Latin America

Here Comes the Second World

Ron Tang — Thu, 01 May 2008 09:42:00 -0400

This article is adapted from Parag Khanna's book The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order.

The term "second world" has fallen out of use. It used to mean countries of the socialist world; today I use the phrase to refer to those countries in eastern Europe and central Asia, Latin America, the middle east and southeast Asia which are both rich and poor, developed and underdeveloped, postmodern and pre-modern, cosmopolitan and tribal -- all at the same time. This is not a temporary state between third world and first, but a permanent condition in which… more

Absolut Canard

Ron Tang — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 04:01:00 -0400

If I didn't already prefer Ketel One vodka in my martinis, I might very well call for my own boycott against Absolut.

Not because I agree with the knuckleheads who fear that the Swedish company's advertisement featuring a map of the American Southwest as Mexican territory is fueling ethnic secessionism, but because, in its attempt to lure upper-middle-class consumers in Mexico, the company played on an age-old canard that has historically been used to justify discrimination against Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans here in the United States.

Last week I was in Las Vegas, and I found myself having a depressing… more

A 670-Mile-Long Shrine To American Insecurity

Ron Tang — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 08:51:00 -0400

Last February, I found myself in the difficult position of explaining American insecurity to a group of Mexican undergraduates at a college in Matamoros, Mexico, just south of the border at Brownsville, Texas. I was taking questions after delivering a lecture on the long-term prospects of Mexican immigrants being accepted into U.S. society. A neatly dressed young man in the back stood up to ask a pointed question. "How," he said politely in Spanish, "could such a rich and powerful country be so self-centered as to build a wall on its border to keep people out?"

For a moment, I figured… more

Monterrey U.S.A.

Ron Tang — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0500

When the Kentucky-based Yum Corp. was looking for a city in Mexico in which to open a Taco Bell, it must have figured it couldn't go wrong with this ultra-modern, hyper-Americanized metropolis 125 miles from the Texas border in the northern Mexican state of Nuevo Leon. Regiomontanos, as Monterrey residents are called, wear their pro-Americanism on their sleeves and see little shame in the fact that their streets are as overrun by corporate American retailers as any suburban town north of the border.

Norteno Mexican culture has long been known for its openness to American ways, but Monterrey's love affair with… more

Waving Goodbye to Hegemony

Ron Tang — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Turn on the TV today, and you could be forgiven for thinking it's 1999. Democrats and Republicans are bickering about where and how to intervene, whether to do it alone or with allies and what kind of world America should lead. Democrats believe they can hit a reset button, and Republicans believe muscular moralism is the way to go. It's as if the first decade of the 21st century didn't happen -- and almost as if history itself doesn't happen. But the distribution of power in the world has fundamentally altered over the two presidential terms of George W. Bush,… more

The Economist on Gregory Rodriguez's Book and Latino History

Communications — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 14:33:00 -0500

New America in the News:

In 1519 a group of Spanish soldiers who had been sent to explore Mexico heard an extraordinary rumour. A sailor, Gonzalo Guerrero, had drifted there on a wrecked ship eight years earlier and was living among the Indians. He had married an Indian woman, with whom he had raised three children, and was tattooed and pierced. Odder still, he intended to stay put. Hernán Cortés, the leader of the expedition, was furious. "It will never do to leave him here," he scowled.

What Cortés took to be a slight against Spanish civilisation, Gregory Rodriguez hails as a vision of America's future. Guerrero was the first Mexican settler and his children were the first mixed-race Mexicans. But only narrowly: Cortés himself soon took an Indian lover, as did many of his men. Gradually Spaniards and Indians (and later blacks) blended to create a mongrel nation. Mexico became a counterpoint to the caste society that developed in its northern neighbour. Then it began to permeate and change that society.

By 2001 Latinos, most of them Mexicans or descended from Mexicans, had become the second-biggest ethnic group in America. This worried African-Americans, who were thus relegated to third place. It also alarmed some whites, who felt that Latinos were failing to conform to American mores. In an influential book "Who Are We?" published in 2004, Samuel Huntington, a Harvard University professor, argued that Mexicans threatened Anglo-Protestant traditions. "Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds" is a much shrewder, less paranoid work. Yet, in some ways, it reaches a similar conclusion. ...

