The Darker Side of Modernity- radicalization as an incomplete project - Alexandro José Gradilla

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- Gradilla 56 - Critical Studies in History 2, no. 1 (Jun. 2009): 56-76.

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The Darker Side of Modernity:

Racialization as an Incomplete Project

Alexandro José Gradilla1

Abstract

This essay analyzes the processes of racialization in Mexico and the United States as a

component of modernity. In my framework, modernity is a project that commences with

the development of capitalism, the “discovery” of the Americas, and the colonialexpansion by Europeans. I also address the conceptual predicament that fragments the

study of Mexican origin populations. Since their racialization process involves multiplehistorical lineages within a binational context, I utilize an analytical lens that is rooted

in the social sciences and cultural studies. Furthermore, the Mexican origin populationis the object of study of two major interdisciplinary fields—Latin American Studies

(area studies) and Chicano Studies (ethnic studies).2

This division gives the impressionthat the on-going racialization processes are distinct projects rather than interconnected.

The racial formation process of the Mexican origin population requires examining keyracializing practices and actions in Mexico and the United States beginning with

Spanish colonialism in Mexico (1521–1821), through the U.S./Mexico period (1821– 1848), and finally concluding with the long period of post-U.S. annexation of Mexican

territory and incorporation of their populations (1848–1950s). Key racializing practicesand actions include social institutions such as juridical systems, the organization of the

division of labor, and educational/schooling policies. Though these practices andactions institutionally pre-date modernity, their use as a racializing technique changes

after the spread of capitalism and colonialism in the New World.

1

Alexandro José Gradilla ([email protected]) is an Assistant Professor in theDepartment of Chicana and Chicano Studies at California State University, Fullerton.2 I adopt “Mexican origin population” because it is the common moniker used in the

social sciences and social history to refer to people who are of Mexican ancestry(Chicanos/Mexican Americans), Mexican immigrants, and all those Mexican nationals thatmove binationally between the two countries.




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Introduction

The study of the racialization histories, of any group or population, tends to avoid

analyzing the role of knowledge in the invention or social construction of “race.”3

Analyzing modernity without the project of colonialism or racism would mean avoidingstudying the dark side of modernity.4 Modernity’s splendors were not and have not been

enjoyed by all people. Traditionally, modernity especially during the Enlightenment iscelebrated for giving rise to such ideas as freedom, liberty and equality. For some

populations, modernity’s gift was various forms of forced labor, loss of land, and theimposition of a new universal knowledge. In the specific case of the inhabitants of

Mexico, their racialization histories modernity deserves attention. The Mexican origin

3 In the social sciences, race is an analytical concept is not understood as a “real”

biological reality; it is instead interpreted as a contextually based social construction. MichaelOmi and Howard Winant have defined racialization or racial formation as “the sociohistorical

process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and thendestroyed…racial formation is a process of historically situated projects in which human bodies

and social structures are represented and organized…we link racial formation to the evolutionof hegemony, the way in which society is organized and ruled.” They further explain “that race

has no fixed meaning, but is constructed and transformed sociohistorically through competing political projects, through the necessary and ineluctable link between the structural and cultural

dimensions of race.” Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960’s to the 1990’s (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 55, 71. Though the idea of

“race” or “people” existed before modernity (ethnos, ethnikos, etc); the creation or invention of

“races” was transformed by the expansion of European colonialism and the international spread

of capitalism.4 Recent works in the critical study of modernity include Walter Mignolo, The Darker

Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995); idem, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern

Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); idem, The

Idea of Latin America (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005); and Ramon Grosfoguel,Colonial Subjects: Puerto Ricans in a Global Perspective (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 2003). Some of the more innovative works have appeared in critically acclaimed edited

collections such as John Beverly, Michael Aronna, and Jose Oviedo, eds., The Postmodern

Debate in Latin America (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); Ileana Rodriguez, ed., The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); JuanPoblete, ed., Critical Latin American and Latino Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 2003); Ana Del Sarto, Alicia Ríos, and Abril Trigo, eds., The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Ramón Grosfoguel, Nelson

Maldonado-Torres, and José Davíd Saldívar, eds., Latin@s in the World-System:

Decolonization Struggles in the 21st Century U.S. Empire (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers,2005); and Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos A. Jauregui, eds., Coloniality at Large:

Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).




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population’s racialization has occurred over 500 years at the hands of the SpanishCrown, the Mexican government, and later the United States.

Walter Mignolo, in The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality,

and Colonization (1995), suggests that Western traditions of knowledge, and in particular European defined forms of literacy, played a part in the colonial dominationof indigenous populations in the Americas. For instance, after the conquest of Mexico,

Spanish friars attempted to evaluate Aztec and Maya forms of literacy in relation totheir own forms. The indigenous writing systems did not rely on letters but on

pictographs and ideographs.5

The Aztec “amoxtli” and the Maya “vuh” were judged as books using European understandings of books. When a text was deemed full of

“superstitions” or “falsehoods” of the devil, these texts were summarily destroyed. 6 Theactions of the friars were not merely defining what a book was—it also became

entangled with the question of what was knowledge. The production of knowledge andthe studying of groups were tools of colonial domination. These tools of colonial

domination—knowledge as defined by the Europeans— are the same tools we areconfined to in the analysis of modernity and its twin, colonialism. Mignolo reasons:

Thus, if scholarship cannot represent the colonized faithfully or allow the

subaltern to speak, it can at least break up a monolithic notion of thesubaltern and maintain an alternative discursive practice, parallel to both

the official discourse of the state, for which maps represent territories andhistories account for the truth of events, and the established discourse of

official scholarship, in which the rules of the academic game are the soundwarranty for the value of knowledge independent of any political agenda

or personal interest.7

Mignolo’s approach requires an examination of “the transformations of activities andcognitive enactments into instruments of power, control and domination,” and in the

case of racialization as a product of modernity, then the rational tools of populationmanagement need to be thoroughly scrutinized.8 A necessary step will be to challenge

the dominant and singular construction of modernity as a project of emancipation.

5Mignolo, The Darker Side, pp. 69-124.

6Mignolo, The Darker Side, p. 71.

