When I was in grade school, I was fascinated by maps. In my earliest notebooks, I drew maps representing where I grew up: New York City, then New York State, and finally all of the United States. One day I was looking at a map in a textbook that showed the Americas, North and South. In the Caribbean Sea I saw the island where my parents were from. The map read “Puerto Rico,” with “(U.S.)” in parentheses underneath the words.
I asked my dad why it said that Puerto Rico belongs to the United States. Did that mean it wasn’t its own country? “No,” he said. “Puerto Rico is a country. Puerto Rico is my country.”
That was the moment that I realized that the status the United States had given to my father’s homeland was that of a “possession.” It was a land that, as a famous 1901 U.S. Supreme Court decision called Downes v. Bidwell decided, belonged to America but was not part of it. In a way, the island had a double identity, and I felt something like that within myself. Even as I was growing up as an English-speaking New Yorker, playing American sports, watching American television, immersed in American culture, those influences were mixed with something else—my parents’ Puerto Rican culture—that wasn’t going away any time soon.
I was born into what could be called the Nuyorican generation. Nuyorican is a label that came from mixing together “New York” and “Puerto Rican.” The Nuyorican generation were the children of Puerto Ricans who had migrated to places like New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. They created a bilingual, bicultural mix that pointed to the future of America, to the era of multicultural and multiracial diversity that is rapidly becoming the reality in twenty-first-century America.
The Nuyorican generation arose in parallel with other hybrid cultures created by the children of immigrants from much of Latin America. The Chicanos of the West Coast and the Southwest mixed Mexican culture, Native culture, and the cultures of American cities like Los Angeles, Tucson, and El Paso. In South Florida, the 1.5 Generation of Cuban Americans blended memories of Havana, the capital of their former island home, into their new home in Miami. To the north, Dominicans found a little bit of Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, in their new home, the part of Manhattan known as Washington Heights.
The narrative of these mixed cultural identities is a little-told part of American history. Yet they were never isolated from or outside the mainstream. Instead, they developed alongside the central trends in American culture. The perspective of Latin American descendants in the United States is a crucial part of understanding our history and seeing where the country is going. For that reason I am pleased to contribute three new elements to this edition of Howard Zinn’s A Young People’s History of the United States. In addition to this introduction, there are two new chapters. “The Latino Emergence” focuses on the major movements of the 1960s and 1970s. “Our Voices Need to Be Heard” brings the story into the twenty-first century, when, like members of many other communities and groups, Latino Americans continue to make their voices heard in politics, activism, and culture.
As Cuban orator, writer, and anti-colonial warrior José Martí argued, the idea of “America” being limited to the continental states of North America—Canada, the United States, and Mexico—erases the fact that the Americas are both Anglo and Latin. They were colonized by European powers, but they are also places where common folk came together in a mix of racial backgrounds and social classes that made the Americas truly a “New World.” Along with, and often intertwined with, the narratives of Native Americans, Black people, and Asian Americans, the narratives of Latino Americans are an essential part of the people’s history of the United States.
Latinos are also a political and cultural force in the present moment. Immigrants and their descendants from twenty-one different countries in Latin America make up about 17 percent of the total U.S. population. They are the second largest group in the country, and for a time they were the fastest-growing subgroup of the total population. In the early years of the twenty-first century, though, the growth of the Latino population slowed due to a lag in the American economy. People of Asian descent then became the fastest-growing population subgroup.
Latino communities are concentrated in different proportions in various regions of the country. The Northeast Corridor has one of the most diverse Latino populations. The nation’s most populous Puerto Rican and Dominican communities have long existed there, and the numbers of Mexicans, Ecuadoreans, and other South American groups are increasing. South Florida has had the biggest Cuban communities, as well as some Puerto Ricans and South Americans. The largest communities of Mexicans and Central Americans are centered in California and the Southwest.
Sometimes stigmatized as foreigners, at other times targeted as consumers and voters, Latinos are often misunderstood. Most are fully proficient in English by the third generation. They eagerly take part in the social and cultural rites of the mainstream culture of the United States. In general they are also very involved in civic responsibilities. The Latino contribution to U.S. culture is more influential than is often recognized. Is there any popular icon more all-American than the cowboy? That character has Mexican origins. Roots rock and roll has strong Cuban influences. And urban Latinos contributed to the origins of the spoken word style of poetry and hip-hop.
Latinos have often created American history through interaction with the many other immigrant and Native groups that are also integral parts of the national story, along with the African people brought to the Americas as slaves. In the Southwest, Mexicans share an intertwined history with Native American tribes and Anglo migrants to California and Texas. During the mid-nineteenth century, Mexicans living along what is now the U.S.–Mexico border were part of the “southern underground railroad” that helped enslaved Black people escape to freedom in Mexico, which ended slavery before the United States did. In the Northeast, Puerto Ricans and Cubans shared space in mambo dancehalls with European immigrants, and they shared rapping and breakdancing with Black and Afro-Caribbean people. In Chicago, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans have joined with Black and white voters to elect some of the country’s first mayors and other officials of color.
As we move forward into the twenty-first century, barriers remain to be overcome if we are to fully understand not just the role of Latinos in U.S. history and culture but also the relationship between the United States and its Latin neighbors in the Americas. The southern border of the United States projects American strength, but it is also a site of controversy. Within the borders of the United States, many people distrust those who hold on to their native language, which has led to people being attacked simply for speaking Spanish to one another in public. Citizenship, not merely as a legal status but as a narrow vision of who can be considered “American,” is still used as a weapon against Latinos. This new edition of A Young People’s History of the United States attempts to weave the narrative thread of Latinos into the larger context of American history, uniting our contributions with those of all the people who together make up the history of these United States.
