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Praise for Juan Gonzalez’s Harvest of Empire “A serious, significant contribution to understanding who the Hispanics of the United States are and where they come from.” —The New York Times Book Review “A profound book with an equally profound message about the origins of Latino migration, domination, and colonization, and historical lessons not found in many American textbooks.” —San Antonio Express-News “A compelling—and enlightening—chronicle … offers an insider’s view of the rich and varied fabric of the people soon to be the largest minority in the United States.” —The Miami Herald “Anyone who finishes Harvest of Empire will never again see Latinos as a monolithic group, but as a diverse society of citizens and future citizens, worthy of recognition and respect.” —Fort Worth Morning Star “In what would seem an impossible task, journalist Juan Gonzalez tackles the entire history of Latinos in North and Central America in a single volume … illuminating.” —Dallas Morning News “Required reading, not simply for Latinos but for everyone.” —The Kansas City Star “Gonzalez’s ever-enjoyable prose grabs the reader and fills in the gaps left by a traditional American history education.” —In These Times “Here at last is the extraordinary saga of the Latinos in North America, brilliantly and compactly told. All the descendants of the old immigrants should read this book, to remind themselves of where they came from, and where all of us are going—together.” —Pete Hamill, author of Snow in August and A Drinking Life “This excellent history of Latinos in North and Central America is fair-handed, extremely well-documented, and filled with the sort of details that explain rather than enflame.” —Publishers Weekly “Juan Gonzalez brings us a sweeping account of the raw quest for empire that shaped the New World and is finally in our time transforming the United States. The history is often brutal, the experiences of the people caught up in the process wrenching. But Gonzalez paints a canvas that is in the end profoundly optimistic, for in the Latinization of the United States he sees the possibility of a renaissance of American democracy.” —Frances Fox Piven, coauthor of Regulating the Poor PENGUIN BOOKS HARVEST OF EMPIRE , a columnist with New York’s Daily News, and a two-time winner of the George Polk journalism award, was named one of the nation’s one hundred most influential Hispanics by Hispanic Business, and has received a lifetime achievement award from the Hispanic Academy of Media Arts and Sciences. Born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, he grew up in a New York City housing project, graduated from Columbia University, and was a cofounder of the 1960s Young Lords. He lives in Manhattan. JUAN GONZALEZ A History of Latinos in America Revised Edition JUAN GONZALEZ PENGUIN BOOKS PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. 2000 Published in Penguin Books 2001 This revised edition published 2011 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Copyright © Juan Gonzalez, 2000, 2011 All rights reserved LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA González, Juan, 1947– Harvest of empire: a history of Latinos in America / Juan Gonzalez.—Rev. ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN: 978-1-101-58994-6 1. Hispanic Americans—History. 2. Immigrants—United States—History. 3. United States—Emigration and immigration—History. 4. Latin America—Emigration and immigration—History. 5. United States—Relations—Latin America. 6. Latin America— Relations— United States. 7. United States—Territorial expansion—History. 8. United States—Ethnic relations. I. Title. E184.S75G655 2011 973’.0468—dc22 2011006880 Printed in the United States of America Set in TimesTen Roman Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. The scorn of our formidable neighbor who does not know us is Our America’s greatest danger. And since the day of the visit is near, it is imperative that our neighbor know us, and soon, so that it will not scorn us. Through ignorance it might even come to lay hands on us. Once it does know us, it will remove its hands out of respect. One must have faith in the best of men and distrust the worst. —José Martí, January 10, 1891 Contents Introduction Part I—Roots (Las Raíces) 1. Conquerors and Victims: The Image of America Forms (1500–1800) 2. The Spanish Borderlands and the Making of an Empire (1810–1898) 3. Banana Republics and Bonds: Taming the Empire’s Backyard (1898–1950) Part II—Branches (Las Ramas) 4. Puerto Ricans: Citizens Yet Foreigners 5. Mexicans: Pioneers of a Different Type 6. Cubans: Special Refugees 7. Dominicans: From the Duarte to the George Washington Bridge 8. Central Americans: Intervention Comes Home to Roost 9. Colombians and Panamanians: Overcoming Division and Disdain Part III—Harvest (La Cosecha) 10. The Return of Juan Seguín: Latinos and the Remaking of American Politics 11. Immigrants Old and New: Closing Borders of the Mind 12. Speak Spanish, You’re in America!: El Huracán over Language and Culture 13. Free Trade: The Final Conquest of Latin America 14. Puerto Rico, U.S.A.: Possessed and Unwanted Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes Glossary Bibliography Interviews Index Introduction Between March and May of 2006, an estimated 3 to 5 million people, most of them Latinos, filled the downtown streets of some 160 U.S. towns and cities in the largest series of mass protests the nation had ever seen.1 Not even during the heyday of the American labor movement in the 1930s, or during the high tide of civil rights protests and public opposition to the Vietnam War during the 1960s, had such astonishing numbers paraded peacefully in so many different localities over a common grievance. Never before had a group at the margins of U.S. society taken our political establishment by such complete surprise. Word of the mobilizations, it turned out, had spread largely via Spanish-language radio and TV and through social networks of young Latinos on the Internet, so government leaders and the general public had little idea of what was happening until the huge crowds suddenly started to appear on our city streets. The immediate aim of the marchers was to defeat a bill in Congress that would establish tough new criminal penalties for immigrants who were in the country illegally. The opponents sought not only to derail what came to be known as the Sensenbrenner bill, but to replace it with a comprehensive overhaul of U.S. immigration policy, one that would include a “path to citizenship” for an estimated 12 million undocumented workers already in the country. Protest leaders framed their effort as a moral call for compassion and respect, for dignidad for illegal immigrants. Many adopted the slogan Si Se Puede! (Yes We Can), the nearly forgotten words that legendary Mexican American labor organizer César Chávez had coined half a century earlier for his United Farm Workers Organization. Their message reverberated from the bustling streets of established Latino neighborhoods in the major cities to scores of newly sprouted barrios in small towns and hamlets across the American heartland. The rallies they scheduled suddenly swelled with tens of thousands of maids, nannies, and maintenance workers, with lowly gardeners and day laborers, with restaurant busboys and dishwashers, with hotel waiters and bellhops, with hardened slaughterhouse workers and construction hardhats, many of whom had quietly led a furtive existence in the shadows of society, always afraid of being stopped by a local cop or sheriff, or of being caught in an immigration raid and hastily deported. Suddenly, this brown-skinned and once-docile mass of humanity was parading through glistening city centers in broad daylight. With spouses and children at their side and their infants in strollers, they proudly marched with their entire Pentecostal or Catholic congregations, their ministers and church banners at the front, waving both the American flag and those of their native countries. These were not simply gatherings of the undocumented, however. Hundreds of thousands of Latinos who had been born in the United States or become naturalized citizens, or who were longtime legal residents, also participated. And leading the way in virtually every protest were startling numbers of U.S.-born Hispanic high school and college students, many of them facing the prospect of being separated from their immigrant parents who could end up being deported. All shared the same burning sense of outrage. All were fed up with the mainstream media’s reigning stereotype that depicted hordes of Latinos and undocumented workers as a new menace engulfing the country. And though Latinos made up the overwhelming number of marchers, they were hardly alone; joining them as well were thousands of Polish, Irish, Korean, Chinese, and Filipino immigrants, along with many white and black religious and labor leaders and supporters. The immigration protests of 2006 marked a rare example of an outcast group suddenly rising up and forcing the majority to rethink accepted notions of democratic and human rights. For most of the marchers, it was their first act of social protest, one that would permanently alter the way they viewed the world. For just as the 1963 March on Washington defined the outlook of many black Americans, and just as the college rebellions of 1968 shaped the thinking of a generation of white Americans, so too did these protests represent a political coming of age for the nation’s Hispanic minority. The new movement burst on the scene with such unexpected force that it quickly gave rise to several contending narratives in the commercial media. On the one hand, scores of mainstream newspapers and television stations started for the first time to produce poignant and sympathetic stories about the lives of the undocumented, a perspective the press had largely ignored until then, preferring instead the stereotype of the “illegal alien.” On the other hand, the fast-growing Spanishlanguage media offered a radically different narrative—one of solidarity, not of sympathy. From the scores of popular radio DJs around the country to the big television networks like Univision and Telemundo, from the hundreds of weekly Hispanic newspapers to the big city dailies like La Opinión in Los Angeles and El Diario–La Prensa in New York City, the Spanish-language press openly extolled and promoted the movement. They depicted it as a heroic effort by Hispanic Americans to finally be recognized for their contributions to the nation. But an equally powerful narrative emerged from right-wing talk radio and TV hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and Lou Dobbs. Seizing on the fact that some protesters proudly waved the flags of their home countries alongside the Stars and Stripes, these commentators openly sought to stoke public rage. They demanded tougher immigration policies and mass deportations and warned of an attempt by Latino radicals to reconquer the former Mexican territory of the Southwest as a Hispanic homeland. Not surprisingly, anti-immigrant sentiment in the general population became more virulent, more sustained, and more clearly targeted at Hispanics. As it did so, local politicians around the country became overnight celebrities for instituting local crackdowns on immigrant communities. They included Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Arizona’s Maricopa County; Joe Barletta, the mayor of Hazleton, Pennsylvania; and Steve Levy, the Suffolk County Commissioner in Long Island, New York. From across the political spectrum, many white and black Americans angrily demanded stepped-up deportations and stiffer penalties on companies that employed undocumented workers. They urged a sealing of the U.S.