7 Mignolo, The Darker Side, p. 5.8

Mignolo, The Darker Side, p. 334. Earlier in the same chapter, Mignolo uses“cognitive enactment” in lieu of representation because “looking at them as a social and

semiotic interactions and territorial control instead of a representation of an ontological space

opens up new ways of understanding in which cognitive patterns become embedded in socialactions and representations become performances of colonization.” Mignolo, The Darker Side,

p. 313.




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Acknowledging that ‘modernity’ manifests itself one way in Europe and another way in the formerly colonized world requires a particular conceptual standpoint.

Critical scholars, such as Mignolo, Aníbal Quijano and Enrique Dussel, have labeled

the other face of modernity that is experienced by the formerly colonized world and/or populations as “coloniality”9 or colonialism without the official institutions of colonial administration. Whereas colonialism is historically and geographically specific,

coloniality is the persistent legacy after colonialism. The instruments of modernsociety—schooling, labor, laws, organized religion, etc—have a dual purpose. On the

one hand, education is an institution that can enlighten, but for many it is a tool of exclusion and regulation. Any perspective on the indigenous people originating in

Mexico must include the impact of colonial relations.An examination of the fluid and regional histories of the Mexican origin

population’s identity is necessary. The history of the Mexican origin population’sracialization demonstrates the importance of developing a “geopolitical” framework for

understanding the dynamics that have influenced the construction of an incomplete or on-going racialization.10 The different manifestations of racism in the United States and

Mexico, coupled with the context of identity formation and history, are relevant. JuanPoblete states:

The approach I am favoring here calls for a geopolitical understanding of

(1) the racialization of the international division of labor; (2) the production of knowledge and the administration of scales, scapes and

scopes on so-called global processes; (3) a cultural and historicalunderstanding of previous globalizing colonial projects; and (4) a critical

perspective on the claims of transnationalisms and nationalisms as

mutually exclusive projects.

11

Therefore it is important to outline the connections and mutual exchanges between the

racialization projects of Spain, Mexico and the United States. The formation of themodern/colonial world-system created not only new markets (financial and commercial

circuits), but also new forms of knowledge. The foundation of modernity/coloniality israce, and the new basic unit required to understand the world is no longer provincial kin

relations, but, rather, the nation-state.12

9Mignolo asserts that coloniality “points toward and intends to unveil an embedded

logic that enforces control, domination, and exploitation disguised in the language of salvation,

progress, modernization, and being good for everyone.” Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America, p.6.10 Juan Poblete, “Introduction,” in Critical Latin American and Latino Studies, ed.

Poblete, pp. ix-xli.11 Poblete, “Introduction,” p. xxviii.12 Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs, pp. 51, 59, and 64.




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The Racial Formations of the Mexican Origin Population

After the “conquest” of Anahauc (Mexico) by Spain and during the colonial period in

Mexico (1521–1821), “new” identities were invented by the Spanish and imposed on

the newly colonized subjects of Spain. The Spanish government’s system of colonialadministration kept detailed records and instilled social order of all of its newly won

resources: both human and non-human. The creation of the casta system (racial caste)was meant to manage Spain’s imposed racial hierarchy.13 The racial system which was

based on a system of skin color, appearance and closeness to “Spanishness” or “Europeanness” (culturally, linguistically and religiously) determined one’s relationship

to power.14 The casta system eventually expanded from five original categories(European-born Spaniard, New World–born Spaniard, Indian, African, and mestizo) to

as many as fifty racial categories, to accommodate the various cross-mixtures. The“racial” mixing and intermarriage of Europeans to non-Europeans were managed by

Spanish laws and “enacted” by the Catholic Church.15 The Spanish-Mexican racialdiscourse rearticulated identities by utilizing various systems of signification. For

example the casta system borrowed terms that referred to animals or animal breeding asreferential descriptions of the subordinated racial identities.

The Spaniards used animal husbandry terms to describe the new hybrid population: mestiz o and mulato originally referred to the various mixtures of horses

with other horses and mules with horses. Lobo, the mixture of indigenous Africans withmestizo ancestry, is also the Spanish word for “wolf.” The system of racial

categorization in the Americas has frequently fallen along the lines of animalclassification. The distinction of parts, quarters, halves, and full- or purebred were all

originally made to describe animals and were later applied to the classification of humans. European forms of knowledge and knowing were greatly stunted by these new

populations in these new spaces. During this early period of modernity and colonizationof the Americas, notions of chimera-like hybrids filled the European imagination, such

as Shakespeare’s Caliban, who was envisioned as a half-man/half-fish and, by other definitions, as a monster.16 New Spain’s mixed-race populations were institutionally

disempowered because to be labeled racially by the colonial administrators meant onewas socially and culturally further away from “Spanishness” or civility. The mestizos

13Suzanne Oboler, Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives: Identity and the Politics of (Re)

Presentation in the United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), pp. 19-

23. 14 Martha Menchaca, Recovering History, Constructing Race: The Indian, Black, and

White Roots of Mexican Americans (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), pp. 62-66.15

Menchaca, Recovering History, pp. 53-57.16 Ronald Takaki, “The Tempest in the Wilderness: The Racialization of Savagery,”

Journal of American History 79, no. 3 (1992): 892-912.




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did not have control over their labor; the economic system of colonial Mexico left their labor force in an inchoate state, neither free nor enslaved. The control and ordering of

the colonial division of labor (slavery, encomienda, repartimiento and requerimiento de

labor ) also required a complex system of organization. The casta system not onlydefined one’s relationship to and social standing within the colonial body-politic, it alsodefined one’s relationship to the economy.17 The control over one’s labor was the

privilege of the European and New World born Spaniards. Diminishing and denigratingmestizo labor to the level of “beast of burden” had devastating effects on this group’s

social life. The colonized “castas” endured the complex process of concomitantly being“animalized,” and racialized which resulted in stratified social and economic relations.18

The long-term effects of being de-humanized are that these individuals and populationslearn to internalize low self-worth and stigma.

