Joppke, Christian

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“ n e i t h e r v i l l a i n s n o r h e r o e s ” :m a k i n g h i s p a n i c s i n a m e r i c aG. CRISTINA MORA, Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucratsand Media Constructed a New American(Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2014)How Americans of Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban descent, not tomention innumerous other Central and South American immigrantgroups, came to be “Hispanics”, has been told many times. But it hasnever been told quite right. For conservative pundits, it is a story of“villains”, of elite activists playing the “race card” in an era of civil rightslaws and rampant identity politics, thus deflecting from—perhaps evenhindering—ordinary folk becoming assimilated much like previousimmigrant groups from Europe.1 For the “race, class, gender” bunchof American sociology, it is a story of “heroes”, resisting colonialism andracial oppression that have been different in kind from the lesserobstacles faced by ordinary immigrant groups of the past.2For Cristina Mora, true sociologist she, there are “neither villains norheroes” (p.xiv). There is not even one central actor, be it the “state” ora “social movement”. Instead, there are “relations”, between a wholevariety of actors, “activists”, “bureaucrats”, and “media”, to quote fromthe subtitle of her work. These relations eventually engendered“Hispanics”, as a result of a “classification struggle”, as she says withPierre Bourdieu (one of only two fellow-sociologists who are quoted inthe main text) (p. 11).In a clever analytical move, the unit of analysis in Making Americansis not groups, institutions, or social movements but “organizations”whose singular purpose is to persist and grow. These organizations—instate, civil society, and market—coexist in a “field” (it is never quite clearwhether it is one or several), which the author memorably defines as“a crowded social landscape wherein stakeholders contest and refinedifferent definitions and understandings of group categories” (p. 11).Accordingly, federal census bureaucrats facing a “legitimacy crisis”1 Linda Chavez, Out of the Barrio: Towarda New Politics of Hispanic Assimilation.New York: Basic Books 1991.2 Yen Le Espiritu, Asian AmericanPanethnicity. Philadelphia, Penn.: TempleUniversity Press 1993. This work isnotionally on the “Asian“ case, but it isfashioned as part of a larger story of“Native Americans“ and “Latino Ameri-cans“ as (non-European) “ethnic groups[that] have united to protest and promotetheir collective interests“ (pp. 2-3).531Christian JOPPKE, Institute of Sociology, University of Bern[christian.joppke@soz.unibe.ch].European Journal of Sociology, 55, 3 (2014), pp. 531–536—0003-9756/14/0000-900$07.50per art + $0.10 per pageªEuropean Journal of Sociology, 2014. doi: 10.1017/S000397561400040Xuse, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S000397561400040XDownloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Basel Library, on 10 Jul 2017 at 15:10:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms ofafter a severe undercount of black and other minority groups in the1970 census proposed a “Hispanic/Spanish origin” category to wardoff pressure by activist groups and to count more accurately nexttime around; the fledgling National Council of La Raza, originallya regional pressure group of Mexican-Americans in the AmericanSouth West, readily adopted a panethnic Hispanic identification,which now included Puerto Ricans and Cubans, “so that it couldobtain more grants and resources” (p. 15); and Univision, the firstnationwide Hispanic television channel, promoted the panethniccategory because it increased the size of its market and thus potentialrevenues from advertisers. All wanted different things but theycoalesced to produce the same outcome, “Hispanics”.In what, I concur, is a “model and masterpiece of institutionalanalysis” (Mora’s Princeton advisor, Paul DiMaggio, endorsingthe book), two factors are held responsible for this outcome: first,“collaboration across fields” (now it is several), and, secondly, the“ambiguity” of the panethnic label. With respect to the first, Moraobserves that “by 1990, media executives would routinely ask activists orcensus officials to appear on news segments and public affairs programsabout Hispanic panethnicity” (p.xiii). Similar cooperation-flaggingvignettes could be provided for the “activists” and the “census officials”in this constellation. While initially there was conflict, in particularbetween bureaucrats and activists (La Raza’s roots, after all, are inthe radical Chicano movement of the late 1960s), it quickly gave wayto collaboration and a sense of mutual dependence. Networks emergedof people moving between all three segments of the field (it really isonly one), one-time government appointees morphing into activistcounselors morphing into media entrepreneurs. As one of them told theauthor (who is never short of a catchy and original quote to bring homea point): “We all came to know each other [. the] world of Hispanicleaders was small [.] we could call one another up easily” (p. 156).Take away “Hispanic leaders”, and you might think this is a descrip-tion of French politics (where the filling of important positions in state,corporations, and public life is a game of musical chairs among enaalumni, so-called enarques, except that there is no shortage of chairs).But here it is democracy in action, where previous underdogs obtaina seat at the table, and where the state is not a bulwark of privilege (as itis in France, no less when so-called “Socialists” are in charge, theircurrent leader-cum-president, of course, being an enarque). Instead,here the state is but one part of a network whose true site is civil society.Which raises an interesting point: is not what is presented here––bychristian joppke532use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S000397561400040XDownloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Basel Library, on 10 Jul 2017 at 15:10:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms ofway of cutting-edge organizational sociology (“stakeholders”, “fields”,“networks”, etc.)