-Mexico border through the rapid completion of a physical and virtual wall across its entire two-thousand-mile length. The protesters and their allies, however, were equally defiant. Such was the force of their outcry that the Sensenbrenner bill died in the Senate. But so did a proposed bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform bill in 2007 that was backed by Massachusetts senator Edward Kennedy, Republican senator John McCain, and President Bush. The new movement failed to achieve its main goal of immigration reform, yet it still left a deep and unexpected imprint on the entire country, for its stunning rise effectively marked the end of thirty years of conservative domination over national politics. Six months after the immigration protests, Democrats swept control of both houses of Congress, and one of the chief reasons for that historic power shift was the mushrooming Latino vote. The number of Hispanics casting ballots that November jumped by nearly 1 million over the previous midterm election—from 4.7 million in 2002 to 5.6 million in 2006. And since the Republican Party was most closely associated with the Sensenbrenner bill, the percentage of Latinos who cast ballots for Republican candidates in the House of Representatives plummeted from 38 percent to 30 percent.2 Then in 2008, Illinois Democratic senator Barack Obama, borrowing the same “Yes We Can” slogan of Chávez’s farm workers and the immigrant rights movement, captured the White House. Obama owed his historic victory in no small measure to the overwhelming support he received from Latino voters. Some 9.7 million Hispanics cast ballots for president in 2008, 2.1 million more than in 2004. Obama garnered 67 percent of those votes, while Republican John McCain received just 31 percent, with McCain’s share representing a significant drop from the 40 percent Latino support George W. Bush enjoyed in his 2004 reelection. The 2.1 million additional Latino voters in 2008 mirrored a similar startling jump among African Americans; and along with a sharp increase of more than 300,000 Asian Americans, it produced the most diverse electorate in the nation’s history and assured the election of our first black president. In the euphoric aftermath of Obama’s inauguration, many claimed the United States had entered a new postracial era. A dispassionate review of voting statistics, however, did not provide such comforting visions of change, nor did the rise of the right-wing Tea Party movement soon after. Obama, after all, had received the support of only 43 percent of white voters, while John McCain amassed 55 percent. Such a yawning gap among whites would normally signal a Republican victory. Only the enormous turnout and overwhelming support Obama generated among the country’s racial minorities—95 percent of African Americans voted for him, as did 62 percent of Asian Americans—made it possible for him to win the election handily.3 Obama’s rise thus reflected how the country’s electorate was changing, and not just in terms of greater opportunities for African Americans. The first decade of the new century saw the number of Hispanic elected officials nationwide surpass 6,600. Between 1994 and 2009, the number of Latinos in Congress climbed by nearly 50 percent—from 17 to 25—while the number of Hispanics holding elected positions in state governments increased by one-third—from 184 to 247. At one point during the past decade, a record three Latinos held seats in the U.S. Senate—Mel Martinez (R-FL), Ken Salazar (D-CO), and Robert Menendez (D-NJ).4 When I penned the first edition of Harvest of Empire at the end of the 1990s, the federal government was in the early stages of erecting a wall between Mexico and the United States, just south of San Diego. The makeshift barrier, I noted then, was not nearly as impressive as our planet’s great testament to human insecurity, the 1,500-mile long Great Wall that China’s emperors spent centuries building against the Huns. Nonetheless, the American version was a clear indication that the U.S.Mexico border had become the epicenter of momentous changes in our hemisphere: by day, a constant stream of trucks headed south, carrying goods to newly erected factories bustling with nearly a million low-wage workers; by night, a silent flood of people headed north in search of the U.S. wages that could spell survival for family members the migrant had left behind. Both movements were creating huge windfalls for tiny investor elites on both sides of the border, while leaving horrendous social conditions on the Mexican side. The movement of labor northward, rivaling in size the great westward trek across the North American frontier by early European settlers, has produced a remarkable transformation—the Latinization of the United States. Unparalleled immigration has taken place from Mexico, the Caribbean, Central and South America since World War II, especially escalating since the 1960s. Over 40 million foreigners settled here between 1960 and 2008, more than during any fifty-year span in the country’s history, and half of those newcomers were from Latin America. Yet most experts were not fully grasping the magnitude of the change, despite a string of hyperbolic press accounts during the 1980s and 1990s that focused on Hispanic population growth. The Census Bureau, for instance, has had to repeatedly revise upward its projection for the future growth of the Latino population. Its most recent estimate predicts the country’s current Hispanic population, which was 46 million in 2009 (and that’s without counting the 4 million residents of Puerto Rico who are U.S. citizens), will nearly triple to 132 million in 2050. At that point, Latinos will comprise nearly one-third of the entire U.S. population; and together with African Americans and other nonminorities, they will make up more than half of all U.S. residents—235 million of 439 million people. Whites of European descent, in other words, will cease to be a majority in the United States by midcentury, though they will no doubt remain the dominant racial group in terms of wealth and power. Looking out beyond 2050, it is now likely that by the end of this century a majority of the U.S. population will trace its ethnic heritage to Latin America, not to Europe.5 This is amazing when you consider that Latinos numbered a mere 9.1 million and represented just 4.5 percent of the population as recently as 1970. The Hispanic population explosion is no longer confined to the Southwest border region, or to a handful of big states like California, New York, and Florida. It has now extended to virtually every suburb, small town, and rural area of the country, with Mexican restaurants, Spanish bodegas, and Latin music now a ubiquitous part of life throughout the United States. Such rapid change has understandably led to deep insecurity among non-Hispanic whites, even among some black Americans. This is especially so for the large baby boomer generation, whose members grew up during the 1950s and 1960s when U.S. immigration rates were at the lowest levels of the twentieth century. The foreign-born population was not only tiny then, but the prevalence of racial segregation and the proliferation of all-white suburbs meant that both white and black Americans had little social interaction with people who were culturally or linguistically different from themselves. The country, in other words, was racially divided but demographically homogeneous.6 Today, many of those older Americans are the ones voicing the greatest fear that Latino and Asian immigration will permanently alter the American way of life. A disturbing number started to believe in the 1990s that the country was under attack by modern-day Huns, hordes of Spanish-speaking “barbarians at the gate.” Many came to regard the multicultural education movement in the public schools and universities as nurturing a divisive form of ethnic nationalism, one that is subverting the Eurocentered traditions of U.S. history and fostering such “un-American” reforms as bilingual education. Nothing seems to inflame advocates of our nation’s Anglo-Saxon traditions so much as this issue of language. Since a people’s culture is inevitably expressed through its language, the growth of “foreign” language use somehow implies the growth of alien cultures. Hispanics, whether rightly or not, are now seen as the vanguard of a linguistic threat. One manifestation of widespread insecurity is the rapid escalation in hate crimes against Latinos, with the FBI reporting a 35 percent jump between 2003 and 2006. Other studies suggest the bureau’s tally drastically undercounts the extent of the problem, especially when it comes to Latinos. In 2008, for instance, the FBI reported 7,780 bias-crime incidents. That number, compiled from local police reports, has fluctuated between 6,000 and 10,000 throughout the decade. Only 11.5 percent of the 2008 incidents, according to the FBI, were because of ethnic or nationality bias.7 But a separate 2005 analysis by the Bureau of Justice Statistics claimed the real number of bias crimes has been far greater, averaging more than 190,000 annually for much of this decade. That study, based on the National Criminal Victimization Survey, revealed that nearly 30 percent of hate crime incidents between 2000 and 2003 involved ethnic bias. It also noted that more than half of bias crimes were never reported to police, with a major reason being that undocumented victims of such attacks are far less likely to file a police report than citizens or legal residents.8 At the same time, some local governments increasingly adopted laws targeting illegal immigrants. Perhaps most controversial was the law the Arizona state legislature passed in 2010 that authorized police to stop and question anyone who they had a “reasonable suspicion” was in the country illegally. Our country is hardly unique, however, in its unease over Third World immigration. Since World War II, the shrinking of the modern world through air travel and mass communications and the everwidening chasm between the rich, developed countries on the one hand, and poverty-stricken Asia, Africa, and Latin America on the other, have fueled unprecedented immigration to the West. Invariably, the old colonial ties meant that Third World immigrants gravitated to the metropolises of their former colonial masters. In Great Britain, burgeoning Pakistani, Indian, and Jamaican immigrant populations have unnerved native whites. In France, a new right-wing movement targets Algerians and Tunisians. In Germany, foreign nationals from Turkey, Africa, and Southeast Asia have drawn the ire of native citizens. But how did the vast explosion in the Hispanic population of the United States occur? What were the forces that propelled so many Latin Americans to come here? Was it simply lax border enforcement and misguided federal immigration policies? Or was it something more fundamental to our own nation’s very development? The central argument of this book is that U.S. economic and political domination over Latin America has always been—and continues to be—the underlying reason for the massive Latino presence here. Quite simply, our vast Latino population is the unintended harvest of the U.S. empire. Most of us are uncomfortable thinking of our nation as an empire, even if Wall Street speculators and investment banks have repeatedly shown their ability to wreck entire economies halfway around the globe in a matter of hours—a power far greater than the Roman or Ottoman empires ever wielded. Our public schools have failed miserably in this regard, for they have taught us little about the machinations that accompanied our nation’s territorial expansion or that helped bring about U.S. domination of the modern world. Not too long ago, Latin America was generally pictured as our exotic backyard, a series of nondescript banana republics and semicivilized nations where Americans liked to travel for adventure or for vacations or to accumulate cheap land or to make their fortunes. The region’s hapless governments became perpetual prey to the intrigues of competing circles of U.S. bankers and investors and to the gunboat diplomacy of U.S. presidents. But now Latino migrants, the product of those old relationships, have invaded the North American garden, kitchen, and living room. We are overflowing its schools, its army, even its jails. Immigrants have existed, of course, from the beginning of civilization. And the basic reasons people move from one land to another have not changed—starvation or deteriorating social conditions, political or religious persecution, a chance to improve one’s lot by starting anew somewhere else. But Latin American migration and the Latino