Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America

“The Census Bureau, for instance, has had to repeatedly revise upward its projection for the future growth of the Latino population. Its most recent estimate predicts the country’s current Hispanic population, which was 46 million in 2009 (and that’s without counting the 4 million residents of Puerto Rico who are U.S. Citizens), will nearly triple to 132 million in 2050. At that point, Latinos will comprise nearly one-third of the entire U.S. population; and together with African Americans and other nonminorities, they will make up more than half of all U. S. residents—235 million of 439 million people.”

By 2050, a majority of Americans will no longer trace their principal ancestry to Europe, and one-third will trace their most proximate ancestry to Latin America. This book seeks to explain the various forces that have created this explosion in the Latin American US population, demonstrating the forces that both push and pull such migrants to the United States.

“The central argument of this book is that U.S. economic and political domination over Latin America has always been—and continues to be—the underlying reason for the massive Latino presence here. Quite simply, our vast Latino population is the unintended harvest of the U.S. empire.”

The author’s thesis emphasizes that Latin American immigration is a direct result of American policy over the past centuries. Rather than scapegoating immigrants for societal problems, the United States should recognize its responsibility for the current situation and work to mitigate the devastation it has caused with sensible, comprehensive immigration reform.

“Of the Europeans who settled America, those who hailed from England and Spain had the greatest impact. Both transplanted their cultures over vast territories. Both created colonial empires from whose abundance Europe rose to dominate the world. And descendants of both eventually launched independence wars that remade the political systems of our planet. That common history has made Latin Americans and Anglo Americans, like the Arabs and Jews of the Middle East, cousins in constant conflict, often hearing but not understanding each other.”

From the beginning, the US and Latin Americans grew and developed side by side. However, rather than supporting each other in their independence efforts, the newly independent United States stayed on the sidelines watching, eager for the opportunity to jump in and take Latin American land for itself once Spain no longer controlled it. Proximity elicited greed and annexation rather than cooperation and support, but the metaphor likening Latin and Anglo Americans to “cousins” implies it does not need to be this way; shared history means that The Us/Them