Discourse and ideology deliver a powerful mechanism of self-management andregulation. The “self” policing that resulted from the belief that one is on the same

social level as animals did not prevent challenges to the racializing dominant order. Astrategy utilized by many socioeconomically disenfranchised classes during the colonial

period was to strive for limpieza de sangre.19 The phrase referred to throughintermarriage (marrying up) in order to improve familial bloodlines. Maintaining fair

skin was important in improving one’s life chances since many forms of discriminationand acceptance were based on how one appeared. Keeping the bloodline pure was

called pureza de sangre, or the purity of blood.20 Through “creative” record-keeping, one or both parents would be moved up one

or two racial categories to improve the child’s life chances. After all, institutions and bureaucracies are composed of people. If the colonial administrators or their agents

were involved in the racial management of populations, then it was possible to intervene

at the local level to change one’s racial classification. Therefore another route to puritywas supplicating (or bribing) the parish priest during the recording of the baptismalcertificate in order to elevate the child’s “purity” or at least give the impression moving

them closer to Europeaness.

17 Menchaca, Recovering History, pp. 51-58.18 Contemporarily, many Mexican Spanish-speakers and their children refer to their

bodies, to the actions of bodily movements, and to others by using animal specific terminology

in Spanish. Instead of referring to their human feet (pies), Mexican Spanish-speakers refer totheir animal feet (patas). Instead of eating like a human (comers), they eat like an animal(tragar) or grab like an animal (agarrar). A common refrain among immigrant men who work in

the service sector is “orale huey” (“Come on, you castrated ox”). These supposed“grammatical” errors are actually the incorporation of racialized discourse that serves to

acknowledge the social and economic location of this segment of the Mexican origin

population.19 Oboler, Ethnic Labels, p. 21.20 Oboler, Ethnic Labels, p. 21.




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Eventually, most of the population in Mexico were defined as mestizo or indigenous, with few members of society “pure” Spaniards (Europe-born and Americas-

born). In the late colonial period, Mexican racial classification became a system of

racial performance, which became possible as the recording of categories became lessdetailed and practical. With the Catholic Church as a key arbiter and manager of racialdesignations, the Church eventually tired of designating the racial identities of their

flock. In regions of New Spain where the Church wielded power, church officials wereable to eliminate the various racial designations down to “ gente de razon” (people of

reason), according Menchaca, the Church’s actions meant their focus would now be based on how Hispanicized the petitioner was (Spanish-speaker, Roman Catholic

convert and adhering to Spanish cultural practices) instead a prescribed racialdesignation.21 By the early nineteenth century in Mexico, the subjects of New Spain,

especially among the European creoles (New World born Spaniards) and mixed racegroups (mestizos, mulattos, etc) began to identify with new referents such as Americano

and Mexicano.22

These new identity labels represented a political break from Spanishand European identification. Certain practices allowed these shifts to occur: 1) in the

case of the racial castas, the poor recording keeping by the military, church officials,and census takers which made it nearly impossible to specifically designate an accurate

racial designation; and 2) for the Creole elites, the increasing resentment felt by manysocial groups in New Spain over the Spanish Crown’s preference to appoint European

born Spaniards to key powerful posts.23 Mexico gained its “independence” from Spain after 300 years of colonial rule;

the newly independent nation now entered a new phase: coloniality. Though theapparatus of colonial administration was officially “gone,” the logic and ideology

remained—the new elites of Mexico sustained many of the practices of the prior

colonial regime.

24

Mignolo clearly demonstrates that “Creole of Spanish and Portuguesedescent lived under the illusion that they were Europeans too, although they felt their second class status.”25 The Creole elites did not create a new intellectual or political

break from the Europeans instead they attempted to emulate them. These newlyempowered Creole elite also attempted to hide “colonialism” which meant that though

they despised the official colonial system they recognized the efficiency of colonialinstitutions. In the middle of the nineteenth century, on the surface Creole elites

attempted to create new institutions infused with the ideas of Enlightenment thinking but in actuality these new government structures replicated the practices of colonial

administration.26

I identify the next phase of racialization, for the Mexican origin

21

Menchaca, Recovering History, pp. 122-123, 166-169.22 Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America, p. 21.23 Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America, p. 21.24

Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America, p. 7.25 Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America, pp. 66-67.26 Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America, pp. 66-67.




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population, as the period between Mexican Independence and the U.S.-Mexico War (1821-1848).

The desire for land by the future North American hegemon, the United States,

required new strategies and tactics for legitimating the taking of new territories. In thecase of political struggle over land and political power in the Mexican territory of Tejas,the re-cycling or repurposing of a blood libel legend, La Leyenda Negra (The Black

Legend) and other calculated language-based strategies to redefine and impose a newidentity on the Mexican residents of Texas. The campaign for land by American settlers

racialized the Mexican population. This new phase of racialization will form the basisof key knowledge about Mexicans from 1820s to the 1880s.

The original account of the Black Legend stemmed from the accounts of FrayBartolomé de las Casas about how the Spaniards colonized the New World. The

Spaniard was seen as a foul mix of African and Mediterranean European heritage. TheSpaniard’s racial impurity was compounded by the bloodiness of the conquest, which

ensued in the name of Christianity. Catholics were perceived as “cannibalistic” becauseof the holy sacrament of the Eucharist, which entailed the “eating” of Christ’s body and

the “drinking” of his blood. From the perspective of the Protestant, English-speakingworld, the Spanish Inquisition in Spain and the Americas, with its violent religious

conversion tactics, had formed a concrete image. The image of the bloodthirstySpaniard is important because in the context of Texas, the dehumanizing stereotypes of

the Spaniard were spliced into racist ideologies about native people and Mexicans.27 According to Raymund A. Paredes, the Anglo settler distrust of Mexicans was

threefold: they were of Spanish descent, Catholic, and indigenous.28 The Black Legendcreated a legitimating narrative for the seizure of Mexican landholdings by the United

States and, more specifically, by white Protestant Texans. This new invocation of the

legend served as an ideological strategy to contend that if the Mexican origin populationwere incapable of developing or controlling resources, such as land.29 During the Spanish colonial period, a persistent problem existed in the

northernmost regions of New Spain. It was very difficult to populate these areas basedon numerous factors, one being under a highly centralized colonial government living

far from the seat of power was not advantageous for those people who desired upwardmobility. The failing colonial government passed a series of land colonization acts that

encouraged subjects of New Spain and from other nations to enter these territories inorder to settle them. Furthermore Mexico also used land distribution as a means of

raising funds and to encourage Christian non-Indians, including citizens from the

27 Raymund A. Paredes, “The Origins of Anti-Mexican Sentiment in the United States,”

The New Scholar 6 (1977): 139-165.28 Paredes, “The Origins,” passim.29 Paredes, “The Origins,” p. 158.




