The 2020 census will show how the future minority-majority U.S. will depend on Latinxs and Asian Americans.
The 2020 census is upon us. The massive, once-a-decade operation to count the population of the U.S. will engulf American households in the coming weeks. As always the stakes of the census are much greater than numbers, but this year they are amplified by the proximity to the presidential election. The census is our nation’s mechanism for registering the transformations in the social landscape and constituencies of America. Over the next ten years, tough debates on how the nation should respond to its changes will build on the demographic story the census reveals. Distributions of political power and billions of dollars in resources are at stake.
With operations gearing up and no numbers ready to crunch yet, one outcome is already certain: the census will show the increasing centrality of Latinxs and Asian Americans to the U.S. Alongside those who identify as multiracial, they are the fastest growing racial/ethnic groups. The Asian American population increased 72% from 2000-2015 while the Latinx population grew 60% in the same period. Together, they account for over 2/3 of the population growth in the U.S. since 2000. From only 4% of the nation’s population in the 1960s to 24% today, they are projected to top 40% in the coming decades.
Asian Americans and Latinxs are the central players in the turbulent national drama sweeping the U.S. towards the minority-majority threshold, a historic tipping point over which much ink will surely be spilled this census year. But whether Americans welcome this dramatic transformation or view it with apprehension, they, regardless of political affiliation, have not fully understood this forthcoming change.
The United States of America is rapidly becoming an Asian and Latinx America. But this is a reality we have hardly acknowledged let alone tried to grasp. To do so we need to overcome a public discourse that sees these communities as separate. Stereotypes oppose them in our national conversations—Asian Americans as “model minorities” and Latinxs as “illegal immigrants.” Media coverage emphasizes their political conflicts. Take the recent Harvard University affirmative action case, whose rhetoric pitted Asian American students against Latinx and African American students. And in the academy, scholarship on these populations unfold in separate fields.
My new book Giving Form to an Asian and Latinx America » challenges this idea of separation. It reveals the intertwined story of Asian Americans and Latinxs from the late twentieth-century to the present, following their entangled histories, politics, and literatures. It contends that we cannot fully understand either group or the shifts in our national landscape unless we see how Latinx and Asian American communities have formed in mutual relation.
This book shows the struggles of Asian Americans to be essential to Latinx politics and the challenges facing Latinxs to be central to Asian American politics. Few Americans realize, for example, that there are over 1.7 million undocumented Asian immigrants in the U.S., the fastest growing segment of the undocumented population. Immigration reform is hardly an issue for Latinxs alone. Clarifying points of intersection like this, I build the case for an inter-minority solidarity that could shape the future of the U.S. and its relations to the world.
Perceiving the Asian and Latinx United States is difficult because it requires looking across minority groups that seem different, even opposite, to see their intertwined fates. One powerful and pleasurable way to do this is to turn to the extraordinary storytellers from these communities. Writers such as Sandra Cisneros, Karen Tei Yamashita, Junot Díaz, and Aimee Phan shape the histories and challenges of their communities into literature in related ways, offering us clues to the links between their communities that are not obvious when we look for outright similarities in their social conditions and immediate concerns.
Indeed, some of the most consequential relations between Asian Americans and Latinxs are obscured unless we zoom out to see their intertwining in mass conflicts and forces that have shaped the 21st-century globe. For example, the Cold War transformed the domestic sphere by displacing millions of Asians and Latin Americans to the U.S. Asia and Latin America were the most proximate arenas of U.S. Cold War interests and simultaneous sites of the “hot wars” that belied the idea of a Cold War.
The Vietnam War looms large in our memories as an illustration of such hot wars, but reading Vietnamese American and Dominican American literatures together reveals the intimate connections of the Vietnam War to a simultaneous conflict that Americans have forgotten: the 1965 U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic, launched to show American strength as the first U.S. combat troops were landing in Vietnam. If Americans want to manage the flows of immigration, such linked histories teach us that we need to take a hard look at the global military machine the U.S. has built and the streams of desperate people its violent workings displace to American shores.
Perceiving the Asian and Latinx United States is difficult because it requires looking across minority groups that seem different, even opposite, to see their intertwined fates.
While the migrations unleashed by military forces were forming the Asian and Latinx United States, equally powerful economic forces were linking Latinxs and Asian Americans together in yet other surprising ways. Consider the cases of India and Mexico, which are the two largest senders of migrants to the U.S. When we think of Indian American communities full of high-tech immigrant workers and Mexican American communities with many undocumented laborers, it’s easy to think they have little to do with each other. One group appears as the “good” immigrants the nation wants to recruit and the other as the “bad” immigrants to keep out.
Reading the literatures from these communities side-by-side helps us see a different story. They are entangled in a project of economic globalization and labor migrations spanning Asia, Latin America, and the U.S. Neoliberal policies have reshaped our immigration system to draw millions of elite Asian workers which make the U.S. more competitive. At the same time, neoliberal policies deregulated Latin American economies with devastating effects that have propelled millions of impoverished Latin Americans to the U.S. as undocumented immigrants. This two-pronged migrant labor system bolsters our increasingly unequal and split economy, which demands cheap, exploitable labor and high-tech knowledge workers. Those seeking the deeper sources of contemporary immigration levels need to confront the differentiated but linked ways that the U.S. economy profits off of immigrants.
As the 2020 census will show, the Asian and Latinx United States is here to stay and grow. For Asian Americans and Latinxs this is an important opportunity for alliances. Each group is not alone in its struggles. For the nation as a whole, this is an urgent time to understand a new American formation, reflect on our decisions at home and abroad that fuel its growth, and deliberate on its central role in the nation’s future.
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