Crossing Borders: Race and Racism in the Americas, Part II

The last two decades have been marked by movements of people on a scale not seen in the Americas since the Conquest. Armed conflicts in Central America and the Andean nations and an economic meltdown affecting the entire region have caused millions of Latin Americans to abandon the places they and their forebears called home. The United States has continued to be the destination of choice for the majority of these migrants, especially Mexicans and Central Americans, but many other migrants have sought new lives in other Latin American nations.

In the this Report, contributors explore the interplay of group self-perception and perception of the Other which will determine how completely, if at all, newcomers are integrated into existing societies and cultures—and how much of a cultural mark they make on their new homelands.

September/October
2001
Volume: 
35
Number: 
2

Taking Note

JoAnn Kawell
Whither the U.S.-funded war in Colombia? In late July, a Senate committee cut $164 million from the Bush Administration’s $731 million proposed Andean drug war budget and the House voted against allowing unlimited use of U.S. military personnel and contract employees in Colombia.

Intro

NACLA
The last two decades have been marked by movements of people on a scale not seen in the Americas since the Conquest. Armed conflicts in Central America and the Andean nations and an economic meltdown affecting the entire region have caused millions of Latin Americans to abandon the places they and their forebears called home.

Open Forum

Patricia Verdugo
Since the bombing of the Moneda Palace, the 1973 event that put Augusto Pinochet in power, he has continued to be above the law. Now an Appeals Court has pronounced a “temporary dismissal” of the case against him for “health reasons.”

Updates

Fernando Salla
In the early afternoon of February 18, 2001, during family visiting hours, the biggest prison rebellion in Brazil’s history began in a few prisons in the state of São Paulo.
Rosamel Millaman
On July 25, over a hundred members of Chile’s most militant indigenous group, the Mapuche, burst into government offices in the south-central city of Temuco, throwing rocks and sticks at the police officials who guarded the site. By the end of the day 14 officials were injured and 120 Mapuches detained.

Report

Alejandro Grimson
As the sun rises in a working class neighborhood of Buenos Aires, Bolivian immigrants wait on a street corner for Korean or Argentine textile manufacturers to come and hire them for one or two days work.
Jordi Pius Llopart
Two international human rights bodies—the Inter-American Human Rights Commission and the Inter-American Human Rights Court—are examining charges that the Dominican government is illegally expelling large groups of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent and is using what amounts to racial profiling to select those who will be deported.
David Howard
Haiti and the Dominican Republic share a single Caribbean island, Hispaniola, but Haitians living in the Dominican Republic—who number at least half a million out of a population of eight million—have been subject to mistreatment and periodic waves of deportation; the most brutal was a 1937 expulsion during which the army and police killed thousands of people.
Seledad Ortega
“This area is full of Peruvians. They are everywhere, these dirty Indians that stand on the street all day. They lean on our shop windows and keep the clients away from our stores. It would be better if they went back to their country and stopped coming to take away our jobs,” comments a salesclerk at a bookstore on central Santiago’s Cathedral Street.
Eve Kushner
Percy Takayama says that several times recently when he’s approached a Lima newspaper kiosk, people gathered to scan the tabloid headlines have yelled at him that “Japanese should go back to their country!” Others have shouted that the Japanese have robbed the country blind; he recently tried to buy something at a store, only to have the clerk say, “I don’t wait on criminals.”
Robert Smith
Over the past decade, one of the more dramatic population developments in the United States has been the burgeoning of the Mexican community all along the eastern seaboard. Population experts predict that within ten years Mexicans will be the largest minority on the east coast—from Florida to New England.
Ana Guillén
In April 1994 I came to the United States from El Salvador. I came with three other young women and a “coyote”—a border-crossing guide for undocumented migrants. We made the trip from El Salvador, through Guatemala and Mexico, by car, taxi, bus, truck, bicycle and a pedaled cart we called a “tricycle.”

In Brief

Rosalind Bresnahan
Police Halt "Outing" of Chilean Magnate and Human Rights Violator SANTIAGO-In late June, the Chilean human rights movement known as La Funa was met with water cannons, beatings and mass arrests for the first time since beginning public "outings" of human rights violators in October 1999. The repression demon- strated the political clout of the Funa's target, magnate Ricardo Claro, one of Chile's wealthiest and most powerful men.