Review of The Roots of Latino Urban Agency: Editors, Sharon A. Navarro and Rodolfo Rosales
By Sidney Plotkin
This is a fine collection on the rich promise of Latino urban activism. As the editors, Sharon A. Navarro and Rodolfo Rosales make clear, anyone bent on offering generalizations about Latino politics in America had better be careful. Latino political engagement fits no single model.
When approaching a phenomenon as heterogeneous as this, sensitivity to local variety is essential. We are dealing here, after all, with a great mix and blend of Latino peoples, an abundantly diverse population “who come from about two dozen...nations, each (with) its own history, economy, and social and political systems.” More, Latinos have pursued disparate “patterns of migration” and “encountered different experiences in the United States” (pp. 121-122). Some Latino communities form small, almost invisible enclaves within giant cities and tiny country towns. In other settings however, as in the big cities studied here – Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami and San Antonio - Latinos concentrated in much larger numbers, creating potential for major impacts on local politics.
Most of the essays in the book show Latinos to be remarkably versatile in strategy and tactics, deploying an array of political techniques and practices creatively fashioned to suit specific conditions of their city. Latino communities, the authors suggest, have brought indigenous traditions, experiences, habits, and needs into reflexive counterpoint with prevalent features of local political systems, which activists engage and sometimes change. Indeed, the range and scope of particular experience is a main theme throughout.
Of course, like other immigrant and marginalized groups, Latinos seek incorporation into local, regional and national systems of power. But the ways and means, the strategies and tactics, they have used, reflect both sensitivity to the local political environment and a keen adaptability to requirements of challenging for power in particular places. As the dominant political arrangements and cultures of cities vary, so too does the kind of “agency” that Latinos must use to vault their way into the system. For Navarro and Rosales and their colleagues, the specifics of localized place, history, tradition and power matter a lot.
More, unlike African-Americans, who by the 1960s managed finally to nationalize their local and regional struggles, the editors emphasize that Latino politics has never jelled into a decisive moment of national recognition. Instead, the diversity of Latino social experience fuses with the heterogeneity of US cities to produce political strategies and outcomes that defy easy generalization. In a sense, diversity has begotten diversity. As the editors explain, Latino politics remains “essentially a regional and/or urban phenomenon...with no overarching historical identity” to serve as national unifier (p. 6).
And yet for all that diversity, the essays suggest certain commonalities worth thinking about as well as enduring issues that need to be addressed. Ranking high among such commonalities and issues is the relation of ethnicity to class. Latino people bring much cultural diversity to America; they find themselves living amidst very different local political systems; but the impacts of class and capitalism are among the most striking uniformities of American life, structural realities with which all groups must sooner or later contend.
Curiously, the editors suggest that though class is a key issue, their volume does not address its “profound significance.” (p. 123). They are excessively modest. In fact, most, if not all, of the essays here describe the implications of class realities for Latino communities. And they do so with notable sensitivity to the “multiple marginalizations” within which urban Latinos must make their way in American society. (p. 74) There are abundant observations to be found in these essays about the complex interactions among plural cleavages that shape life in the Barrio. In other words, we learn much here about how factors of class, Latino ethnic identity, and gender can combine in shifting ways both to reflect and to shape disparate political possibilities and strategies.
Jessica Lavariega Monforti, Juan Carlos Flores and Dario Moreno, for example, offer a striking, albeit not especially hopeful example, in their look at Miami Mayor Manny Diaz. Needless to say, winning Mayoral elections is no small political accomplishment, for Latinos or anyone else. And Diaz did so by coming from way behind; he was a distant underdog in his race against former Mayor Maurice Ferre. By nurturing ties with major local Cuban-American development interests, and skillfully exploiting the city’s impatience with a series of recent scandals, Diaz followed the tried and true method of many American Mayors; he skillfully crafted a well-financed urban growth machine to advance Miami’s economic future. The growth machine model is as generic as most urban American skylines. Attract investment; build gleaming towers; inflate real estate values; replace old neighborhoods with bohemian-like enclaves for the “creative class”: gentrify, gentrify, gentrify. The middle and upper classes will stream in, taxes will rise, budgets will magically balance, and the city will shine in the approving eyes of national and international finance. One problem with the strategy of course is that it frequently requires dispossession of working class communities, the very neighborhoods so often filled with people of color, including, as in Miami, Latinos. Another is that building booms typically generate bubbles. These inevitably burst, as Miami’s did; and when they do, cities and their poorest residents are left holding the bag. In a comment redolent with sensitivity to the class edge of Latino experience in America, the authors conclude that “the rank and file people of Miami did not benefit from the boom,” and “they are surely suffering from the consequence of Diaz’s growth-at-all-costs strategy” (p. 94).
