Latinos Remaking America. Eds. Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco and Mariela M. Páez.

Latinos Remaking America. Eds. Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco and Mariela M. Páez. Berkeley: University of California Press and Harvard University David Rockerfeller Center for Latin American Studies, 2002. pp. 490. Paper $19.95. ISBN 0-520-23487-1

The 2002 census proved without a doubt that Latinos have become the largest minority group in the U.S.  It proved that for our public policy and legislations to ignore the thirty-eight-plus million documented Latinos (Chicanos, Mexicanos, Latin Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cuban, and Dominicans) would be akin to grand-scale social suicide.  The impressive body of scholarship collected in Latinos Remaking America presents an array of possible research routes that will help guide us into a future responsive to the specific needs (healthcare, education, religion, immigration policy, and etc.) of Latinos who have been the long-ignored active participants in the shaping of the U.S. as a modern nation-state.  Editors Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco and Mariela M. Páez bring together Latino/a public and health policy analysts, historians, Trade Union organizers, political scientists, educators, and anthropologists, to contour a topographic map of Latino/a experience--differences and similarities between upper-class Cubans and working class Mexicanos, genders, age groups, and etc.) in all its complexity to help provide the empirically verifiable research for us to modify public policy.  as such, while the research culled together here identifies sub-group differences, it aims ultimately to draw conclusions from "robust conceptual understandings" (6) that will help make visible Latinos as a group that shares the common language of Spanish, the Catholic religion, and the experience with racial discrimination.  Today's Latinos are actively redefining the sociocultural space of the nation-state, no longer participating in an Us/Them social model, but rather promoting a "Both/And model of acculturation.

Most of the essays gravitate around formative acculturative experiences.  Alex and Carol Stepick look at public policy--education and healthcare in particular--that have shaped the Cuban American experience in Miami.  Here, because of the U.S. governments long history of supporting state aid for bilingual education programs and health care in Miami are not nor will they ever be under threat of erasure (as with California and Texas, for example).  Institutions such as the Great Society and the U.S.  Cuban Refugee Program became springboards for the already well-to-do Cuban migrants ("Golden Exiles") for economic success.  As they discover, most Cuban Americans--unlike the many Nicaraguans in Mimi--are conservative and less likely to report experiences of racial discrimination.  While Cubans and Latin Americans are  segregated as a result of the historical circumstances that led to their migrations--the Miami Cubans looking down on the others, even--such a study points to how public policy can--and cannot--work for Latinos in the U.S.

As the collection impresses on us, there are crucial differences within the Latino community that we can learn from and that should effect directions of research and policy making.  According to Robert C. Smith, for example, the numbers of Latina women working "pink collar" jobs (in retail or as clerks, for example) is on the rapid rise in New York City.  In contrast to older generations, this new generation Latinas have taken active charge of their education (choosing which high-schools to attend and so on) to help them better determine their economic future.  Unlike their male counterparts with less education and still tied to "immigrant" laboring positions, these Latinas there has been a marked improvement in job success, benefits, and pay.  Robert C. Smith concludes of his research on their education and work at home as "mediators, translators, and surrogate parents" (121) has opened doors "created by employer preferences and reinforced by the male/female skills gap" (121).  However, as Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo's research reminds:  not all Latinas can climb socioeconomic ladders.  Latinas continue to be hugely exploited as "braceras" by middle-class American families nation-wide.  Latinas from Mexico and Latin America become the cheap labor pool for the middle-class to be able to carry two jobs and raise families; these Latinas become the arms (braceras) that raise children far removed from their own families. Here, rather than opening doors of opportunity, globalization rears its ugly head as gendered-bodies move across increasingly surveillanced borders (making it hard to return for these Latinas to return home) to fit into the machinery of capitalist exploitation.  Other research collected here continues to paint in the details of this massively exploitive system, mentioning, for example, how the passing of the Illegal Immigrant Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act in 1996 led to the continued oppression and fragmenting of Latino communities North and South of the border.  And, research into health care by David Hayes-Bautista, Richard Brown, and Hongjian Yu collectively paints a dramatic picture of a health care system that fails Latinos due to a lack of access to education, non-mandatory employee health-care coverage, and targeted research (Latinos suffer from a higher rate of diabetes) as well as the paucity of bilingual and Latino physicians and fear of la migra. Current health care policies neglect fundamentally Latinos, contributing to this groups decreased contribution to the economy (more sick leaves, for example). 

As the research in toto suggests, it will only be when Latinos have equal access to education and health care that life in the U.S. will be less bleak.  Editors Suárez-Orozco and Páez also include essays by historians and cultural anthropologists to demonstrate the need for us to continue to keep our eyes focused on the Latino presence in the U.S. in all their complexity.  Chicano historian, George Sánchez, usefully meditates on the importance of looking to a pan-Latino past to understand better our present and future.  Here, Sanchez looks history to critique the present preoccupation with the multiethnic body that has been used as a symbol that represents "the nation's hope for the future and its potential for overcoming racial strife" (50) but that covers over (as with mestizaje in Latin America) deep racial divisions that continue to exist in U.S. society.

Some of the more esoteric scholarship aside--"intraspychic" needs and conflicts and/or the notion of an "educational sovereignty", for example--and Dorris Sommer's wildly speculative claim of the nation-as-narration built of fantasies "of monological and monocultural nationhood" (457),  the sound methodologies and clear expression that informs the research gathered in Latinos Remaking America will certainly broaden and deepen our knowledge of Latinos in the U.S.  Indeed, as Latinos Remaking America so convincingly proposes, it will be empirical research that tests, refutes, and refines hypothesis that will lead to public policy reform and legislative acts that will pave the way for the making of a truely democratic nation-state where all  will have access to education, health care, and the right to representation.  

--Frederick Luis Aldama

University of Colorado at Boulder