MY JOURNEY TO El Norte was a circuitous one, taking me via England and, later on, through the islands of the Caribbean before ending not far from where I began, in Dalton, Georgia. This sleepy, mostly white Appalachian town had a dramatic transformation when I was in high school. In 1990, my freshman year, the school consisted of a majority English-speaking student body, with only a handful of people in the English as a Second Language (ESL) classes. By the time I was a senior, the morning announcements were made in English and Spanish, and the ESL classes were full. Thousands of workers and their families, mainly from Mexico, moved to Dalton to work, for the most part, in the carpet mills that dominated the town’s economy. I graduated in 1994, only months after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into force. We were twelve hundred miles from the border, but Mexico had come to us. Today, my old high school has a student body that is about 70 percent Hispanic, and the town is around 50 percent.
The complexity of what I experienced then and in the two decades since is what informs this book. What started in my Spanish-language classes was augmented by the arrival of people who could teach me about banda music and telenovelas. Later, I added to this mix by spending a decade researching a PhD that involved the colonial histories of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. Finally, my experience has been filtered through two decades of living in one of the world’s most multicultural cities, London, England.
My family moved away from Dalton years ago, as have many of my high school friends, and I hadn’t really thought about the town, or the question of immigration in the United States, in any serious way until the 2012 election. I was in Washington, D.C., while working on my history of the Caribbean, Empire’s Crossroads. As I watched and read the coverage, I was struck by the general tone of the media conversation. The way Hispanic people were depicted surprised me because the language seemed unchanged from the rhetoric of more than a decade earlier. The subtexts and implications were the same—there was little recognition of a long, shared past, and instead the talk was of border-jumpers, lack of documentation, and the use of “Mexican” as shorthand for “illegal immigrant.” It was jarring because the reality of who was coming to the United States had long been more complex, not least because plenty of immigrants and citizens have roots in all the distinct nations of Latin America. The simmering anxieties about the Spanish-speaking population that such rhetoric exposed exploded in the 2016 presidential race, during which chants of “build that wall” between the United States and Mexico could be heard at campaign rallies for Donald Trump. When I started this project, that election was still years away.
This book is still concerned with the questions that arose in 2012, but they are now given new urgency: there is a dire need to talk about the Hispanic history of the United States. The public debate in the interval between elections has widened considerably. The response to frank discussion about issues such as white privilege at times appears to be a vocal resurgence of white nationalism. For quite some time the present has been out of sync with the past. Much of the Hispanic history of the United States has been unacknowledged or marginalized. Given that this past predates the arrival of the Pilgrims by a century, it has been every bit as important in shaping the United States of today.
I realized, watching my Mexican schoolmates, that if my surname were García rather than Gibson, there would have been an entirely different set of cultural assumptions and expectations placed upon me. I, too, had moved to the South—I was born in Ohio—because my father’s job necessitated it. We were also Catholic, my grandmother didn’t speak English well, and I had lots of relatives in a foreign country. Yet my white, middle-class status shielded me from the indignities, small and large, heaped upon non-European immigrants. Like most people in the United States—with the obvious exception of Native Americans—my people are from somewhere else. In fact, I’m a rather late arrival. The majority of the motley European mix of Irish, Danish, English, and Scottish on my father’s side dates from the 1840s onward. My maternal grandparents, however, came to the United States from Italy in the period around the Second World War—before, in the case of my grandfather; and afterward, for my grandmother. The pressure to “Americanize” was great in the 1950s, and my grandmother, who never lost her heavy Italian accent, felt it necessary to raise my mother in English. She died before I could learn any of her Veneto dialecto. My Anglo-Saxon name belies my recent immigrant roots. What continued to bother me was: why had I—and other Italian-Americans—been able to transcend this but not those with Hispanic names? There are plenty of Hispanic Americans who have a much deeper past in the United States than I do: so why are they still being treated as strangers in their own country?
Language, belonging, community, race, nationality: these are difficult questions at the best of times, but they are especially fraught with pain at the moment. This book is an attempt to make some historical sense of the large, complex story of Hispanic people in the United States. There have been more than two hundred years of wars, laws, and social attitudes that inform the contemporary situation, in addition to an earlier three centuries of an entangled colonial history.
Much of this project also involved plugging the gaps in my own knowledge, as well as connecting the dots of what I have learned, from my Mexican-infused adolescence to my scholarly work on the Spanish Caribbean. However, there was a gulf in the middle. I had crossed the Mississippi only a few times in my life, so as part of my research I set out to experience the vast space of El Norte, a slang term for the United States, yet a phrase heavy with meaning. I covered more than ten thousand miles, from Florida to northwest Canada, stopping at everything from taco trucks to university library special collections, national parks, and historical monuments. My aim was to have a tangible sense of the wide terrain of the Hispanic past and present. The landscape of this historical inquiry often felt as endless and overwhelming as the sky on an empty Texas road. Really, though, it was just the starting point of a much longer journey.
The poet Walt Whitman, writing in 1883 to decline an invitation to speak at the anniversary of the founding of Santa Fe, meditated on the country’s Spanish past. “We Americans have yet to really learn our own antecedents, and sort them, to unify them,” he wrote. “Thus far, impressed by New England writers and schoolmasters, we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion that our United States have been fashioned from the British Islands only, and essentially form a second England only—which is a great mistake.” Whitman believed that understanding the nation depended on knowing its Hispanic past, and that “to that composite American identity of the future, Spanish character will supply some of the most needed parts.”1