La Comunidad Latina in the United States: Personal and Political Strategies for Transforming Culture

David T. Abalos

Jan 1998 · Greenwood Publishing Group

About this ebook

La comunidad Latina, the fastest growing ethnic group in the United States, has long been told that assimilation is the only way to succeed in American society. This book challenges that generally accepted view and concludes instead that transformation as a way of life is the only viable option for the Latino community as a whole, regardless of racial, class, regional, or religious differences. It highlights how in the everyday life of la comunidad Latina the members of the community can recognize the underlying ways of life, the stories, and the patterns of relationships that cripple them, and how to break with these ways of life, stories, and relationships to create fundamentally more loving and compassionate alternatives.

Along with all men and women, Latinos and Latinas face four choices: retaining a blind loyalty to a romanticized past, assimilating, violating each other, or transforming their ethnic and racial group for the better. This examination of the underlying sacred meaning of the stories of the Latino culture attempts to determine whether these stories are destructive or creative. Now coming of age, la comunidad Latina, previously wounded by assimilation, continues to tell its story in art, literature, history, and religion so that the world may, perhaps for the first time, see its personal, political, historical, and sacred faces. The most important story now being lived is that of Latina women and Latino men who are making choices that will determine the ultimate meaning of a new Latino culture in this nation.

Ratings and reviews

The author shows little understanding of Haitian-Dominican relationships and history, mainly because he ignores the historical and cultural differences between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and makes the mistake of projecting its own African American view of reducing multi-casual differences to a racial issue. While the formation of the Haitian State was racial, that was not the case in the Dominican Republic. In Haiti, whites were killed, were banned from investing, and could not become Haitians. Rather than adopting the jus solis principal for automatic citizenship at birth, like the rest of the Latin American countries, Haiti adopted the jus sanguinis principle; that is; you can only be Haitian by blood, not by birth. He omits that when the Spanish colony (now Dominican Republic) declared its independence from Spain and its allegiance to the Great Colombia, the powerful Haitian military invaded the ex-Spanish colony, imposed French, and declared the island “one and indivisible”, under their rule (I mean the Haitian Empire from the North, because after independence they divided the country into two different nations based on race: negros and mulattoes). Dominicans had to fight the Haitian military in many occasions to obtain their freedom from Haiti in 1844. The reason why Dominicans do not cut sugar cane it is because Dominican peasants used to own the land that was taken away from them during the American invasion of 1916-1924. The country was underpopulated and Dominicans fought the Americans, but lost the war to the invading forces and their newly trained Army, which continue oppressing people with Trujillo as its leader. Dominican peasants flew to the mountains to continue to plot the land. It was the government of the USA that brought in Haitians to harvest their sugar cane plantations, given that both countries were occupied. Dominicans were not willing to work for the invaders for slave-like salaries when they had access to land. (See Melvin Knight, The Americans in Santo Domingo, 1928. Dominican society is one of the most racially integrated societies today, and we are not used to judge people by the color of their skin as you find in the United States and in most Latin American countries. International capital and their acolytes also want to reduce the problem of Haitian exploitation to one of race. They use foreign workers to break unions and lower wages. When a particular branch of industry, now agriculture and construction become stratified by nationality (language + ethnicity) it also means that wages are lowered. The same thing happens in the USA with farm workers. This is a branch where only Latin Americans work. Would you argue that African Americans are racist because they do not want to do farm work? My conclusion, this is a racist analysis of Dominican society. Are Americans racists because they built a wall and use robot airplanes, military and vigilante to guard their border from Mexican inmigrants? Why not with Canada? Argelia Tejada Yangüela, PhD

About the author

DAVID T. ABALOS is Professor of Religious Studies and Sociology at Seton Hall University. He has lectured and written extensively on multicultural and gender scholarship and also on Latinas and Latinos in the United States from the perspective of the politics of transformation. He is the author of Latinos in the United States: The Sacred and the Political (1986), The Latino Family and the Politics of Transformation, a Choice Outstanding Academic Book for 1994 (Praeger, 1993) and Strategies of Transformation Toward a Multicultural Society: Fulfilling the Story of Democracy (Praeger, 1996).