In other words, we overstayed our tourist visa and were ordered to self-deport immediately. We did not. Instead, we chose to live in the shadows, becoming what some insist on calling “illegal,” as if any human being can ever be essentialized as illegal.
Contrary to the pronouncements of the current highest office holder in the land, I never brought drugs into this country. I never committed a crime, nor am I a rapist. My fellow Latines and I do, however, have lots of problems, all stemming from the rising xenophobia amplified by this Administration as it proceeds to implement death-dealing anti-immigration policies.
Latines are deemed to be “illegal” until proven otherwise. This forces us, who are now documented, to carry proof wherever we go, knowing it still might not be enough for those who gaze upon us as a threat.
As some call for mass deportation and others chant, “Build the wall,” missing from the current discourse is the question, “Why are we here?”
Why do we cross borders? Why do we come, leaving behind all we love, all that defines our identity, to find residence in an unwelcoming and hostile land that consistently sees us as a danger?
At best, the rhetoric is that we are coming for opportunities to seek the so-called “American Dream.” At worst, we come to suck up free social services, taking advantage of the generosity offered by this country.
Both are wrong. We Latin American immigrants are here because of bananas.
During the nineteenth century, this nation embraced the quasi-religious ideology known as Manifest Destiny. Under this belief, God gave this pristine “virgin” land to Anglo-Saxons as their Promised Land.
Like the biblical Israelites before them, they were to be the “New Israel,” an “exceptional” people called to violently occupy the land of the Canaanites (Deut. 20:16). Only these Canaanites went by modern-day names like Apache, Arapahoe, and Assiniboine.
Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri captured this divine mission when he declared in 1846: “It would seem that the white race alone received the divine command to subdue and replenish the earth!”
During the twentieth century, as the U.S. expanded toward Latin America, they became less concerned with acquiring new territory. Those lands contained what was considered an inferior Brown race that could eventually dilute U.S. white purity if they were annexed. Hence, Manifest Destiny morphed into Gunboat Diplomacy, the means of acquiring economies, not territories.
Whenever any country bordering the Gulf of Mexico chose to follow its own sovereignty, the Marines were dispatched to establish a government that protected U.S. business interests. In other words, those that put “America first.”
These new governments came to be called “banana republics” because they were geared to protect multinational corporations (like the United Fruit Company) in providing bananas (along with other resources) to U.S. consumers at a cheap price.
President William Howard Taft would capture the emerging empire’s goals of Gunboat Diplomacy in his 1912 speech, where he concluded: “The day is not far distant when three Stars and Stripes at three equidistant points will mark our territory: one at the North Pole, another at the Panama Canal, and the third at the South Pole. The whole hemisphere will be ours in fact as, by virtue of our superiority of race, it already is ours morally.”
Throughout the twentieth century, the U.S. participated in at least 47 regime changes in countries bordering the Gulf of Mexico. This included 21 military invasions and at least 26 covert CIA operations. That comes to about one regime change every other year.
Today, the U.S. is redefining Manifest Destiny for the twenty-first century. The term Manifest Destiny was again uttered during the recent presidential inauguration address.
Manifest Destiny was never satisfied with being confined to the Western Hemisphere. This new Administration’s manifestation of Manifest Destiny is sought through a neo-gunboat diplomacy that aims to retake the Panama Canal, pursue the takeover of Greenland, attempt to make Canada the fifty-first state (Puerto Rico and Washington D.C. are probably not ‘white’ enough), and hope to acquire Gaza, turning it into the Middle East Riviera.
But here is what proponents of Manifest Destiny ignore. When one nation builds roads into another for the express purpose of stealing their natural resources and exploiting their cheap labor, we should not be surprised that the inhabitants of those lands take the same roads, leading them to everything stolen from them.
Why do they come? Why did I cross a border?
I came following bananas. I came following all that was stolen from me and my people, the resources and cheap labor that provided the seed money for building the industrial structures that originally “Made America Great.”
So, when well-meaning liberals speak of dealing with this current immigration crisis by exhibiting the virtue of hospitality to the stranger, they get it all wrong. Hospitality assumes the house belongs to them.
It presumes they advocate this virtue out of the generosity of their heart. They are willing to share a corner of “their” home as long as we strangers follow their rules and express gratitude.
But this U.S. house was built with Latin American natural resources and cheap labor. Because of Gunboat Diplomacy and the creation of “banana republics” throughout the twentieth century, we who hail from Latin America hold a lien on the title of this U.S. house.
Hence, the ethical response is not the virtue of hospitality. It is the responsibility of restitution.
What does the U.S. owe Latin American immigrants for all that has been stolen from them? We don’t want your hospitality; we want to collect on the lien we are holding.
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Professor of Social Ethics and Latinx Studies at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado, and a contributing correspondent at Good Faith Media.
