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Hispanic diaspora and Chicano identity in the United States The South Atlantic Quarterly Durham Winter 1999 Authors: Ramon A Gutierrez Volume: 98 Issue: 1/2 Pagination: 203-215 ISSN: 00382876 Subject Terms: History Colonialism Culture Hispanic Americans Immigration Geographic Names: United States US Abstract: Mexico and all the nation-states of Latin America are settler societies in which immigration and emigration, borders and boundaries have been constant themes and at the center of national mythologies. Gutierrez discusses Hispanic diaspora and Chicano identity in the US since 1492. Copyright Duke University Press Winter 1999 Full Text: On the first day of April 1996, the world watched in terror as images beamed to millions of television screens showed an undocumented Mexican worker named Enrique Funes Flores being whacked across the back, the latest casualty in the U.S. war against Mexican immigrants. Offering no resistance nor even attempting to flee, Alicia Sotero Vasquez received similar treatment. She was beaten and yanked by her hair to the ground, her head grazing the bumper of a truck as she went down. I didn't do anything wrong. I merely came here to find work," she explained. But her words and those of her companion could not be heard over the obscenities shouted by Deputies Tracy Watson and Kurtis Franklin, who were seething with rage as they enforced the U.S. border with their batons. Although the "coyote," the smuggler of these Mexican immigrants, apparently got away, Deputy Franklin stood triumphantly over his captured female "alien," grinding her body into the dirt with his boot. Why? This was the question we were asked to ponder as eyewitnesses to another electronic lynching. Was it racism? Was it "high-speed pursuit" syndrome, as some claimed? Were the beatings civil rights violations or had the deputies simply been protecting our borders? In this period of deindustrialization, economic downsizing, a disappearing middle class and a growing polarization between the other two classes, the nature of the Hispanic, Latin, and Mexican diasporas in the United States was clearly up for debate. To those who complain that the U.S. borders are being violated daily by hungry, dirty, illiterate, and unskilled hordes from Mexico who work illegally for a pittance, it seemed that Enrique Funes Flores and Alicia Sotero Vasquez had gotten exactly what they deserved. Members of the White American working class complain that for decades Mexicans have been crossing the border and taking US. jobs. The ratification of the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) ! Treaty, which theoretically erases the economic borders of Mexico, the United States, and Canada, has only complicated matters by attracting American companies to Mexico. One-time presidential candidate Pat Buchanan best articulated this concern when he claimed that the U.S. economy would recuperate only if immigration ceased completely and illegal workers were deported. "A nonwhite majority is envisioned if today's immigration continues," he warned. Decrying the globalization of labor and the denationalization of American capital, Buchanan's rallying cry was "America First," "America for Americans." 1 From the perspective of the millions of ethnic Mexicans living in the United States whose foremothers and -fathers had worked in the mines, built the railroads, and turned the desert of the Southwest into verdant fields, the Flores-Vasquez beatings were yet another example of racism and discrimination, part of a long history of hurtful humiliations at the hands of those who enforce the borders of the body politic on human backs. For the ethnic Mexicans in our focus group, the Flores-Vasquez beatings illustrated the dangers that migrant workers face in the United States. Here, the talk was not of episodic abuse nor of an adrenaline rush, but of harassment that is constant, brutal, and systemic. The Mexicanos complained of police putting their communities under surveillance and limiting their free movement. They described deputies who intimidate their teenage sons as suspected gang members, holding guns to these boys' groins, grabbing them by the testicles, and shoving their faces into the dirt without provocation. Macho policing and gringo justice -that is how Mexicanos view such exercises of state power. What the Flores-Vasquez beatings also sharply focused was the long history of the Hispanic and Latin diasporas in the United States. Beginning with massive movements of people from Spain to Mexico and from there to the United States between 1492 and the present, this is a history of shifting bord! ers and boundaries - of territories and of identities - and of the peoples and states that have crafted and contested those constraints. Mexico and all the nation-states of Latin America are settler societies in which immigration and emigration, borders and boundaries have been constant themes and at the center of national mythologies. In 1492, there were approximately ten million people on the Iberian Peninsula, with about seven million in the kingdom of Castile, one million in Portugal, and 1.5 million in Catalonia and Aragon. Officially, the Spanish Council of the Indies recorded 15,480 pasajeros a Indias (passengers to the Indies) during the entire sixteenth century. If we add an estimate of the illegal migration, the actual number was probably closer to 100,000. