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Editor's Note: Octavio Pescador is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
(CNN) - Uncle Bernie's political revolution was not enough to win the Democratic Party presidency. The system cut off his wings in one fell swoop. Everything indicates that the ties of hierarchs with backs and godparents, the vote of the black population and the electoral apathy of the young people derailed the insurgent locomotive. And the covid-19 put an end (de facto) to the process of his candidacy. As a good revolutionary by conviction and not by convenience, and as in 2016, the leader prefers to die standing up than to live on his knees and, even in defeat, he wins among his own for consistency and dignity. If it gives in, the movement that imprinted a shift to the left on the Democrats' agenda for four years, winning the loyalty of Latino youth, ends. That dreamy youth is one of the pillars for US population growth. and, therefore, the future of all public and private institutions / organizations, including political parties.
The success of the "sanderistas" to attract and add Latino youth to their campaign responds to two factors: resources and agenda. The invitation came accompanied by paid job offers in relevant positions. That is, they took the boys seriously and included them on the payroll. They gave them a real and not symbolic space. They worked with them and not only used them. And the youth complied, giving Sanders the required margin to win California, Nevada, and South Texas. Beyond wages and the possibility of giving their opinion and being heard, the young people joined the Sanderista cause because they saw their interests represented, those of their parents and of all those who have fought for social justice and cultural equity. In U.S.A.
Although there are significant differences in the Latino population (cultural, economic, ethnic, migratory, and regional), in terms of political preferences the majority of young people tend to the center-left (except in Florida). In the American Southwest, this trend is accentuated by the social and academic legacy that has marked Latin history, absent from textbooks (on both sides of the border, by the way), but essential in the defense of civil rights and the search for a better life for the families of peasants, workers and other workers in the service sector.
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And the mythical Joaquin of the poem is no longer "lost in a world of confusion" and in California he has become mayor, attorney general, president of the Assembly and the Senate, vice-governor, etc. Its heir is the Puerto Rican Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whom the Sanderistas elevated to the front of the bicultural and bilingual wing of the insurgent movement within the Democratic Party. With the candidacy for the presidency out of our hands, we would suppose that the Sanderistas see as a primary task to amalgamate their Spanish-speaking supporters and cultivate the unprecedented levels of political participation (mobilizing, voting and contributing resources) of Latino youth. The sleeping (electoral) giant has already been awakened. Without a doubt, they know well the historical route of the dreamy movement that brought them to this point.
Almost eight years ago, the DACA decree was passed, provisionally granting legal immigration status to numerous young people who could prove having resided in the United States. from before the age of 16 and have completed high school or equivalent in the American school system. A movement that started in the classrooms of UCLA and other higher education institutions in the early 21st century achieved a bitter victory for our students and the hundreds of thousands of people who joined the cause. After many years and several frustrated legislative votes, the boys managed to get out of the shadows to continue studying and get formal employment, but, sadly, their parents were unable to enter what was thought to be the prelude to, at least, integration. economic.
In the middle of the past decade, leaders who had been organizing communities of Asians, Central Americans, and Mexicans (among others) dreamed of achieving immigration reform. If in the 1980s a Republican president - Ronald Reagan - approved amnesty, the election of a Democratic president with a legislative majority in 2008, provided good news. Hope was emerging among immigrant advocacy organizations that were fighting for the immigration regularization of more than 11.6 million people who live and work without documents in this country. In 2006, these organizations, in collaboration with labor unions, clergy and the Spanish-speaking media, had coordinated the largest marches of immigrants in the largest US history. and subsequently channeled that energy to support the election of Barack Obama.
But the demands of the movement's leaders were never met. Worse still, the mobilizations of millions of undocumented immigrants from coast to coast awoke the xenophobic ogre of broad social sectors, reaffirmed the lucrative silence of the business community and evidenced the lack of will / capacity of the democratic leaders to fully integrate the undocumented. The reactionary wing of the Republicans - which had been promoting the criminalization and persecution of the undocumented since the mid-1990s, led by Pete Wilson in California - updated the nativist discourse. Xenophobes argued, on the one hand, that only those who comply with immigration law should be welcomed - waiting their turn - and, on the other, that the American way of life was being threatened by criminals and blots who abused social services.
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The most progressive groups in the Democratic Party accepted Obamacare's priority on the agenda and gave the possibility to define when and how an immigration reform would be presented, which never happened. To the contrary, the administration continued mass deportations - heartbreakingly separating thousands of families - which earned President Obama the title of "deporter-in-chief". The concession to grant DACA to young people in the final stretch of his government was perceived as an attempt at redemption for having abandoned the possibility of achieving a general immigration reform that included his parents when the Democrats controlled both houses of the federal Congress. The leaders' grief and anger was magnified in 2014 with the unsuccessful attempt to expand DACA coverage for parents of dreamers.