presence in this country, as I attempt to show in this book, differed from that of the Europeans in several important ways. First, the Latino migrant flows were directly connected to the growth of the U.S. empire and responded closely to its needs, whether it was the political need to stabilize a neighboring country or to accept its refugees as a means of accomplishing a broader foreign policy objective (Cubans, Dominicans, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans), or an economic need, such as satisfying the labor demands of particular U.S. industries (Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Panamanians). Second, once the Latin Americans got here, they moved not from an immigrant to a mainstream status, but to a linguistic/racial caste status, mostly as a result of how language and race conflicts have been dealt with throughout the United States and Latin American history. Third, most Latin Americans arrived here when the United States was already the planet’s dominant superpower, as our society was entering a postindustrial period and as our gap between rich and poor was growing, which meant that the unskilled factory jobs European immigrants had utilized to rise into the middle class were no longer a major option. But as our corporations and financial institutions penetrated ever more deeply into Latin America, they fueled an unprecedented movement of labor from the south to the north. Government policies aimed at promoting greater economic integration only ended up exacerbating income and wealth disparities between inhabitants of the two regions. This is especially true in those countries most under the sway of Washington and Wall Street. As a result, our economy became an irresistible magnet drawing low-wage labor from the poorest areas of our “common market.” In 1990, for instance, four years before the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect, federal estimates of the number of immigrants living in the United States illegally ranged from 3.4 to 5.5 million. Most reliable estimates today place that number around 12 million, with Mexico being the source for more than two-thirds of those migrants. Before NAFTA took effect, an average of 350,000 Mexicans were migrating to the United States annually. By the early years of this decade, this had climbed to nearly 500,000 per year. Mexico now has the dubious distinction of sending more of its nationals to work abroad than any other country in the world, including China and India.9 But grasping the underlying causes of Latino immigration is just the start. It is equally important to recognize the flesh and blood stories behind this enormously complex phenomenon. Why did each Latino group come when it did? Why did some come and others not migrate at all? What did the pioneers of each group find when they got here? How did they interact with other Americans? How did they build their communities? Why did some retreat into ethnic enclaves and others not? How are Latinos changing the nation, and how do Anglo-Americans, white and black, feel about those changes? This book seeks to answer many of those questions by presenting an integrated historical look at both Latin America and Latinos in the United States—how both contributed to and were affected by the development of American ideals and American reality. It is divided into three main sections, which I have called “Roots,” “Branches,” and “Harvest.” “Roots,” composed of three chapters, traces the long and tortuous relationship between Latin America and the United States. The first chapter, covering the colonial period, summarizes how Latin America and the United States developed into such radically different societies from the 1500s to independence; the second, how the United States expanded into an empire during the nineteenth century through seizing and exploiting Latin American territories; and the third, how our leaders turned the Caribbean region into a U.S. protectorate in the twentieth century. Admittedly, reviewing five hundred years of New World history in three short chapters is a daunting task, so be forewarned: I attempt to focus on key lessons and patterns that I have culled from various histories by both Anglo and Latin American authors, with an eye toward what light can be shed on our contemporary situation. The second section, “Branches,” is composed of six chapters, each devoted to one of the major Latino groups in the country. Here I combine the research of others on the modern migration saga with my own oral history interviews and investigations as a journalist. The immigration story of each Latino nationality is unique in the times it occurred, the class and type of people who came, and the way they dealt with their new environment. Our immigrant tales are as varied as those of the Swedish, Irish, Germans, Poles, and Italians who preceded us. No doubt, several books could be devoted to each Latino group, but I chose to focus my individual chapters on a family or a few individuals who tend to reflect the general migration story of that group, especially in its early years. I have tried to zero in on immigrants who became leaders or pioneers of the migration, and who have thus spent some time consciously digesting their own experiences. Most of them are people whom I have met during more than thirty years working as a journalist here and in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. They are not the usual ethnic politicians whom outsiders look for when they want a quick read on how a community feels or acts. Rather, I have focused on grassroots leaders, people who clearly have earned the respect of their fellow migrants, but who rarely get interviewed or known outside their own communities. The final section, “Harvest,” is about Latinos in America today. It is composed of five chapters on some of the most pressing issues the average American usually associates with Latinos—politics, immigration, language, and culture. In addition, I have added a chapter on a key cause of Latin American migration over the past sixty years—U.S. trade policy, or what should more properly be called globalization. Finally, there is a chapter on Puerto Rico. Why a whole chapter? Well, that tiny island in the Caribbean was a bigger source of profit for U.S. investors during the twentieth century than any other country in the world. It also happens to be the last major American colonial possession. Yet Puerto Rico receives very little attention commensurate with its importance. Ending colonialism there is an issue with far-reaching repercussions, and not just for the 7.8 million Puerto Ricans here or on the island. Until Puerto Rico is decolonized, American democracy will not be complete. Developments in Latin America and the United States over the past ten years have produced a wealth of new evidence to support my original “harvest of empire” thesis. In this revised edition, I have sought to trace those key developments. The book’s first two sections have remained the same except for minor stylistic improvements. I have extensively revised and updated, however, the five chapters in the final “Harvest” section, supplementing them with more up-to-date data and with accounts of key incidents and trends that are shaping the Latino community’s evolution. Among the most noteworthy of these over the past decade have been: The post-9/11 crackdown on illegal immigration by both federal and local governments and the astonishing immigrant rights movement it sparked. The growing influence of the Latino electorate in the nation’s political life, perhaps best symbolized by President’s Obama’s historic appointment of the first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice, Sonia Sotomayor. Puerto Rico’s extraordinary four-year battle to get the U.S. Navy out of Vieques, as well as the island’s deepening economic crisis and still unresolved status issue. The disastrous impact of U.S. free trade policies on Latin America and on immigration to our shores in the wake of NAFTA. The emergence of left-leaning populist governments throughout Latin America and how that sea change has affected the Latino population of the United States. No nation, of course, is as crucial to U.S. relations with Latin America, or to establishing control of our immigration flow, than Mexico. The exodus of that country’s workers to El Norte has become so massive that a few years ago Mexico moved into first place as the nation supplying the largest number of legal immigrants to the United States since the federal government began keeping statistics in 1820. It has now surpassed even Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Ireland in this regard. NAFTA, which was supposed to spur more new jobs in Mexico and thus slow the pressure on Mexicans to emigrate, has instead led to a greater exodus to the United States. Meanwhile, American corporations have sharply increased their control over Mexico’s manufacturing, banking, and agricultural sectors, and they now dominate its trade. Foreign banks moved into the country in a big way after the 1994 peso crisis, to the point that Citigroup is today one of Mexico’s largest banks, while a handful of U.S. and other foreign firms now control more than 80 percent of that country’s banking assets.10 Tens of thousands of subsistence farmers in the Mexican countryside have been driven to near ruin. Instead of planting traditional beans and corn they have been increasingly lured by violent drug cartels to switch to marijuana and opium crops. Some officials estimate that as much as 30 percent of Mexico’s farmland is now devoted to illicit crops. The large number of unemployed men in border cities like Juarez, Tijuana, and Brownsville have become easy recruits for the private armies of the drug cartels. Spiraling drug violence in those cities has become a harrowing replay of the tragedy that engulfed Colombia in the 1980s.11 The book is aimed at the general reader who wishes to deepen his or her understanding about Hispanics as well as at the growing number of Latino students, professionals, and intellectuals, who may know a great deal about their particular ethnic group—Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, for instance—but little else about any other Hispanics. So who am I to undertake such an ambitious task? Well, I was born in 1947 to working-class parents in Ponce, Puerto Rico. My family brought me to New York City’s El Barrio the following year and I have lived in this country ever since. As a journalist, and before that as a Puerto Rican community activist who helped found and direct two national organizations, the Young Lords in the 1960s, and the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights in the late 1970s, I have spent decades living in and reporting on scores of Latino communities throughout the United States and Latin America, devouring in the process every study or account of the Latino experience I could find. At some point, I grew tired of having our story told, often one-sidedly, without the passion or the pain, by experts who had not lived it. There have been several such well-intentioned efforts for the general reader over the years, but too many fell into what I call the safari approach, geared strictly to an Anglo audience, with the author as guide and interpreter to the natives encountered along the way. In our universities, meanwhile, many fine historians have broken important ground in recent decades with their research into Latino life in this country, and this book would not have been possible had they not paved the way. But many of those efforts focused on one Latino group, or on a specific area such as culture or politics, or a specific period of history. Few have attempted to sketch a broader canvas, to connect the past to the present, to cut across academic disciplines, while still making the entire process coherent to both Latinos and Anglos. Few attempt to understand our hemisphere as one New World, north and south. Even fewer trace the seamless bond between Anglo dominance of Latin America—two hundred years of massive and ever-increasing transfers of wealth from south to north, what Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano has called the “open veins of Latin America”—and the modern flood of the