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries fewer records were kept on Iberian emigration to the Americas. Historians have estimated that settlers probably left the metropole for the American colonies at a rate of 100,000 per century. One long-held view is that Spanish America was settled by single men, while Anglo-America was settled by families. in the early years of Spanish colonization this was true. But by the early 1500s about ten percent of all licenses for emigration to the Indies were issued to women, and we know that women and families were always in this migrant stream. Immigrants to Spanish America were largely from the Iberian provinces of Extremadura and Andalusia, as is evident from the language, identities, and life stories of the conquistadores and missionaries. National consciousness (by which I mean identity as subjects or citizens of a nation-state) was weak, even nonexistent, among Spain's first colonists in the Americas. What common identity they did share was religious; they were Christians, first and foremost. The fervor of their religious sentiment had been forged during Spain's reconquest, in those years of warfare between 711 and 1492 when the Moors occupied the Iberian Penin! sula and the Christian monarchs rallied their subjects behind the standard of the Cross to push the forces of Islam back into Africa. What victories they won were won in the name of Christianity. Both on the Iberian Peninsula and in the Americas, among the earliest and most deeply felt boundaries was the one between cristianos viejos (old Christians) and cristianos nuevos (new Christians). Old Christians were those who had defended the faith against infidels and heretics; new Christians were the Moors, Jews, and Indians who had been recently converted to the faith by force or under duress. Next in importance for the Iberian emigrants to the Americas was the patria chica, the "small fatherland," or region of origin. Each of Spain's medieval kingdoms had a well-developed conciencia de sf, or self-consciousness. Having proclaimed themselves old Christians, these emigrants would then boast of being Aragonese, Catalan, Castilian, and so on. It should come as no surprise, then, that the word the Indians first used to describe their European overlords was castillas. Indeed, what we now consider the Spanish language is properly Castilian. Although the Indians understood l! ittle of what Spain's soldiers said, they repeatedly heard the soldiers call themselves castellanos, declare the Indians subjects of Castilla, and identify their new lord as the king of Castilla. Gaspar Perez de Villagra, who participated in the 1598 conquest of New Mexico, wrote in 1610 that the Indians at Acoma Pueblo "called out to me crying, Castilian! Castilian! Our chief asked me if more Castilians follow and how long before they arrive .12 The colonist's identification with one of Spain's regions as the patria chica was never entirely lost in the Americas, and it persists to this day. The Spanish conquest of the Americas brought together men from different regions and helped to shape a common experience and cultural identity among them. Men who had never before identified themselves as espaholes came to think of themselves as such in legal and cultural terms, particularly when confronting indigenous peoples as their overlords. By calling themselves Spaniards, the colonists acknowledged that their culture and social institutions were of Iberian origin and thus quite different from those people they called Indians. Indians. Now there is a curious word-a misnomer based on a geographical mistake by Christopher Columbus, who believed he had actually reached India when he spotted the islands of the Caribbean in 1492. The term came to disguise an incredibly diverse and complicated human geography. In 1492 there were some 123 distinct language families spoken in the Americas, including over 260 different languages spoken in Mexico alone by a population that may have numbered as many as twenty million people. When the espanoles called the natives of the Americas "Indians," they denied and attempted to erase the ethnic diversity they found, thereby leveling through conquest native political and religious hierarchies. Where once there had been native lords and servants, warriors and armies, what now stood opposed to the conquering Spaniards was a defeated classIndians. The colonists who called themselves Spaniards and settled Spanish America-Mexico and the U.S. Southwest-were extremely status-conscious. Initially, they created borders around the major polities, dividing the population between the Republica de Espaholes and the Republica de Indios. But this spatial division was more of a legal fiction than an enforceable reality, for the Spanish colonists needed labor, tribute, and love, all of which required constant daily interactions with Indians. The Spanish nevertheless continued to view colonial society as hierarchically ordered by a number of ascriptive status boundaries based on religion, legitimacy of birth, race, occupation, and-by the nineteenth century-citizenship as well. Whenever anyone came before a tribunal, whether civil or ecclesiastical, the judge always began by asking that person's calidad (literally, quality) or station in life. Juan Sanchez es de calidad cristiano nuevo, hyo ilegitmo de Maria Sanchez y de padre no ! conocido, mestizo, y obrero, the scribe would note if Juan Sanchez were