Latino Politics. Lisa García Bedolla

Preface to the Third Edition

       Lisa García Bedolla

      Reading my 2013 preface, I feel that I was both naive and overly optimistic, despite my claim that things were difficult then. Being a person of color in the United States requires quotidian optimism – a belief you reaffirm daily that today people will be their best selves and that historical and present-day inequities will not affect how you are able to move through the world. For me, that belief was deeply shaken when Donald Trump was elected President of the United States in 2016. At that moment, I felt the racist and sexist vicissitudes of the United States were laid bare, to an extent I found difficult to face.

      My feelings were driven, in large part, by how my daughter Micaela (the child whose existence is coterminous with this book) experienced that political moment. In 2015, when we were watching the Republican debates and candidate Trump disparaged Mexicans, Micaela asked me, “Mami, is he talking about us?” (I am Cuban American and my husband was born in Mexico). I had to answer, “Sí, mi amor, he is talking about us.” That exchange led a group of her then-2nd-grade friends having a conversation on the playground to decide who would “get to stay” if Trump became President. Her all-female group included her, a 2.5-generation Latina, a 2.5-generation South Asian, a 2nd-generation Swede, and two US-born white Americans. After intense conversation, the group decided that my daughter and the south Asian girl would have to “go.” The phenotypically white Swede, even though she was no more “American” than those two girls, would be able to stay. Even at the age of 7 in “liberal” Berkeley, our children understood the US racial hierarchy.

When Trump won, Micaela could not stop crying. Because she knew my husband had been born in Mexico, she was convinced that Trump’s election meant he would be deported, and so we would have to leave the country in order for our family to be together. It took months to convince her otherwise. As a mother and an American, I worry about the trauma my daughter experienced in that election. I doubt she was alone in her anxiety and in her understanding of the political moment we were in. I ended the 2013 preface with such optimism, with her starting school in a social context that was so different from what I had experienced in Los Angeles in the 1970s. But Trump’s election has reminded me of the ebb and flow of social progress, and the deep racial animosity that still exists in the United States. That racial inequality was unmasked and deepened by the COVID-19 crisis in early 2020. The global pandemic laid bare how social stratification determines individuals’ life chances, making clear our profound interdependence and also our significant social vulnerabilities. I don’t know what having experienced this historical moment as a young child will mean for Micaela as she grows up. But I worry, both as a parent and as an American. At more than 60 million strong, we Latinos are part of the US social fabric. Nothing will change that. But I wonder what the future holds for all of us. And I struggle to maintain my optimism.

      As this book went through copyedits, the COVID-19 crisis was raging and a new movement for racial justice was on the rise. I hope that these dual crises, providing an opportunity for anti-racist efforts advancing greater equity, will lead to real progress within US society, economics, and politics. But all the institutional and historical obstacles discussed in this volume remain in place. If the movement is able to sustain a multiracial, majority coalition, maximize its influence inside and outside of policymaking bodies, and sustain that energy over time, real change may be possible.

Christian Hosam

      Latino politics is key to understanding the nature of contemporary American democracy. From the battles over sanctuary cities that illustrate how federalism shapes the lives of the undocumented, to what a disaster like Hurricane Maria tells us about the ways in which racial justice and environmental justice interlock and intersect, and, further still, how the status of the US relationship to Cuba informs us about how political change that at one moment seems like a vague dream can quite rapidly turn into a stunning reality. This project has reshaped and refined my understanding of my own status as a Black man, an immigrant, and a scholar of American politics.

      I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to work on this book. What is both fascinating and harrowing about working on a project like this, one that requires you to distill the behavior, history, and resistance of a number of different groups, is that you have to think carefully about how to balance the need to tell stories and the requirement of placing those stories in the context of a larger narrative about American politics. This challenge has gotten even more intense with the election of Donald Trump and the global currents of xenophobia, nativism, and racism that undermine any hope of a more just, egalitarian society. It is simply not enough to tell the stories of how different ethnic groups arrive in the United States, because the places that they come from and the underlying politics that shaped their decision to emigrate continue to affect them here and now.

The core lesson that I learned from co-authoring Latino Politics is this: to understand someone’s lived experiences, make no assumptions about where they fall on things based on your own preconceptions. In this book, we encounter intra-racial conflict, counterintuitive voting decisions, and massive violence faced by various ethnic groups. But we also see solidarity movements, political growth and evolution, and collective mobilization that refuses to accept oppressive conditions. Latino politics is critical to understanding American politics because it helps us see a multifaceted “racial group” for whom ethnic identity, political affiliation, and lived experiences and aspirations are always up for grabs. When you sit with this work, you learn about political history and behavior, yes – but perhaps you will also gain tools to help you unpack how to make decisions, both political and not, in a world that increasingly forces us to make consequential decisions without clear answers.