region’s people to the United States. It is the view of this book that one would not exist without the other. If Latin America had not been pillaged by U.S. capital since its independence, millions of desperate workers would not now be coming here in such numbers to reclaim a share of that wealth; and if the United States is today the world’s richest nation, it is in part because of the sweat and blood of the copper workers of Chile, the tin miners of Bolivia, the fruit pickers of Guatemala and Honduras, the cane cutters of Cuba, the oil workers of Venezuela and Mexico, the pharmaceutical workers of Puerto Rico, the ranch hands of Costa Rica and Argentina, the West Indians who died building the Panama Canal, and the Panamanians who maintained it. In this country, just how white and black America cope with the mushrooming Latin American population will determine whether our nation enjoys interethnic tranquility in the twenty-first century or is convulsed by conflicts such as those that tore apart the multiethnic states of Eastern Europe, the old Soviet Union, and elsewhere. The reader will hopefully find in these pages not facile solutions to complex problems but a frank attempt to make sense of both the Latin American and North American experience. It has not been easy to separate my head from my heart as I sought to chronicle this story. I have met too many Latinos throughout my life who struggled and sacrificed far beyond the endurance of most of us to create something better for their children, yet found no respite and little respect, only to be, as the late poet Pedro Pietri once wrote, “buried without underwears.” The deeper I delved into the twohundred-year record of shenanigans by our statesmen, businessmen, and generals in Latin America, the angrier I became, especially since those leaders never seemed to learn from the past. My anger, however, is not tainted by hate; it comes from the frustration of seeing how bountiful our nation’s promise has turned out for some, how needlessly heartbreaking for others, and it is tempered by the conviction that the American people still cling to a basic sense of fairness, that once they understand the facts, they rarely permit injustice to stand, which is in part why I have included in the book a host of facts not commonly known about Latinos. Hopefully, by the time you have finished this book, you will see the Latino in America from another viewpoint. We Hispanics are not going away. Demographics and the tide of history point only to a greater not a lesser Latino presence throughout this century. Ours, however, is not some armed reconquista seeking to throw out Anglo occupiers from sacred lands that were once Latino. It is a search for survival, for inclusion on an equal basis, nothing more. It is a search grounded in the belief that, five hundred years after the experiment began, we are all Americans of the New World, and our most dangerous enemies are not each other but the great wall of ignorance between us. A word about language usage. I believe needless time has been spent by Latino intellectuals in this country debating whether the term “Hispanic” or “Latino” best describes us. Neither is totally accurate but both are acceptable, and I use them interchangeably in this book. Much as blacks in this country went from being comfortable with “colored,” then Negro, then black, then African American, so will U.S. Latin Americans pass through our phases. I remember back in the mid-1980s attending a joint conference in Mexico of Mexican and U.S. Hispanic journalists. The small Indian town where the conference was being held organized a reception for us visitors one night. The town square was decorated with a huge banner that read: Bienvenidos, periodistas hispano-norteamericanos (Welcome, Hispanic–North American journalists”). So, to each his own labels. Likewise, we all know the word “America” has been unfairly appropriated by the people of the United States to refer to this country when it actually denotes the entire hemisphere. Latin Americans, meanwhile, refer to the United States as norteamérica, or North America, and to U.S. citizens as norteamericanos (apologies to Canadians). And in Mexican American communities here, whites are sometimes called Anglos. Here, too, I have eschewed purism, using Americans, North Americans, and Anglos interchangeably. I have used Mexican Americans or Chicanos to refer to Mexicans born and raised in the U.S., and mexicanos, tejanos, californios to refer to those Mexicans who lived in the country before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo made them U.S. citizens. I have italicized Spanish words wherever possible and have provided a glossary of definitions of those words at the back of the book. That said, I ask you to travel back with me to tear down some walls and begin a new journey through the American story. PART I Roots(Las Raíces) 1 Conquerors and Victims: The Image of America Forms (1500–1800) We saw cues and shrines in these cities that looked like gleaming white towers and castles: a marvelous site. —Bernal Díaz del Castillo, 1568 T he arrival of European explorers to America began the most astounding and far-reaching encounter between cultures in the history of civilization. It brought together two portions of the human race that until then had known nothing of each other’s existence, thus establishing the basic identity of our modern world. French writer and critic Tzvetan Todorov has called it “the discovery self makes of the other”; while Adam Smith labeled it one of “the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind.”1 Of the Europeans who settled America, those who hailed from England and Spain had the greatest impact. Both transplanted their cultures over vast territories. Both created colonial empires from whose abundance Europe rose to dominate the world. And descendants of both eventually launched independence wars that remade the political systems of our planet. That common history has made Latin Americans and Anglo Americans, like the Arabs and Jews of the Middle East, cousins in constant conflict, often hearing but not understanding each other. Most of us know little of the enormous differences between how the Spanish and English settled America, or how those disparities led after independence to nations with such radically divergent societies. For just as adults develop key personality traits in the first years of childhood, so it was with the new nations of America, their collective identities and outlooks, their languages and social customs, molded by centuries in the colonial womb. This first chapter seeks to probe how both Latin American and Anglo American cultures were shaped from their colonial beginnings in the 1500s to the independence wars of the early 1800s, particularly how each culture took root in separate regions of what now makes up the United States. What kind of people were the original English and Spanish settlers and how did the views and customs they brought with them affect the America they fashioned? What was the legacy of the settlers’ religious beliefs, racial policies, and economic relationships? How did the colonial systems of their mother countries influence their political traditions? How were the rights of individuals regarded in the two groups of colonies? How did divergent views toward land, its ownership and its uses, promote or retard the development of their societies? To what degree did the various Amerindian civilizations the Europeans conquered influence the settlers’ own way of life? WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE The native population at the time of first contact has been much debated. Estimates vary wildly, though there seems little doubt that it equaled or surpassed that of Europe. Most likely, it was around 60 million; some scholars place it as high as 110 million.2 The greatest number, perhaps 25 million, lived in and around the Valley of Mexico, another 6 million inhabited the Central Andes region, while the territory north of the Rio Grande was home to perhaps another 10 million.3 A bewildering level of uneven development prevailed among these Native Americans. The Han and Capoque were still in the Stone Age, nomads foraging naked along the bayous of the North American Gulf Coast. The slavebased city-states of the Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas, on the other hand, rivaled the sophistication and splendor of Europe. The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán was a bustling metropolis. Meticulously designed and ingeniously constructed in the middle of a lake, where it was accessible only by wellguarded causeways, it contained some 250,000 inhabitants when Hernán Cortés first entered it. (London’s population at the time was a mere 50,000 and that of Seville, the greatest city in Castile, barely 40,000.) The Spaniards were awestruck. One of Cortés’s captains, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, left a vivid description of what he and his fellow Spaniards beheld that first day from the top of the central Aztec temple: We saw a great number of canoes, some coming with provisions and others returning with cargo and merchandise; and we saw too that one could not pass from one house to another of that great city and the other cities that were built on water except over wooden drawbridges or by canoe. We saw … shrines in these cities that looked like gleaming white towers and castles: a marvelous sight. Some of our soldiers who had been in many parts of the world, in Constantinople, in Rome, and all over Italy, said they had never seen a market so well laid out, so large, so orderly, and so full of people.4 But Aztec civilization could not compare in grandeur, archaeologists tell us, to its predecessor, the city-state of Teotihuacán, which flourished for several centuries before it collapsed mysteriously in A.D. 700, leaving behind soul-stirring pyramids and intricate murals and artifacts as clues to its resplendent past. Nor did the Aztecs approach the sophistication of the Mayans, America’s Greeks, whose mathematicians and astronomers surpassed any in antiquity and whose scholars invented during their Classic Period (a.d. 300 to 900) the hemisphere’s only known phonetic script. Farther north, beyond the Rio Grande, hundreds of native societies existed when the Europeans arrived, all with their own languages and traditions, though only the Pueblos of New Mexico and the Iroquois Confederation in the Northeast approached the level of civilization reached by the natives of Meso- and South America. The Pueblos were descended from the even larger and more advanced Anasazi, who flourished in present-day Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries A.D. before they, too, mysteriously disappeared. By the time the first Spaniards arrived in the region in 1540, the Pueblos numbered around sixteen thousand. They were living in small cities of multilevel adobe apartments built on high plateaus, among them Acoma, Zuñi, and Hopi. A peaceful, sedentary civilization, the Pueblos survived off the ocean of barren scrubland and buttes by planting extensively in river bottoms. They practiced a complicated animist religion that revolved around their ceremonial center, the kiva, where they taught their young that “competitiveness, aggressiveness and the ambition to lead were … offensive to the supernatural powers.”5 The Iroquois Confederation, formed around 1570 by the Mohawk shaman, or chief, Hiawatha, was the largest and most durable alliance of native societies in North American history. Its influence stretched from the hinterland of Lake Superior to the backwoods of Virginia. Feared by all other Indians, the Iroquois became gatekeepers to the huge fur trade and a decisive force in the competition between the English and French for its control. They lived in towns of up to several thousand residents in wooden longhouses protected by double or triple rings of stockades. Social authority in each of the five Iroquois nations was matrilineal. Women chose the men who served as each clan’s delegates to the nation’s council, and each nation, in turn, elected representatives to the confederation’s fifty-member ruling body, the Council Fire. That council decided all issues affecting the