Anisa Khalifa: Latinos are among the fastest growing, most diverse communities in America. But we often hear about them as if they're one people with a fairly uncomplicated backstory.
Cecilia Márquez: Much of the history that we're told about Latinos in the U.S. is based in California, Chicago, maybe Texas, and, and New York. Miami makes an appearance too.
Anisa Khalifa: And while those are all important places with important stories, they don’t give us anywhere near the full picture.
Cecilia Márquez: There's more than one Latino history, and one of the ways that it's shaped is where you are, in your region.
Anisa Khalifa: I'm Anisa Khalifa. This is the Broadside, where we tell stories from North Carolina, at the crossroads of the South. This week, how Latinos made their home in the South, and how it’s shaped them in return.
Cecilia Márquez: I'm Cecilia Márquez. I am the Hunt Family Assistant Professor of History at Duke University.
Anisa Khalifa: Cecilia is also a self-described Latina from the South.
Cecilia Márquez: You know, I think DC, Arlington and Northern Virginia are contested spaces in the South. But I would say yes, I'm a Latina who grew up in the South.
Anisa Khalifa: She's the author of a new book called Making the Latino South, which tracks the history and growth of Latino communities in this region. And the origin story of that book actually took place right here in Raleigh, North Carolina. A few years ago, Cecilia went to the 50th anniversary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, at Shaw University. SNCC was the youth-led vanguard of the civil rights movement. She was there to interview its surviving leaders.
Cecilia Márquez: And on the last day, I met Luis Zapata, and he was a United Farm Workers organizer in California who moved to Mississippi to help organize with the Civil Rights Movement, to help organize the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union. And I was like, wait, what? There were Latinos in the Civil Rights Movement?
Anisa Khalifa: For Cecilia, who had never heard of Latinos in the South during the early 60s, let alone on the forefront of this movement, it was an eye-opening encounter. And it inspired her to dig deeper.
Cecilia Márquez: My goal was really to retell Southern history from the perspective of Latinos, but also to tell Latino history from the perspective of the South, because I think there's a lot for us to learn about both of those things.
Anisa Khalifa: So to start us off with, this is like one of my favorite parts of your excellent book. Can we talk about South of the Border? Can you describe it for listeners who have never, like, driven past it?
Cecilia Márquez: Yeah, so South of the Border is a Mexican-themed rest stop right between North and South Carolina on I-95. Um, it is sort of like a racist Disneyland, basically, their version of Mickey Mouse is Pedro, the sort of the mascot of the location, and he looks like what you might imagine, sort of Speedy Gonzales as a person. Um, and it's Mexican themed. It has a sombrero roof. It has, uh, Statues of Pedro everywhere, it's, you know, it's this kind of, this world on the side of the road that the founder Alan Schafer created, which was supposed to be kind of like Disneyland, this kind of immersive, tropical, Mexican-themed space that is also deeply steeped in Mexican stereotypes.
Anisa Khalifa: Yeah, and can you tell me a little bit about Alan Schafer, like what was his motivation in creating this? I mean, he's not Mexican himself.
Cecilia Márquez: No. No, he's actually fascinating. He's a Jewish entrepreneur, um, very small Jewish community at the time in South Carolina, so he's part of already kind of a minoritized community. He grows up in a family that does alcohol distribution, and so originally south of the border is to indicate that it's south of the North Carolina border because North Carolina went dry in the 1930s, so you couldn't get alcohol there. So south of the border was kind of a wink to say, come here. We have booze. That's the original South of the Border.
And then it's not until a few years later when he's trying to sort of grow the business that he meets with Strom Thurmond, a famous senator from South Carolina, big pro segregation guy. And Strom Thurmond says, why don't you make a restaurant here? Make it more family friendly. Make it somewhere that people want to come and hang out. That'll kind of get people off your back about the alcohol stuff. And so from there, Alan Schafer decides to make it Mexican themed. And he takes the sort of South of the Border title and runs with it. And, Pedro really at its heart is Alan Schafer and Alan Schafer's imagination of what Mexicanness was.