––as an exchangeable instance of socio-political con-flict in truth a very American story that would not be possible in theossified state-societies of Europe, where the state is anything but flatand pluralistic?Further on this point, the opening salvo in the making ofHispanics, which is otherwise presented as a story of horizontalrelationships among a plurality of actors, without any primemover, still comes from the democratic state. In the late 1960s,responding, of course, to the civil rights struggles of the time, itwas the federal government, under the (Republican) Nixon presidency,but in a process that had started under the preceding (Democratic)Johnson presidency, which created the Cabinet Committee onOpportunities for Spanish Speaking People (ccossp)—the very firstorganization to carry a pan-ethnic name! The purpose was plainlyelectoral, to “turn Mexican American and Puerto Rican protests intopolitical opportunities” (p. 17). Johnson is quoted as howling ata Mexican-American delegation, “Keep this trash out of the WhiteHouse” (p. 24). But the interest, which transcended party lines, in“securing the Spanish-speaking vote” (p. 18) proved stronger. It paidoff. Nixon managed to increase the “Spanish-speaking” vote five-fold,from 7 percent in 1968 to 35 percent in the 1972 presidential elections(p. 43). If slight criticism of Mora’s stellar book is allowed, it is that her“bureaucrat-activist-media” triangle omits the crucial importance ofthis fourth (or rather first) actor in the genesis of Hispanics: the vote-catching political entrepreneur in the democratic state. It makes thisan even more specifically American story than it would otherwise be(the European democratic state is buffered by bureaucracy, in particularby party bureaucracy, as well as by more exclusive citizenship laws,from the full force of the elementary democratic mechanism).Next to “collaboration across fields” (it really should read, I think,though less elegantly, “collaboration within one field by different kindsof actors”), the “ambiguity” of the pan-ethnic marker is the second keyelement in Mora’s story. No one could and would say what the contentof “Hispanic” exactly was. “Language”, an obvious and often usedpossibility, could not be the gist of it, because second- and third-generation immigrants often no longer speak Spanish. A legacy ofcolonialism and oppression by Anglos, the heart of the radicalMexican-American Chicano identity, made no sense for privilegedmiddle-class Cubans who had an issue not with wasps but withCastro. In fact, the term “Hispanic” was despised by some for its533neither villains nor heroesuse, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S000397561400040XDownloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Basel Library, on 10 Jul 2017 at 15:10:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms oflinguistic association with Spanish-European colonialism, andthey preferred (and still prefer) the more correct “Latino” label(including the author herself, p. xiv). Importantly, to stay clear ofthis rift, the various actors involved in the making of Hispanicsmade at best vague references to a “common Hispanic culture”(of which the Spanish language, of course, was always an impor-tant part) (p. 48), and they mostly avoided the divisive colonialismtopic in favor of defining Hispanics as “hardworking, religious,and family-focused”—qualities that “could have been applied toany group” (p. 5). To leave the content of Hispanic ambiguousproved the pan-ethnic marker to be merely “a means to an end” thatcould be bent in many directions: Hispanics were a “disadvantaged andunderrepresented minority group” for the activists in search of federalgrants (p. 5); they were an “up-and-coming national consumer market”for media executives eager to increase advertising revenues (p. 6); andthey were just a “certain educational, income, and fertility pattern” forthe census officials whose main interest was in “statistical correlation”(p. 13). However, as the network evolved, these frames were fungible ormodular. That is, they could be borrowed and adapted by other actorsof the same network: media executives would play the minority card toget licensing privileges from the Federal Communications Commission(fcc), and activists would play the “Hispanic market” card to lurecorporate sponsors (a vital necessity after the incoming Reaganadministration dramatically axed federal funds in the early 1980s).