a new Christian, the illegitimate son of Maria Sanchez and an unknown father, and a mestizo who worked with his hands.3 As I have already suggested, one's social status was based first on religion and then on legitimacy of birth. Such legitimacy or illegitimacy was a signifier of racial status, for, as the sixteenth-century legal scholar Juan de Solorzano y Pereira noted in his treatise Polftica indiana, "Few Spaniards of honor marry Indian or African women.... Children from such illicit unions are infamous, they carry the stain of color and other vices."4 Throughout the colonial period in Spanish America, illegitimacy was seen as an indecent and shameful mark because of its association with mixedrace unions which violated the imaginary boundary between the Republic of Spaniards and the Republic of Indians. To be born illegitimate was a mark of marginalization from both republics and thus a sign of racial inferiority. How racially inferior depended on one's proximity to the vanquished and distance from the victors. This was biologically determinedthrough blood-a fluid believed to carry the! metaphysical pollution and taint of conquest and defeat. When Spanish men and Indian women criminally mixed their blood through miscegenation, they introduced mestizaje, which gave rise to an elaborate legal vocabulary for registering the most infinitesimal degrees in which the blood of Spaniards, Indians, and African slaves might be mixed: a union between a Spaniard and an Indian produced a mestizo; a Spaniard and a mestizo produced a castizo; a Spaniard and an African begot a mulato, and so on. Mexico's eighteenth-century legal dictionaries contained as many as fifty different racial mixtures codified as the Regimen de Castas (Society of Castes). The Regimen was a code of legal color distinctions most of which were impossible to distinguish visually. Had Spanish immigration to the Americas not continued from 1492 to 1821, had the population in the Americas-European, African, and indigenous-not mixed biologically, culturally, and linguistically, had new territories not been explored, conquered, and colonized, the hierarchies envisioned by Spanish monarchs to separate Spaniards from Indians in the Indies might have remained intact. But with every century of Spain's colonial project in the Americas, state-sponsored population movements expanded, consolidated, and legitimated royal authority. The great conquests of Mexico, Peru, Guatemala, Florida, and New Mexico came between 1518 and 1540- In the 1560s the silver mines of Mexico's north and of the Bolivian highlands were opened up, and thousands flocked to those spots in a manner not unlike what must have been the case during the California gold rush. In the 1700s the great pampas and the River Plate of Argentina were opened up, as were California, Texas, and Arizona to ! the north. The Spanish state's economic policy of settling new regions and expanding its empire was radically at odds with its legal and cultural policy of maintaining rigid social hierarchies based on the inequalities born of the conquest of Indians and the enslavement of Africans. For when new colonies were established, people moved and thus upset established status hierarchies in both the places from which they came and those to which they went. if one could pass for a higher-status person, one did. If one could avoid punishment or taxes by claiming an inferior status, one did that too. Finally, by the 1770s, the Spanish Crown admitted defeat in terms of strictly demarcating the races and began to "Whiten" its population by selling certificates of Whiteness to those who could afford them, whatever their color or phenotype. Racial passing then rendered the boundaries of the Society of Castes obsolete as population movements eroded those between the Republic of Spaniards and the Re! public of Indians. In sum, then, mestizaje, or biological, racial, and cultural mixing, remains the diasporic legacy of the largely single Spanish men who conquered Mexico and the rest of Spanish America. In the nineteenth century, with new regional borders and boundaries, the seventeenth-century patria chica became patrias-fatherlands-or nation-states. Between 1810 and 1821, all the regions of Spanish America save Puerto Rico and Cuba became independent nations. Mexico declared itself a sovereign state in 1821, but it was not until i88o, under the rule of President Porfirio Diaz, that its regions or "small nations" were integrated as a nation-state. Between 1821 and 1857, the presidency of Mexico changed at least once a year, an instability and vulnerability that lost Mexico one-third of its national territory to the United States at the end of the U. S.