Anisa Khalifa: This is all happening during a fascinating moment in our nation's history — 1954. The year Brown v. Board of Education — and also a mass deportation of Mexicans in what the US government called "Operation Wetback." Cecilia says there are a few reasons why a Mexican theme would be so appealing at this time.
Cecilia Márquez: One of them I think is the, sort of the rise of travel, basically, people who are starting to go to Mexico, starting to go to Cuba, starting to go to Puerto Rico for the first time. And a lot of people can't afford to do that. And so South of the Border becomes a place where they can kind of play with those ideas about leisure, and the fantasies they have about Latin America in a place where that they can afford to go to. The other thing that's happening at this time is there's a kind of massive revolution around race happening in the South.
So not very far from South of the Border we have the Greensboro sit-ins. We have civil rights activism throughout North and South Carolina. This was a place that people could escape. It was a place that white Southerners could escape their changing world. It was a place that they could be away from the Civil Rights movement. I get to wear a serape. I get to sit next to a donkey. I get to get drunk in a very religiously conservative part of the world. Um, I get to sort of let my hair down, and that's what they sort of associated with Mexicanness.
Anisa Khalifa: Yeah. So, South of the Border still exists.
Cecilia Márquez: Yeah, it still exists. So it has this Mexican theme, and then in 1961, as part of the, uh, the Civil War Centennial, Alan Schafer opens Confederateland at South of the Border.
Anisa Khalifa: Wow.
Cecilia Márquez: So it's a Confederate theme park within the Mexican theme park, and it includes Pedro in a Confederate uniform, Pedro's Plantation is a, is a sort of a site that you can visit, Fort Pedro. And Confederateland is there up through like 1980. But if you go to South of the Border today, I mean, the things that you can buy in the shop include like Pedro paraphernalia, dreamcatchers and Confederate flags, right? It's this fascinating kind of confluence of all of these parts of the story.
Anisa Khalifa: A lot of people might look at a grotesque attraction like this and recoil, but it's also a time capsule in a lot of ways. Right? How does South of the Border represent ideas about how Latinos fit in, or didn't fit in, in 1940s and '50s America?
Cecilia Márquez: Yeah. I think what it tells us is that there were white Southerners looking to Latinos to kind of play with ideas about race and ideas about racial loyalty that they were losing from Black Southerners, as the civil rights movement was gaining traction, as protests were kind of coming to fruition and really challenging the sort of white Southern way of life, there's, you know, putting Pedro in a Confederate uniform is a way of saying, this is a racial population that will be loyal to us. This is a racial population that won't protest, that supports white supremacy, that supports the Lost Cause, unlike the folks who are building the Civil Rights movement that would eventually bring down Jim Crow.
Anisa Khalifa: Yeah. So take us back to the 1940s and '50s. The Latino community in the South is pretty small. When did that start changing, and what did Latinos find when they came here from other parts of the U. S., like Texas or California?
Cecilia Márquez: Yeah. So I opened the book with a story of the Soto family, um, and they are living in San Antonio, Texas in the 1950s. So Daniel Soto, the patriarch of the family, he's an electrician, but he's struggling to find work. His wife is working in part, um, as a housekeeper, also struggling to kind of make ends meet. They're, you know, they're experiencing what a lot of Mexicans and Mexican Americans experience in Texas at this time, racism, segregation, exclusion, um, they're experiencing all of that in Texas. And they get a call from Mary Soto's brother-in-law, who's living in Rosedale, Mississippi, and he says, why don't you guys come try out Mississippi? It's really nice here.
And so they go. They move 300 miles east. Their daughter has this much better experience. She attends white schools. They're able to get better paying work. They sort of settle into a small but tight-knit Mexican, Mexican American community in the Mississippi Delta. And they're able to build a life there that is much better in a lot of ways than what they had left in San Antonio, Texas. And this is in the 1950s. I mean, if you think about, you don't think about the Mississippi Delta as the place you go for kind of like racial freedom in the 1950s, but that's what they found.