“Stakeholders learned to appropriate frames from one another”,Mora summarizes the process (p.156).However, not anything goes. “Ambiguity” was kept in check by“analogy”, which is another of the very few and parsimoniouslydeployed entries from the lexicon of organizational theory. It meansthat, in the end, Hispanics were “like blacks” (a disadvantagedminority), not least for census officials who, post-1980, wouldroutinely compare Hispanic-origin data with those of “non-Hispanicwhites” and “non-Hispanic blacks” (p. 115). One should know that,notably not to deplete the other minority “races” (p. 101), the first“Hispanic” category in the 1980 census was officially an “ethnic”(not “racial”) category, which co-existed with (i.e., was asked inaddition to) the official race question. Accordingly, Hispanics couldofficially be of “any race”. But Hispanic was still seen as “analogous”to race. This delimited the inherent ambiguity of the Hispaniccategory and worked to “construct a barrier between categories”(p. 158).534christian joppkeuse, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S000397561400040XDownloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Basel Library, on 10 Jul 2017 at 15:10:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of“Hispanic” thus evolved not as the identifiable product of a firstmover but of a relational field. It is no wonder that the origins ofthe new category became immediately obscured. “A sort of collectiveamnesia sets in”, Mora concludes her impressive account, as if thecategory had “always existed” (p. 159). Once the category was out, by theactors and processes authoritatively documented in Making Hispanics, itconsolidated through “organizational diffusion”, via academics surveyingand writing about “Hispanics”, political parties eager to catch the“Hispanic vote”, and—last but not least—the demographic force ofnew Latin American immigration, mixed marriages, etc.In the end, the bottom line of Hispanic is racial—which is puzzlingto the European eye that is not used to “race” as official legal-politicalcategory. It is but consequential that the US Census Bureau is atpresent contemplating folding the current dualism of the (pseudo)-ethnic “Hispanic origin” question and still separate race categories(“white”, “black”, “Asian”, and “native American”) into one single racequestion. In that way, “Hispanic” would simply be added to the currentquadruple to complete what has long been known as the “ethno-racialpentagon”3. Ironically, this would send America back to 1930, theone and only time that “Mexican” was explicitly a race category inthe census. However, at that time, it (rightly) came to be rejected bythe population thus designated (who were no longer “white”) as theracist affront that it was meant to be.4 But the world has changed inthe meantime. In the post-civil-rights era, “race” is less a stigma thanan opportunity (concretely, affirmative action privileges). To the degreethat “Hispanics” are analogous to blacks (and other racial minorities), itis anachronistic for (and factually rejected by many) Hispanics to alsoconsider themselves “white”, “black”, “Asian”, or “native American”,as the censuses so far have asked them to. This bears the risk of“incorrectly framing Hispanics as a homogenous community withlittle internal variation”, advises Mora (p. 168). But, this is theimportant and irrefutable take-away message of Making Hispanics,“there are no true or false identities, for each is the product of asocio-historical process” (p. 169).To this reviewer (who never took a class in organizational sociology),there is another take-away message.Making Hispanics shows the powerof organizational sociology as a kind of meta-sociology to provide the3 David Hollinger, Postethnic America,New York: Basic Books 1995.4 See Jennifer Hochschild and BrennaPowell, “Racial Reorganization and theUnited States Census 1850-1930”, Studiesin American Political Development 22 (1),2008, 59-96.535neither villains nor heroesuse, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S000397561400040XDownloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Basel Library, on 10 Jul 2017 at 15:10:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms oftheoretical core for a deplorably fragmenting and intellectuallyatrophying discipline. Others would have framed the topic of thisbook: ethnic and racial classification, differently—as one of socialmovements, of the state (within the ambit of “political sociology”),or, most obviously, of ethnicity and race. However, this has so faronly yielded the one-sided, if not misleading (“villain” vs. “hero”)pictures that are the point of departure for this book. All the authorneeds to build her more complete story is fewer than a handful ofvery elementary (though cutting-edge and optimally deployed)concepts of organization theory (“field”, “network”, “ambiguity”,“analogy”).5 No more is needed, except of course the exceptionaltalent of a Cristina Mora, to produce this (almost) perfect work ofsociology.That exceptional talent, it should be mentioned at the end, isherself the child of Mexican immigrants, whose father did not make it“past grammar school” (p.xix). His daughter saw the halls of Berkeley,Princeton, Chicago, only to return for a first teaching job to Berkeley(and I bet she had a choice). Her “acknowledgements” mention someof the finest in American sociology (more than your aging reviewerever met). America needs winners, and here is one. She did not needit, but the Hispanic pan-ethnicity described in her book probably didnot hurt either. Would a review of the brilliant first book by a risingstar of second-generation Muslim vintage, graduating from Cambridgeand just hired by Sciences Po, coolly and disengagedly dissecting thestory of her own group, be thinkable in Europe? Cristina Mora’s is anAmerican story twice over, which should be heeded in a Europe that, toparaphrase lbj, still prefers to “trash” its immigrants.C H R I S T I A N J O P P K E5 See the crisp theoretical synopsis of herbook, Cristina Mora, “Cross-Field Effectsand Ethnic Classification”, American Socio-logical Review 79 (2), 2014, 183-210.536christian joppkeuse, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S000397561400040XDownloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Basel Library, on 10 Jul 2017 at 15:10:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of

"Neither Villains nor Heroes”: Making Hispanics in America

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"Neither Villains nor Heroes”: Making Hispanics in America

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