-Mexican War in 1848. During the early 1880s, when President Diaz began consolidating the various Mexican regions into a powerful state and the United States began placing restrictions on Chinese immigrants, movement across the U.S.Mexican border was constant, fluid, and free. Mexico was a close and convenient source of cheap immigrant labor for the United States, and the development of Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas as economically productive areas necessitated cheap and tractable unskilled labor. One sector of the American economy after another called on Mexicans, first to mine the vast mineral deposits of the West, then to construct the railroads that would move those minerals to ports and eastern manufacturing centers. When rail lines made it possible to transport agricultural products to markets quickly, Mexicans tilled, tended, and harvested the fields; for the last two decades their work has also included cooking food, washing dishes, and nursing the frail and the young. Mexicans became the immigrant laborers of choice in the Mos primarily because the Chinese, who had provided the bulk of California's labor during the gold rush, were subject to entry restrictions with the passage of the 1882 Alien Contract Labor Law. When the Japanese Gentlemen's Agreement Of 1907 restricted Japanese immigration, Mexican labor was still abundant and available. By 1930, the U.S. Census recorded approximately 1.2 million ethnic Mexicans employed mainly in mining, transportation (primarily as railroad field hands), and agriculture (initially picking sugar beets and cotton, later citrus and table vegetables). Mexican peasant laborers began entering the United States in greater numbers during the Mos largely because of the rural poverty they faced at home, a situation that culminated in the 1910 Mexican Revolution. Landless and increasingly unable to produce or purchase the basic necessities of life, those men and women were forced to migrate to known work sit! es. in the Mos President Diaz began a massive modernization program centered on the creation of an extensive infrastructure that would connect Mexico's productive areas with markets; railroad lines linking Mexico and the United States were the cornerstone of this plan. Once displaced from their ancestral homes, especially in Mexico's developing northern states, workers and peasants found it quite easy to trek further north into the United States. No formal barricade separated the countries before 1924. The availability of jobs at wages significantly higher than those in Mexico made the move all the more irresistible. In the midst of the revolutionary violence that rocked Mexico between 1910 and 1917, the United States became a peaceful and attractive haven. Historically, two dominant stereotypes have been used to describe the Mexican immigrant in the United States, namely, a "problem" threatening the racial, hygienic, and economic basis of American life or an "asset" contributing to U.S. prosperity both by performing indispensable tasks at wages that citizen workers will not accept and by paying taxes from which they rarely benefit. Those who see Mexicans as a problem have demanded severe immigration restrictions, particularly during economic depressions; those who see Mexicans as an asset have generally favored open doors and less governmental regulation, particularly during times of prosperity. The question of whether Mexicans are to be deemed an asset or a problem has long been embedded in the numbers game. How many Mexicans actually migrate to the United States? This has not been easy to determine. Statistics on Mexican entries into the country along the southern border were not kept until 1924, when an actual barrier (a fence) was erected and enforced by a newly created border patrol. Before that, the only Mexicans counted in U.S. immigration statistics were those who arrived at official ports of entry in New York or San Francisco. And since few Mexicans ever saw the Statue of Liberty, those numbers rarely reached the hundreds before 1924. Following the 1929 Depression, restrictionist pressures mounted in the United States, and between 1930 and 1937 some 500,000 Mexicans (many of them U.S. citizens) were repatriated. Not until 1942, as the United States entered the Second World War, were Mexican immigrants allowed in again in large numbers. To offset labor shortages in industries deemed essential to the war effort, Congress authorized Public Law 45, a guest-worker program that became widely known as the "bracero program." Although this legislation was initially deemed a temporary emergency measure, it was repeatedly extended until 1964- Approximately 4.6 million braceros entered the United States between 1942 and 1964. The initiation of the bracero program coincided with another major trend in Mexican emigration -undocumented migrants entering the United States. According to statistics recently compiled by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 22 million undocumented Mexican immigrants have been ! apprehended and deported to Mexico since 1942. Precisely what this number means has been the topic of heated debate too, although some clarification was gained with the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. Undocumented immigrants who had entered the country before i January 1982 were granted the right to legalize their status, and amnesty was granted to those who had worked in agriculture for at least go days of the year prior to 1 May 1986. When 2.3 million applicants came forward, the 1980s projections of seven to eight million undocumented Mexicans in the United States proved to be greatly inflated. In the 1990s the numbers have been estimated at two to four million. Who migrates across the U. S.