confederation by consensus. The Europeans who stumbled upon this kaleidoscope of Amerindian civilizations were themselves just emerging from a long period of backwardness. The Black Death had swept out of Russia in 1350, leaving 25 million dead. There followed a relentless onslaught of epidemics that so devastated the continent that its population declined by 60 to 75 percent in the span of a hundred years. So few peasants were left to work the land that feudal society disintegrated, the price of agricultural labor soared, and new classes of both rich peasants and poor nobles came into being. The sudden labor shortage spurred technical innovation as a way to increase production, and that innovation, in turn, led to the rise of factories in the cities. The social upheaval brought about a new mobility among the long-suffering peasantry, and with it a new aggressiveness. Rebellions by the starving poor against their feudal lords became more frequent. Some even assailed the all-powerful Catholic Church, whose bishops preached piety to the common man while surrounded by the privileges of the nobility.6 By the fifteenth century, the frequency of plagues ebbed, population rebounded, and the continent emerged into a dazzling era of artistic and scientific achievement. The first printing presses disseminated the new knowledge widely, through books written in scores of vernacular languages, ending forever the monopoly of Latin and the stranglehold of the clergy on learning. In 1492, as Columbus launched Europe’s historic encounter with the Amerindians, Renaissance geniuses like Hieronymus Bosch and Leonardo da Vinci were at the apex of their fame; the German master Albrecht Dürer, was twenty-one; Niccolò Machiavelli was twenty-three; Dutchman Desiderius Erasmus was twenty-six; the Englishman Thomas More was fourteen; Copernicus was only nineteen, and Martin Luther a boy of eight. The revolutions in production and in knowledge were reflected in politics as well. For the first time, strong monarchs ruled England and Spain, kings who were determined to create unified nations out of fiefdoms that had quarreled and warred against each other since the fall of the Roman empire. Foremost among those monarchs were King Ferdinand of Aragón and Queen Isabella of Castile, who joined their twin kingdoms and finally ousted the Moors in 1492 from the Kingdom of Granada, the last Arab stronghold in Europe. For most of the previous eight centuries, Moors had occupied the Iberian Peninsula, where they withstood fierce but intermittent crusades by Christian Spaniards to reclaim their land. Those crusades—the Spanish call them La Reconquista—had succeeded over the centuries in slowly shunting the Moors farther south, until only Granada remained in Arab hands. Ironically, the Moorish occupation and La Reconquista prepared Spain for its imperial role in America. The occupation turned the country and the city of Córdoba into the Western world’s premier center for the study of science and philosophy, while the fighting engendered a hardened warrior ethos in the hidalgos, Spain’s lower nobility. It was those hidalgos who later rushed to fill the ranks of the conquistador armies in the New World. The wars provided vital practice in colonization, with Spanish kings gradually adopting the practice of paying their warriors with grants from land they recovered in battle. Finally, La Reconquista reinforced a conviction among Spaniards that they were the true defenders of Catholicism. Unlike Spain, which grew monolithic through La Reconquista, England emerged from the Middle Ages bedeviled by strife among its own people. The most bloody of those conflicts was the thirtyyear Wars of the Roses, which finally drew to a close in 1485 when Henry Tudor of the House of Lancaster vanquished Richard III of the House of York. Henry VII quickly distinguished himself by creating a centralized government and reliable system of taxation, the first English monarch to do so. His success was due in no small measure to the prosperity of English farming, to the flowering of English nationalism, and to his enlightened concessions to local self-government. Henry’s subjects proudly believed themselves to be better off than any people in Europe, and they were largely right, for neither the widespread class divisions nor the famine and squalor that afflicted much of the continent during the fifteenth century could be found in England. Slavery, for instance, did not exist in the kingdom, and English serfs already enjoyed greater liberties than their European counterparts.7 The yeomanry, small farmers who comprised a large middle class between the gentry and the serfs, fostered economic stability and provided a counterweight to curb the power of the nobility. At the same time, Parliament and the traditions of English common law accorded the average citizen greater protection from either the king or his nobles than any other political system in Europe. Such were the conditions in 1497 when Henry, fired by news of Columbus’s discoveries, dispatched explorer John Cabot to America. Cabot landed in Newfoundland and laid claim to North America for the British Crown, but he perished in a subsequent trip before establishing a colony. That failure, along with the discovery of gold and silver in Mexico and Peru a few decades later, permitted Spain to catapult to the pinnacle of sixteenth-century world power. Meanwhile, the English, bereft of colonies and increasingly consumed by religious and political strife at home, were reduced to sniping at Spanish grandeur through the exploits of their pirates. When they finally did embark on a New World empire a century later, the English brought with them not just their tradition of local self-government but the vestiges of their domestic conflicts as well, most important of which were the religious schisms and sects that arose after Henry VIII broke with the pope in Rome and established the Church of England. Among those sects, one in particular, the Puritans, was destined to leave a vast imprint on American society. Another “British” conflict that was to greatly influence the New World was the colonizing of Catholic Ireland and the bloody repression that accompanied it. By their callous treatment of the Irish, Anglo-Norman Protestants set the stage for the massive Irish flight that followed. English leaders justified that occupation by claiming that the Irish were a barbarian people, but in doing so, they gave birth to notions of Anglo-Saxon superiority that they would later use to justify their conquest of Native Americans.8 EARLY SPANISH INFLUENCE IN THE UNITED STATES The textbooks most of us read in grammar school have long acknowledged that Spanish conquistadores crisscrossed and laid claim to much of the southern and western United States nearly a century before the first English colonies were founded at Jamestown and Massachusetts Bay. But most Anglo American historians have promoted the view that the early Spanish presence rapidly disappeared and left a minor impact on U.S. culture when compared to our dominant Anglo-Saxon heritage. Those early expeditions, however, led to permanent Spanish outposts throughout North America, to the founding of our earliest cities, Saint Augustine and Santa Fe, and to the naming of hundreds of U.S. rivers, mountains, towns, and even several states. Moreover, they led to a Spanish-speaking population—more accurately, a Latino/mestizo population—that has existed continuously in certain regions of the United States since that time. That heritage, and the colonial society it spawned, has been so often overlooked in contemporary debates over culture, language, and immigration that we would do well to review its salient parts. Juan Ponce de León was the first European to touch what is now U.S. soil. His fruitless search for the Fountain of Youth led to his discovery in 1513 of La Florida. He returned eight years later but was killed in battle with the Calusa Indians before he could found a settlement. Nearly two decades after Ponce de León’s death, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado and Hernando de Soto, their imaginations fired by the treasures Cortés had seized in Mexico, each led major expeditions in search of the fabled cities of gold. Starting from central Mexico in 1539, Coronado and his men marched north into present-day Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, planting the Spanish flag wherever they went. By the time the expedition returned in 1542, the Spaniards had discovered the Grand Canyon, crossed and named many of the continent’s great rivers, but discovered no gold. The same year Coronado set out, De Soto led an expedition out of Cuba that explored much of Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana, but he and half his men perished without finding any treasure. The most extraordinary exploit of all, however, was that of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, who arrived in Florida in 1527—fifteen years before De Soto—as second-in-command to Pánfilo de Narváez, the bungling onetime governor of Cuba whom King Charles of Spain authorized to complete the colonization of Florida. After landing on the peninsula’s western coast, Narváez led a threehundred-man expedition inland near present-day Tallahassee, then foolishly lost touch with his ships and was killed. His men, unable to withstand the constant Indian attacks, headed west along the Gulf Coast on makeshift barges. Only four survived the ordeal, among them Cabeza de Vaca and a Spanish Moor named Estevanico. The four spent the next seven years wandering through the North American wilderness. Their six-thousand-mile trek, one of the great exploration odysseys of history, and the first crossing of North America by Europeans, is preserved in a report Cabeza de Vaca wrote for the king of Spain in 1542. At first, they were separated and enslaved by coastal tribes, where Cabeza de Vaca was beaten so often his life became unbearable. After a year in captivity, he managed to escape and took up the life of a trader between the tribes: “Wherever I went, the Indians treated me honorably and gave me food, because they liked my commodities. I became well known; those who did not know me personally knew me by reputation and sought my acquaintance.”9 His rudimentary medical knowledge enabled him at one point to cure some sick Indians. From that point on, the tribes revered him as a medicine man. Once a year, when the various tribes gathered for the annual picking of prickly pears, he was reunited with his fellow Spaniards, who remained enslaved. At one such gathering in 1533, he engineered their escape and they all fled west through present-day Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. As they traveled, word spread of the wondrous white medicine man and his companions, and soon thousands of Indians started to follow in a caravan of worshipers. The four did not finally reconnect with Spanish civilization in northern Mexico until 1534. By then, Cabeza de Vaca had been transformed. He no longer regarded the Native American as a savage, for he now had an intimate understanding of their culture and outlook. Instead, the barbarity of his fellow Spaniards toward the Indians now filled him with despair. His description of his trip through an area where Spanish slave traders were hunting Indians remains a powerful revelation into the nature of the Conquest: With heavy hearts we looked out over the lavishly watered, fertile, and beautiful land, now abandoned and burned and the people thin and weak, scattering or hiding in fright. Not having planted, they were reduced to eating roots and bark; and we shared their famine the whole way. Those who did receive us could provide hardly anything. They themselves looked as if they would willingly die. They brought us blankets they had concealed from the other Christians and told us how the latter had come through razing the towns and carrying off half the men and all the women and boys.10 THE TOLL OF CONQUEST The devastation Cabeza de Vaca warned of still defies comprehension. By the late 1500s, a mere century after the Conquest began, scarcely 2 million natives remained in the entire hemisphere. An average of more than 1 million people perished annually for