And so Latinos were able to live as what I call provisionally white. So what does that mean? What does that kind of like, academic term mean? What it means is that they can attend white schools. They can live in white neighborhoods. They are able to occupy white jobs, things like that. They also, they can't do things like join the country club. They're Catholic. They have Spanish last names. You know, they might look different. They can't join the Klan. Like there's, there's like certain white spaces that they are blocked from. But for the most part, they're able to live amongst and alongside white people in the South.
Anisa Khalifa: So you're saying they fit into this place that was kind of in between Black and white people. They were accepted in white spaces, but not totally. But I'm assuming this is only for non-Black Latinos.
Cecilia Márquez: All for non-Black Latinos. Yeah. I mean, I think another good example is at my own institution, at Duke University. There's this really fascinating set of sources that we found of this, um, young man named Juan de Rivera. He's trying to come to graduate school at Duke in the 1940s. There's all this kind of back and forth between the graduate school dean and the admissions officer about, like, Well, his hair is kind of curly, his skin is a little bit dark, he's a little too ethnic, but his wife is very white, and her hair is very straight, and so there's all of these kinds of like, very intense racial negotiations about can this person attend, and they ultimately decide, yes, they say that people like him have been accepted as, quote, dark Spaniard. That's their language in the South.
And that's kind of the story, right? Juan de Rivera is in some ways the story of non-Black Latinos in the South, which is ultimately, he gets to go to Duke, one of the best schools in the Southeast at the time, an all-white school at the time. But he's also, he's on the edge in some way. We know that they experienced things like discrimination there.
So I think people are very quick to say, like, we need to get rid of the Black-white binary. That's like something that comes up a lot when we talk about Latinos and Asian Americans in the South. And what I say is like, maybe. But also, in this earlier time period, Latinos, Asian Americans, other populations were living alongside white people, right? It may not have been a perfect fit, but for the most fundamental, like, structural things around, like, safety, around economic mobility, around academic access, like, they had access to all of the white institutions. Being Latino was interesting, but whether or not you were black was what was important.
Anisa Khalifa: After the break: the Southeast embraces a Latino population boom… but as the century turns, so does that warm welcome.
Starting in the 1970s, the South saw a huge new wave of population growth for Latino communities. Cecilia says there are a few reasons for that. One of them is that Southern industries were actively recruiting Mexican and Mexican American laborers.
Cecilia Márquez: There's a kind of famous, uh, billboard that they put up in Tijuana that says mucho trabajo in Russellville. There's a lot of work here in Russellville, Alabama. One of the things that's happening in the 1980s is that manufacturing and food processing is expanding in the southeast when it's actually contracting in other parts of the country. Um, so factories are looking for labor forces. They start to recruit Mexican Americans, they start to recruit Mexicans, and then they offer incentives. They say if you bring X number of workers we'll give you a bonus.
So people start to do, you know, this is how migration works. All these folks are sort of showing up in Georgia, North Carolina, and then they're calling their friends and saying, come move here with us. It's, it's nice. In addition to the kind of industry, a lot of them are coming from rural Mexico and then they land in Los Angeles and they don't like the city, frankly, you know. And I think people underestimate that a lot, but they want to live in a place where they can buy a home, where they can raise their children safely. They want to be able to live a more rural life, basically.
Anisa Khalifa: And then in 1986, something happened that made that possible. Ronald Reagan passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which gave amnesty to around 3 million undocumented people.
Cecilia Márquez: For the first time, folks who are in places like Los Angeles sort of in these systems that work for undocumented people were able to move. They had citizenship. They could find a job somewhere else. They could buy a house. They could do lots of things they couldn't do before. And so with that flexibility, places like Arkansas and Georgia looked really appealing. So Latinos become a bigger and bigger part of the population in the South. I mean, between 2000 and like 2010, like, once this migration is really starting to pick up, the Southeast is like the fastest growing Latino migration spot.
Anisa Khalifa: In the 1990s, we get Proposition 187 in California, which was one of the harshest immigration laws we'd seen at that time. It denied social services to undocumented immigrants. How did that impact the growth of Latino communities in other places, like the South?
