The Real Story Behind the Secret Service Prostitution Scandal

Most of the media coverage surrounding President Obama’s visit to Cartagena, Columbia during the April 14^th weekend has centered on the alleged boorish behavior and subsequent resignations of several Secret Service agents, particularly members of the President’s advance team.  Sadly, few media outlets have reported why the President was in Colombia in the first place.  With its tabloid-like focus on sex and prostitution, U.S. news outlets continue to contribute to people’s poorly informed understandings of U.S. foreign policy or the role the United States plays in the affairs of its neighboring countries.

According to the White House’s website, President Obama was in Cartagena to attend the Sixth Summit of the Americas.  While there, the President finalized negotiations on a free trade agreement that takes effect on May 15^th, agreed to continue joint efforts to fight drug trafficking, discussed ongoing initiatives for energy interconnectedness, and agreed to extend visas of Columbians in the US by ten years.

The Summits of the Americas are arranged by the Organizationof the American States, an international body whose current configuration dates to 1948.  Latin American and Caribbean nations comprise most of the OAS membership, but Canada and the United States are member nations too.

That the current OAS’ origins date to the late 1940s should not surprise for a couple of reasons.  For one, the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman still were engaged in the Good Neighbor Policy to some extent during that time.  The Good Neighbor Policy was an attempt to reverse the prior foreign policies of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 and its related Roosevelt Corollary of 1910, by stating that the United States no longer would interfere in the affairs of independent Latin American states, but would instead work more cooperatively as partners.  For another, the emergence of the Cold War necessitated the U.S. establishing collective security on a regional basis.  Economical and military alliances with Latin American nations in the interest of U.S. national security seemingly made sense at the time.

Despite its diplomatic overtones and military implications, however, most people think of the Good Neighbor Policy - if they think about it at all - as a cultural exchange between the United States and Latin American countries.  Unfortunately for American audiences, this exchange likely resulted in establishing Latin Americans as campy or cartoonish characters that confirmed existing stereotypes as embodied by Carmen Miranda and Chiquita bananas, or as depicted in by the Walt Disney Company.

The Good Neighbor Policy’s usefulness for subsequent Presidential administrations diminished during the Cold War, as Latin American countries became proxy sites of fighting between the United States and any perceived Communist threat, with the fear of Communists in Latin America resulting in at least one U.S. President circumventing Congress to shape his foreign policy.

As it turns out, then, U.S. involvement with Latin American countries did not start with President Obama’s Colombian visit or with his advance team soliciting prostitutes.  Rather, the U.S. has been screwing Latin America for decades.

Latino Canadians

I was in Vancouver over the weekend attending the American Educational Research Association Conference there. I presented a paper that looks at the development of ethnic identity among Mexican-descent youth in New York City and how these youth come to equate low educational achievement with being Mexican; I argued that the data I collected shows that it is not surprising given some of the discriminatory messages they hear from teachers, and from mixed messages that their parents send, in terms of advocating hard work and a strong Mexican identity, but also with an explicit message that says, “don’t be like me.” I am sure I will have future opportunities to expand on this research that came out of my dissertation, but being in Canada offered me some time to ponder more important things: sports and Latinos.

I ran into a friend from graduate school who is now a professor at the University of Toronto. Rubén Gaztambide-Fernandez was actually a few years ahead of me in our doctoral program. Since arriving in Canada, he became interested in the large number of Latin-American descendants who call Canada home. When we met in passing he let me know that Latino Canadians have been around for over 50 years, yet few people have taken note, and now Rubén finds himself at the forefront of this area of inquiry.

Walking through Canadian streets a few days later, my wife and I were looking for souvenirs for our children and I immediately thought that I’d like to buy my three-year-old son a Canadian hockey jersey or maybe even a mini-hockey stick. Just as my son was entering consciousness a couple of years ago, my hometown Chicago Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup. After a long drought, and fan indifference, Chicago was taken by hockey fever, especially given the dismal state of our other sports teams. One of my close friends, who is Mexican, noted that he felt some ambivalence about the fair-weather fans, especially the Latinos who had taken to the sport, swept up in the championship fervor, when the sport goes virtually unknown in our homelands whose climate is not the most hospitable to hockey. Regardless, my own Mexican family was taken by the success of the Blackhawks and my son and daughter both reveled in the contagious “Chelsea Dagger” that became the team’s anthem that year. For our son, “hockey” became one of the first two-syllable words he would utter with great enthusiasm anytime he saw my father and I watching a game on television.

One of the more popular players on the Blackhawks the year they won was Dustin Byfuglien, who was also notable as one of the few African Americans in the sport. On our search for a pint-sized jersey, I also ran into a few hockey sticks and then my mind drifted at the thought of buying our son one and it being the beginning of his journey to break ethnic and racial barriers in the great sport of our northern neighbors. This led me to wonder whether there was a Latino presence on hockey teams, given their presence in Canada.