most of the sixteenth century, in what has been called “the greatest genocide in human history.”11 On the island of Hispaniola, which was inhabited by 1 million Tainos in 1492, less than 46,000 remained twenty years later.12 As historian Francis Jennings has noted, “The American land was more like a widow than a virgin. Europeans did not find a wilderness here; rather, however involuntarily, they made one.” Fewer natives perished in the English colonies only because the Amerindian populations were sparser to begin with, yet the macabre percentages were no less grisly: 90 percent of the Indian population was gone within half a century of the Puritan landing on Plymouth Rock; the Block Island Indians plummeted from 1,500 to 51 between 1662 and 1774; the Wampanoag tribe of Martha’s Vineyard declined from 3,000 in 1642 to 313 in 1764; and the Susquehannock tribe in central Pennsylvania nearly disappeared, falling from 6,500 in 1647 to 250 by 1698.13 Much of this cataclysm was unavoidable. The Indians succumbed to smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, and bubonic plague, for which they had no immunity, just as Europeans had succumbed to their own epidemics in previous centuries. But an astounding number of native deaths resulted from direct massacres or enslavement. If the Spaniards exterminated more than the British or French, it is because they encountered civilizations with greater population, complexity, and wealth, societies that desperately resisted any attempt to subjugate them or seize their land and minerals. The battle for Tenochtitlán, for instance, was rivaled in overall fatalities by few in modern history. During the eighty-day siege of the Aztec capital by Cortés and his Texcoco Indian allies, 240,000 natives perished.14 A few Indian accounts of the battle survive today only because of Franciscan missionaries like Bernardino de Sahagún and Diego de Durán, who as early as 1524 developed a written form of the Nahuatl language, the lingua franca of central Mexico. The missionaries urged the Indians to preserve their tragic songs and reminiscences of the Conquest, and several of those accounts, such as the following section from the Codex Florentino, vividly describe what happened at Tenochtitlán: Once again the Spaniards started killing and a great many Indians died. The flight from the city began and with this the war came to an end. The people cried: “We have suffered enough! Let us leave the city! Let us go live on weeds!” A few of the men were separated from the others. These men were the bravest and strongest warriors. The youths who served them were also told to stand apart. The Spaniards immediately branded them with hot irons, either on the cheek or the lips.15 Less than a quarter century after the arrival of Columbus, the Indian genocide sparked its first protest from a Spaniard, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, who had arrived in Santo Domingo as a landowner but opted instead to become a Franciscan missionary. The first priest ordained in America, he quickly relinquished his lands and launched a campaign against Indian enslavement that made him famous throughout Europe. As part of that campaign, he authored a series of polemics and defended the Indians in public debates against Spain’s greatest philosophers. The most famous of those polemics, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, recounts scores of massacres by Spanish soldiers, including one ordered by Cuba’s governor Pánfilo Narváez, which Las Casas personally observed. In that incident, according to Las Casas, a group of natives approached a Spanish settlement with food and gifts, when the Christians, “without the slightest provocation, butchered before my eyes, some three thousand souls—men, women and children, as they sat there in front of us.”16 Las Casas’s untiring efforts on behalf of the Amerindians led to Spain’s adoption of “New Laws” in 1542. The codes recognized Indians as free and equal subjects of the Spanish Crown, but landowners in many regions refused to observe the codes and kept Indians in virtual slavery for generations. Despite his heroic efforts, Las Casas, who was eventually promoted to Bishop of Chiapas in Guatemala, also committed some major blunders. At one point he advocated using African slaves to replace Indian labor, though he ultimately recanted that position. While his polemics were among the most popular books in Europe and led to widespread debate over the toll of colonization, they greatly exaggerated the already grisly numbers of the Indian genocide, thus making Las Casas the unwitting source of the Spanish “Black Legend” propagated by Dutch and British Protestants.17 Spain, of course, had no monopoly on settler barbarism. In 1637, the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony mistakenly concluded that local Pequots had killed two white men, so they set out to punish them. Assisted by other Indian enemies of the tribe, the Englishmen attacked the Pequot village on the Mystic River while its braves were absent, and roasted or shot to death between three hundred and seven hundred women and children before burning the entire village.18 Forty years later, during King Philip’s War, colonists and their mercenaries conducted similar vicious slaughters of women and children. An estimated two thousand Indians perished in battle and another thousand were sold into slavery in the West Indies during the conflict.19 And South Carolina’s Cherokee War (1760– 1761) turned so brutal that a colonist defending a fort against Indians wrote to the governor, “We have now the pleasure, Sir, to fatten our dogs with their carcasses and to display their scalps neatly ornamented on the top of our bastions.”20 This type of savagery, often reciprocated by Indians desperate to defend their land, became a hallmark of Anglo-Indian relations far after the colonial period. A particularly gruesome example was carried out by Andrew Jackson in 1814. Settlers and land speculators from the Carolinas had started moving into the territory shortly after the War of Independence. When the settlers tried to push out the Indian inhabitants, the Creeks resisted and the U.S. Army, led by Jackson, intervened. During the war’s decisive battle at Horseshoe Bend, Alabama, on March 27, 1814, Jackson’s men massacred and cut off the noses of 557 Creeks, then skinned the dead bodies to tan the Indian hides and make souvenir bridle reins.21 THE ROLE OF THE CHURCH While all European settlers justified the Indian conquest and genocide as God’s will, the Spanish and English differed substantially in their methods of subjugation, and this eventually led to radically different colonial societies. English kings, for instance, ordered their agents to “conquer, occupy and possess” the lands of the “heathens and infidels,” but said nothing of the people inhabiting them, while Spain, following the dictates of Pope Alexander VI, sought not only to grab the land but also to make any pagans found on it “embrace the Catholic faith and be trained in good morals.” In Spain, both Crown and Church saw colonizing and conversion as a unified effort. Priests accompanied each military expedition for the purpose of Christianizing the natives. Within a month of landing in Mexico, Bernal Díaz reminds us, Cortés presided over the first Indian baptisms, of twenty women given to the Spanish soldiers by the Tabascans of the coast: “One of the Indian ladies was christened Doña Marina. She was a truly great princess, the daughter of Caciques and the mistress of vassals … they were the first women in New Spain to become Christians. Cortés gave one of them to each of his captains.”22 As the Conquest proceeded, priests performed such baptisms by the thousands. Before the holy water could dry on their foreheads, the Indian women were routinely grabbed as concubines by Spanish soldiers and settlers. The priests even performed occasional marriages between Spaniards and Indians, especially among the elite of both groups, thus fostering and legitimizing a new mestizo race in America. For example, Peruvian historian Garcilaso de la Vega, called El Inca, was born in 1539 to a Spanish officer and an Inca princess, while the parish register of Saint Augustine, Florida, recorded twenty-six Spanish-Indian marriages in the early 1700s, at a time when only a few hundred natives resided near the town.23 Far more important than legal marriages, however, was the extraordinary number of consensual unions. Francisco de Aguirre, among the conquistadores of Chile, boasted that by fathering more than fifty mestizo children, his service to God had been “greater than the sin incurred in doing so.”24 The first English colonies, by contrast, began as family settlements. They maintained strict separation from Indian communities, sometimes even bolstered by segregation laws.25 In North America, Indians rarely served as laborers for settlers or as household servants, and unmarried sexual unions between natives and whites were rare except for captives of war. The English, furthermore, never saw proselytizing among the Indians as important. True, the Virginia Company listed missionary work as one of its purposes when the Crown granted Jamestown its charter in 1607. And nine years later, the Crown even ordered funds raised from all parishes in the Church of England to erect a college for the natives. But the company never sent a single missionary to Virginia and the college was never built. Officials simply diverted the money for their own ends until an investigation of the fraud prompted the Crown to revoke the company’s charter and take over direct administration of the colony in 1622.26 Likewise, the New England Puritans segregated themselves from the Indians, not even venturing out of their settlements to win converts until decades after their arrival. In 1643, sections of Harvard College were built with money raised by the New England Company among Anglicans back home. While donors were told the funds would be used for Indian education, some of the money ended up buying guns and ammunition for the colonists.27 So minor was Puritan concern for the Indians’ souls that by 1674, fifty-five years after the founding of Plymouth Colony, barely a hundred natives in all New England were practicing Christians.28 At one time or another, clerics Roger Williams of Rhode Island, Cotton Mather of Massachusetts Bay, and Samuel Purchas of Virginia all vilified the natives as demonic. The Reverend William Bradford, one of the original Pilgrim leaders, insisted they were “cruel, barbarous and most treacherous … not being content only to kill and take away a life, but delight to torment men in the most bloody manner.”29 Throughout colonial history, only Williams’s Rhode Island colony and the Quakers of Pennsylvania showed themselves willing to coexist in harmony with their Indian neighbors. Despite their low view of the Indians, the English settlers did not try to bring them under heel. At first, they merely purchased or finagled choice parcels of land from some tribes and pressured others to move toward the interior. In the Spanish colonies, however, the natives were far more numerous, and the policies of the Catholic Church far more aggressive. Church leaders did more than merely recognize Indian humanity or accommodate mestizaje. The Church dispatched an army of Franciscan, Dominican, and Jesuit monks, who served as the vanguard of sixteenth-century Spanish colonialism. The monks who flocked to America perceived the chaotic rise of capitalism in Europe as auguring an era of moral decay. In the Native Americans they imagined a simpler, less corrupted human being, one who could more easily be convinced to follow the word of Christ. So they abandoned Spain to set up their missions in the most remote areas of America, far from the colonial cities and encomiendas. Those missions—the first was founded by Las Casas in Venezuela in 1520—became the principal frontier outposts of Spanish civilization. Many had farms and schools to Europeanize the Indians and research centers where the monks set about learning and preserving the native languages. Quite a few of the monks were inspired by Thomas More, whose widely read Utopia (1516) portrayed a fictional communal society of Christians