Cecilia Márquez: Yeah. So one thing that we also know about migration is that it happens in waves. So the, so the first wave is often single men coming to sort of test the waters. And that wave goes fine. Everyone's very chill. The challenge is often when women and children show up. Because that's when you start having folks attending schools, showing up in doctor's offices, using social services. And once you start to get that kind of second wave of women and children, communities start to respond. And it's a mixed bag.
I mean, I think for the most part, um, Latinos are actually really welcomed in the South in the 1980s and the 1990s. Part of that was that the Southeast was desperate for their labor. Part of it is that the folks who owned the companies, like I look, for example, at Dalton, Georgia, which is, for those who don't know, the carpet capital of the world, they're very proud of. At the same time that this Prop 187 is being passed, they're starting a bilingual education program called the Georgia Project to welcome in these newcomers.
And part of the reason they're doing that is that the carpet executives are doing a kind of massive campaign to be like, welcome these newcomers, welcome them to our community. And part of what they talk about is they're very hardworking, they're good people, they're faith-based people, um, trying to basically kind of grease the wheels of their welcome because they are so excited about having this new labor force, partly because they can pay them less, partly because, um, they're more exploitable in certain ways if they're undocumented.
Anisa Khalifa: And how did this new welcome campaign shift the stereotypes about Latinos in the US?
Cecilia Márquez: You know, if in the earlier period, Latinos were provisionally white, were able to sort of access white institutions and things like that, the 1990s and 1980s is really a turning point where they become Hispanic for the first time. This kind of pan-ethnic sense of like hardworking Hispanic immigrants.
That's kind of what takes hold in the '90s. You see it in places like Atlanta, um, in the 1996 Olympics, for example, much of that infrastructure was built by Latinos. And Latinos take that on, too. They're also like, we are good, hardworking, taxpaying people. And that becomes a kind of a racial category of its own. If in places like New York, Chicago, LA, the idea of Latino or Hispanic community had been there for decades, it's really in the 1980s and '90s that it's starting to form for the first time in the South, this idea of a Hispanic community or a Latino community.
Anisa Khalifa: So as we move out of the '90s into the 2000s and then forward. If you have these ideas about Latinos being hardworking, religious, family-oriented, they change again.
Cecilia Márquez: Yeah. If the hardworking Hispanic immigrant really characterize the '80s and '90s, the illegal alien is really what would come to, to become the kind of category in the 2000s and 2010s and in some ways to today. So a couple things are happening.
So the first is 9/11. So 9/11 happens in 2001 and there's a ton of money being poured into local, federal, state policing and basically getting these different levels of police to work together. There's a sense that 9/11 happened because these agencies weren't talking together. So one of the programs that gets started, um, and sort of takes hold in the 9/11 era is the 287G program. It's really important for the story of Latinos in general, but especially in the South. And what it does is it makes it so that local police officials can collaborate with ICE, Immigration Customs and Enforcement, to begin detention and deportation proceedings for sort of everyday crimes.
So what does that mean? That means that if I'm undocumented and I'm driving and I have a taillight out. What would normally be a violation, uh, go get your taillight fixed, please, and pay $200. Now, all of a sudden, if that police officer suspects for any reason, which is also really invites kind of racial profiling, if they suspect for any reason that I am undocumented, they can detain me and begin investigating and then eventually deporting me. So local police didn't have that power before. And in 9/11, post-9/11, a lot of states enroll in this 287G program, which gives local police officers more power than ever before.
So that's the first thing that happens. The second is the Great Recession in 2008. Economic downturns are a bad time to be an immigrant in general. Economic downturns lead to spikes in xenophobia, spikes in nativism. So the combination of massive police power and growing sort of racial resentment combined to create this moment of the quote unquote illegal alien.
And what's really striking about it is some of the people that I talk to will talk about how they moved in the 1990s. They were the hardworking immigrants. They experienced this warm welcome, this moment where they were seen as, um, the lifeblood of a community. And that's a quote from one of the carpet industry executives that I, that I spoke to, that they're a lifeblood of a community. And then within 10, 15 years, they are now reviled as illegal immigrants. In their lifetime, they were experiencing both of these things. And so it's a really important reminder that the way that we think and talk about race is very disconnected from the actual people.