If Miami exposes the danger and risk of relying on capital alone to propel a city’s development, Richard DeLeon’s study of San Francisco illustrates ample possibilities for Latino political agency to nurture considerably more democratic and socially just outcomes. In crucial ways, San Francisco is like Miami, albeit more so; it is an international or global city, the kind of place that attracts business interest without too much pleading. But as DeLeon carefully shows, Latino residents of the city’s Mission District have a long history of defending their neighborhood against capitalist encroachment. And the legacy of such experience proved especially valuable in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Like Manny Diaz in Miami, San Franscisco’s Mayor Willie Brown fashioned a local growth machine in league with regional capitalist interests, especially the high-flying investors of nearby Silicon Valley. As Brown once famously put it, “Mayors are known for what they build and...I intend to cover every inch of ground that isn’t open space” (p. 47). Thus Mayor Brown and his allies had land use plans aplenty, looking to replace the working people of the Mission and other neighborhoods with hi-tech firms and their associated “creative class” services and residences.
But unlike in Miami, Latino activists in San Francisco fought back. They were defiant. They broke out of the mold of exclusive reliance upon orthodox Mayoral centered politics. Building on the city’s progressive traditions and its relative openness to multi-racial, multi-cultural coalitions, Latino agency in this instance proved itself a formidable class barrier to unregulated expansion. Knowingly combining protest and electoral campaign skills, activists in San Francisco pushed back against the growth machine, lending a measure of protection to working class neighborhoods and giving the city’s land use pattern a more democratic, egalitarian face. Aided by an enormously important institutional change, adoption of district-based elections for the city’s formerly at-large elected Board of Supervisors, DeLeon pointedly describes how Latino, Gay, environmental and neighborhood groups, often with Latino leadership, were able to elect a pro-neighborhood majority on the Board, one that dramatically curtailed the Mayor’s capacity to engineer growth without consent of the governed.
For DeLeon, the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition (MAC) provides a persuasive “model of how Latinos can wield land use planning tools to secure their turf in big cities; mobilize voters and elect Latinos to positions of power in local government; and sustain a grassroots movement to force the bureaucrats and politicians to do the right thing while extracting needed resources from the local private sector” (p. 63). The lesson is clear: notwithstanding Paul Peterson’s famous thesis that cities may not resist capitalist imperatives; there is no iron law at work here. Popular action and politics can sometimes bend economic forces to fit more democratic designs.
Richard Armbruster-Sandovals’ contribution offers comparable lessons and conclusions. For Los Angeles, where the early 2000s have been witness to violent inter-ethnic conflict between young Latinos and African Americans, Armbruster-Sandoval uncovers a vivid history of inter-racial coalition politics that has episodically sparked community action. From the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee to the social movement politics and inter-racial coalitions of the Bus Riders Union, to the more recent Justice for Janitors labor campaign and inter-racial cooperation in the LA music scene, Latino politics in the City of Angels has featured, if not consistently enough, a healthy openness to joint action with progressive whites, labor organizers and African-Americans.
Armbruster-Sandoval does very important work here, reminding us of a historical and strategic capacity to work across what Ira Katznelson, following Antonio Gramsci, called the deep-set inner trenches of urban politics, including not least, the formidable trench dividing workplace from community politics. Because such coalitional efforts have lagged in recent years, their revival for L.A. deserves much attention among today’s activists, especially so to “help reverse the existing currents of conflict (and) prevent other tragic deaths” (p. 36).
Chicago, itself no stranger to urban violence, offers yet other models for effective Latino agency. In a marvelously insightful essay, Michelle Michelson analyzes the insurgency of a group of seemingly weak Latina mothers. She shows how they capably invoked local traditions, and their role as community guardians, to create a novel “opportunity structure.” In effect, the mothers invented their own brand of agency, to engage and successfully influence Chicago schools policy.
Ignored by city education administrators, when they asked that their children remain in neighborhood schools after their original school building had been declared unsafe, Latina mothers struck back hard against bureaucratic indifference. Courageously, they began a hunger strike to force elite attention to their demands. Then, later, after repeated efforts of protest failed, they used another hunger strike to get a new school built in the neighborhood and at their preferred site. Employing a blend of powerfully evocative symbols, the hunger strikers set themselves up in a “tent city...called camp Cesar Chavez...decorated with an American flag between two Mexican flags.” (p. 71). Victory was not immediate; but with continued efforts, including disruption of a Mayoral press conference at City Hall, the Latina mothers of Chicago managed ultimately to win their battle for the school.