-Mexican border? The standard historical truism worldwide has been that the poorest cannot afford to move and the rich have no reason to do so, leaving the stratum in between as the one that has the wherewithal and the motivation to seek a new life. So too for Mexicans. Initially, the individuals who emigrated were from the middle sectors (based on wealth or occupation). They left Mexico without kinship or social ties in the United States on which to draw and were the only social group economically capable of risking a move that would initiate a migrant stream from their home communities. Once they were established in the United States, ties of kinship and friendship made it possible for the poorer members of their communities to follow and eventually to dominate the migrant stream because they found a support network when they arrived. Once such support networks became extensive, migration became less dependent on class. Where do Mexican immigrants come from and where do they go in the United States? The majority come from the central Mexican states of Guanajuato, Michoacan, Mexico, Jalisco, and, since 1965, from the state of Oaxaca as well. While the revolutionary violence between 1910 and 1917 accounted for the great majority of Mexican emigrants during those years, in the decades that followed it was the jobs, the higher wages, and the possibility of upward mobility that attracted them to the United States. Here their numbers are concentrated in the Southwest, with first California and then Texas receiving the bulk. However, Washington, the Great Lakes region, and increasingly New York State have also developed sizeable Mexican communities. The story usually told of the Mexican immigrant in the United States has been a heroic male tale. Regardless of the mythology, however, women have been a major component of the migrant stream since the 188os. Between 193o and 1933, for example, two-thirds of those Mexicans who were repatriated were women, and, since 1945, slightly more than half of all Mexican immigrants have been women. Mexican women usually entered the migrant stream only after a particular community had a well-established immigrant network in the United States. Men obviously migrated first, familiarized themselves with labor markets and work demands, and, when they felt secure, sent for their wives and children. Thus Mexican communities with long histories of U.S. emigration have also had higher proportions of women among those emigrants. Much of the recent opposition in the United States to the continued entry of Mexicans has been based on claims that their numbers are too large or that they cannot assimilate to the American way of life. If one looks closely at the statistics, however, they show that since 182o around 75 percent of all U.S. immigrants have been of European origin. Another 8 percent came from Canada, 6 percent from all of Asia, and only 5 percent from Mexico. Are Mexicans diluting White America? No. Individuals of European ancestry today dominate the U.S. population numerically and proportionately. By far the largest ethnic group is composed of the roughly 55 million persons who claim German ancestry. The English are the second-largest group, with some 50 million individuals. (Only when the Irish (45 million), the Scottish (ii million), and the Welsh (2 million) are combined does the composite "British" ancestry predominate.) Italians and French number around 13 million each. African Ameri! cans are 30 million in number. Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and "Spanish-others" together amount to only 24 million, while the Asian total Of 4 million is an aggregation of Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Koreans, and Vietnamese. Since the passage of the 1965 Hart-Cellar Immigration Act, formerly restricted immigrant groups, particularly those from Asia and Latin America, have entered the United States in numbers and with a rapidity comparable to that of Eastern and Southern Europeans between 1880 and 1920. The entry of these new populations into large metropolitan centers, their concentration in certain locales, and their segregation in certain occupations have made them particularly visible and easy to scapegoat. Numerically, though, relative to the total population of the United States, their impact on the nation's ethnic composition is rather small. While such numbers a century ago might have provoked some justified panic, today it is disproportionate to the actual social or demographic impact. Statistics similarly show that Mexicans rapidly integrate themselves into American society. Take marriage, for example: thirteen percent of first-generation Mexican men married non-Hispanic women; by the third generation the portion was 36 percent (among men of high occupational status, 49%). The probability of marriage between a third-generation Mexican American and an Anglo-American was higher than that between a third-generation and either a first- or second-generation Mexican American. In California the intermarriage rate is now around 50 percent, but in New York it is well over go percent. Language follows a similar generational pattern. Among those immigrants born and raised in Mexico, 84 percent speak mainly Spanish at home. By the third generation, however, 84 percent speak mainly English at home. Indeed, many Mexican Americans are monolingual in English by the third or fourth generation. The changing complexion of the U.S. population has provoked anxiety in every period of the nation's history. Benjamin Franklin worried that Germans would overrun Pennsylvania, while the arrival of large numbers of Irish Catholics and East European Jews in the Mos fueled nativist fears about the corruption of the Anglo-Protestant body politic. "Yellow peril" fears led to entry restrictions first for the Chinese and then, at the turn of the century, for Japanese immigrants, culminating with the internment of Japanese Americans during World War 11. Today, fearing Mexicans and Central Americans, we construct barricades along our southern border, hoping thus to cure our economic and political woes when, in fact, these immigrants rarely take jobs and services from citizens who actually want them. Thus far we have examined the creation of the U.S.