58 pages • 1-hour read
Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America
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Themes
The American Dream Versus the American Nightmare
Harvest of Empire opens by questioning why the English colonies in the Americas achieved great success while Spanish colonies fragmented and eventually dissipated. Traditionally, scholarship has pointed to the Protestant work ethic as the cause of this disparity. The premise of the American dream is that as long as a person works hard, they can achieve anything, no matter where they come from or what status they were born into. Thus, the often-told story of America is one of how various colonists came to this country ready to work hard and build a life for themselves without any barriers. The accomplishments of the United States can be pointed to as evidence of the American dream.
This narrative has obvious elisions—e.g., the role that the genocide of Indigenous Americans and the enslavement of Black Americans played in the US’s success. Gonzalez, however, notes that it also erases the reality of America’s relationship to Latin America. Though certain differences—e.g., in patterns of land ownership—did set the stage for the Spanish and English colonies’ divergent trajectories, much of America’s success stems from its history of annexation and exploitation. Throughout the early years of the United States and up until 1898, many Anglo American settlers acquired their land by stealing, cheating and ultimately going to war to gain Florida, Texas, California, and other lands from Mexico. During the 20th century, America focused less on territorial expansion and more on economic penetration, as the US government propped up brutal dictators who were friendly to US business interests despite these dictators’ brutal records regarding human rights.
As Gonzalez shows, such US policies have driven Latin American immigration to the US to a substantial degree, whether by rendering immigrants’ countries of origin unstable, violent, and impoverished or (as in the case of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo) by simply redrawing the borders between countries and changing the citizenship of those living there in the process. In the US, however, these immigrants have often struggled due to racism and xenophobia, resulting in a bitter irony: Those whose exploitation has enabled others to achieve the American dream are often barred from it themselves. Gonzalez is determined to bring this dark underside of the American dream to light to recontextualize the 21st-century immigration debate and to ensure that all immigrants have the chance to share in America’s prosperity.
The Us/Them Dichotomy
Gonzalez is from Puerto Rico, and he devotes a chapter to the unique position of the people of Puerto Rico. They are citizens of the United States, and yet they live in the oldest colony of the United States: “Despite our de jure citizenship, the average North American, whether white or black, continues to regard Puerto Ricans as de facto foreigners” (81). This is the case not just for Puerto Rican citizens but for many US citizens from Latin America, who are often seen as not fully American. It is part of the project of Harvest of Empire to challenge the xenophobia that divides the US into those who “belong” and those who “don’t.”
Gonzales does so in part by drawing attention to the shared history linking the United States and its Latin American neighbors. To be sure, much of that history is grim: Both Anglo and Latin America have their origins in colonialism, enslavement, and the genocide of Indigenous populations. More recently, the regions’ entanglement has taken the form of US exploitation of and interference in Latin America. Nevertheless, Gonzales finds in this long-standing proximity and interdependence reason to hope. He describes the regions as “close cousins,” implying that they are more alike than different. The structure of the book reflects this thesis: In showcasing personal stories to represent each of the countries in the “Branches” section, he emphasizes the shared humanity that links them to others in the US.
Gonzales also contextualizes anti-Latin American racism within the broader history of xenophobia in the US, arguing that there have been at least three anti-immigrant waves in US history. However, the first two of these have come and gone without the fears surrounding immigration coming to pass; indeed, the targets of these periods of xenophobia—mostly immigrants from Eastern, Southern, and/or Catholic Europe—have so thoroughly assimilated into US society (and contributed to its success) that a modern reader may struggle to understand why prejudice against them ever existed at all. The same, Gonzales suggests, may one day be true of Latin American immigrants.
At the same time, Gonzales challenges the notion that immigrants need to fully assimilate. Those who fear immigration want to limit citizenship to preserve the status quo, fearing that letting the “Other” into the social fabric of America will forever change the country’s identity. Instead, they want the immigrant to change. By scapegoating and criminalizing difference and creating images of immigrants as dangerous menaces to society, these anti-immigrant voices put tremendous pressure on immigrants to assimilate quickly. Immigrants must thus lose their own cultural narratives and blend into a monocultural vision of America if they don’t want to be cast as invaders, but Gonzales suggests that this reflects a reductive understanding of difference. As his discussion of various political coalitions of marginalized groups demonstrates, it is possible to remain distinct in some ways while still uniting behind a common cause.
The Immense Wealth of Multicultural America
In challenging us/them thinking, Gonzales also shows the assets of diversity and immigration, illustrating the benefits of a multicultural America. Moreover, he implicitly argues for a redefinition of wealth; while the US has money to spare, he suggests that this is not the only criterion that should matter when assessing an individual or group’s contributions to a country.
In his overview of the history of the precolonial Americas, Gonzales draws attention to the continents’ immense resources and the sophisticated civilizations that were able to flourish there as a result. The advent of colonialism, however, sets the pattern for the rest of the book: Rather than share the region’s resources, Spanish and English settlers alike appropriated those resources—particularly land—for themselves, contributing to the decline or destruction of many Indigenous societies. Over the centuries that followed, Gonzales argues, the US adopted a similar policy vis-à-vis its Latin American neighbors, extracting wealth from these countries while often leaving their citizens impoverished (or worse). To add insult to injury, Latin American immigrants who came to the US to escape these conditions often faced allegations that they were “stealing” jobs from “real” Americans or otherwise hurting the economy.
Gonzales argues that this need not be the case, and not only because the wealthiest country on Earth can surely afford to share its wealth at least somewhat more equally. Rather, he details the many ways immigrants enrich their communities even beyond furnishing labor power or paying taxes—e.g., by contributing to the development of new forms of art as different cultures encounter one another. Wealth, for Gonzales, is not simply a matter of dollars.
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