As Michelson emphasizes, Latina activism in this instance involved a kind of gendered agency, one that grew directly out of what the women saw as their responsibility to protect their children and community from a callous, unresponsive city administration. For the women, conventional party and electoral politics were of little value. In this heavily Democratic Party-controlled city, electoral politicians took Latino votes for granted.
On the other hand, the fact that voters had managed to elect Latino candidates to local office, and that non-citizens enjoyed the right to vote in school board elections, offered important psychic boosts, increasing the women’s faith in their power to achieve their goals. Pointing up both the creativity and “intersectionality” of the women’s strategy, including its class aspect, Michelson writes:
“Would the need for a hunger strike have existed if the affected community had been Anglo and higher income...arguably not. Here, then, is the intersectionality and the unique political opportunity structure. In part it was imposed from above, but the positive aspects were generated from below by the involved women...(The) unique intersectionality of these categories (ethnicity, gender, class)...created a positive political opportunity structure, due to the way in which these poor Latinas were able to manipulate and benefit from their position in Chicago society.” (Parenthesis added; italics in original)
In Chicago, unlike LA and San Francisco, Latino agency assumed a more specifically ethnic and gendered character. The possibilities for coalition politics being more limited, Latinas acted creatively and effectively within and against the barriers they encountered.
The final essay in the collection is an examination of ethnic bloc voting in San Antonio’s 2005 Mayoral election. Sylvia Manzano and Arturo Vega employ sophisticated quantitative methods to demonstrate that Anglos and Latinos voted as more or less coherent ethnic blocs. We see, for example, that in San Antonio, as DeLeon also showed for San Francisco, white liberal Mayoral candidates can defeat Latino opponents with the votes of much more conservative whites, who fear liberal whites much less than a potential Latino Mayor. This is an important point. But in the very next election after 2005, Julian Castro became San Antonio’s third Latino mayor, a possibility that is not foreshadowed by this analysis of 2005’s outcome.
The problem is not that Manzano and Vega fail to predict the future. It is that they are so preoccupied with detailed scrutiny of voting data that we get no sense of what the 2005 election was about aside from ethnicity. When local elections turn on competing ethnic identities this is usually because facts of ethnicity are more than symbolic, more than matters of identity alone; ethnic identity is inextricably tied to realities of power and control of public policy and the public purse. Certainly this is true for San Antonio, and I am sure the authors know that, but we do not see such realities or the attendant issues.
Indeed, Manzano and Vega offer the important observation that if anything, Latino turnout in San Antonio elections is markedly less than in other cities with substantial Latino populations, such as Denver and Los Angeles, which, like San Antonio, have elected Latino Mayors. But why then is Latino turnout so much lower in San Antonio? Is it because local activism has followed the less conventional channels of protest and disruption? Or is it because local elections and elites have successfully repressed or submerged vital Latino concerns?
If the 2005 Mayoral election was an issue-less election, that would be an important fact worth explaining. Whereas the other essays in this wonderful collection reveal much about specific features of diverse Latino communities and their surrounding cities, this one richly informs us about the empirical details of one election, but without providing much in the way of clarifying social, historical or political context.
Overall then, this valuable collection illustrates and illuminates how distinct Latino communities have negotiated the extraordinarily diverse terrain of American urban politics, often, if not always, with impressive success. In this sense Navarro and Rosales make a convincing case: Latino political influence can well be understood and “measured” by conceiving of “political agency” as “the power of community to develop and achieve creative goals, including social and political change, within their social environment” (p. 123) For anyone interested in the possibility and variety of such agency, this is an indispensible collection.
Sidney Plotkin is Professor of Political Science at Vassar College, where he teaches courses on American and urban politics, public policy, power and the politics of capitalism. He taught at UT San Antonio from 1976-1981, when he went to Vassar. Having writtenmany articles and reviews on the subjects of land use politics, community action and power, he has also authored several books, the most recent, The Political Ideas of Thorstein Veblen, co-authored with Rick Tilman (Yale, 2012).
Sharon A. Navarro and Rodolfo Rosales are associate professors of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Navarro is the author of Latina Legislator, co-author of Políticas, and co-editor of Latino Americans and Political Participation. Rosales is the author of the Illusion of Inclusion: The Untold Political Story of San Antonio. The Roots of Latino Urban Agency is available from the University of North Texas Press, Denton, Texas, as well as through bookstores and online outlets.