Well, it was with a literal bang that I found out. Watching a much less captivating Blackhawks team last night, I saw the awful hit that Blackhawk player Marian Hossa took from Raffi Torres of the Coyotes. It knocked Hossa unconscious and earned him an immediate trip to the hospital. Once I learned from the evening news that Hossa was fine, I began to wonder about the Hispanic surnamed Torres. A quick search on Wikipedia taught me that Canadian-born Torres is in fact of Mexican and Peruvian descent. So, apparently ethnic barriers have already been broken in hockey, although it is probably still a matter of time before we hear about Los Blackhawks, although Coyotes is already a name with Mexican roots.

To carry a theme from the last few blog posts relating the perceived versus actual solidarity of Latinos, I was none too happy to learn of Torres’s ancestry, although it took little time for me to move beyond my ambivalence, as it is hard to stand with someone who could perpetuate such an unsportsmanlike and brutal hit, in addition to other egregious off the ice antics. So, the evidence continues to mount that we can we Latinos are a diverse and complex group that is difficult to generalize under one umbrella.

My wife put the kibosh on the hockey stick, by the way. Hockey, she said, is just too violent, Latino or otherwise.

Ozzie Guillen and the Latino Ethnic Identity

Any devotee of Chicago sports was familiar with the Blizzard of Oz long before his rise to infamy during this past week.  Some of us learned to tolerate his verbal antics while others of us learned to be chagrined.  And while Ozzie Guillen’s latest controversy is nothing new for some, as sports columnists from the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune make clear, the reaction of Miami’s Cuban-origin community to Guillen’s remarks about Cuba’s former leader, Fidel Castro, offers another opportunity to explore the Latino ethnic identity.

Like a Rorschach test, one can read just about anything into this story.  One read is how the Marlins team owners seemingly misjudged Cuban’s love of the baseball.  Clearly some are willing to allow their hatred of Castro to trump any appreciation of the sport.  Another read would suggest that Miami’s Cubans are more eager to exert a Cuban nationalist identity, one that supersedes their identification with American baseball - long admired and romanticized as the quintessential national pastime shared from one generation to the next.  A more compelling read, however, is how the reaction of some among Miami’s Cuban-origin population further suggests – however anecdotally - the fallacy of a "Latino community" in the United States.

I argued recently that a Latino identity is an homogeneous monolithic that obviates the cultural heritages of diverse people.  Elsewhere on this site was discussed the Pew Hispanic Research Center’s findings that American Hispanics and Latinos do not proclaim a pan-ethnic identity, choosing instead a non-American, but nationally-bound identity.

And now we have Miami’s Cubans.  Like a switch hitter at the plate, they are exerting a nationalist identity with one hand and denying affiliation with a Latino American identity with the other.  Further, Guillen’s own Venezuelan heritage creates an additional crack in the "Latino" facade.  Miami’s Cuban-origin population does not recognize Guillen as a fellow Latino American in calling for his firing or organizing boycotts until he is fired.  Rather, they see someone insensitive if not antithetical to their own Cuban national interests.

The irony here of course is the former Cuban leader's own appreciation for baseball, evidenced by his likely or unlikely try-out for one major league team or another.  Perhaps Miamians should heed the words of James Earl Jones as Terrance Mann in Field of Dreams as they confront lingering tensions emerging from any nationalistic, cultural, or ethnic differences.  Baseball, he says, “reminds us of all that once was good and that could be again."

Amen to that.

Latinos Part Dos

So, none other than the Pew HISPANIC Research Center (my emphasis) has weighed in on how people who can trace some of their ancestry to Latin America living in the U.S. actually identify themselves. It wasn't much of a surprise that most Latinos don't identify as such at all. They don't even identify as Hispanic for that matter, making a lot of the debate that happens in intellectual circles and the media of little consequence. Their findings reveal that 51% identify by their country of origin and only 24% use a pan-ethnic label that groups them together, such as Latino or Hispanic. And when looking at those pan-ethnic labels, much to the chagrin of Latino studies programs all over the country who claim that Hispanic is an imposed label that affirms Spanish hegemony, only 14% of those surveyed would choose the term Latino, compared to 51% who don't care, and 33% who prefer Hispanic. As for the argument of denying imperialism, I never understood why trading a moniker associated with one empire for another would solve the problem. A critical race theorist might argue that any pan-ethnic label is really just a tool to bring the overall average down, to deny diversity, and create a garbage category that legally confirms the inferiority of said socially constructed group. As someone who does embrace the occasional label and who is ultimately pragmatic, I do think there is a reason for us to continue the push for unity, even though the Pew report also shows that more than two thirds of Latinos don't believe that we share a common culture. The reason is simple: there is power in numbers. We do share enough that working together could go a long way for improving the U.S. as a whole, especially given the demographic trajectory of the nation. Finally, for as much as us intellectuals would like to assert our uniqueness, I am reminded of Malcolm X who noted that to outsiders we all pretty much look the same anyway.