, non-criminal place in American society for Latinx immigrants is that of being its source of cheap labor. The very appearance of certain bodies on screen and the very sound of some accents seem to be sufficient conditions for humor. By limiting the range of emotional expression of certain characters, this seemingly innocuous humor can have the effect of dehumanizing people, thereby justifying their exploitation.

Such depictions collectively tell an old, exhausting story. In José Antonio Villarreal's Pocho (1959), Villarreal includes a scene in which a young boy, Richard, identifies with the movie stars of the genre that helped establish the psychological attachments of national belonging, the 1930s Western.26 "I am Buck Jones," says Richard, "and Ken Maynard and Fred Thompson, all rolled into one — I'm not Tom Mix [however] because I don't like brown horses."27 In these films, the bad guys would have looked a lot like his father, Juan Manuel, who fought in the Mexican Revolution. Juan Manuel would have been policed by the Texas Rangers (formed by Texan landowners to protect their property) and the figures represented in Westerns as compulsively clad in white hats and riding white horses. In a historical detail that the novelist surely knew, the one actor Richard rejects, Tom Mix, actually fought in the Battle of Ciudad Juarez alongside the revolutionary figures that Richard's father, Juan Manuel, represents. Juan Manuel, the novel notes, was in that battle too.

Richard's identification with those who would persecute his father suggests a growing sense of self-hatred. His father, a skilled equestrian, corrects his son by arguing, "if you knew anything about horses, you would know that a good horse is not chosen for his color." Richard, a precocious autodidact, shows that he does know a thing or two about horses: "they call it breeding," Richard says. "Regular horses have small feet," whereas "plow horses" "have big wide feet."28 Immersed in pop culture, Richard could grow up believing that white horses are better than brown ones and that some bodies are more suited to perform hard labor. This logic that sorts bodies into different classes is reaffirmed later in the novel by Richard's high school counselor, who assumes that Richard is not a good candidate for college because he is Mexican American. The counselor instead guides him to "automechanics or welding or some shop course, so that he could have a trade and be in a position to be a good citizen."29

This all too common advice was so ubiquitous outside of the world of fiction that nine years after Pocho's publication, thousands of Mexican American high school students walked out of their schools in East Los Angeles to protest the discriminatory practices they faced.30 Many Mexican Americans had by the late 1960s started calling themselves "Chicanos," a term that may have originated from an original name for the Aztecs, Mexica (pronounced "Mesheeka"), and which during the 1920s referred to Mexican migrants who came to the US in search of work. The term came to represent a collective identity, a statement of pride that rejected the abundant caricatures and demanded social change. Instead of accepting the demeaning images evident in, say, Frito Bandito advertising, Chicano artists invoked Mesoamerican iconography. They circulated the story of Aztlán, the mythic homeland of the Aztecs believed to have been located somewhere in what is now the American southwest. The myth became a galvanizing story that symbolized the injustice of land taken first by Spanish colonialism then by American imperialism. Chicano scholars identified a historical pattern in which Mexican Americans were treated as a colonized people. Chicano scholars began to characterize Mexican American neighborhoods as internal colonies subjected to a de facto second-class status. The solution they proposed was decolonization.

"To be considered an effective solution" to the problems facing Chicanos, write Mario Barrera, Carlos Muñoz, and Charles Ornelas in 1972, "a proposed change must contribute to decolonization - that is, it must enable Chicanos to gain greater control over their environment while maintaining their collective identity."31 What Barrera et al mean by gaining "greater control" is "among other things, increasing the range of alternatives open to Chicanos and developing Chicano control over those institutions which most directly affect their lives."32 These strategies involve increasing Chicano institutional inclusion and replacing white ownership and management. This approach, however, risks benefitting only the few capable of upward mobility. As they acknowledge, such efforts "may allow individual Chicanos to increase their social mobility" and thus "would not contribute to decolonization" because class mobility could sever their "ties to the barrio."33 In their account, the resulting class differences are mitigated by their invocation of a "collective identity" (the benefits of the Chicano upper classes would count as benefits for everyone) and by "the creation of alternative institutions designed for and controlled by Chicanos."34 Presumably, so long as we replace white institutions with brown ones, the problems that emerge in the market — including inadequate pay, underfunded childcare, the lack of affordable housing, and inadequate access to education — will have been solved.

In 1977, Chris. F. García and Rodolfo de la Garza frame the problems and their solutions in similar terms. "[C]hange in the objective conditions of Chicanos," they argue, "in health, in educational achievement, in political organization — will come only after Chicanos undergo major structural and psychological changes; that is, only after Chicanos decolonize themselves."35 By "structural changes" they mean the decolonial resistance to "cultural genocide," "external administration," and "institutional racism."36 White elites, who hoard the resources, fail to recognize the importance of Chicanos's culture and language and continually exclude them from opportunities. Decolonization would address the unequal distribution of resources, which disproportionally benefit "the superior colonizing elite" by enabling self-pride and promoting Chicano-owned institutions."37 They also recommend that Chicanos should foster such cultural "social cohesiveness" among themselves, which would correct for the resulting class differences among Chicanos.38 "Middle-class Chicanos," they describe, "proud of their accomplishments and pressured by the racism of the core culture, have sometimes forgotten the plight of their working-class brothers and sisters and have disassociated themselves entirely from the lower-class people."39 A shared culture would correct for this disassociation by encouraging cultural solidarity. Extrapolating from their recommendations, we might believe that the reason business owners and CEOs do not provide adequate pay and healthcare for their employees results from their lack of cultural sympathy.