Anisa Khalifa: And then around 2010, some states like Alabama started passing strong legislation with the aim of encouraging people to "self-deport". What was the impact of these laws?
Cecilia Márquez: Homes were abandoned, you know, stores were abandoned. People just left. You know, they remember the day at school when half of the kindergarten class was just gone. And people leave because they're terrified. They start doing raids of factories, raids of poultry processing plants, and things like that. And, and they're really trying to make the South a place that is unfriendly to Latinos.
What they kind of didn't account for is that Latinos have now been in the South for a long time. You know, now we're talking about people who have their grandkids in the South, and so we're talking about people who are part of this community and are fundamentally Southern and feel, um, connected to this location and aren't going to leave.
Anisa Khalifa: So kind of jumping off of that, what is the place of Latinos in the South now?
Cecilia Márquez: It's a good question. This sort of gets us back to what is Latino because, you know, when we talk about Latinos in the South now, there's a lot of versions of what it means to be Latino. There's me. I'm a college professor. I have my students who are a sort of a wide range of Latino, young Latino people who are at Duke University, one of the best schools in the country. We have Latino and Latin American immigrants coming to RTP and working in our pharmaceutical industry.
We also have Central American migrants coming and replacing a lot of those Mexican Americans in things like poultry processing. We have folks working on H2 visas, um, in our agricultural system, which for those who don't know, H2 visas are basically you can come and work and then you have to leave immediately, right? And so it's these systems that are basically like how do we extract as much labor from these folks as possible.
So, you know, there's lots of different ways of being Latino in the South right now. Um, on the one hand, we have Ricky Hurtado, who is an, you know, an elected official here in North Carolina, sort of starting this energy of getting Latinos in, more and more involved in politics. We also have Latinos who are ardent Trump supporters, you know, and who are gonna go vote for Mark Robinson and are really excited about it.
The same way that I don't think there's one South, I don't think there's one Latino South. And I think any effort to try and put our arms around and try and deeply understand the Latino South, even as someone who wrote a book called Making the Latino South.
Anisa Khalifa: I was gonna say.
Cecilia Márquez: I know. But I think, you know, I hope what my book does is say it's really complicated. Um, it's really complicated, race has changed dramatically, and Blackness really matters. Like, those are the kinds of big takeaways. And so I think we need to, like, let there be lots of Latino Souths. Latinos are part of every part of Southern history, right? The good, the bad, the ugly. And so we have to be, um, accountable to that. And we have to know that about ourselves, that on the one hand, we get to claim the South. Like, we are Latinos and the South is ours. We are part of this. But it also means we have to be accountable to the ways that we have benefited from the long history of anti-Blackness and white supremacy in this region.
Anisa Khalifa: Is there something that really surprised you when you were writing this book or something that just sticks with you and you can't stop thinking about like a story or a fact or something?
Cecilia Márquez: South of the border. I mean, it remains something that I, I like, you know, I, I can't quite get out of my head and I'm sort of fascinated by and…You know, I have a fantasy of someday like talking to, because now there are Latino communities surrounding those areas. And I'm like, what do you guys think about this? Like, how do you interact with this? What does this mean to you? Um, yeah, it's…
Anisa Khalifa: Like, I can't really wrap my head around the fact that it still exists.
Cecilia Márquez: You haven't ever seen it?
Anisa Khalifa: I haven't seen it.
Cecilia Márquez: It's a weird place. It's worth stopping to see, you know, maybe don't buy anything.
Anisa Khalifa: Cecilia Márquez' book Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation is available now from the University of North Carolina Press. This episode of the Broadside was produced by me, Anisa Khalifa, and edited by Jerad Walker. Wilson Sayre is our executive producer.
The Broadside is a production of WUNC–North Carolina Public Radio and is part of the NPR network. You can email us at broadside@wunc.org. If you enjoyed the show, leave us a rating, a review, or share it with a friend! I’m Anisa Khalifa. Thanks for listening y'all. We'll be back next week.