Latinx Politics – Resistance, Disruption, and Power: A Charla with Lisa García Bedolla
Editor’s Note: The following interview is part of a politics dossier featuring presenters from TLP’s recent conference, “Latinx Politics — Resistance, Disruption & Power.” To download the PDF, click here.
The Latino population in the United States grew by nearly 50 million from 1965 to 2015 and today, at 18 percent of the U.S. population, Latinos are the largest minoritized group. The magnitude of this segment of the electorate has important political implications because of its capacity to engage in collective action. As we approach the 2020 presidential election, Latino political presence, action, and participation are particularly critical due to the current socio-political moment in which various Latino groups are targeted and marginalized at a social level and by the State. While often rhetorically constructed as a monolithic group, Latinos are heterogeneous and vary in national origin, migration histories, access to citizenship, socioeconomic position, generation status, and phenotype. Given Latinos' diversity and the current social, racial, and political climate, the Latinx Politics Conference seeks to expand our understanding of Latinx Politics in the current era through theoretical, empirical, and artistic presentations and discussions.
Ahead of this timely and critical conversation, charlamos with the Latinx Politics Conference keynote speaker Dr. Lisa García Bedolla, Vice Provost for Graduate Studies, Dean of the Graduate Division, and Professor in the Graduate School of Education at University of California, Berkeley. Drawing on her research and expertise on Latinos and political engagement, Dr. García Bedolla provides key insights into various topics, including her personal journey to Latino Politics, dominant and problematic framings of Latinos’ politics in mainstream media, the importance of using an intersectional approach to study Latinos, developing respectful and reciprocal partnerships with community, the role of political leaders in addressing the needs of Latinos in the current public health, economic, and racial moment, anti-Blackness in Latino communities, and exciting transformations in Latino politics over the years.
We invite you to read through our charla below and join the conversation at the Latinx Politics Conference on September 25th. Register for the conference here.
The following interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Ariana Jeanette Valle (AJV): Can you tell me about your personal trajectory and how you became interested in Latino Politics?
Lisa García Bedolla (LGB): My parents were political refugees from Cuba and I think that was important in two ways for me. The first was that politics decided my life. If it hadn’t been for the revolution I would not be in the United States. I also wouldn’t have had the opportunities that I’ve had in the United States. So, I appreciate that these larger forces really influenced me. And, I was always interested in why other people then choose to become engaged or not.
The second piece was that being Cuban and growing up in Los Angeles meant that Americans thought I was Mexican and Mexicans thought I talked funny, so there was also a way in which I was an outsider. I think that was part of what led me to become an academic. I always was observing others and never feeling like I necessarily fit in. I think that makes you ask questions in a way that you wouldn’t if you were part of the in-group. I think both of those things led me to care a lot about how politics influences people but also to have that skill to be able to see things in a way that people don’t necessarily see… I think that’s a lot of what made me an academic.
And then Latino Politics specifically, the 1994 elections happened while I was living in Connecticut while I was in graduate school. And I happened to be working on figuring out a new dissertation topic because I had originally gone to graduate school to study Latin America and my dissertation topic was going to be studying Cuba and Chile as the bookends of neoliberalism at that time. When I did my first visit to do some research in Cuba I got kicked out by the government early on and that made me rethink what I was doing and realize I wasn’t going to have control over what I was going to study. It just so happened the election happened. For folks who don’t remember, that was the biggest political mobilization among Latinos in the United States since the Chicano Movement and the Puerto Rican Movement. So, it was historic and I really felt, especially in Los Angeles which is my hometown, I felt a real responsibility to tell that story. And I guess the rest is history. I switched [topics] and I’ve kept studying it [Latino politics] since then.
AJV: And here we are in 2020 and another important political moment! Which takes me to how Latinos are often described especially right before elections. I wanted to ask you about the media’s use of the “sleeping giant” to describe Latinos, based on your research, what are the various ways in which Latino communities are engaged politically?
LGB: The short answer is if you invite us in we will come. The issue is we are never invited in. Often policies affect us indirectly but they are not necessarily designed to help us. I personally hate the “sleeping giant” metaphor because it assumes a level of apathy and passivity, which in my research I have never found among Latinos. People care very much about what is happening in the world, people care very much about what government does or does not do in communities. The issue is whether people feel that politics is an area in which they feel they have power to engage and whether or not they feel it’s an area that’s going to meaningfully make a difference in their lives.
Folks are busy, people have multiple jobs, they are trying to survive, if you are trying to survive you are going to spend your time on the things you find most relevant and the issues you care about.
There tends to be a frame where if people don’t vote then there is something wrong with them. They are “sleeping” they are “apathetic” or what not. I think it is really important to flip that, if people don’t vote that is actually because the system does not work for them; it is a rational response to your social position and to the messages you are getting that you are not a part of this system and you are not meant to have a say in this system.
At least in my research, part of the reason why I now work with community-based organizations to do community organizing is because I think it is really important for people to be spoken to about politics by people who are similarly situated to them and by people who have similar life experiences, so that they can be reeducated about the power that they have through collective action. If we think about what we learn in school, we do not learn in school that government is for us and open to us. What we learn in school is that the founding fathers were brilliant, the institutions are perfect. So, folks have to learn both the ways in which government affects their lives and the multiple ways in which they can have a say in it. Once you do that, Latinos engage because they can see why they should spend their time on this. I really dislike these frames that pathologize people for not engaging, rather than saying they are not engaging because in fact nobody is talking to them.
