In 1970 the Latino population of the United States stood at around 9.6 million people.  They comprised just 4.7% of the U.S. population and 71% were native born.  In terms of national origins, 60% were Mexican, 15% were Puerto Rican, 7% were Cuban, and 6% were Central or South American, with 13% representing “other” origins.    Over the next four decades, however, this small population was radically transformed by mass immigration to the point where in 2010 the number of Latinos stood at 50.5 million people, who constituted 16.3% of the U.S. population.  Meanwhile, the share of native born Latinos had dropped to around 61% and the distribution of national origins had shifted, with Puerto Ricans and Cubans declining to just 9% and 3.5% of the total, respectively while Mexicans, Central Americans, and South Americans rose to comprise 63%, 7.9 and 5.5% of all Latinos. 

            At present, therefore, more than three quarters of all Latinos trace their origins to Mexico, Central America, or South America, compared with just 15.5% from the Caribbean.  Moreover, whereas Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Dominicans are overwhelmingly legal residents or citizens of the United States the bulk of Mexicans, Central Americans, and South Americans are non-citizens and a substantial share lacks documents entirely.   The percentage foreign born among Mexicans is 36%, compared with 63% among Salvadorans, 69% of Guatemalans and Hondurans and two-thirds of Nicaraguans and Colombians.  According to the latest estimates from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 58% of Mexican immigrants are present illegally, compared with 57% of Salvadorans, 71% of Guatemalans, and 77% of Hondurans. 

            In other words undocumented migrants are no longer a small share of the Latino population.  Among Mexican and Central Americans they constitute a majority of all those born abroad; and even when one considers national origins as a whole, the undocumented constitute 21% of all persons of Mexican origin, 38% of those of Salvadoran origin, 50% of those of Guatemalan origin, and 52% of those of Honduran origin.   Never before have so many people been outside the law and never before have the undocumented been so concentrated in such a small number of national origins.  As a result, working class Latinos are now the most vulnerable of all of America’s disadvantaged populations.

            The rising tide of illegality within the Latino population is critical to understanding the nature of discrimination and exclusion in contemporary American society, for whereas Latinos may be a protected category U.S. under civil rights legislation, undocumented migrants are not.  Indeed, U.S. immigration law encourages and often compels employers, landlords, and service providers to discriminate against the undocumented even as civil rights law requires them to remain neutral with respect to Hispanics.  In recent years, the federal government has also stripped away legal protections from all non-citizens, not just the unauthorized but legal permanent residents as well.  Legislation passed since 1996 has curtailed access to federally funded entitlements, stripped away rights to due process, and criminalized infractions that had formerly been civil violations, retroactively declared criminal convictions to constitute grounds from immediate deportation, and given the executive branch the right to declare anyone deportable on national security grounds without trial. 

            Meanwhile it has steadily expanded the immigrant enforcement apparatus not only at the border but internally.  Since 1990 deportations from the United States have risen exponentially, rising from just 30,000 in that year to nearly 400,000 in 2010.  Along the border, the number of Border Patrol Agents has risen from 3,700 to more than 20,000.  The United States has built a massive bureaucracy to enact the 1930s deportation campaigns and the 1953 border militarization known as Operation Wetback on a permanent, ongoing basis.

            Accompanying the rising share of undocumented migrants in the United States has been a sharp increase in the number of temporary legal workers admitted into the U.S. labor force.  Entries to the United States by H-visa holders from Mexico alone rose from 17,000 in 1990 to 517,000 in 2010, a record number that exceeds the number of guest workers imported at the height of the Bracero Program in the late 1950s.  Between the rising share of undocumented migrants and the increasing inflow of temporary workers, the number of people lacking labor rights in U.S. markets has increased dramatically, especially in new and old destination areas where Latin American immigrants have concentrated. 

            The rising share of exploitable workers lacking both civil liberties and economic rights, when combined with rising enforcement and steadily more onerous sanctions against undocumented workers, has caused a remarkable decline in the real value of the wages of Latino workers, especially among Mexicans.  Accompanying the drop in wages has been a decline in incomes and a rise in poverty rates, to the point where Latinos have fallen from their historical position in the middle of the socioeconomic hierarchy between whites and blacks, to a new position at or below the position of African Americans.   Accompanying this decline, other indicators of social well-being—notably health and education—have also fallen.

