1.
EMPIRES
My children grew up devouring stories of empire and injustice, fantasies set in worlds that are not our own. I took them to movies and bought them books that transported them into fictional realms and into alternate pasts, or deep into the future, or into a galaxy “far, far away.” This is a rite of passage of a United States childhood. We watch and read narratives of powerful elites living inside stone towers and walled cities, protected by death rays and roiling fires and all-seeing eyes. The empire of fantasy and cosplay is steel and stone perfection, and it is savagery. We sit in a darkened theater, or with our faces covered in the bluish glow of our private screens, and we watch heroes who are small and weak and isolated fight back against power. When we see the empire defeated, we feel strong, liberated, and renewed.
Stories about empire move us because they’re echoes of the memories that reside deep in our collective consciousness. We live in a world of migrating peoples and interconnected markets, a global system of wealth creation built upon acts of violence. In the Americas, European conquerors erased ways of life that were alien to them, fought wars, enslaved people, razed temples, and outlawed religions. Bits and pieces of this history have been passed down to us. In class, or in books, we learn about the ship with captive men and women from the African kingdom of Ndongo that arrived in the colony of Virginia in 1619; about the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole being forced out of their lands in the Trail of Tears. Hollywood takes the history of colonialism and conquest and dresses up the characters in robes and helmets and gives them prop weapons, and it transforms this history into a crowd-pleasing fantasy. As Junot Díaz once put it: without the history of racialist ideologies, X-Men makes no sense; without colonialism, Star Wars make no sense; and without the history of chattel slavery in the New World, Dune makes no sense.
The largest “Latino” city in the United States, Los Angeles, is also the home of a movie and television industry that makes billions of dollars telling empire fantasy stories. The most recent film adaptation of Dune earned more than $400 million in box office revenue, and when I saw the film with my Mexican Guatemalan American son (who had read the novel in high school), we listened as one of the characters pronounced a speech about the horrors inflicted by an empire. Her words could have been spoken by any of a number of different peoples across the eons of time: “The outsiders ravage our lands in front of our eyes. Their cruelty to my people is all I’ve known.”
In the real lives of Latino families, the empire’s power is plain to see. Let’s start with geography, and the natural barriers that separate the beginning and the present of our family stories. The choppy seas of the Straits of Florida and the western Atlantic; the cacti and dry washes and dirt trails in the Sonoran Desert. The United States Coast Guard patrols the migrant routes across the Caribbean, and along the border between Mexico and California and Arizona there are fences, and a wall. What is a barrier several hundred miles long, topped with barbed wire and patrolled by armed guards, but the physical expression of an empire and its will?
The idea of Latino or Hispanic people as a race apart was born from the history of the United States and its triumphant march across the North American continent. The United States made us into “people of color,” and now our American story has the epic sweep of an IMAX movie; we have crossed oceans and deserts, and entered into new and exotic urban “barrios” and “ghettos,” and planted roots in farm towns on vast and verdant plains. Armies, police, and various systems of incarceration enforce an unequal order in which our labor produces the riches of an empire. Many of us live with the everyday fear that the agents of the empire will arrive at our front doors and take our mothers and fathers and grandparents away from us, into an imperial machinery of detention and deportation.
In trying to subjugate us, the empire darkens us, in more than one sense of that word. Melanin is what makes us darker, and melancholy is a darkening of the spirit. The root of these two words is the same: the Greek “melas,” meaning black. Throughout this country’s history, the lives of the people today known as “Latino” have been shaped by the American tradition of creating legal categories applied to the “nonwhite.” We have been “braceros” and “illegal aliens” and “resident aliens,” and for many of us migration to the United States has become a one-way journey, a forever-goodbye to our homelands. Our second-class, outsider status in the United States produces the melancholy that is, in many ways, a defining element of the migrant experience. “Did he know he was never going to see his own mom and dad ever again?” one of my students writes of her immigrant father’s departure from Mexico. “Did he know that twenty years later he would cry like a small child for his mom”—watching on a video call from California—“as his sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles, buried her frail corpse…”
The experience of having been uprooted from one way of life and transported into another, entirely different way of living marks the collective psyche of Latino people in the real-life empire of the United States of America. We have an ancestor who left behind a home where she understood the ways of the world, where she knew the paths across her village to take to school and work, where she knew the names of her neighbors and the moods and light of the changing seasons. She enters a cold and lonely country where Anglo-Saxon order and efficiency shape the landscape. Where she is a member of the laboring caste. Whatever success she may have in North America, that feeling of being separated from the essence of herself never leaves her. One of my students writes of a mother who decides to return to Mexico, leaving her grown children behind. “No te quiebres,” she tells her son during a tearful farewell, the words summarizing a migrant philosophy: don’t break. If this woman was our grandmother, or great-grandmother, the legacy of her journeys, her exploitation, and her resilience can be something as subtle and indelible as the pigment in our skin, the shape of our noses, the color of our eyes. The dark shades we see, or think we see, when we look in the mirror.