For the complete article, please follow this link. Gregory Rodriguez is director of the California Fellows Program at New America Foundation and is an Irvine Senior Fellow.

Gregory Rodriguez in The Washington Times on Mexican Immigration

Communications — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 11:56:00 -0500

New America in the News:

The influx of Mexicans into the United States will change how race is perceived in American society, says Gregory Rodriguez, [director of the California Fellows Program at the New America Foundation]. ...

Author of a new book, Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America, Mr. Rodriguez said at a Washington press conference this week that Mexican-Americans have been "racially categorized" for centuries and that integration is a must for American society.

His book provides an in-depth history of Mexican immigration to the United States. ...

For the complete article, please follow this link. To see video from Rodriguez's recent book event at the New America Foundation, please click here.

Gregory Rodriguez on Immigrants, Acculturation in The Arizona Republic

Communications — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 17:17:00 -0400

New America in the News:

If Sunnyslope had a patron saint, her name would be the Virgin of Solitude.

The black-cloaked woman is the saint of Oaxaca, Mexico, but her image drapes walls in homes and businesses throughout Sunnyslope, one of the Valley's oldest neighborhoods, nestled at the bottom of Phoenix's North Mountain.

Over the past decade, so many immigrants from the southern Mexican state have moved into Sunnyslope that the working-class community in north-central Phoenix is becoming known as "Little Oaxaca..."

Now, waves of Mexican immigrants fleeing poverty in Oaxaca are drawn to Sunnyslope for its affordable housing and its access to major bus routes..

They are transforming pockets of the neighborhood, and re-creating pieces of the Mexican villages they left behind...The neighborhoods help cushion immigrants' adjustment to the U.S., experts said, and allow them to still feel close to their homelands.

"The new enclaves become a . . . stepping stone for immigrants," said Gregory Rodriguez, an Irvine Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank where he studies acculturation.

"It's lonely and disorienting, moving to a land with different expectations. These neighborhoods help ground people and help root them in the past, even as they're obviously charging forth in the future..."

For the complete article, please visit The Arizona Republic website.

Phillip Longman on Implications of Mexico's Birth Rate in San Diego Union Tribune

Communications — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 16:19:00 -0500

New America in the News:

MEXICO CITY – Mexicans living abroad sent home a record $23 billion last year, raising new questions about whether the government of President Felipe Calderón can afford to slow migration.

In just one year, the amount of money migrants wired their families jumped 15 percent, according to Mexico's central bank, overtaking tourism to become the nation's second-biggest source of foreign income after oil.

“This is a river of gold that flows into Latin America and Mexico. Daily. Weekly. Monthly. It never stops,” said Sergio Bendixen, president of Bendixen & Associates, a public opinion research firm in Coral Gables, Fla., that surveyed Mexicans on both sides of the border for the Inter-American Development Bank.

Bendixen's study highlights a basic fact about immigration: Mexicans who migrate to the United States are key to the economies of both countries...

As Mexican government and business leaders contemplate ways to deal with migrants' increasing economic power, the United States may face an entirely different immigration challenge in the next few decades: a decreasing supply of unskilled labor from Mexico.

“The rate of growth in Mexico's population is headed downward” at an unprecedented rate, said Phillip Longman, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a Washington, D.C., research group, and the author of a book on shifting demographics titled, “The Empty Cradle.”

“From the mid-'70s until now, Mexico has gone from an average of six children per woman to two,” he said. “That's going to lead to much less pressure to immigrate to the United States.”

Eventually, Longman said, “we may actually find ourselves competing to attract workers.”

For the complete article, please visit The San Diego Union Tribune website.

The United States and the Emerging Powers

Articles — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 12:22:00 -0500

History is replete with examples of great power conflict that develops when the world’s dominant powers are not willing or able to accommodate the interests of rising powers into the international order of the day. The last time the world denied two major rising industrial powers, Germany and Japan, what they considered their rightful place in the sun the result was world war. Following World War II, another hot world war was avoided only because the Western powers accepted the separate international system the Soviet Union had created until it collapsed from its own internal pressures for greater political and… more