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United States. These were some of the rationales behind the General Law of Colonization in 1824.30

Mexican land laws required settlers to adhere to Mexican laws, to learn Spanish,

to convert to Roman Catholicism, and more importantly to pay taxes to the governmentof Mexico.31 For the white U.S. settlers who struggled with and resisted the multiplerequirements for land ownership that became a fount of their growing discord, many of

them inadvertently generated a new tool of domination. From 1821-1836, the newsettlers began to describe their Mexican neighbors and hosts as morally defective and

culturally debased.32 Key stereotypes were developed during this phase regardingMexicans, such as being innately “lazy,” “dirty,” and “promiscuous.” Though these

strategic pronouncements dehumanized the Mexican origin population, thereappearance and deployment of the Black Legend assisted in profoundly dehumanizing

the population and legitimated the taking of land. Racism in this context was based in acompetition for land. In this period Mexicans and American settlers are economic and

political competitors.The social rivalry between the American settlers and the Texas Mexicans

eventually gave way to a fragile peace structure that eventually permitted a new political alliance with a common enemy. Eventually the major focus of the Texas

settlers was the Mexican government. Some Texas settlers were even successful intapping into the resentment felt by many Texas Mexicans over the Mexican

government’s desire to intercede in the political and economic affairs of Texas territory.In fact, the racial politics deployed by the settlers did not incur the sympathy of the U.S.

government. It did incur sympathy only after General Santa Anna attacked the Texassettlers in the Alamo and with the slaughter of American prisoners of war.

33The U.S.-

Mexican War destroyed the peace structure between the white Texans and Mexican

Texans. What was not destroyed, however, was the racial ideologies developed by U.S.settlers that were utilized against the Mexicans population. The end of the U.S.-Mexican War introduced another phase of racialization.

After the U.S.-Mexican War of 1848, Mexico signed the Treaty of GuadalupeHidalgo, giving up one third of its territory. Various language and legal rights were

given to the former citizens of Mexico by the treaty to protect them from unfair or biased treatment. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was a binational experience in the

racial formation of Mexicans. The treaty guaranteed that the Mexicans who decided toreside in the United States would acquire the status of “free white people.”

34Citizenship

30 Menchaca, Recovering History, pp. 181-186.31

Menchaca, Recovering History, pp. 187-203.32 Arnoldo de Leon, They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes Toward Mexicans in

Texas, 1821-1900 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983), pp. 24-48.33

David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986 (Austin:University of Texas Press, 1987), pp. 26-27.

34 Omi and Winant, Racial Formation, p. 82.




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“protected” by a treaty did not change the attitudes shaped by everyday perceptions of “Mexican” identity. Articles 8-10 of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo made certain

guarantees such as full citizenship to the former Mexican citizens who resided in the

American Southwest. Specifically article 9 states that “The Mexicans who, in theterritories aforesaid, shall not preserve the character of citizens of the MexicanRepublic…shall be incorporated into the Union of the United States…and be admitted

at the proper time to the enjoyment of all the rights of citizens of the United States.”35

Other guarantees included respecting the land grants that many some Mexican families

had held since the Spanish colonial period. Eventually most of the protections andguarantees were slowly eroded away by acts of the U.S. Congress or through the powers

of states or territories (enabled by the Congress) to interpret aspects of the treaty.36 In the mid-nineteenth century, citizenship in the United States was restricted to

white men. At the time of the U.S. annexation of former Mexican territories, thedefinition of Mexican citizen included people of Spanish (European), mixed-race

(mestizo), Indian (Native American), and African (Black) ancestry.

37

Native Americanand Black Mexicans were the first groups to lose political enfranchisement. In the

former Mexican territories, Christianized or Hispanicized Indians shared full citizenshiprights. Furthermore, slavery was illegal in the Mexican republic. If you were deemed

eligible for citizenship in Mexico, one was able to vote and own property. Immediatelyfollowing the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo existing “social customs” and

U.S. laws took precedent over the protections in the treaty.38 Former Mexican citizensof mixed racial heritage slowly lost their rights. In this next phase, the legal system and

economic imperatives will play a role in the racializing of Mexicans in the Southwest.The sociopolitical situation in California introduced a different scenario.

Through Spain and later Mexico, an infrastructure began to take shape to provide the

necessary foundation for the Californio elite’s economic base. Missionaries carrying outtheir religious vocation of converting indigenous people to Catholicism also provided a pool of labor for the ranchos of the land owning elite. The various Indian tribes of

California not only built the missions but were also retained in large numbers asindentured laborers on the ranchos. A hierarchical infrastructure made it possible for

the Californios to establish expansive ranchos.39 Tomás Almaguer explains that “Classand race relations in California were fundamentally structured by the land-tenure

system introduced after Mexican independence from Spain in 1821.”40

After theranchero elite, the “middle class” Californios were part of the following segments of

35 Menchaca, Recovering History, p. 217.36

Menchaca, Recovering History, pp. 215-276.37 Menchaca, Recovering History, pp. 215-276.38 Menchaca, Recovering History, passim.39

Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy inCalifornia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 45-74.

40 Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines, p. 47.




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society included rancheros and farmers with smaller land holdings, skilled rancholaborers and foremen, artisans in the Mexican pueblos and a few territorial and local

officials. These Californios were mostly mestizo. The lower classes were the non-

skilled laborers (mostly mestizo) and Indian populations.Californios owned the majority of the land in California, but the discovery of

gold changed the situation for the Californio ruling elite forever. The massive flood of

white settlers soon began to outnumber the local Mexican population.41 Many of thesettlers who arrived in California in 1846 realized the great economic potential of the

mining industry. In 1848, a call was released in the name of free labor. The spirit of thewhite Californians is captured in an excerpt from California’s first English-language

newspaper, The Californian. In the call for free labor, the writers stated: “We desireonly a White population in California; even the Indians among us . . . are more a

nuisance than a benefit to the country, we would like to get rid of them.” 42 The call wasmade not only against Indians but also against free Blacks and slave owners with slaves.

