Theology Today - Vol 26, No. 3 - October 1969 - CRITICSCORNER - Hispanic-Americans and the Crisis in the Nation

334 - Hispanic-Americans and the Crisis in the Nation

Hispanic-Americans and the Crisis in the Nation
By Jorge Lara-Braud

HISPANIC-AMERICANS constitute the second largest ethnic minority in the U. S. A. There is reason to believe their number has by now gone beyond the figure of 10,000,000. Contrary to popular belief, the vast majority (more than 80 per cent) are urban dwellers, and even a larger percentage are U. S. citizens.

Dr. Jorge Lara-Braud is Director of the Hispanic-American Institute of Austin, Texas, an ecumenical agency devoted to the advancement of the Spanish-speaking people of the U. S. A., and to understanding of U. S.-Latin American relations. A full-length article by Dr. Lara-Braud, entitled "Browns in Anger," will appear in the April, 1970 Issue of THEOLOGY TODAY.

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These people are here to stay. Nevertheless, their significance is hardly understood by either church or nonchurch groups. At present this is largely the result of the nation's overwhelming concentration on the convulsions within the black community. Read, for instance, the daily newspapers and the church publications dealing with the "crisis in the nation." One looks in vain for a parallel concern with Hispanic-Americans. To be sure, here and there references to them are found. Seldom, however, are we told the facts experienced by Hispanic-Americans themselves.

The acquisition of Spanish-speaking citizens by the United States was largely the result of military conquest. Conquered people have a way of gradually being reduced to "hewers of wood and drawers of water." Eventually, a convenient stereotype builds around them: simple, childlike, indolent folk requiring no more than the bare essentials of life, a periodic fiesta or two, and the sporadic application of legal and economic force, lest cultural deviancy transcend the tolerance of a society bent on melting differences away.

The stereotype persists. Officially approved history school textbooks tend to portray the continued existence of the conquered Hispanic-American as a passive onlooker of the booming development of his former lands by the energetic conqueror from the North. Seldom are we told of the key role played by the back-breaking labor of the conquered peoples in building the railroad, mining, sheep, cattle, and agricultural empires of the newly acquired U. S. territories. Rarely, if ever, are we told of the strikes since the 1920s of historic import and major economic significance in the industries built with their sweat and blood. The omission on both counts, their toil and their protest, turns out to be a classical conspiracy of silence.

The ranks of conquered people were later swelled by several waves of refugees. As early as 1910-1925 Mexicans fled the Revolution and its aftermath, and as late as 1959-1968 Cubans abandoned their island to Castro's Marxist experiment. Other waves of poor Mexican and Puerto Rican immigrants have come and gone since the 1920s, according to the U. S. demand for cheap agricultural and factory labor. "Prestige" immigration from Latin American has been minimal. The combined legacy of military conquest, cheap foreign labor, and exile immigration, not surprisingly, has resulted

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in an image of a people in dire need of social and cultural rehabilitation if they are to qualify for full-fledged citizenship.

The church for a long time treated Hispanic-Americans as objects of cultural rehabilitation, i.e., "Americanization." Apparently, in their case, the principle of inclusive fellowship would best be served by eventual absorption into typical U. S. social institutions, on the assumption that they themselves would favor an accelerated acquisition of the social, cultural, and economic equipment that would enable them to perform in the mainstream of national life, no longer as strangers in the land. Provision of permanent facilities, ministries, and liturgies designed to retain their language, values, and traditions was considered unwise long-range strategy. Halfway houses were deemed adequate. Other "language" minorities had been able to blend themselves within two or three generations almost imperceptibly within the so-called American melting pot, why not they? Is it any wonder that today most of our Hispanic-American congregations bear all the marks of marginality?