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On television, in bars, and at family barbecues, a certain kind of “white” person will express their idea of “Mexicanness,” an understanding of one of the “darker,” nonwhite tribes of the United States. In Clint Eastwood’s movie The Mule, a federal agent comes upon a group of tough Latino drug dealers in a Chicago neighborhood and says, “Jesus, it’s like the Star Wars cantina in there.” The Mexican border has become such a powerful image in the United States imagination that the average person equates Latino identity with the border and with a B movie understanding of Mexico as the home of a colorful, alien people with shaved heads who wear serapes. A Peruvian street vendor in New Jersey, a Colombian undergraduate, a Venezuelan janitor, and a Cuban American worker in an Alabama chicken plant are all “Mexicans” to people ignorant of Latin American geography. And “Mexican” itself is a series of stereotypes with echoes of racist attitudes about Native American people. White eyes believe they see the patina of a border or ocean crossing on Latino skin, and they have the sense of us as a conquered people who are allergic to the discipline and the good manners of Anglo-Saxon culture. We sun-darkened people fade into the background of their lives, the supporting players and extras of United States life. Or, like Native “braves” wielding axes in an old Western, we are dangerous when we are on the warpath. You’ll see us portrayed as gang members, circling the figurative wagons of white families, in that new U.S. film genre, the cartel movie.
When an immigrant woman arrives in an American city like Los Angeles, the empire gives her an identity that settles over her like a cloak, like the costume of an alien tribe. She can see the power of the empire in the rumble of the patrol cruisers of the many different law enforcement agencies that roam the streets, and in the official emblems and coats of arms on government buildings and sanitation trucks. And yet this new territory represents the possibility of personal liberation, as in the story one of my students tells of her mother, a woman who began working at the age of twelve in Yucatán, running away from her village to work at a tortilla factory; a woman who was forced to marry at age sixteen, and who crossed the United States border at eighteen, to escape the mother who “cut my wings.” Like the hero in a Hollywood epic, an immigrant arrives in this country and finds her way. She learns daily lessons about the American people and their odd habits at her new job; and then one night she attends a party in her barrio, and a new friend pushes her into a dance floor of spinning bodies. And the next chapter in her life begins.
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The essays my students write for me are filled with romantic stories about their parents. They speak of a woman who remembers the seductive sensuality of a young man with his shirt open, or a courtship that began with an encounter on a city bus. From reading their work I’ve come to see how the United States of our times is a country built on the grunts, the lovemaking, the cursing, the gossip, the heroism, the betrayals, the acts of compassion, the good luck and the bad of Spanish-speaking immigrants. The intimate dramas of their journeys, their twists and turns, are not recorded in multipart television dramas or bestselling fantasy fiction. Instead, a migrant leaves behind a shoebox of letters and photographs stored at the bottom of a closet; or he records key dates and names and addresses on a slip of paper preserved in a wallet for years; or, as one of my students once discovered, he keeps a portrait of a secret “other” family hidden inside an old boot in Georgia. Our collective origin story is a million unfilmed soap operas and a million unproduced Hamlets. It’s the lovers meeting in a forest of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or the strong-willed, independent woman of a Zora Neale Hurston novel.
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Like “mutant,” “Vulcan,” or “Wookiee,” “Latino” and “Latinx” and “Hispanic” are the made-up words of storytellers describing a group of people engaged in an adventure. Latino people are brown, Black, white, and Indigenous, and they are European, Asian, and African. Some of us speak excellent Spanish, but many more of us do not. This diverse group of people is joined together by shared roots in the upheavals and the crises set in motion by the building of the United States into a global superpower, and, further back in time, by the Spanish Crown’s attempt to build an empire in the Western Hemisphere. This is an obvious truth, one that looms over the daily life of this country, but that is entirely absent from the mass-media discourse about what the United States is. About one in five residents of the United States can trace their roots to Latin American institutions like the encomienda (which granted Spanish conquerors the rights to the labor of Indigenous people) and mestizaje (the new, Eurocentric social order created by “racial” mixing that followed the conquest). All across the United States, there are people whose family histories include events such as the campaigns of ethnic cleansing in Latin America against the Yaqui, Pipil, and other peoples, and the uprisings against U.S.-backed regimes that unfolded in tropical mountains and arid savannas. The wealth and comfort of the people of the United States cannot be separated from this history. If you could take a decades-long, time-lapse film of a typical U.S. suburb, you would see Latino laborers frenetically constructing, demolishing, rebuilding, and remodeling that suburb over and over again; with each day and year of work, they further deepen the presence of Latin American tragedy and ambition in the homes, workplaces, and neighborhoods of the United States.