Tomás Almaguer states that fugitive slave laws, anti-slave labor acts, and lawsdiscouraging “free blacks” were designed to prevent them from moving to California.43

The call was also meant to discourage Mexican immigration. By 1850, the CaliforniaState legislature passed the Indenture Act which allowed white Californians to take

legal custody of Native American children and adolescents.44

Though the law did notmake Native American slavery legal, it allow for Native Americans to become

apprentices under white legal guardianship. Popular interpretations of U.S. government policies such as “Manifest Destiny” were important in shaping the views of the growing

white majority. Almaguer states,

In symbolic terms, the notion of manifest destiny implied the domination

of civilization over nature, Christianity over heathenism, progress over backwardness, and, most importantly, of white Americans over theMexican and Indian populations that stood in their path. United States’

dominion over what was then Mexican territory laid the basis for rapidlydeveloping the region along new socio-cultural, political, and economic

lines.45

The ideologies of Manifest Destiny and “free labor” were central to California’s re-settlement. The next struggle was over the definition of a “white” person; the process of

41

Douglas Monroy, Thrown Amongst Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 152-62.42 Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines, p. 34.43

Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines, pp. 38-41.44 Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines, p. 136.45 Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines, pp. 32-33.




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determining one’s whiteness would not be based on a clear definition of white but onwhat was not white.

In order to understand the basis of the Californio claim to whiteness some legal

background information will be necessary. Before the writing of the Californiaconstitution, Mexicans were viewed as “half-civilized” by their fellow white citizens.Spanish heritage (language, culture and religion) gave the Californios a tenuous

connection to European identity, or a “white” identity. Under the new U.S. government,Californios slowly began to lose political influence, despite helping to draft the state

constitution. During the writing of California’s constitution, the issue of race becamemore and more pressing. One argument for the whiteness of Californios was “that the

term ‘white’ was a reference to European ancestry and social standing, not merely toskin color.”46 The Californios had temporarily maintained their privileged position on

the basis of “ethnic” and class similarities with their white counterparts. Eventually,Californios saw their power wane, and in the political sense, this occurred rapidly. The

gradual racialization of the Californios began from the bottom up.In 1850, the neophyte California legislature passed the Foreign Miner’s Tax.

This tax applied to anyone deemed foreign. This affected not only miners from Northern Mexico but also Chilean, Peruvian, and Chinese immigrants.47 Government

and mining interests freely determined economic and political inclusion through theconstruction of non-European immigrants as “foreign.” Through state intervention,

resources were systematically allocated to one group at the expense of others.Legislatively, another setback for California Mexicans was the passage of the 1855

Vagrancy Act (also known as “the Greaser Act”), a vaguely worded law that gave lawenforcement the right to incarcerate anyone who seemed to be loitering or without

work. Therefore, Californios or Mexicans who could not afford the Foreign Miner’s

Tax were out of work and vulnerable to arrest under the Greaser Act.

48

Working-classand non-land-owning Californios were at a great disadvantage. The legal system’scontribution to the racialization of Mexicans and other groups deemed non-white was

through criminalizing these populations as law breakers. Elite Californios would slowly become disenfranchised and hence racialized through legal battles in the courts.

The juridical arena was another space that invented white identities, especiallythe parameters of inclusion and exclusion. The case of Manuel Dominguez in 1857

demonstrated the trumping of race over class in the definition of whiteness. Dominguezwas a member of the Constitutional Convention and the Los Angeles Board of

Supervisors. Upon arriving in San Francisco to give testimony in a courtroom, the dark-complexioned Dominguez was denied the right to testify because “Indians” were

forbidden from testifying in court. According to Tomás Almaguer’s summary of the

46Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines, p. 55.

47 Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines, p. 70.48 Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines, p. 70.




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case, “although Mexicans were legally accorded the same rights as free white persons,actual extension of these privileges to all segments of this population was quite another

matter.” The common-sense definition of white was critical to being accepted as

white.49

Being Californio was not enough; it also necessitated being fair-skinned or “passable” as white.

By 1890, the Californios had completely ceased to matter in California’s

economic and political life. As a result of the racialization of the Californian Mexican population, mestizos were unevenly categorized based on class status. The elite

Californios, who participated in the writing of the state constitution, were able toinstitutionally de-center the term “white” from the white elite in order to “write”

themselves into the political structure. But when the racialization shifted and thecategory of “white” became synonymous with “Anglo,” Californios lost their political

and social access to the term. They had become, again, “half-civilized.” 50 Naming andclaiming whiteness for the Californio lacked the support of everyday common sense

within California and the United States; the perceptual field overruled the linguistic because “whiteness” had to be connected to skin color, not cultural heritage alone. The

Californio elite thought they had protected their rights through official structures (legaland political), but these written rights carried very little validity in everyday political

and social life.As the Californios lost economic, social, and political power, the Mexican

population (including the Californios) began to lose their “white” status. As DouglasMonroy has shown, the Californio strategy of claiming whiteness was meant to

“counter the threat that the Mexican immigrants, whose numbers they correctly perceived as growing, posed to their shallowly rooted status and culture.”51 Poorer, more

indigenous-appearing Mexican immigrants outnumbered the small Californio

population. In California cities such as Los Angeles, most of the Mexican origin population (more than 90 percent) settled after 1848.52 The shift in population led to ashift in social status for the Californios. The Mexican origin population became more

politically and economically vulnerable to the needs of U.S. capitalist development.Mexican workers in the United States now found themselves in a different segment of

the labor market and no longer owned land. Monroy describes the difficulties faced bythe Mexican origin population in California at this time: “Mexicans could find neither

independence as small producers nor a sympathetic patron to attach themselves to.Dependence on a seasonal and illiberal labor market proved the only opportunity for

unskilled Mexicans in the late nineteenth century.”53

49

Omi and Winant, Racial Formation, p. 60; Ian Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996), pp. 67-77.50 Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines, p. 90.51

Monroy, Thrown Amongst Strangers, p. 158.52 Monroy, Thrown Amongst Strangers, p. 158.53 Monroy, Thrown Amongst Strangers, p. 272.