What seems to have escaped the strategists is simply that the parallel between Hispanic-Americans and other "language" minorities turns out to be no parallel at all. In the first place, the living organism of Hispanic-American culture was already deeply rooted in this American soil a good many years before the arrival of the Pilgrims or Puritans. Despite the traumas of military conquest, of dispossession of lands by legal chicanery, of prejudicial treatment of cheap laborers, and condescending acceptance of bewildered exiles, the very blood stream of the Hispanic-American organism has never ceased to be replenished. Meanwhile, Latin America has been rediscovered south and north of the Rio Grande following the tremors of the Cuban revolution. Being a Spanish-English bilingual is no longer quaint or un-American. Practically all major institutions of higher learning have initiated programs of Hispanic-American studies. Hispanic-Americans are here to stay, to increase, and to become U. S. citizens with a difference: as a bilingual and bicultural community.

Hispanic-American traditions constitute a humanistic treasure house without which the life of this nation and its churches would be sadly impoverished. Among them, honor is put before gain, human life is held sacred over "humane" causes, the wisdom of the

337 - Hispanic-Americans and the Crisis in the Nation

old is the measuring rod for the dreams or fads of the young, the primacy of being is affirmed over the tyranny of doing, human existence is protected from the enslavement of the machine, and freedom is valued more than life in times of threat to one's native or adopted country. Race (raza) is that ideal of universal solidarity to which they pay tribute on October 12, not so much as Columbus Day, but as "El Dia de la Raza."

The tragedy is that these traditions have been more hindered than enhanced. In fact, Hispanic-Americans still contend with an institutionalized system of rewards and punishments based on the relative success or failure with which one can abandon his "foreign" ways and adopt those more typical of the homogenized mainstream. Even then, those who so "succeed" more often than not discover that despite the silent trauma of self-denial, they have not quite arrived. Their physical features, the remnants of an accent, their Spanish surname still identify them with the vast "unrehabilitated" mass of the blood kin they mistakenly thought they had divorced themselves from. The results are frequently pathological. Alienated success types are driven farther and farther apart from their ethnic family by promotional overexposure. But few can escape the inner sense or the outer denunciation of a sell-out. Under those conditions, self-hatred is inevitable and self-justification indispensable. When this alienated success type is put in a position of authority over his own ethnic family, especially law enforcement, an appalling miscarriage of justice often results. In the mirror of the name, face, speech, dwelling, and ways of those unfit people, his self-rejected image is magnified a thousandfold. The mirror or his "success" must go. He cannot have it both ways. Much regret has been expressed about lack of leaders among Hispanic-Americans. If by leaders we mean those rewarded with positions of power for rejecting or suppressing their ethnic family, then we should all rejoice for their shortage or weep for their abundance.

Without the benefit of learned research or advanced academic instruction, the vast majority of Hispanic-Americans have perceived that for their own well being and the sanity of the nation, they want to be loyal American citizens, keeping alive the multicultural heritage of not just one America, but all Americas. To do less would be for them to reject themselves and to concede victory to the racists.

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Society is not likely to take seriously ecclesiastical pronouncements calling for fair dealings with Hispanic-Americans when the church itself allows for little or no participation by them in its process of decision-making. By and large, the church continues to view them as objects of mission. Provisions for them are still largely in terms of benefaction through such institutions as mission churches, houses of neighborly service, schools, clinics, and mission outposts. These institutions were legitimate at one time. Their unmodified perpetuation calls in question the maturity of Hispanic-Americans to be themselves agents of mission.

Hispanic-Americans genuinely rejoice in the church's overdue attention to the plight of black Americans. Much promise is seen as churches allocate "crisis" monies to the black community for programs of self-determination. But the lesson is lost on no one, really. Unless a minority mounts a vigorous campaign of open resistance against legal, institutionalized violence, it will continue to endure the nightmare of the wretched. Like black Americans and other exploited minorities, Hispanic-Americans demand nothing less than restitutional justice: the freedom and resources to determine their lives in consonance with their rich cultural traditions and with the pluralistic ideal of American society.