“Harvest of Empire”: New Book Exposes Latino History in America as Obama Campaigns For Latino Vote

From Democracy Now: listen at the link, transcript posted when available.

President Obama’s trip to Puerto Rico was announced at a time when he is making a concerted push to win the Latino vote in 2012. Earlier this month, Obama gave a major address to a mostly Latino audience in El Paso, Texas, calling for immigration reform. Juan Gonzalez joins us to discuss the history of Latinos in the United States and how it relates to U.S. political and military intervention in Latin America. Gonzalez, a Democracy Now! co-host and New York Daily News columnist, has just published an updated edition of his book, “Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America. Originally released in 2000, the book explores the stories of Latinos from Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and around the region. We air a few clips from a new documentary in production based on “Harvest of Empire.”

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/5/25/harvest_of_empire_new_book_exposes

AMY GOODMAN: Juan, your book, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America, came out in 2000. So, it’s 2011. You have completely revised it. Why put it out again?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, first of all, it has continued to be adopted by many colleges across the country in college courses, and my publisher felt that a lot of the data had sort of gotten outdated in terms of some of the studies that I had been citing. But I also think that the main reason is that the Latino presence in America continues to grow at an astounding level, and most Americans still feel remarkably insecure and lack knowledge as to why this is happening. And you can see it by all the right-wing shows that are constantly stoking anti-immigrant fervor against undocumented immigrants in the country.

And I think—I felt that it was necessary not only to update the figures, but to re-emphasize the enormous transformation that is occurring in the United States, that, for instance, the Census Bureau now projects that before 2050 one out of every three people living in the United States will be of Latino origin. And if the current trends continue, it is entirely possible that by the end of this century, by 2100, half of the entire population of the United States will trace its origins not to Europe, but to Latin America. This is an enormous transformation, when you consider that there were only a few million Latinos in the 1970s, representing about four percent of the population, and now you’re talking about, by 2100, more than 50 percent of the entire nation.

And of course, this is not just happening in the United States. The reality is that there’s been an enormous transformation of the advanced countries of the world since World War II as the third world has come to the West. England doesn’t know what to do about all the Indians, the Pakistanis and the Jamaicans. France doesn’t know what to do about all the Algerians, Tunisians and Moroccans. Germany doesn’t know what to do about all the Turks. The peoples of the colonial countries have come to the West since World War II, and they are transforming the very compositions of these nations, raising all kinds of questions about language and religion and culture. And in the United States, it’s largely been the Latin Americans. As I show, between 1960 and 2008, more than 44 million people migrated to the United States, whether legally or illegally, and half of them were from Latin America, so that really the thrust of the immigration situation in the United States and the growth area is among the Latinos of the southern half of the hemisphere.

AMY GOODMAN: Juan, a documentary about Harvest of Empire is in the works right now. It won’t be completed for a number of months. But I wanted to play a few of the rough cuts from the film. This is the indigenous Guatemalan activist Rigoberta Menchú, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 for helping to publicize the plight of Guatemala’s indigenous people under the brutal U.S.-backed government.

RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: Guatemala was unbelievable. Two hundred thousand dead that we have accounted for, 50,000 disappeared. Eighty-three percent of the disappeared and executed were Mayas. I left Guatemala after they burned my father alive in the embassy of Spain. They were asking for political asylum from the Spanish government. They were trying to save their lives by entering the embassy. But at that moment the Guatemalan security forces attacked the embassy. They burned everyone alive. No one survived—not the students, no one who was there. Is it possible that we can be safe from genocide? Can it be that we will not be victims of genocide tomorrow? I do not have any guarantees. If what exists in Guatemala is persecution, murder, killing, if what you have is insecurity, then I prefer to cross the border and go to a place with more security.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Rigoberta Menchu, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, from the forthcoming documentary, Harvest of Empire. Father Roy Bourgeois is also interviewed in the documentary, who is the founder of the group School of the Americas Watch, speaking about El Salvador in the 1980s.

bq. FATHER ROY BOURGEOIS: I had never seen anything like El Salvador. I was more frightened there than Vietnam. I mean, I had never seen such brutality of a military toward their people. The death squads were running wild. What was going on there was the slaughter of the innocents. It was genocide.

JUAN GONZALEZ: It was a war that was fought everywhere.

FATHER ROY BOURGEOIS: Anyone against U.S. foreign policy or talking about land reform, they were labeled subversive, el enemigo, the enemy.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Father Roy Bourgeois. This is a film that’s being made based on Harvest of Empire, just a very rough cut. How this fits into immigration, Juan?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, I think the central theme of my book is that the—you cannot understand the enormous Latino presence in the United States unless you understand America’s role in Latin America, and in fact that the Latino presence in the country is the harvest of the empire. It is the result of more than a century of domination of many of these countries. And in fact, those countries that were most dominated by the United States are the ones that have sent the most migrants to this country. And Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Salvador, Guatemala, these are the countries that have provided the bulk of the migration from Latin America, largely many of them fleeing from the civil wars, as in the cases of Guatemala and Nicaragua and El Salvador, in which the United States government played a key role in backing one side or the other, others coming here as a result of the needs of American businesses that established migration and recruiting, actually recruited people to come here to fill jobs—that’s more so in the case of the Puerto Ricans and the Mexicans. And so, in essence, the migration flows, the mass migration flows of Latin Americans to this country were a direct response to the needs of the empire. Most Americans are not aware of that, because most Americans don’t even think of our country as an empire.

in full:http://www.democracynow.org/2011/5/25/harvest_of_empire_new_book_exposes