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In California, the Mexican elites were stripped of their control by the new, more powerful white majority and supplanted in significance by new waves of immigration

from Mexico. The unstable discussion concerning the racial identity of Mexicans

assisted in the collapse of the Californios because popular discourses about Mexicanidentity disemboweled the “official” state-imposed and nuanced definitions created byCalifornios. The racialization of the Mexican origin population included the

proletarianization of this group into specific spaces within the economy. Controlling thelabor market required controlling the labor force through programs and policies that

would assist in the creation of compliant bodies and populations. Such great ideals of modernity as freedom, liberty, and equality, to name just a few, did not provide a

protection of the rights or liberties of the Mexican origin population. Instead, theyexperienced another layer of racialization, or the darker side of modernity (coloniality).

The Californios and Mexicans immigrants in California were not colonized by newAmerican settlers; rather, they experienced various social and political exclusions that

limited their ability to maintain political equality with white Californians. The endresult for the Mexican origin population remained the same—exclusion, domination,

and dehumanization on many social levels.

Control of the Dirty and Immoral Labor Force:

Americanization Campaigns as Addressing the Problem of Race

[I]f the body can be separated from a person’s selfhood and controlled , it can also be

corrected and improved . Also, the body can be controlled only if it can be corrected

and improved . Either way, another area of supposedly individual choice becomes part of public life, directly subject to the society’s power-knowledge nexus and to the typicalformat of expertise which goes with the nexus . . . becomes a proper theme in

development.—Ashis Nandy, The Savage Freud and Other Essays54

In this next phase of racialization, new tools of control were developed. In the early

twentieth century, the Mexican origin population was no longer in competition with

white elites; Mexican American and immigrant Mexican populations were proletarianized as laborers, especially after 1882 and the passage of the Chinese

Exclusion Act. Governmental and economic interests needed to efficiently manage and

control the “Mexican problem.”55 The solution was “Americanization” programs, which

54Ashis Nandy, The Savage Freud and Other Essays on Possible and Retrievable

Selves (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 145-46 (emphasis added).55 Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines, pp. 103-104; Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects:




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demonstrate how governmental or state definitions of racial identities utilize static,essential notions of racial identity. Official discussions attempted to define the Mexican

origin population as a racial problem. The lack of a unified perspective on the expected

results of this initiative created conflicting understandings of the goals of Americanization. These tensions and conflicts were based on the ultimate objectives of the programs: were they going to isolate the Mexican origin population from U.S.

society, or were they going to make this population an effective workforce?Americanization signified creating and imposing an “almost American” identity

that the Mexican origin population would soon realize was not equal with a “real”American identity. Under the guise of incorporating Mexicans into society, these

programs resulted in efficient proletarianization.56 It is important to consider the proponents of Americanization campaigns in this analysis. During the Progressive Era,

middle-class reformers attempted to correct many social ills. Some reforms wereinstitutional, while others needed to take place on the individual level. Middle-class

reformers tried to protect and help Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants.Though they were empathetic they were not free from the dominant biases that plagued

many Americans during the Progressive Era. These reformers did not want to deport or incarcerate racial minorities like nativist or racist organizations, but they did share a

similar concern in that they believed the culture of Mexicans and Mexican Americanswas inferior to American culture. This next section will provide some of the political

context of this era so as to better understand the limited choices the reformers had.Immigration was a significant phenomenon for the United States during the

twentieth century. The various rounds of deportation and repatriation campaignsdemonstrate the power of xenophobic and racist fervor. Nativists were determined “to

destroy the enemies of a distinctly American way of life.”57 Mexicans were judged on

their foreignness, language ability, citizenship status, and ability to blend in with therest of America. In Los Angeles, “brown scares” targeted Mexicans. Hysteria wasgenerated in the pages of the Los Angeles Times. As Ricardo Romo notes, Mexicans

were a prime economic scapegoat during the Depression, and “Jobs which had beenconsidered menial or unworthy a year earlier attracted hundreds of Anglo applicants at

this time.”58 Economic and labor competition created a hostile environment for Mexicanworkers and their families. This situation left them with little choice but to enter

government-created programs. Mexican labor was managed and regulated in exchangefor protection from anti-Mexican nativists. In Texas, the economic and social fabric

Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

2004), p. 52.56 Gilbert G. Gonzalez, Chicano Education in the Era of Segregation (Austin: Balch

Institute, 1990), pp. 77-93.57

Ricardo Romo, East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio (Austin: University of TexasPress, Year), p. 90.

58 Romo, East Los Angeles, pp. 90-92.




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presented a different challenge. Many feared a “deluge” of Mexicans arriving in thestate.

59

According to David Montejano, “University professors, ministers, social

workers, politicians, and eugenicists warned of grave social problems; some evenenvisioned an ominous clash between blacks and Mexicans for ‘second place’ in Anglo-American society.”60 Montejano also notes that the fears of Mexican immigration were

based on their “fecund” nature and their ability to cause “statistical terrorism” for the population of Texas. Mexicans were deemed a “partly colored race” that needed to be

dealt with, but what troubled policymakers was whether they should integrate or segregate this new racial problem. They, like others during this period, opted for a third

solution: Americanization programs.During the first half of the twentieth century, the main targets of

Americanization programs were not adult men, but women and children. 61 The heads of Americanization programs focused on women and girls. Women were identified as

culture-bearers and sites for change; hence, they were perceived as potential scientificmanagers of the home.62 Teaching Mexican immigrant women how to cook, clean, and

medicate like Americans was a priority in Americanization classes. Most of theinstructors were white middle-class women. As Vicki Ruiz noted, “Imbued with the

ideology of ‘the melting pot,’ teachers, social workers, and religious missionariesenvisioned themselves as harbingers of salvation and civilization.”63 A key element of

the classes was to produce feelings of disdain for the women’s own native culture byconvincing them that it was inferior to U.S. culture.64 This type of eugenics ideology

influenced sanitation and hygiene movements that were also core components of Americanization programs. Home economics classes taught Mexican women how to

cook “American” foods. Mexican women were taught how to set tables and how to

59 Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, pp. 180-190. 60 Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, pp. 180-190.61 Gonzalez, Chicano Education; George J. Sanchez, “Go After the Women:

Americanization and the Mexican Immigrant Woman, 1915-1929,” in Unequal Sisters: A Multi-Cultural Reader in U.S. Women's History, ed. V. L. Ruiz and C. DuBois (New York:Routledge, 1994), pp. 284-97; Romo, East Los Angeles.