AJV: In your work, you emphasize the significance of using an intersectional lens, why is an intersectional approach important for understanding Latino politics?
LGB: I think what is really interesting about Latinos and part of why we’ve been so disruptive to the U.S. social fabric, at least how Americans identify themselves and think about race, is because we don’t fit in a Black/white binary. To quote Vasconcelos, we are la raza cósmica, we can be everything from white origin, African origin, Indigenous, from Asia. Everyone came [to Latin America] we are part of the “new world.” The most important insight from the intersectional frame that Kimberlé Crenshaw created is the idea that these different pieces are not additive. I am not Latina plus woman plus my class status, but rather they are mutually constitutive. I experience my Latinidad or I experience my womanhood through and as a product of my racial status and my other social positionings and my sexuality, all of that.
I think that for Latinos, it’s especially important to understand that because we are so diverse, we are diverse not only in terms of racial admixture, we are also diverse in terms of national origin, generation, geography, class, how long your family has been here, where they landed, what the immigration rules were affecting your particular family situation, etc. All of those things impact how Latino folks move through space in the United States. To understand the Latino experience, you need to have a much more robust and intersectional understanding of all of those different pieces and why they matter. In talking about the Latino community often we get into an almost essentialist orientation where we think, “oh Latinos are voting this way and they are voting this way because they are Latino” and not “they are voting this way because they’ve had a set of life experiences that have led them to a worldview that supports a particular set of policies.” It’s only through understanding the complexity of peoples’ social positioning that we can actually meaningfully talk about what matters in Latino politics and what matters to the Latino community.
AJV: Which takes me to my next question, which is related to the tensions between this idea of the Latino vote or the Latino community that often gets discussed during elections, in the media, in academic conversations. How do we deal with the tensions between the homogenizing effects of that framing but also the similarities and experiences that may bring people together?
LGB: Yes, that is an excellent question. It is a tension. On the one hand, if I care about the status of people of Latin American descent in the United States, I want to talk about the size and robustness of that community and I need to have some language to talk about that, so there is a need to talk about Latino as a group. The difficulty though, especially when you’re thinking about the Latino vote, is that there are multiple Latino votes. Even if we just look at folks of Puerto Rican origin, the ones who grow up in Chicago have a different history, different organizational structure, different voting patterns than the folks who were in New York, the ones who recently arrived in Florida also have different attitudes and opinions.
The irony is that there is no national vote for anybody. We look at these national polls but the reality is that we don’t have a national electorate; our presidential politics is decided at the state level. It would be more useful to think about the California Latino vote—even in California we are so big we have Northern California versus Southern California. Also, thinking about new arrivals versus folks who have been here longer… and Texas, New Mexico, have a unique history. The difficulty is that our current political framing doesn’t have room for thinking about that complexity and doesn’t have room for thinking about those differences and why they matter. For example, in Florida the research suggests that Puerto Ricans in Florida vote more conservatively than the Puerto Ricans in New York. Part of that may be who chooses to move to Florida and part of that may be that growing up in Florida you are growing up in a more conservative context and that then affects socialization patterns. There is not enough room in our political discourse to really think about that socialization process and regional differences in a nuanced way and to appreciate that even if the outcome is 75-percent of Latinos agree with one another in terms of how they want to vote, how they got there is very different—like I was saying earlier, it is about life experiences and structural position not because they happen to be Latino.
Even if we look at African Americans who overwhelmingly vote democratic, they don’t vote overwhelmingly democratic because they are Black, they vote that way because they have a set of shared experiences that have led them to a particular understanding of their position within the polity. And the same is true for Latinos. Often people say “why do Latinos support Trump?” but the idea that everyone from a community is going to agree is kind of crazy. Everyone who has sat through Thanksgiving with their family should understand that is not a reasonable assumption. But it comes from this legacy of an essentialist vision and biological definition of race that seeps into our discourse and that we have to continually disrupt in order to understand how power, marginalization, and being a minoritized person influences the ways in which you interact with the political system.
To continue reading the full interview, click here.
Dr. Lisa García Bedolla obtained her BA in Latin American Studies and Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley, and her PhD in political science from Yale University. She is a Professor in the Graduate School of Education and previously, she served as Director of the Institute of Governmental Studies. Dr. García Bedolla’s body of research focuses on understanding the causes and consequences of political and educational inequalities in the United States, using multi-disciplinary approaches to examine disparities that cut across the lines of ethnicity, race, gender, class, and more. As the Vice Provost for Graduate Studies and Dean of the Graduate Division, Dr. García Bedolla oversees Berkeley’s 11,500 graduate students, and is the chief advocate for graduate education and research at Berkeley. She is a member of academic and administrative leadership groups convened by the Chancellor and the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost. She works with the Graduate Council of the Academic Senate on policies that sustain the world-renowned excellence of more than 100 graduate programs.
Ariana J. Valle is Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow at New York University and an incoming Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Davis (2021). She is an LA-born/raised sociologist of migration, race/racialization, and ethnoracial politics and her research focuses on the experiences of Latino communities in the U.S.