Review

General Books

Juan Gonzalez, a Puerto Rican-American, and an activist, is an award winning journalist for the New York Daily News and co-host of Pacifica radio network's "Democracy Now." He has written an ambitious comparative study of the principal Hispanic groups in the United States covering five-hundred years of Latino history and contemporary political, cultural, and economic relations. Gonzalez book occupies a unique place in the literature on Hispanic groups because of its attempt to tell the stories of Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, Central Americans, and Colombians within the framework of the creation and operation of an American empire. The book promises to become a often-used source in multicultural studies, ethnic studies, and empire studies courses.	1
The book is divided into three parts. Teachers will find little of surprise in Part I of the book dealing with the roots of the Latino immigration to or conquest by the United States, primarily because the account is drawn from familiar but selective secondary sources. These chapters offer a simplified contrast between Spanish and English empires, present a zero-sum game of emerging Anglo-American dominance at the expense of its southern neighbors, Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, and detail the consolidation of U.S. economic and political control of the Caribbean in the 20th century through a series of case studies. Part II adopts an anecdotal method of focusing on a single family to tell the story of how each of the specific Hispanic groups migrated to the United States. Gonzalez own family figures in the Puerto Rican story, South Texas landowners are used to tell a Mexican conquest and persistence story, a working class anti-Castro family tells the Cuban revolution and refugee story, while the Dominican immigration story is told by a working-class mother and a politically active daughter. Gonzalez abandons this method in the telling of three Central American civil war stories, the Panamanian story turns out to be not so much about Hispanics as English speaking Anglo-Caribbean West Indian mother and son, the latter who learns Spanish, while the Colombian drug war story is told through two families of brothers and sisters caught up in the repression and violence both there and here. Readers will find Part III of the book the most rewarding. Here the author focuses on contemporary issues of Hispanic political mobilization, which he demonstrates has been increasingly important in local and national politics; record levels of immigration, which has evoked a powerful but mis-guided nativist backlash; separatist concerns by critics like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., that Hispanic language and culture groups are unassimilatable, which he convincingly argues is part of Schlesinger's marginalization of minorities; the failure of successive free trade initatives to deliver social progress, environmental safety, or alleviate immigration pressures; and the status of Puerto Rico, whether it should seek independence, remain a commonwealth territory, or become the 51st state.	2
A number of Gonzalez's positions are open to debate. He writes from the perspective of a Latino, angry at Anglo-American domination and racism. The book is long on the victimization of many groups by Anglos, and short on intra-ethnic prejudice or bias. The differences between Hispanic and European immigrant groups is over-emphasized, while the agency of the Hispanic groups is often minimized. Is the current Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban political mobilization different from that of previous European immigrants? Despite its claim to comprehensiveness, Gonzalez neglects to include Philippians in his study, and yet they were as much a product of Spanish colonization and American conquest as Puerto Rico. His decision to use family stories to illustrate ethnic and national histories is particularly problematic. Can the Mexican story be told based on a family of original landowners? That seems to marginalize the millions of landless immigrants that came afterwards. At bottom, he struggles with integrating the stories of the families he has selected into an account of each group's experience. Finally, his contemporary analysis asserts repeatedly that a new amalgamated Hispanic identity is emerging in the United States, driven by a near-paranoid, English-only movement. Yet he does not present a sustained argument for the development of a unified Hispanic identity. Instead, the basic thrust and organization of his work demonstrates the diversity of the sources, experiences, political orientations, cultural idioms, and trajectories of America's Spanish-speaking populations. While I have my reservations about the perspective, methods, comprehensiveness, and conclusions of Harvest of Empire, it strikes me as a valuable addition to the literature on Hispanics in the United States. Gonzalez has cast a harsh light on the consequences of empire for a diverse population of Western Hemisphere peoples. His controversial stands on historical and contemporary issues should elicit stimulating discussions in our classrooms. The book seems particularly well suited for comparative race and ethnicity courses with an emphasis on major Latino groups.	3
Long Beach City College   Julian J. DelGaudio

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.