            The remarkable rise in illegality among Latinos has implications that extend far beyond the undocumented themselves.  In addition to the 1.5 million undocumented children living in families containing an unauthorized parent are four million U.S.-born citizen children, whose progress in society is held back by the very real fears and trepidations of their undocumented parents and siblings; and these numbers do not take into account the millions of other older children of undocumented migrants and more distant relatives.   In 2008 the Pew Hispanic Center found that 72% of Latino immigrants said they worried about deportation some or a lot, as one might expect; but the figure was still quite high at 35% among native born Latinos, who were presumably not vulnerable to deportation themselves but worried about the deportation of friends or relatives.  Indeed, 53% of native born Latinos said that the immigration debate had made life difficult for them.   

            Thus the illegality among Latinos that has been manufactured by U.S. policies over the past decades constitutes the single largest and most potent barrier to Hispanic socioeconomic mobility and integration in the United States.  With huge fractions of Latinos lying outside the protections of the law and even larger shares related to people who lack legal protections, and with most rights stripped away from all non-citizen foreigners, the Hispanic population has never been more vulnerable and its position in America more precarious.  Until the burden of illegality is lifted from the shoulders of Latinos in the United States, little other progress—economic, social, or political—will be possible.

“Scientific Polling y el Voto Latino” — by
Ali A. Valenzuela  (Assistant Professor of Politics)

During the 2012 election, scientific polling and polling aggregators such as Nate Silver at The New York Times, Simon Jackman  at The Huffington Post, and our own Sam Wang at the Princeton Election Consortium entered the national consciousness like never before. Polling aggregators’ rise to prominence was due in part to the availability of massive amounts of state and national polling data, which the aggregators combined into sophisticated statistical models used to predict election outcomes in individual states as well as nationally. Several of the predictive models turned out to be highly accurate and immediately debunked claims of unfairly skewed polls favoring the Democrats that had been circulating in the weeks before Election Day. The polls did favor the Democrats, but that was because the Democrats were ahead in the presidential contest.

There are two important points in this conclusion. First, party identification – the level of support for the Democratic or Republican Party among the American public – changes from election-to-election, year-to-year and sometimes from poll-to-poll. Enthusiasm for the candidates, the state of the economy, and candidate positions on major policy issues like healthcare or U.S. military action abroad can all affect the proportion of Americans that identify as Democrats or as Republicans in a given poll. Just because a poll shows more Democrats or more Republicans than in the previous election does not mean that the poll is inaccurate. Second, scientific polling, and especially the combined average of many scientific polls, provides a very accurate snapshot of the level of support for a candidate in a national election. Scientific polling within states, and especially the average of many scientific polls within a state, provides a very accurate snapshot of state-levels of support for a candidate.

However, when it comes to polling Latino voters, many commercial firms do a poor job because of challenges and costs associated with interviewing voters in Spanish. For example, most polling firms employ a call back method in which, when they encounter a Spanish-speaker, they hang up and schedule a call-back with someone who can carry out the interview in Spanish. This has the effect of reducing response rates and the number of Spanish-only interviews that are successfully completed. Utilizing fully bilingual callers for Latino polling is expensive but necessary when upwards of 45% of the Latino electorate consistently prefers to interview in Spanish. This figure is among registered Latino voters who are all American citizens, to say nothing of the overall Latino population.

More critically, many polling firms, including the National Exit Poll, which interviews voters as they leave their voting places, do not interview in Spanish at all (more information). Exit Poll results are widely reported by the media, yet the effect of English-only interviewing is to bias results for Latinos towards those who are more acculturated: those who speak better English and live in wealthier parts of the country. Research consistently shows that more acculturated Latinos tend to hold more conservative policy attitudes and vote preferences more favorable to the Republican Party than among less acculturated Latinos. So polls that do not interview in Spanish, or that interview a lower-than-average proportion of Latinos who speak only Spanish, produce results that do not accurately reflect the Latino vote nationally or in states with a sizable Latino population.

The conservative bias of English-only Latino polling tends to produce results showing Republican candidates with more Latino support than in reality. In 2010, inaccurate Latino polling created a situation where Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) was predicted to lose his reelection bid for the U.S. Senate by a slight margin, but he instead won by 5.6 percentage points over his anti-immigrant challenger, Sharron Angle. Senator Reid won in large part because of the Latino vote, which supported his candidacy by a 90–8 margin, a huge gulf in Latino support between the two statewide candidates (more information). With Latinos representing about 12% of the Nevada electorate in 2010, their 82-point margin in favor of Reid translates into almost 10 additional percentage points for the Democratic win column, a figure greater than Reid’s margin of victory. Latino voters were pivotal to Harry Reid’s reelection and his return to the U.S. Senate as Majority Leader.

