LATINOLAND: A Portrait of America’s Largest and Least Understood Minority, by Marie Arana
The former Washington Post editor Marie Arana recently approached the Cuban American archaeologist Jorge Zamanillo with a question. As the founding director of the not-yet-open National Museum of the American Latino, Zamanillo would help make sense of Hispanic identity and history. How, Arana asked him, do you begin to define “us”?
The question has engrossed everyone from historians and census takers to political consultants and advertisers, and it animates Arana’s “LatinoLand,” a sprawling account of Hispanic life in America that ties together personal narrative, historical research, along with hundreds of interviews. Recent books on the subject by Héctor Tobar, Ed Morales and Laura E. Gómez have grappled with Hispanic identity and its colonial roots. Arana, the inaugural literary director of the Library of Congress and the author of a family memoir and books on Simón Bolívar and Latin America, acknowledges the complexity of her task while maintaining a misty idealism about the future of the Latino community in the United States.
She begins her account with the story of her family’s arrival in 1950s Miami, back when Latinos officially made up 2 percent of the United States. That number is closer to 20 percent today, an enormous and increasing population that, despite being mostly Mexican American, is also growing in its diversity. A central tension of “LatinoLand” is how to navigate these demographic differences while holding 60 million people to a single, collective identity.
This may be why Arana insists early on that her book is just a “personal portrait” of Latinos in America. Her impressionistic approach allows her to cover the big and the small, from the Spanish conquest and legacies of colorism in the Americas to the Bracero program, which opened U.S. agriculture to temporary workers from Mexico in the 1940s and ’50s. Other topics that capture her interest: Richard Nixon’s creation of Hispanic Heritage Week in 1969, Central America’s civil wars in the final decades of the 20th century and Latino representation in Hollywood films.
There are also eye-opening discussions on the rising popularity of Mormonism and the “prosperity theology” of Pentecostalism among Hispanic Americans. Arana decries the outdated “myth” of a monolithic “Latino vote,” pointing to a growing conservative Latino political base after years of neglect by the liberal establishment. “It’s not that I embrace the values of the Republican Party,” Samuel Rodriguez, an evangelical pastor who has advised George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, tells Arana. “It’s that the Republican Party embraces more of my values.”
Much of the history in “LatinoLand” will be familiar to many readers, and Arana’s commentary isn’t particularly revelatory. What brings her book to life is the richness of voices and perspectives. Linda Chavez, a conservative commentator, counts among her ancestors the settlers of Santa Fe and the governor who surrendered New Mexico to Zachary Taylor during the Mexican-American War. Willie Velásquez, a little-known political organizer, is celebrated as “one of Latino history’s titans” for his ambitious campaign to register millions of voters. Raymundo Paniagua, a marine biologist, fled Honduras after he was shot point blank in the head. He landed in Arlington, Va., where he was able to afford surgery and a prosthetic eye thanks to the generosity of “the local Catholic and Mormon churches.”
Arana covers serious ground here in brisk, accessible prose. However, in section after section, the book’s hurried pace eventually generates the feeling of being perched on a speeding tour bus. There’s barely time to take in how Washington’s meddling in Latin America has, over decades, reshaped the Hispanic American population in the United States. Historical episodes are picked up and dropped in a few pages, sometimes within the same paragraph. Did you know about the mass deportation of Mexican American U.S. citizens during the Great Depression? Or the complicity of Latin American countries in the internment of Japanese during World War II? Moving on, we’re already at the next stop of “LatinoLand.”
Zamanillo ultimately responds to Arana’s question about Latino identity with a shrug: “We’re not that different,” he argues. Arana herself seems to agree, despite the ever-shifting geographic and political diversity of Latinos in the United States and the fact that younger generations — including her own children — eschew “an identity they no longer feel is theirs.”
“LatinoLand” never fully reconciles these differences, but insists on a bond that runs deep. “Just go to a fiesta,” Arana signs off. “It is there.”
LATINOLAND: A Portrait of America’s Largest and Least Understood Minority | By Marie Arana | Simon & Schuster | 554 pp. | $32.50