Over the years a number of my students have shared with me what they have learned about the history of empire and how it has touched their lives. One of their accounts tells of a father haunted by the violence he had seen in El Salvador, in that country’s civil war, a conflict fought in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s on mountainsides and on the slopes of volcanoes, and in cities where right-wing death squads and soldiers armed with M16s and machetes mutilated their victims, and where an underground movement spread the idea of social revolution. My student’s father had been a rebel fighter, and a relative of his was killed in the government massacre of hundreds of civilians in and around the hamlet of El Mozote. He was an angry and emotionally tortured man, and he eventually took his own life in an apartment in San Francisco, leaving his body for his young daughter to discover. When this student came to my office to discuss the paper in which she described these events, I told her how sorry I was for the loss of her father. You were too young to have lived that, and seen that, I said. Then I told her everything I knew about the revolution and war in El Salvador, and what the violence of that conflict did to the psyche of its people. I wanted to help her see her father’s brokenness in the context of his country’s brokenness, a horror of “counterinsurgency,” napalm, and torture cells, all at the service of “order,” class privilege, and the victory of the United States in the “Cold War.” I wanted her to understand her father’s story, and her own loss and pain, in the context of empire.
Hollywood spends large amounts of money to re-create the horror of empire building and colonialism on-screen. It blows up entire planets, with genocides unfolding on a single page of a movie script. In Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the First Order simultaneously destroys five planets of the Republic, and we see an entire civilization wiped out. The stage directions read: “LIKE AN ATOMIC BOMB TEST TIMES A ZILLION … FIREBLAST OBLITERATED IT ALL … DOZENS OF LANGUAGES EXCLAIMING IN FEAR AND HORROR.” The massacres in big sci-fi and fantasy movies have become more realistic and graphic with the passage of film history, as if to try to match the barbarism of real-life events like those that unfolded in Guatemala, El Salvador, and other places in the final decades of the last century.
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The Salvadoran Revolution is not part of the mainstream public school curriculum in the United States, as I was reminded one day on the subway in Los Angeles. I was scribbling in pencil on the manuscript of the novel I was revising when a young man of about sixteen asked me, with a tinge of sarcasm, if I was doing my “homework.” I explained that I was finishing a book about the revolution in El Salvador. He told me his parents were both from El Salvador, but he didn’t know anything about a revolution. So I told him some of the stories I’d heard from former rebels when I visited the old battlegrounds of the Salvadoran insurgency. How one campesino transformed a small tractor into a tank, and how the army got so freaked out by one rebel fighter they never managed to capture, they spread the legend that he could transform himself into a tree. I told him about the teenage women who took M16s to fight against an army of rapists. He furrowed his brow with puzzlement, because I had just told him that he and all his relatives were characters in a story with the big-screen sweep, the violence, and the heroism of The Lord of the Rings.
In the world of Hollywood fantasy, it’s assorted meek peoples from otherworldly realms, most often played by white actors, who fight back and resist and win. “What can men do against such reckless hate?” Théoden, the King of Rohan, asks in The Lord of the Rings as the evil army of Saruman threatens to kill the women and children hiding in his fortress. The brave Aragorn tells him he must go to battle. But in real life, the powers that lord over us want us to surrender to their power, and to forget they exist. The empire wants us to believe that empires exist only in fantasies. This is part of its hold over us. The systems that make us subservient peoples are built on the illusion that we are to blame for our own powerlessness. The same media conglomerates that sell us empire fantasy stories have little to say about the real-world truth of imperial violence. And they have nothing to say about the way empires have shaped the intimate worlds of our families. At best, the fantasy factories offer us shallow and stereotypical tales set in a colorful and exotic version of the Global South (with palm trees, prostitutes, and tropical drinks on offer), or in menacing and one-dimensional depictions of the barrios and ghettos of the United States (amid gang members and urban slums). In truth, the forces of empire have conspired to make us into a dumber, hungrier, and more desperate people. Sometimes they have succeeded, and sometimes they have failed; and we are still standing, and breathing, and now we are reading and studying. We are protagonists in a truer, uglier, and more chaotic and interesting story of empire.
I’ve spent a lifetime trying to sort out my own place in the story of empire and trying to comprehend the power and vulnerability of empires. At first, by listening to the stories my parents told me. And then, as an adult, by visiting Montana battlefields, the site of slave burial grounds in Manhattan, the street corner in Los Angeles where Chinese residents were pulled from their homes to be lynched. Often, this quest has taken on a solitary and spiritual quality. Immigration to the United States ripped my Guatemalan family in two, and my personal memories are an unsettling vapor of chaotic and accidental events. But every time I stand in a spot where the empire’s history unfolded, where I can see myself and my family and my countries inside this larger human chronology, the ground beneath my feet grows more solid, somehow.
And that’s why, when my children were still small and impressionable, my wife and I packed them into a car and set forth on an expedition southward from Los Angeles. We headed for Tijuana to see the fence the United States government built at the Mexican border, and the spot where its steel sheets and pillars plunge into the sea.
Copyright © 2023 by Héctor Tobar
