Hispanic Heritage Month tipsheet
EDITORS: The following Indiana University professors have prepared comments about Hispanic issues to coincide with Hispanic Heritage Month, which began Tuesday, Sept. 15, the anniversary of independence for five Latin American countries -- Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua -- and continues until Oct. 15. Contact information for each professor is listed below.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Sept. 23, 2009
When Latino immigrants become the topic of the day for talks shows and media commentators, one of the striking features of every debate is the intense nativism of one set of commentators, said IU Professor Peter Guardino.
Peter Guardino
These commentators often argue that Latino immigrants are prone to crime, a drain on government budgets and unwilling or unable to assimilate, he said. The fact that data does not support any of these ideas seems to have no effect at all on nativist opinion. In fact, Guardino, a historian, said he has seen nativists literally walk out of the room rather than hear him describing recent social scientific research on Latino immigrants.
"I find these attitudes particularly ironic given the fact that the ancestors of today's nativists also faced the same prejudices," Guardino said. "There is a long tradition of this kind of nativist thinking in America, and it stretches back as least as far as Benjamin Franklin, who in the 1760 worried that German immigrants to Pennsylvania were aliens whose failure to assimilate would undermine Anglo-America. Franklin asked 'Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our language or customs, any more than they can acquire our complexion?'"
Nearly a century later, in the 1840s, Irish and German immigrants were seen as lazy, violent people who were unwilling or unable to become "true Americans," Guardino said. "They, like Franklin's earlier Germans, were seen as racially distinct from white Americans. Similar ideas drove anti-immigrant sentiment and legislation aimed at Asians in the late 1800s. And from the 1880s to the 1920s, immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were seen in essentially the same way. In other words, every major wave of immigration has been met with the same arguments. Yet, the descendants of those immigrants now see themselves as being as American and, generally, white." And, as Guardino points out, some of them feel "fully empowered to take up the same nativist arguments used against their own ancestors."
Guardino suspects that nativist arguments will continue to be emotionally powerful because they express some people's anxieties about social change and because politicians and commentators know that nativist arguments can be used to tap into those anxieties. Thus nativist arguments will continue to be part of public discussions of immigration, and, as we have seen with the health care debate, other issues.
Peter Guardino studies Latin American and U.S. history. He can be reached at 812-855-6108, and pguardin@indiana.edu.
Like their Hollywood counterparts, Latin American films and television melodramas have always been popular and highly profitable. However, during an evening discussion about favorite Latin American features with a colleague at a conference of film scholars in 2005, IU professor Darlene Sadlier realized how little had been written about them.
"The lively conversation made me realize how very little material in English existed concerning Latin American melodrama, even well-known movies made in the 1940s in Mexico, the country that has received the majority of scholarly attention on the subject," said Sadlier, a professor of Spanish and Portuguese. Her subsequent efforts resulted in a new anthology, Latin American Melodrama: Passion, Pathos, and Entertainment (University of Illinois Press, 2009), which she edited and to which she contributed an introduction. The book features chapters from some of the major figures in Latin American film scholarship and covers 70 years of movies and television within a transnational context, focusing specifically on the period known as the "Golden Age" of melodrama.
Darlene Sadlier's recent book is an anthology entitled "Latin American Melodrama: Passion, Pathos, and Entertainment" that covers 70 years of movies and television within a transnational context.
"The term melodrama has somewhat broader implications in countries such as Mexico, Argentina and Brazil, where it refers not only to domestic dramas but also to historical epics in which family life is viewed in relation to national issues," she writes in the book's introduction. "The history of the form is rich, and its complexity is evident in essays collected in this book . ... Taken together, they give us a sense of melodrama's range and variety and help us understand why it has been the most durable form of popular art in the Latin American cinema."
Sadlier, also the author of Nelson Pereira dos Santos (University of Illinois Press, 2003) and Brazil Imagined: 1500 to the Present (University of Texas Press, 2008), can be reached at 812-855-1514 or sadlier@indiana.edu.