Guillermo V. Flores, writing in the mid-1970s, similarly divides the US into monolithic blocs of colonizing whites and colonized non-whites. He argues that all whites are the beneficiaries of cultural colonization, enjoying what he calls a "racial-cultural surplus value." 40 He thus contends that Chicanos should mobilize on the basis of their own culture, which we all seemingly share. He presupposes that the monolithic blocs share their respective cultures regardless of the potential difference in their class status and material interests. His model does not account for differences in changing beliefs, nor does it differentiate between working-class Chicanos and those who come to benefit from the exploitation of the working class.

These examples of decolonization do not account for the antagonism that emerges between working-class Chicanos whose wages are lowered by the continued abuse of undocumented workers as a source of cheaper labor. They do not identify the advantages that Chicanos might have that undocumented Mexicans do not. They do not highlight how Chicanos benefit from the exploitation of other countries' resources.41 Apparently, it does not matter what Chicanos believe; what matters is our ancestry and the culture that should be ours. Instead of advocating for the potential shared interests among those who are exploited for their labor, these thinkers emphasize (and exacerbate) their racial antagonism by encouraging differences and promoting separation. The decolonization evident here ultimately offers a limited vision because its goal appears to be the reversal of the existing hierarchies so that Chicanos no longer disproportionately inhabit the bottom.

The Limits of Decolonization

Because of the need to advance a shared culture, several Chicano literary critics lamented that José Antonio Villarreal, who published Pocho during the 1950s, did not have access to the communal sensibility that solidified during the 1960s and 1970s.42 Villarreal, however, did see the power of something like decolonization. Set in 1920s Mexico, the novel's first scene depicts Juan Manuel murdering a Spaniard and justifying the murder on nativist grounds. He vulgarly and misogynistically asserts that the Spanish "must be driven out of México" lest their "milk" continue to "flo[w] into our women!"43 The Mexican Army general who shows up to arrest him turns out to be an old friend from the revolution who now works for the new Mexican president. He boasts of the fringe benefits he enjoys; he earns a comfortable living and brags about the "well-bred" women, "even gringas" (white women), who pass through Juarez.44 Notice how the general's use of the objectifying term "well-bred" echoes Richard's comments on the breeding of horses and confirms the reality of racialized social hierarchies. Upon hearing him describe his new position, Juan Manuel berates the general for betraying his people. "Did you forget [your] big white breeches and the huaraches [sandals] when you received this command?" he asks, "Do you not remember that our people have better manners than this aristocracy, that our ancestors were princes in a civilization that was possibly more advanced than this one? [that] the india [the indigenous woman of Mexico] is still the most beautiful woman in the world"?45

I summarize this scene to show how Juan Manuel connects his political commitments to his rejection of a racialized value hierarchy. He is right to align those who wore white breeches with "the indio," the victims of Spanish colonialism. The indigenous who fought alongside Emiliano Zapata had subsisted as peons on the large plantation estates established during Spanish colonial rule. They wore customary white breeches and huarache sandals as they fought to secure land for themselves.46 Juan Manuel's description of 1920s Mexico as an "aristocracy" implies the continuity of colonial rule, even though Mexico had declared independence from Spain a full century before the events depicted in the novel's opening. By emphasizing the beauty of the indigenous, Juan Manuel's counter-aesthetic enables a sense of decolonial resistance.

While the novel grants the power of this form of resistance, its mention of Juan Manuel's "fair" skin and "blue-grey" eyes — on its very first page — suggests that his gross nativist desire to keep European "milk" out of Mexico is ultimately misguided.47 His Spanish surname "Rubio," after all, has come to mean "blonde." More importantly, the Mexican revolutionaries — even the indigenous peons — did not fight against "the Spanish." Rather, Juan Manuel and his fellow revolutionaries fought the Mexican Federal Army in an attempt to replace the Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz, who, for over three decades, had enabled the accumulation of vast amounts of wealth and land in the hands of a concentrated Mexican elite.

The novel shows how Spanish colonialism and the attendant racial hierarchy play essential roles in the establishment of inequality in Mexico. Yet Juan Manuel's Mexican nativism cannot function as a viable solution because "the Spanish" as such are not the problem. This is why Pocho highlights how after Juan Manuel moves to the US, most of his new friends in California are Spanish immigrants. As his wife Consuelo explains to Richard, "when he says [negative things about] the Spaniard, it does not mean that he is against the race, only that it fell upon the lot of the landowners [in Mexico] to be Spanish."48 Spaniards in Mexico "were the oppressors, the rich ones," but the Spaniards living in the US "are different — they are also from the lower class although some of them take on airs here."49 The Spanish are not the problem; landowners who exploit workers are. 