-Mexican border, the movement across it, and the assimilation of Mexican immigrants through marriage and language acquisition. Such nation-state borders have, however, been repeatedly and ferociously contested by intellectuals, artists, and activists. As U.S. imperialism grew in the Mos, the Cuban author jose Marti asked both North and South Americans to imagine a different America, one which the native and mestizo people controlled for their own self-realization and their own ends. Marti called it Nuestra Am6rica (Our America).' Later, in the 1920S, jose Vasconcelos, the Mexican philosopher, aiming to contest the notions of European supremacy, Aryanism, and racial purity, wrote La raza cosmica (The Cosmic Race), in which he celebrated mestizaje. Through the mixing of Indians, Europeans, and Africans, a new race, a cosmic race, had been born that would inherit the Americas, or so Vasconcelos opined.6 During the 1960s, in protest over their marginality in the United States, Mexican Americans began to call themselves Chicanos-a word derived from Nahuatl, the Aztec language, and thus allying them in hemispheric terms with the oppressed indigenous nations of the Americas. But just as peoples have crafted hemispheric identities in resistance to states, so too have states subverted those designs. When, for example, Spain lost the last remnants of its colonial empire in 1898 with its defeat by the United States in the Spanish-American War, it launched a massive worldwide cultural campaign known as hispanidad to recuperate its cultural empire in North and South America. The initial fruits of hispanidad became apparent shortly after the turn of the century in the southwestern United States with the invention of "Old Spanish Day" festivals in such places as Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Santa Barbara, California; the publication of English translations of Spanish narratives of e! xploration, discovery, and conquest; and the promotion of all things Hispanic. Mexicans of mestizo origin started referring to themselves as "Spanish" or "Spanish American," rejecting "Mexican" or "Mexican American" as a pejorative label. What was being emphasized over and over again was a fundamental connection with Spain's culture and history and a rejection of or amnesia about Mexico and all things Mexican. I suspect that one reason why the hispanidad movement became so popular in the southwestern United States is that it coincided with a period of massive Mexican immigration and, consequently, provoked fears and anxieties that found expression in "scientific" racism and other xenophobic ideologies. By calling themselves "Spanish" or "Spanish American," Mexican Americans could distance themselves from then-arriving mestizo immigrants and thus affiliate themselves with Whiteness, Christianity, and the European. Recently, in response to the U.S. Census Bureau's attempt to erase those very national distinctions by creating a "Hispanic" category, immigrants of Latin American origin, unifying around their linguistic distinctiveness, began to call themselves Latinos. To conclude, what I have tried to emphasize in the long historical sweep from 1492 to the present is the way in which diasporic movements of peoples to and through the hemisphere have continually eroded stateimposed borders and boundaries. The erosion of borders within the body politic has always been evident on human bodies, whether as Mestizaje, or biological mixing, through marital assimilation, or by reeducating the senses, training the immigrant tongue to utter English words. But such regimens have never been totally successful because diasporic movements are shifts of money, technology, and ideas as well as people. Given the global communication revolution we have recently witnessed, my suspicion is that diasporic movements and identities will only proliferate. And as they do, new, more repressive regimes will arise to contain them. This, I suspect, was the lesson that the beatings received by Enrique Funes Flores and Alicia Sotero Vasquez, beamed unflinchingly arou! nd the globe on April Fool's Day, was meant to teach us. Notes i Patrick J. Buchanan, Great Betrayal: How American Sovereignty and Social justice Are Being Sacrified to the Gods of the Global Economy (Boston, 1998), 23 2 See Ramon A. Gutierrez, "Unraveling America's Hispanic Past: Internal Stratification and Class Boundaries," Azt/an 17 (1986): 79-101, esp. 87. 3 Ibid-, 90 4 As quoted in Ram6n A. Guti6rrez, When Jesus Came., the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (Stanford, 1991), 202. 5 jose Marti, Nuestra American (Caracas, 1977). 6 jose Vasconcelos, La raza cosmica: Misi6n de la raza iberoamericana (Madrid, 1966). RAMON A. GUTIERREZ, Chancellor's Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies and History at the University of California, San Diego, is founding Chair of the Ethnic Studies department and Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. His publications include When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, i5oo1846 (1991).