located somewhere on an island in America. One of More’s most ardent admirers was Vasco de Quiroga, who established a mission of thirty thousand Tarascans in central Mexico and rose to bishop of Michoacán. Quiroga, like More, talked of trying to “restore the lost purity of the primitive Church.” Since Indians had no concept of land ownership or money, the missionaries easily organized cooperative tilling of the land and even communal housing, just as More espoused. The natives proved less malleable and far less innocent than the Europeans imagined, so much so that early colonial history is filled with countless stories of monks who met hideous deaths at the hands of their flocks. Despite those tragedies, the monks kept coming, and as the years passed, some of their missions even prospered. That prosperity enraged colonial landowners, who increasingly regarded mission Indian labor as unwanted competition for the products of their plantations. In 1767, the colonial elite finally succeeded in getting the Jesuits, the most independent of the monastic orders, expelled from the New World. By then, 2,200 Jesuits were working in the colonies and more than 700,000 Indians resided in their missions.30 Long before those Jesuit expulsions, Spanish monks played a crucial role in colonizing major parts of the United States. Most important were the Franciscans, who founded nearly forty thriving missions in Florida, Georgia, and Alabama during the 1600s and numerous others in the Southwest. Saint Augustine was the headquarters for the Florida missions, in which as many as twenty thousand Christianized Indians lived.31 While most of the Florida missions eventually were abandoned, several in the Southwest later turned into thriving towns, with Spanish monks today recognized as the founders of San Antonio, El Paso, Santa Fe, Tucson, San Diego, Los Angeles, Monterey, and San Francisco. The Florida missions and settlements left a greater imprint on frontier American culture than we might believe. That influence was not always a direct one. Rather, it came by way of the Indians and Africans who remained after the missionaries were gone and who carried on some of the customs they learned from the Spanish settlers. Indians who traded with Europeans at Pensacola in 1822 were “better acquainted with the Spanish language than either the French or English,” notes historian David Weber, and Englishmen who settled in Virginia, Carolina, and Georgia encountered Indians who were already cultivating peach trees the Spanish had introduced from Europe. Weber notes that the missionaries of Florida and New Mexico “taught native converts to husband European domestic animals—horses, cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, and chickens; cultivate European crops, from watermelon to wheat; raise fruit trees, from peaches to pomegranates; use such iron tools as wheels, saws, chisels, planes, nails, and spikes; and practice those arts and crafts that Spaniards regarded as essential for civilization as they knew it.” The knowledge the missionaries imparted to the Indians, whether in agriculture, language, customs, or technology, did not disappear when the last monk departed. Rather, it remained part of Indian experience so that by the time Anglos began settling in the Southeast, they discovered the “civilized tribes,” among them the Creeks, the Cherokees, and the Choctaws. Even some of the most nomadic and fierce of the Southwest nations, the Apaches, Comanches, and Kiowas partially assimilated into Spanish society. In one unusual case, Apache Manuel González became mayor of San Jose, California.32 Apart from the missions, the Church reached into every corner of colonial life. It functioned side by side with Spanish civil government, sometimes even above it. In every town, the church was the dominant structure adjacent to which was erected the central plaza, the cabildo, and la casa real. While the Crown collected its royal fifth from the elite, the Church collected its 10 percent tithe from everyone, rich and poor, white and colored, as well as tribute from the Indians. Parish priests were the main moneylenders, and bishops held unparalleled power over the social life of colonists and natives alike. While the Church served as a buffer for the Indians against the worst abuses of Spanish civil society, it also discouraged independence or self-sufficiency and it demanded obedience from the natives it protected. Even Europeans who dared question Church authority or doctrine were liable to be called before the all-powerful Inquisition, which could threaten anyone up to the governor with excommunication or prison, and which routinely prohibited the circulation of thousands of books and works of art it deemed sacrilegious. Its demand for blind faith toward Church doctrine impeded for centuries the spread of tolerance, ingenuity, and creativity in Latin American thought. No English colonial Church enjoyed a monopoly power approaching that of the Catholic Church in the Spanish territories. The proliferation of sects among Protestants meant each denomination, even when its leaders wished to set up a theocratic colony, could do so only within a circumscribed area, as the Puritans did in Massachusetts and Connecticut. The Puritan witch trials of the late 1680s in Salem and surrounding Essex County rivaled the worst atrocities of the Inquisition. Twenty men and women were executed and more than 150 imprisoned, but the fanatics proved incapable of controlling everyone. Long before the witch trials, Roger Williams rebelled and founded the Rhode Island colony, where he permitted all manner of worship, and other colonies followed similar liberal policies. Catholic Maryland enacted a religious tolerance law and Quaker William Penn set up his Pennsylvania colony, which, likewise, welcomed all believers. New York City turned into such a hodgepodge of religious groups that its English governor reported in 1687: “Here, bee not many of the Church of England, [and] few Roman Catholicks, [but] abundance of Quakers—preachers, men and women, especially—singing Quakers, ranting Quakers, Sabbatarians, Anti-sabbatarians, some Anabaptists, some Independants, some Jews: in short, of all sorts of opinions there are some, and the most part of none at all.”33 After Parliament declared religious freedom in the colonies with the Toleration Act of 1689, the emigration of sects from Europe soared. Thousands of Germans, among them Lutherans, Moravians, Mennonites, and Amish, settled in the Middle Colonies and the hinterlands of the South, as did Scotch-Irish Presbyterians in the South. THE ROLE OF RACE Beyond their religious practices, the English and Spanish colonial worlds diverged substantially in their attitudes toward slavery and race. The long period of Arab domination left an indelible legacy of racial and cultural mixing that the Spanish immigrants carried to the New World. Moorish occupiers of the Iberian Peninsula had invariably taken Spanish wives, setting off an era of miscegenation so extensive that “by the fifteenth century there were dark-skinned Christians, lighthaired Moors, hybrids of every shape and complexion in Castile,” according to one historian. Some Muslims, called Mudejars, continued to live under Christian rule, while some Christians, called Mozarabs, learned to speak Arabic and adopted Muslim habits. The dress, foods, and traditions of Moors and Spaniards permeated each other’s societies. In architecture, for instance, the horseshoe arches, tiled floors and walls, and open interior courtyards so commonly associated with Spanish design in America, all drew from Arabic inspiration.34 This tradition of racial mixing made it more acceptable for Spanish settlers to engage in sexual unions with both Amerindians and Africans. This was especially true for settlers from Andalusia in southern Spain, the province that endured the longest period of Moorish occupation, and which supplied nearly 40 percent of the early settlers to America.35 At the beginning of the Conquest, Seville, Andalusia’s main port, was Spain’s most cosmopolitan city and the nexus for commerce with Africa. It quickly turned into the bustling crossroads for transatlantic trade as well. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the city counted nearly 100,000 inhabitants from all parts of Europe and the Mediterranean, including 6,000 African slaves.36 But racial mixing did not mean racial equality. As the Indian population of America gradually rebounded, and as black slave labor assumed a greater role in colonial plantation production, the Spanish and Creole upper classes became increasingly fearful of revolt—so fearful that after the Haitian revolution, the Council of the Indies, the Crown’s administrative body for colonies, banned all marriages between whites and free blacks or mulatos. Despite the ban, the practice of mixed racial marriages continued, with dispensations often granted in cases where the honor of the woman was at stake. Upon denying one such request in 1855, the civil governor of Oriente Province in Cuba remarked, “There is little doubt that the dissemination of ideas of equality of the white class with the coloured race puts in jeopardy the tranquillity of the Island, the largest proportion of whose population consists of the said race.”37 Apart from the ban on white-colored unions, the institution of marriage itself played a distinctive role in Spanish society. It was one of the many avenues the Church utilized to mitigate the worst aspects of slavery that were so evident in the English colonies. The Church would not permit slave owners, for instance, to separate married couples, and it sanctioned marriage between slaves and free persons. Historian Herbert Klein reports that in selected parishes of Havana between 1825 and 1829, more than a third of all marriages were between slaves, and nearly a fifth were between a slave and a free person. In many parts of Cuba, the marriage rate among slaves was equal to or higher than among whites.38 Perhaps even more important than formal marriage, however, was the social impact of consensual unions. No European society before the nineteenth century witnessed the level of free unions found in Latin America. Illegitimate births among free persons of all classes were close to 50 percent. Among the white upper classes, they were higher than among any other European elite.39 Those unions, which were invariably between white men and nonwhite women, were preferable to official marriage because they did not subvert the class structure. The prevalence of both consensual unions and miscegenation, along with the strong influence of the Catholic Church, led to major differences between how the English and Spanish regarded the rights of slaves, especially toward the end of the eighteenth century. Until then, all colonial powers had allowed masters to free their slaves. But after the Haitian revolution, the British, French, and Dutch started to restrict manumission, while the Portuguese and Spanish colonies promoted and codified the practice. As a result, only in the Portuguese and Spanish colonies did giant classes of free blacks develop, and with them the mulato group (in some countries they were called pardos or morenos) that so distinguished Latin America’s rainbow racial spectrum from North America’s stark black-white system of racial classification. In the United States, for instance, the first federal census in 1790 reported that “free coloreds” were less than 2 percent of the population, while black slaves were 33 percent.40 The same proportion of free blacks to slaves was roughly true in the British, Dutch, and French Caribbean colonies. But the opposite trend prevailed in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, where free blacks or coloreds outnumbered slaves, with perhaps 40 to 60 percent of free blacks able to purchase their emancipation outright.41 The viceroyalty of New Grenada, which included Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador, had 80,000 slaves and 420,000 free coloreds in 1789.42 Cuba had 199,000 slaves and 114,000 free coloreds in 1817.43 By 1872, free coloreds composed 43 percent of Brazil’s population, outnumbering both pure whites and black slaves. Color and status so deeply demarcated