62 Gonzalez, Chicano Education; Vicki L. Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives:

Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930-1950 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987), p. 17; Sanchez, “Go After the Women.”

63 Ruiz, Cannery Women, p. 33. Another side of Americanization for Mexican origin

women was the more “free will”-based consumption of pop culture, which at times contradictedsome of the ideals of white middle-class women. This is what Ruiz has labeled “cultural

coalescence.” She defines it as follows: “Immigrants and their children pick, borrow, retain,

and create cultural forms . . . When standing at the cultural crossroads, Mexican women blendedtheir options and created their own paths.” Ruiz, Cannery Women, pp. 52, 50.

64 Gonzalez, Chicano Education; Sanchez, “Go After the Women.”




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appropriately apply make-up like “ladies,” as opposed to prostitutes.65 Parents were toldto foster “innate” work skills, such as shoveling, needlepoint, house cleaning, and crop-

picking.66 Such Americanization efforts were also supported by many Mexican

American organizations.67

The strategy was twofold; not only did Mexican culturaltraditions have to change, but Mexican bodies also had to be altered. All women wereexpected to conform to American ideals of gender.68

Americanization programs also addressed language. The Mexican populationhad to be convinced that their language and culture were impediments to success in

school and society. Junius L. Meriam, a UCLA education professor, believed thatlinguistic conflict led to social discord. He remarked: “Here exists a situation, due to

speech conflict, that usually cloaks, if it does not only express, a conflict of races.” 69 The presence of more than one language would create conflict. No thought was given to

the idea that ignorance, fear, or racism could be the source of friction. Another tacticaimed at removing language from the child was to tell the parents not to speak Spanish

to their children because it would confuse them and they would be mentallydisadvantaged if they were bilingual.70 Speaking Spanish and retaining Mexican cultural

practices were perceived as backward.Stigmatizing a subjugated group’s epistemology and ontology through

“scientific” means was crucial. Social inequality was explained as occurring because theimmigrants were culturally different and therefore deficient, according to these

“scientific” tools. Inevitably, most of these programs failed to produce thegovernment’s desired results, but the programs did produce results for the real

benefactors of Americanization: U.S. economic interests that needed workers who wereliterate enough to perform factory work efficiently and cheaply. In addition, these

programs provoked enough self-doubt to establish a demoralized population.

65 K. Tsianina Lomawaima, They Called It Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian

School (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994).66

Gonzalez, Chicano Education; David G. Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans and Mexican Immigrants and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 88.

67 Sanchez, “Go After the Women”; Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors, p. 172.68

Comparatively, after being forcibly relocated from native lands and put onreservations, Native Americans lost the authority to control the fates of their children. Nativechildren were sent to boarding schools where children were immersed in English-only

instruction, given “American” clothing, and taught proper hygiene. Boys’ traditionally long hair was always cut, which was a form of humiliation and cultural degradation. In short, school

officials, medical practitioners, and members of the private sector carried out social control of

bodies and identities. See Lomawaima, They Called It .69 Quoted in Gonzalez, Chicano Education, p. 42.70 Sanchez, “Go After the Women.”




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School programs in Texas had no interest in educating Mexican children.Educating Mexicans would remove them from the workforce, where they were needed,

especially in agriculture.71 White teachers had little desire to teach Mexican children at

Mexican schools because the teachers were paid less than their colleagues who taught at“American” schools. These teachers never encouraged attendance or studying.Montejano characterizes the bureaucratic response to this problem as follows:

Those entrusted with administering the separate schools had few

difficulties in creating appropriate policies and explanations for thehandling of the Mexican problem. School authorities usually relied on a

combination of pedagogical and popular sociological explanations to justify the Mexican school situation—mental retardation, language

problems, poor hygiene, health reasons, failure to appreciate education,inherent inferiority, and so on.72

Institutionally and, therefore, officially, children of Mexican origin were learning that

they were inferior, dirty, and diseased. Officials attacked the children’s minds, bodies,culture, and community. Self-hate and self-doubt were the pedagogical lessons for these

children.The basis of their self-hate and self-doubt was the pathologizing of immigrant

and minority identity by institutional representatives, such as teachers and other professionals. Most of the evidence for the pathologizing of identity was suspect.

Gilbert Gonzalez states that “Americanization programs based upon academic and popular literature tended to reinforce the stereotypes of Mexicans as dirty, shiftless,

lazy, irresponsible, unambitious, thriftless, fatalistic, selfish, promiscuous, and prone to

drinking, violence, and criminal behavior.”

73

This was the crux of school-based programs designed to transform the Mexican community into “an English-speaking andAmerican-thinking community.” The task was to clean up these dirty and immoral

“people.” Montejano describes the pathologizing of Mexicans in Texas as “dirty,”which legitimated their segregation.74 In Texas, Mexicans were positioned as a “dirty

enemy.” De Leon adds that the Mexican population was defined as “dirty andimmoral.”75 The dual process of pathologizing and criminalizing served to keep

Mexicans locked into a proletarian labor role. One Texan complained about hiringMexicans because they were “cheap, nasty, diseased criminal labor.”76 The multi-level

71 Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, p. 221.72

Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, p. 192.73 Gonzalez, Chicano Education, p. 36.74 Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, pp. 179-96, 220-34.75

De Leon, They Called Them Greasers, pp. 14-23, 36-48.76 Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton

Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 54.




