Latinos and African-American workers have much in common.
During African-American History Month, it is important for Latinos to understand how slavery and the experience of African- Americans has shaped the history of our adopted country, the United States of America.
This becomes particularly important in light of currently stalled immigration reform and unbridled anti-immigrant hysteria.
At one point in U.S. history, a slave counted as three-fifths of a man for voting purposes – but his master held the vote, not the slave. Though he might be born and raised in this country, a slave had no rights that his master was bound to respect, nor was he considereda citizen.
To make matters worse, in 1857 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that even a free African-American could never become an American citizen. This was part of the infamous Dred Scott decision which allowed bounty hunters to hunt down and return slaves who ha escaped bondage by traveling up North to free states.
Today, Arizona lawmakers are proposing to change the U.S. Constitution so that children of undocumented immigrants are denied U.S. citizenship. This movement seeks to either amend the Constitution, or to create separate birth certificates, one for children of citizens and one for children of undocumented immigrants. Representative Duncan Hunter of California has gone further and proposed that children of the undocumented should be deported along with their parents.
Though the U.S. Civil War (1861 to 1865) formally ended slavery, the inferior status of the African-American conditioned how immigrant workers were treated. Irish fleeing the potato famine of their homeland were at first treated no better than the black man.
This stirred up animosity between them. During the Civil War, riots broke out when Irishmen were drafted to fight against slavery, leading to several lynchings of blacks.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, successive waves of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and Mexican laborers were brought in to build the railroads, harvest the crops, and work the mines wherever labor was scant, particularly in the West.
When they were no longer needed, further immigration was prohibited, for example by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. As part of the legacy of slavery, Mexicans were deported from land that had once been part of Mexico.
The vast territory including Arizona, California, Texas, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, and New Mexico had been taken from Mexico by a war between the U.S. and Mexico (1846-1848). The original impetus had come from Southern interests that wanted to bring in more states for the expansion of slavery prior to the Civil War.
The common thread running through U.S. history has been the contradiction between the promise of opportunity, freedom, and justice on the one hand and the second-class treatment, exploitation, and demonization of a section of the working class on the other.
This has been conditioned by the legacy of black slavery in this country. We can see the consequences of this contradiction today in Arizona’s repressive anti-immigrant laws and the threat of similar laws around the country.
As in the period leading up to the American Civil War, we are once again in revolutionary times. Back then, the white wage laborer attacked the black slave because he could not compete with slave labor. Eventually, all saw that the slave system had to be overthrown.
Today, whites, blacks, and immigrants are pitted against each other. In reality, none of them can compete with the computerized technology that is eliminating human labor in producing the world’s goods.
So workers should not fight with each other. The resolution of our problems comes with creating a society where the fruits of production benefit all of us. This can only come with ending second-class treatment and the marginalization of any workers. That is one of the lessons of African-American history.