Fast-forward to 2012 and the crucial nature of the Latino vote repeated itself in at least four states: Colorado, Florida, Nevada and New Mexico. In these states, three of which were highly contested “swing” states (CO, FL and NV), Latinos’ level of support for President Obama was so much greater than their support for Governor Romney that they made the crucial difference in winning these states for the President. This outcome depended on two key factors: one, which I have already noted, is the large gap in Latino support between the Democratic and Republican candidates, an average difference of 54 percentage-points in these four states. Two, the Latino electorate in these four states—that part of the Latino population that was eligible and turned out to vote—was large enough to translate the gap in support between the two candidates into a substantial and pivotal vote contribution for a Democratic win. Without the Latino vote, and without such a wide margin of support for the Democrats among Latinos, it is unclear whether President Obama would have carried the day on November 6, 2012.

 How did we get to such overwhelming Democratic support among the Latino electorate? As recently as 2004 approximately 40% of Latino voters supported George W. Bush, a vote margin with then-Senator Kerry of only 20 percentage points (more information).  In my presentation, I will report more detailed Latino polling results from 2012 and discuss how we might understand such high levels of Democratic support among Latinos today.

On Friday, May 31, 2013 the Program in Latino Studies will host a Reunions Event for returning alumni from 3–4:30pm.  This event, “¡Adelante! Latinos Reshaping America”, will feature Ali Valenzuela (Assistant Professor of Politics), Douglas Massey (Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology), and Patricia Fernández-Kelly (Senior Lecturer in Sociology).  Marta Tienda (Director, LAO) will moderate, with opening remarks by Germán Lara (President of the Association of Latino Princeton Alumni).  This event is co-sponsored by ALPA.

On December 13, 2012, Princeton hosted the conference “Diversity on Campus: Practices, Policies and Culture.” The purpose of the conference was to assemble leading scholars and academic administrators to exchange views about successful strategies for achieving diversity goals in higher education.  Princeton President Shirley M. Tilghman and Provost Christopher Eisgruber each moderated panels.  Among the questions considered were: 

How can institutions maximize the educational benefits of diversity? How can institutions foster environments in which diverse populations–faculty, students, and staff–can flourish and how can institutional leadership facilitate these goals?

Professor Tienda participated in session 2; a panel discusion about creating a diverse campus. Videos of the panels can be seen here.

For a full description of the event, please visit the article in the Princeton Weekly Bulletin.

Fernando Acosta-Rodríguez

Fernando Acosta-Rodríguez has been the Librarian for Latin American, Iberian and Latino Studies at Princeton University Library since 2003.  In addition to being responsible for the development of Princeton’s world class library collections from Latin America, Portugal and Spain, he oversees all collections and resources related to Latino Studies in Firestone Library.  A fundamental part of that responsibility is to assist Princeton’s students and faculty in the discovery and use of its vast library resources.  As such, Fernando welcomes all students in the Latino Studies Program to  *protected email* or meet with him in person in Firestone.  He also invites all program affiliates to start exploring the Library’s vast resources through the online Latino Studies research guide that he created.

Fernando came to Princeton from The New York Public Library where he served as its Latin American Bibliographer starting in 1997.  He earned both his M.L.I.S. and his M.S. in Politics at the University of Texas at Austin.  In 2009–2010, he served as President of the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials (SALALM), the international professional organization that groups librarians, book vendors, and other information professionals specializing in that part of the world.  He was the editor of the Papers of the 55^th Annual Meeting of SALALM, a volume published in 2012 titled The Future of Latin American Library Collections and Research:  contributing and adapting to new trends in research libraries.

This year, the events that Acción Latina and Chicano Caucus –the two Latino groups participating in this year’s Latino Heritage Month Committee– organized were designed to maximize impact on the general population of university students, particularly those not cognizant or frequently engaged with the cultures in question. The celebration started on October 4th with the Latino Heritage Month Kickoff Event, at Campus Club. Senior Grecia Rivas (’13) opened the evening by reminding us of the importance of our Latin American heritage, and was followed by Ms. Tennille Haynes, the Director of the Carl A. Fields Center, who gave an inspiring speech about multiculturalism. We closed the night by dancing to the rhythm of Latin American music. 