When Juan Manuel moves to the US, he tellingly helps some of the poor white migrants who travel to California searching for work.50 He understands how Californian landowners benefit from having large pools of desperate migrants from Oklahoma and Arkansas who tried to escape the plunging farm incomes, devastating droughts, and the economic depression of the 1930s. They competed against each other and against Mexico's poor migrants, driving down the cost of everyone's labor. In these scenes, the novel depicts the development of whiteness in the US as a form of compensation for poverty (for "whites") and as a harmful obstacle to inclusion and upward class mobility (for "non-whites"). The "Okies and "Awkies,"51 as Juan Manuel calls them, are not poor because of discrimination, yet racism could be a way that they — like the poor Spaniards "taking on airs" — might feel better about their plight. So long as the racial antagonism among such groups continues, the profits of the few will increase.

Historically, in the US, too many owners of property and wealth have been all too willing to pay a premium for the labor of white workers and rig the market by turning away potential buyers of property because of the color of their skin. A mythic form of whiteness has enabled class mobility, while its absence tends to become an insurmountable obstacle. In Pocho, Richard's Italian American friend Ricky Malatesta declares his intention to become rich, stating, "I'm going to get myself an American name, 'cause Malatesta's too Dago-sounding. I'll change it to Malloy or something."52 Anticipating the cottage industry of "How the X became White" scholarship, the novel's revealing choice of "Malloy" as a signifier of American identity shows how the Irish had accomplished the apparently necessary transformation required of upward class mobility.53 But when the Japanese character Thomas Nakano tries to assure his friends (and himself), "I'm an American, just like you guys,"54 the historical context of his statement — the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor bombing — betrays the profound limitations of his self-declared identity. Malatesta can become Malloy, but Nakano remains "Japanese," which is why Malatesta prepares for Officer Candidate School and a pathway into the middle class by the end of the novel. Nakano and his family are forced to move to a Japanese internment camp.

There is, then, the problem of exploitation (wherein some will exploit the desperation of others for profit) and the related problem of exclusion (where some do not have access to the mechanisms that will alleviate their disenfranchisement). For too long, the game has been rigged to support the enfranchised and justify the exploitation of the disenfranchised, keeping them in their supposed natural state. Indeed, the entanglement of these problems is such that they appear as proxies of each other. When academics have treated racist disenfranchisement as a proxy for economic exploitation, however, they have had to stipulate a static, transhistorical notion of identity (and its corresponding culture) that unfortunately reproduces the very logic of race that has been a tool of exploitation.55 Consider how every time Mexican Americans describe ourselves as "mestizo" or as "half colonizer, half colonized," we repeat the dangerous idea that some races are supposedly "pure" while others are the result of "mixing."

I am not suggesting that my colleagues who continue to advance the decolonial paradigm remain unaware of the problems I identify. But I am less sanguine that their diagnosis and proposed cures will help because they risk continuing to use arguments about disproportional disenfranchisement as a proxy. We could instead think through the scenes from Pocho to consider two historically linked but categorically different kinds of problems: the racist justification for discriminatory inequality and the structural fact of economic exploitation.56 The former provides the selection mechanisms that fuel the latter. The myth of whiteness' supposed supremacy is the ideological justification for the economic exploitation of non-whites so that some can maintain a position of power, and it can function as compensation for poor whites. Fixing the prejudiced selection mechanisms might help stop the unfair, demoralizing practices so that the same types of people are not continuously dehumanized, disenfranchised, and disproportionately exploited. This process remains vital because it could lead to a better world in which the "Ramone" characters would no longer naturalize the objectification of people into "bodies." In that world, characters with Spanish names would be spelled correctly, Latinx actors would also play the leading roles, and there may even be more actual Latinx CEOs. The unfortunate reality is that in that improved world (already evident in Hollywood's recognition that there is a large "Hispanic market" in the US),57 there would still be the reality of a job market that does not provide living wages, adequate health care, job security, childcare, housing, and accessible quality education. CEOs could still be making more than 200 times what their lowest employees earn. There would still be people who would need to work multiple part-time jobs out of desperation. The decolonial paradigm could itself inadvertently justify the inequality that has grown radically since the 1970s by implying that so long as instances of severe poverty and its resulting violence are not the result of discrimination, they are not unjust because they are facts of life.

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José Antonio Arellano is an Assistant Professor of English and Fine Arts at the United States Air Force Academy. The thoughts he expresses here are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of his employer. Some of his most recent, relevant essays appear and are forthcoming in Forma Journal, Race in American Literature and Culture, and The Cambridge Companion to Race and American Literature.

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