Today, five of every 100 Hoosiers hail from another country and nearly half of all of all foreign-born Indiana citizens have come from Latin America, according to a new report produced by the Indiana Business Research Center (IBRC) in Indiana University's Kelley School of Business.
The foreign-born population (pop. 264,000) in Indiana is larger than the population of Fort Wayne, Indiana's second largest city (pop. 252,000) and 49.4 percent came from Latin America, more than those from Asia (25 percent) and Europe (17.4 percent).
"Immigration to Indiana tends to mirror national trends, and major influences are economic and social," said Carol O. Rogers, deputy director and chief information officer at the IBRC. "When jobs have been numerous and the economy strong, immigration is on the upswing. As more people move to the United States and establish roots, family members tend to follow and swell the ranks of the foreign born. Historically, when the economy is down, so is immigration."
"Considering the current recession, one of the longest running since the 1930s, we may see short-term declines in the numbers of people coming to Indiana from other countries," Rogers added.
Rogers can be reached at 317-274-2205 or rogersc@iupui.edu. More information is available at the STATS Indiana web site (www.stats.indiana.edu) and from the U.S. Census Bureau (www.census.gov).
At midnight on September 15th, in the central plazas of cities, towns, and villages all around Mexico, mayors and other dignitaries appear on the balcony of a municipal building, loudly ring a bell, and lead a call-and-response of "Viva Mexico" with the crowd gathered below.
Then, traditionally, many would point their revolvers skyward and let out a haphazard volley of gunfire (more recently, given security concerns, most people use fireworks), said Bradley A.U. Levinson, director of IU's Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) and an associate professor of education and adjunct associate professor of anthropology and Latino studies at IU.
"The first time I witnessed the September 15 ritual, in 1990, I did not know to expect such armament," Levinson said. "A crowd of perhaps 2,000 people stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the main plaza of Pátzcuaro, Michoacán. I was amazed -- and alarmed -- when the wizened old lady next to me, after shouting out a surprisingly vigorous 'Viva Mexico,' lifted an ancient Colt 45 above her head and let three bullets fly. Her arm could barely withstand the recoil of the gun. Then she turned and greeted everyone around her with a handshake and a less formalized 'Viva Mexico.'"
The bell rung at midnight represents the bells that were said to be rung by Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla on that same evening in 1810, rallying his congregants in and around the town of Dolores, Guanajuato, and urging them to begin the insurgency against Spanish colonial rule immediately, Levinson said. Today, the midnight ritual is known as the "Grito de Independencia" (Cry of Independence) or Grito de Dolores.
"Needless to say, the mixture of fervor and merriment at midnight on the 15th is exhilarating," he said. The following day, Sept. 16, is considered Mexican Independence Day, and consists of family relaxation, civic speeches and, in the provinces, home-grown parades of marching school children.
The insurgency raged for many years, and the Spanish Crown did not concede independence until 1821, but Mexicans still consider Sept. 16, 1810, as the birth of their nation. (Next year, Mexico will be celebrating a much-hyped bicentennial.) Most of the Central American republics also count their independence from Sept. 15, which is why the National Hispanic Heritage Month begins on this date as well.
"Here in the United States, many people think that Cinco de Mayo represents Mexico's Independence. Actually, Cinco de Mayo is a lesser civic holiday in Mexico, and it celebrates the defeat of a larger invading force of French soldiers at the 'Battle of Puebla' on May 5, 1862. It, too, is a celebration of Mexican national spirit, but it is typically a rather more sober affair. Only the triumph of advertising and the alcohol industry in the United States has turned it into 'Drinko de Mayo,' an occasion for the unfettered (and often insulting) display of drunken merriment and Mexican stereotypes."
Levinson can be reached at 812-855-9098, 812-856-8359 or brlevins@indiana.edu.