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processes of identity formation dominated the Mexican origin population on asuffocating level.

Some Americanization efforts were used to intentionally segregate Mexican

children from other children; these programs served not only an acculturating purpose but also a segregationist one. The more “Americanized” these families were, the moreisolated and segregated they became. For example, the segregation of school-aged

children became more prevalent with Americanization policies. Initially, whenMexicans were seen as “correctable” and put through programs to change them, they

still faced discrimination on a quotidian basis. The main ruptures in this totaldomination were skin color and class. Neil Foley explains, “In some towns, for

example, Mexicans could attend ‘Anglo’ schools if they were ‘clean,’ which often wasa euphemism for ‘white,’ as well as an allusion to the eugenic maintenance of white

‘racial hygiene.’”77 Racial mobility, similar to practices during the Spanish colonial period, was based at times on “passing,” but more importantly, money whitened the

person in question. For Mexicans who were proletarianized, mobility proved difficult,as the goal of Americanization programs was the management and regulation of labor.

The fluid nature of Mexican racial identity provided brief reprieves from moreauthoritarian forms of racism, discrimination, or segregation. Being thought of or

classified as “half-civilized” or of “European heritage” or “not quite white” worked as ashield against experiencing the very overt racist conditions that African and Native

Americans faced in early U.S. history. These reprieves for the Mexican origin population were temporary and varied in their degrees of opportunism. The Mexican

middle classes utilized this ambiguity for self-preservation, and their activism focusedon ameliorating their own situation, not the situation of poor or immigrant Mexicans

and especially not that of African or Native Americans.

In the Southwest U.S., the racial formation of Mexicans began to shift toalternative discourses, such as morality and propriety. Structuring discourse terms, suchas “dirty” or “retarded,” served to remind Mexicans not to challenge the rule or

authority of the dominant order. The Americanization programs were not independentor haphazard; institutionally, the programs were a technique of the modern/colonial

state apparatus. For the Mexican origin population, “Americanization” was offered as acleanser for the potential problem of race. Instead, Mexican immigrants and Mexican

Americans found “their” culture and language under attack, and they were forced intocertain segments of the labor market. At a profound level, the changing or removing of

language and culture is an attack on a human’s ontology and epistemology. Languageand culture are the forms of existence that humans use to express their humanity and

dignity.To view Americanization programs as misguided educational endeavors ignores

their violent and violating nature. Alfred Arteaga reminds us of the forms of control that

77 Foley, The White Scourge, pp. 41-42.




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“distinguish periods of domination” from dire violence to subliminal/symbolicannihilation. He states, “This has been noted in discussions of colonialism . . . when an

army of soldiers kills bodies of natives, [is distinguished] from the subsequent period of

hegemony, when armies of English teachers and religious leaders kill their minds.”78

The institutional legacy of Americanization programs was not the effect they had on thesmall segment of the Mexican origin population that experienced them, as many

children were still not attending schools at this time.The critical legacy of the Americanization programs was the institutional

educational apparatus that resulted from their implementation. School curricula wereestablished and created with a certain notion of what the language, culture, and

communities of Mexicans were believed to be—inferior to the dominant Americansociety. Americanization programs left a lasting impression on the educational

institutions and practices. Pedagogical strategies for teaching Spanish-speaking andimmigrant children further developed after these programs officially ended. Universities

developed curricula for the instruction of teachers, preparing white lower-middle-class professionals to work with the Mexican origin population. These institutional

inscriptions do not fade away or disappear, but transform into new programs, andinform the systemic “thinking” or logic behind new endeavors.

Conclusion

A critical examination of the role of modernity and coloniality in the history of the

Mexican origin population demonstrates the interconnected past of racialization,

proletarianization, and the production of dominant knowledge. This population wasconfronted with a continual racializing process that was not apart or outside of

modernity, but the darker side of modernity itself. Modern societies were notinclusionary; the benefits of democracy were not extended to all groups. For people of

Mexican ancestry, in Mexico and the U.S., their interaction with institutions such aslegal system, the economy, and education did not improve or better their lives. These

institutions became mechanisms social and political control.Examining the racial formation history of the Mexican origin population sheds

light on the importance of institutional linkages—across time and borders. Racialidentities do not persist statically through time but “are created, inhabited, transformed,

and then destroyed.”79

Mexicas (self-referent) were made into Aztecs and through timeinto mestizos then Mexicans and eventually Mexican Americans. The racism faced by

78Alfred Arteaga, An Other Tongue: Nation and Ethnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 2-3.79 Omi and Winant, Racial Formation, p. 55.




each of these historically specific populations evolved over time and space. A commondenominator for the different racialization projects was the same outcome—a more

powerful group imposed an identity on a subjugated population.

Modernity is a project that cannot be separated from the history of capitalism or colonialism. These other projects developed within modernity. The ideas of modernityspread across the world due to the massive expansion of a new economic system and its

institutional structure that managed resources (both human and material) in new lands.Pre-modern institutions such as law, education, or economic relations were transformed

from a local context to one that developed into an international circuit of trade andexchange. Western Europe and later the United States would be at the center of these

circuits. The laboring populations outside of these centers would not experience or benefit rights, freedom, equality, or liberty. Modernity’s promise to these populations

comes much later.The project of modernity has meant something completely different for the

Mexican origin population. They have witnessed the accumulation of wealth,resources, power, and knowledge by a few. Democratic inclusion or equality was not

possible for this population. Modernity’s great contribution to humanity did not applyto them. In most political traditions, equality occurs between equals, and thus the ideas

of Enlightenment do not apply to disadvantaged groups. Inequality and injustice hasresided in the darker side of modernity. Once a group is institutionally disenfranchised

they are relegated to modern society’s politically disempowered identities such as thecriminal, worker, or uneducated. Modernity’s promise may be realized once those who

celebrate the greatness of modernity’s triumphs acknowledge that modernity’s greatnesshas come at the expense of many people and lives. A small step, perhaps, will be to

open up knowledge and truly make it into a tool for liberatory means.

The Darker Side of Modernity- radicalization as an incomplete project - Alexandro José Gradilla

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