For the first LHM week, we had a very engaging lunch discussion about the Latino and Latin American identity with Prof. Pedro Meira Monteiro (Oct 8th), and the student panel “Intersections of Race and Sexuality” (Oct 9th), an event where student leaders shared their personal experiences with this intersection, drawing distinctions and acknowledging similarities amongst different racial and ethnic groups. We also celebrated our Latino heritage at the Princeton University Art Museum; “Latinos at the Museum” (Oct 11th) included Mexican food and beverages, a special guest performance by Ballet Folklórico de Princeton, and a short themed tour of the Art of the Ancient Americas gallery. To close that week, we had a film screening of “Gun Hill Road”, followed by a talkback with Director Rashaad Ernesto Green (Oct 12th). 

 We started the following week’s celebrations with a Mexico vs El Salvador soccer match screening (Oct 16th), organized a “Latino Trivia Night!” (Oct 18th) in order to test our knowledge of Latino and Latin American geography, politics, music, arts and literature, and ended the week with an “Indoors Pickup Soccer” tournament at Dillon Gym (Oct 20th). Before fall break, we also encouraged everyone to go to the discussion organized “Latinos in the 2012 Elections: An Expert Discussion on Research and Politics.”

Finally, we closed the celebrations with a “LHM Variety Show” (Nov 9th), an event where performers from the Princeton Community gathered together to celebrate the Latino culture, dances and music; and a Closing Gala (Nov 10th), our final LHM event consisting of a Latin-American themed dinner catered by Taste of Mexico, followed by a dance party with the band Rumba con Son.

Lozano is completing an article for the Western Historical Quarterly that compares New Mexico and Puerto Rico Spanish language teaching by looking at the ways that regional differences affect language identity.  She is focusing in particular on two major language learning debates that occurred in each region in the early 1940s and is using New Mexico Senator Dennis Chávez to connect the two.

By the end of the year, Professor Lozano will complete a book proposal and several chapter revisions based on her dissertation that examines the politics of the Spanish language in New Mexico and California over the century following the Mexican American War.  The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo made many Spanish speakers US citizens despite a lack of English language skills.  These new citizens and the Spanish speaking immigrants that followed negotiated language politics at a personal, community, state, and national level.  The book looks at the ways in which Spanish language usage affected identity, citizenship, and race.

Although away for the 2012–2013 academic year, Rosina Lozano looks forward to joining the faculty at Princeton University as an assistant professor in the history department beginning in the 2013–2014 academic year.

Her field is the history of religion in Latin America with a focus on Mexico in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her research interests include women, gender, and sexuality, the Catholic Church in colonial society, race, caste, and religion, and the intersection between social and spiritual status in the early modern world. Her work on laywomen’s use of ecclesiastical courts to resolve domestic and marital disputes has appeared in Colonial Latin American Review, and she is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Troubling Devotion: Laywomen and the Church in Colonial Mexico.

She is currently teaching an undergraduate seminar called, “Religion, Gender, and Sexuality in Early Latin America,” and a graduate seminar called “Religion and Church in Mexican History.” In the spring, she will be teaching a lecture course called, “Histories and Themes in Mexican Religion.” Jessica Delgado is also affiliated with the Center for the Study of Religion and runs the Religion and Culture workshop for CSR fellows.

Brian Eugenio Herrera 

At the end of October, Herrera will be delivering the keynote address in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the National Hispanic Cultural Center as part of “Recognizing New Mexico’s Theatrical Past, Present and Future: An Interactive Symposium.”  This symposium is a tour of how theatrical performances have been a part of the lives of New Mexicans for over 400 years.  Herrera’s keynote, “400 Years of New Mexico Theatre History,” charts the broad contours of four centuries of New Mexico’s performance history, beginning with the collision of Spanish liturgical drama and indigenous ritual practice in the sixteenth century and continuing all the way through to the rise of “Tamalewood” in the early twenty-first century.

This semester Professor Herrera is teaching THR 330 Special topics in Performance Practice–Casting: History, Theory and Practices.  This one of a kind course is related to his book project on casting.  During Spring 2012–2013, Professor Herrera will teach THR 331/LAO 331 Special Topics in Performance History and Theory: Playing Latino.  This course will examine how the pan-ethnic construction of Latina/o cultural identity was rehearsed in twentieth century U.S. popular performance. Students will consider a wide array of popular performances and assess the ways such performances have staged shifting perceptions and presumptions about Latinas/os in the United States and how those performances have contributed to broader discourses of race, identity, culture and nation. Topics will include: heritage performance, liturgical drama, stand-up comedy, television, and visual art, as well as literary drama, performance art, and activist teatro.