The legal attacks of nativism and the decision to terminate the program by the current administration have 800,000 young people in suspense under the protection of DACA. It will be the Supreme Court that decides its future in the coming months. Empirical evidence has shown that regularizing boys has benefited their families' economy, health, and education without negatively impacting the general population. And business, society and even some Republican legislators have spoken in favor of extending DACA.
The decision of the magistrates will determine the future of a program that only allows the economic integration of the young beneficiaries, does not offer a path towards full regularization. Several decades ago, the hope of social integration through citizenship was lost and there are few (less) legislative voices that promote a path to naturalization. But having something is better than having nothing and the court ruling will be crucial for the advancement or reversal of the cause that people, once Chicano and today Latinx, have been promoting since the end of the 19th century: respect for the rights of the individual. and equal opportunities.
The genealogy of the dreamers' movement can be traced back to the enactment of the Santa Barbara Plan in 1969. The university students of that time were driven by the peasant movements of Dolores Huerta and César E. Chávez, the urbanists of Sal Castro, the intellectuals of Rubén Salazar, the idiosyncratic Corky Gonzales, the territorial of Reies López Tijerina and the politicians of José Ángel Gutiérrez. Leaders who spearheaded actions framed by the history of black emancipatory struggle and the civil rights movement led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Student leaders gathered at the University of California at Santa Barbara outlined a pedagogical-cultural manifesto claiming their identity. They were beginning to reap the fruits of judicial victories against segregation in the educational sector: Roberto Alvarez vs. the Board of Trustees of the Lemon Grove School District 1931 and Méndez vs. Westminster School District 1947. People had already managed to gain space in the basic and secondary education system and now sought to institutionalize cadre training at the post-secondary level through teaching, research, and dissemination of their worldview and ideals. That is, they wanted to consolidate a Chicano intelligence.
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Those boys today are emeritus professors, the veterans who founded departments of ethnic studies in the university systems of the American Southwest. They are the ones who appropriated a pejorative term, Chicano, and transformed it into an empowering demonym that, although it no longer has daily use among the youth of the 21st century, lives in university classrooms and in the arts and has been adapting to the change of profile in the population that leads the fight that follows. In the 1960s, the proportion of young Latino college students with parents born or living in the US for more than a generation it was predominant. With migration flows in the 1980s and 1990s, the number of young immigrants and / or children of immigrants increased significantly among Latinos in the California higher education system and in the basic and secondary education system in the American Southwest.
In 1994, Proposition 187 in California initiates the wave of actions and policies against immigrants that still persists. The (bipartisan) persecution of undocumented immigrants in recent decades has resulted in an increase in deaths on the border, attempts to ban access to social services (including the public university) and driver's licenses, the deportation of mothers and fathers with no criminal record and the detention of minors and even infants. The nativist (primarily anti-Latin) reaction begins in the southwest and has spread throughout the country, to traditional and new destinations (such as the northeast or south) for immigrants, formerly Mexicans and now Central Americans seeking work. The struggle of yesteryear was for cultural freedom and equal opportunity. Veterans made marginal progress in all areas, but the disparity vis-à-vis the majority population (quality of schools, average income, access to higher education, degree level, etc.) and social segregation has increased.
The contemporary struggle has been to get into college and get financial aid, drive and travel without sneaking around, keep families together, get a work permit, residency, and eventually citizenship. The nativist onslaught in California coincided with the change of leadership in the labor unions, which in the late 1980s began to respond directly to the interests of the majority of the Latino population among their members, welcoming undocumented immigrants to their ranks, supporting their search for immigration regularization and cultivating agents of change. The union strategy led, among others, by Miguel Contreras, paid off. At the beginning of the 21st century, a generation of Latino legislators began enacting laws favorable to the undocumented, for example, allowing them access to the California university system and obtain driver's licenses.
The explicit oppression of nativism toward the undocumented is the most noticeable facet of the supremacist remnants permeating American society. Having founded the social order on the superiority of the dominant group over the rest, the social subjugation of minorities was weaved structurally from the colony. Great strides have been made on the journey towards cultural and political equity from the abolition of slavery in the 19th century to the enactment of civil rights acts in the 20th century, but much remains to be done. The movement of the dreamers continued the claiming and self-determination legacy of the Chicanos who, in turn, reaped the fruits obtained - with blood - by the black people.
The demographic growth of the US Latino population It has motivated the courtship of Democrats and Republicans to win their sympathies. The number of young Americans considered Latinx is increasing. Democrats promote their flag based on socioeconomic affinity and Republicans on family values. The Bush family effectively leveraged their regional and family ties to attract the Latino community to their party. Far, far away are the Republicans of that initiative at the moment. Institutional Democrats have discursively raised the interests of the Latino population and harnessed the energy of dreamers. However, the Clinton and Obama years left founded doubts about the Democrats' commitment to the economic, sociocultural, and political integration of the Latinx. We will see what the bicultural, bilingual wing of the insurgent Democrats, Sanderistas, does with the loyalty of Latino youth.
Bernie Sanders