the English colonies, however, that the free colored class was considered an abnormality only barely tolerated.44 A drop of black blood made you black in Anglo-Saxon society, while in the Portuguese and Spanish world, mestizos and mulatos, no matter how dark, were invariably regarded as part of white society, although admittedly second-class members. Racism obviously persisted in both groups of colonies, but in the Iberian ones it assumed a muted form, its operation rendered more complex by the presence of a huge mixed-race population. The quest for white purity in Latin America became confined to a tiny upper class, while dispensations for lower-class whites to marry outside their race were routinely granted. The reasons were simple. For rich whites, marriage was first and foremost a question of securing inheritance lines. Racial mixing was not allowed to subvert the class structure, though on occasion even some of the elite officially “recognized” their mixed-race children, ushering them partially into white society. The arcane types of mixed-race offspring that developed in Latin America were astounding. Beyond mestizos and mulatos, there were zambos (Indian and black), coyotes (mestizo and Indian), salta-atrás (those with Negroid features born of white parents), chinos (offspring of Indian and salta-atrás), cuarterones (quadroons), and even more exotic distinctions. For the Anglo-Saxon colonies, on the other hand, interracial marriage was taboo, by any class of whites. Even after independence and emancipation, it remained banned, and while rape or unsanctioned unions obviously occurred, Anglo-Saxons almost never recognized their mixed-race children, no matter how light-skinned the offspring or how poor the father. LAND AND POLITICS IN THE TWO SOCIETIES Beyond religion and race, the Spanish and English colonies diverged radically in the way they managed their economic and political systems. Spain’s colonies were royal affairs from the start. Conquistadores functioned as direct agents of the Crown. And Spain’s main object, at least for the first century, was gold and silver; by 1600, its colonies had already produced more than 2 billion pesos’ worth, three times the total European supply before Columbus’s first voyage.45 (The total surpassed 6 billion pesos, mostly in silver, by 1800.) The flood of silver coin, however, only led to massive inflation at home. Domestic industry and agriculture stagnated as more than 200,000 Spaniards left for the New World during the first century of colonization. Countless others abandoned the Spanish countryside and flocked to Seville and Cádiz to engage in mercantile trade.46 The Crown’s expulsion of the Moors and Jews only exacerbated the economic crisis, since those two groups had provided much of the country’s professional and commercial vitality. Jewish merchants fled with their wealth to the financial centers of London, Amsterdam, and Genoa.47 With Spain forced to resort to huge loans from foreign banks to meet the spiraling costs of administering its vast empire, much of the production from the mines of Mexico and Peru passed into the coffers of Dutch and English bankers and went to pay for manufactured goods to supply the colonies. When they finally started their own American colonies nearly a century after Spain, the English and the Dutch rejected Spain’s state-sponsored approach. They relied instead on rich nobles financing individual colonies and on a new type of business venture—the joint stock company. The London Company, the Plymouth Company, the Virginia Company, and the Dutch West Indies Company all secured charters from their monarchs to populate the new territories. While the Pilgrims and other colonists indeed fled religious persecution, the same cannot be said of the companies that transported them. Utopia for these new capitalist concerns was far less spiritual in nature. It meant the chase for enormous profit: from trading for furs with the Indians; from wood and iron and other raw materials that could be shipped to England; and from charging hefty rates for relocating England’s malcontents and dissidents to the New World. In 1627, for instance, the London Company declared one of its objectives to be: “The removing of the surcharge of necessitous people, the matter or fuel of dangerous insurrections, and thereby leaving the greater plenty to sustain those remaining with the Land.”48 The mass exodus from England and Europe, however, was not simply a spontaneous emigration of the continent’s persecuted and destitute, as immigrant myth would have us believe. More than half the population of the thirteen colonies before 1776 was composed of indentured servants. Among these were fifty thousand convicts who were released from English jails during the seventeenth century to populate the Maryland and Virginia colonies, and a considerable number of children who had been kidnapped and sold into servitude.49 Land speculators who worked in tandem with merchants orchestrated and engineered much of the exodus. Labor agents scoured the British Isles and the Rhineland for recruits to work the huge tracts of American land the speculators owned, enticing farm families to sell their property and seek instant wealth in the New World.50 William Penn, for example, employed recruiting agents in London, Dublin, Edinburgh, and Rotterdam. Penn’s merchant friend in Rotterdam, Benjamin Furly, was so successful advertising the colony in the Rhine Valley that he turned Pennsylvania into the center for German immigrants to the colonies.51 At first, England left colonial administration in the hands of the companies, since the Crown was preoccupied with its own domestic strife and religious battles. But by the end of the seventeenth century, Parliament assumed direct administration through its Board of Trade, the counterpart to Spain’s Council of the Indies. Even then, however, England kept its New World bureaucracy rather tiny. The Spanish empire, on the other hand, spawned such a huge colonial bureaucracy that 1.1 million people held religious office of some kind in the Spanish colonies by the seventeenth century, and nearly half a million held government jobs.52 Like most bureaucracies, the colonial Church and civil government slowed the pace of decision making, buried innovation under mountains of reports and edicts, and stifled all manner of dissent. In fairness to Spain, its empire was the largest the world had ever seen. From Oregon all the way to Patagonia, it stretched over some of the world’s most impassable mountains, longest rivers, most forbidding deserts and impenetrable jungles. The population of its colonies, ten times that of the mother country, required far more effort to control than the more compact and less densely populated English colonies east of the Allegheny Mountains. Latin America’s great size and mineral wealth required an enormous supply of laborers. Indians and mestizos mined the empire’s gold and silver, built its cities and churches, tended its herds, and grew its food. And once mining declined in importance, African slaves harvested the new gold, sugar, as well as tobacco, cocoa, and indigo. For a Spaniard in America to engage in hard labor was almost unheard-of. In the English colonies, on the other hand, Amerindians never formed part of the labor force. The colonial economy depended on three groups of workers: free white farmers, propertyless whites (both indentured and free), and African slaves. Nearly 70 percent of all white immigration to the colonies until the Revolution was made up of indentured servants. Those servants, having completed their required years of work, became free artisans in the cities or moved to the frontier to start their own farms. By the time of the Revolution, the majority of the white population was comprised of independent yeomen, small farmers, and fishermen.53 That agrarian group—simple, unassuming, skeptical of far-off government control, and determined to create a new life out of an immense and fertile wilderness—would form the cultural core of the new North American society, or at least of its white majority. Radically different land policies further demarcated English and Spanish colonial society. Frenzied speculation in land was ubiquitous in the English territories.54 “Every farmer with an extra acre of land became a land speculator—every town proprietor, every scrambling tradesman who could scrape together a modest sum for investment,” says one historian.55 Both the English colonial administrators and, later, the state and federal governments fostered speculation. Time and again, those in charge of government created overnight fortunes for their friends and themselves through corrupt schemes aimed at amassing huge holdings. By 1697, for example, four Hudson Valley families, the Van Cortlandts, Philipses, Livingstons, and Van Rensselaers, had amassed for themselves 1.6 million acres spanning six present-day counties in mid–New York State, creating that state’s new landed aristocracy.56 Where the English had their tradition of land speculation, the Spaniards had the opposite, the mayorazgo, in which a family’s rural and urban holdings were made legally indivisible, handed down from generation to generation through the eldest son. Other family members could be assigned portions of the family estate to administer and profit from, but they could never own and, most importantly, could not sell that portion. The biggest mayorazgos went to the original conquistadores. More modest allotments were assigned to their lower-ranking soldiers, and even smaller grants to civilian settlers. As the generations passed, intermarriage within the elite created labyrinthine mergers of old estates. Merchants, miners, and later immigrants often tried to purchase titles or marry into the established mayorazgos. The giant estates only got bigger, never smaller, and individual buying and selling of land for quick profit was rare.57 The mayorazgos, together with the labor system of the encomiendas, thus became the basis for Latin America’s latifundio system, in which a tiny portion of the white population owned most of the land and all others were reduced to laborers. In contrast to both the English and Spanish, Native Americans invariably saw land as a resource to be used by all and owned by none. Even in the most stratified Indian societies, land was owned ultimately in common. Among the Aztecs, for instance, the calpulli, or extended clan, apportioned land to each member. The members, in turn, remitted a portion of their crops to clan leaders, who used that portion to pay the emperor’s tribute.58 No matter how many treaties the Indian nations may have signed to placate white settlers, they invariably saw themselves as ceding use of the land, not perpetual ownership. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the English and Spanish settlers brought with them vastly different political traditions. When each group attempted to transplant those traditions in the New World, they found themselves deeply influenced by the Amerindians who had preceded them. In Mexico, for instance, the Aztec ruler, chosen from within the royal family by a council of nobles, stood atop a highly differentiated class society. He exacted tribute from his own people and from conquered or dependent city-states like Tacuba, Texcoco, Tlaxcala, and Tarasca. The Spaniards did not dismember those centralized structures of power; instead, they appropriated them from above, erecting the scaffolding of their colonial organization, from viceroys to middle-level corregidores, over an already autocratic Indian foundation. And they astutely relinquished control of the cabildos (town councils) outside of the major cities to the In...
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Latin American History

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Latin American History
Part A
Section I
Skopol establishes two features of a civilian and commoners’ led revolution that the
Cuban revolution must meet. First, the revolution is started by a lower class in society's
revolution against the establishment or the state. Secondly, they result in the reorientation of
class structure and society's state. The Cuban revol...


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