Speaking Spanish in the US. Janet M. Fuller
group (approximately 33%), while in Los Angeles there are roughly five times as many Mexicans as Salvadorans (ACS 2015 Five-year estimates). Other areas of high concentration are in Texas, Nevada and New York.
Central American immigration to the US surged in the 1980s, the result of what Gonzalez (2011: 129) calls ‘intervention com[ing] home to roost.’ In other words, the large-scale exodus from Central America was precipitated by civil wars and social chaos, ‘and in each case, the origins and spiraling intensity of those wars were a direct result of military and economic intervention by [the US] government.’ Throughout Latin America, the US has a long history of supporting repressive governments that have engaged in political disenfranchisement as well as violence, torture and murder of their own citizens. Early US interventions and support for dictatorial regimes were meant to install or prop up governments that defended the economic interests of US investors, plantation owners and corporations, who were typically aligned with a local ruling class. In the mid-20th century, Cold War politics also played an important role. Specifically, US politicians framed popular uprisings against repressive US-backed regimes in places like Guatemala, Nicaragua, Chile and elsewhere as communist revolutions (whether or not they had support from Cuba or the Soviet Union), and thus suppressing them was seen as a broader containment of the Soviet interests in the region.
After gaining independence from Spain in 1821, El Salvador faced a growing reliance on coffee as the sole export, increasing the concentration of land in the hands of a small oligarchy, and escalating economic hardship among peasants (Menjívar & Gómez Cervantes, 2018). When Salvadorans called for political freedom, land redistribution and economic reforms, they were met with brutal repression, including La Matanza in 1932, a government-ordered massacre of thousands of mostly Indigenous peasants (Gonzalez, 2011; Menjívar & Gómez Cervantes, 2018). The pattern of popular protest and military repression continued for decades, with the military staging coups whenever it seemed like the leftists were on the verge of winning elections (Gonzalez, 2011).
In 1979 the Salvadoran military again sought to preempt a leftist electoral victory by staging another coup. Civil war broke out between US-supported government forces and various leftist guerilla groups, with right-wing death squads murdering thousands of union organizers and civilians. Approximately 75,000 people were killed during the war, around 85% of them by the government, according to a UN Truth Commission report (Menjívar & Gómez Cervantes, 2018). Particularly brazen was the murder of Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was gunned down by death squads as he was giving mass, in retaliation for having spoken out against poverty, social injustice and torture (the story is recounted in the movie Romero). Under President Reagan, the US continued to supply the Salvadoran government with military and financial aid, even after government soldiers raped and killed four American nuns in 1980. As the war became increasingly violent, more and more Salvadorans fled, many of them to the US.
Like the violence that contributed to them leaving, Salvadorans’ reception in the US was also colored by the Cold War; unlike Cuban migrants who were fleeing a communist regime, Salvadorans were fleeing from an anti-communist government that the US supported. Thus, they did not receive refugee status or benefits and they entered the US largely without authorization. In 1986, as part of a new US law that made it more difficult to hire unauthorized immigrants, Congress passed a limited amnesty to long-term residents with a clean record and knowledge of English, as long as they paid back taxes and a fine. This allowed many Salvadorans in the US to gain authorized status. However, new unauthorized immigrants continued to arrive.
In 1992 the civil war came to an end, but ‘El Salvador was left awash in weapons and […] psychosocial trauma’ (Menjívar & Gómez Cervantes, 2018). Further, the unequal social structure was not addressed and neoliberal austerity policies were imposed, and thus economic conditions worsened for most Salvadorans. As a result, gangs thrived, due to the post-war poverty, violence and lack of opportunity, as well as the arrival of deportees who had been in gangs in the US. In 2001 a series of catastrophic earthquakes and aftershocks brought further suffering and worsened conditions, leading the Bush administration to grant TPS to almost 200,000 Salvadorans. Although the Trump administration sought to end TPS protections for Salvadorans, this was overturned by the courts in 2018.
Levels of violence in El Salvador are worse now than during the civil war and migration has continued to increase (Menjívar & Gómez Cervantes, 2018). In 2014 there was surge in migration by unaccompanied minors not just from El Salvador but from all of Central America. In some cases minors travel to reunite with parents already in the US, and in others they are sent by their parents to escape the violence and lack of opportunities at home. On paper, US immigration law allows people to enter or stay in the country if they have been persecuted or have a reasonable fear of persecution on the basis of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion, but in practice a smaller and smaller percentage of applications is approved. Further, the law stipulates that people can apply for asylum at a point of entry or inside the US, but the Trump administration has refused to accept applications at the border, and has detained or deported asylum seekers who are already in the US. These actions, together with a family separation policy in which thousands of children have been taken from their parents and held in separate detention centers, have caused a humanitarian crisis. (Up-to-date investigative journalism on immigration policy can be found on ProPublica’s website at https://www.propublica.org/topics/immigration.)
Dominicans
As is to be expected, Dominicans have some similarities to, as well as some differences from, other Latinx groups. Dominicans began arriving in the US in the 1960s. Almost as numerous as Cubans and Salvadorans, Dominicans are concentrated in many of the same places as Puerto Ricans: New York, and the cities of the Northeast. There is also a large Dominican community in the Miami area. Rhode Island is the only state where Dominicans are the largest Latinx subgroup, but they also predominate in parts of eastern Massachusetts and Connecticut (ACS 2017 Five-year estimates).
Given the historical legacy of African slavery in the Caribbean, many Dominicans have African ancestry, as do many Puerto Ricans and Cuban migrants who arrived after 1980. According to Gonzalez (2011: 117), both Puerto Rican and Dominican migrants ‘went largely unnoticed at first [because] New Yorkers tended to mistake them for Blacks who happened to speak Spanish.’ Another similarity is that both Dominicans and Puerto Ricans tend to maintain close connections to their home societies, thanks to the geographic proximity to the eastern US and the availability of inexpensive transportation and telecommunications (Guarnizo, 1994; Roth, 2012). However, because Dominicans are not US citizens by birth, their ability to travel back and forth is far more restricted than Puerto Ricans’.
Like other Latin American countries, especially in the Caribbean, the Dominican Republic has been the object of US economic, political and military intervention. The US involvement in the Dominican Republic has been so continuous and intense that in the mid-19th century the Dominican president requested annexation by the US. Although annexation never happened, the US has been actively involved in Dominican political and internal affairs (Lowenthal, 1970). In the 20th century, US Marines occupied Santo Domingo three times, at least partially to protect US commercial interests in fruit and sugar production. The background for the most recent occupation, in 1965, was the assassination of dictator Rafael Trujillo, a brutal strongman who had ruled the Dominican Republic for 31 years. Trujillo’s democratically elected successor was overthrown by a military coup, which led to a popular uprising. Fearing that the Dominican Republic was on the brink of a Cuban-style revolution, the US sent troops to help the military crush the revolt. This allowed a former aide of Trujillo to come to power, and to continue the right-wing violence and repression of human and civil rights (Gonzalez, 2011).
During Trujillo’s reign, the Dominican government had made it extremely difficult to leave the country. His death, and the violence that surrounded it, led to a large-scale outmigration in the mid-1960s. That first group of Dominican migrants included members of the well-educated urban upper middle class, as well as people of lower socio-economic status from cities and rural areas (Guarnizo, 1994; Zong & Batalova, 2018). They were more likely to be political refugees rather than economic migrants (Gonzalez, 2011) but, like Central American migrants escaping civil wars, Dominican arrivals