CLASS AND RACE FORMATION IN NORTH AMERICA
By
James W. Russell
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Class and Race Formation in North America. University of Toronto Press, 2009. $28.95. Formerly published as After the Fifth Sun: Class and Race in North America (Prentice Hall, 1994). Available from University of Toronto Press and Amazon.com. NAFTA Stimulated Surge in Mexican Immigration, Study Finds (Press Release) Radio Interview 45 minutes with Wayne Norman, WILI-AM (2-14-09) |
Race first became an issue in the class structuring of North American societies in 1521 when Tenochtitlán, the capital city of the Aztecs, fell to Spanish invaders. For the first time conquerors and conquered were racially different. After the end of the Aztec era, Spanish and later European colonizers built new societies in which they occupied the dominant class positions and forced Indians, Africans, and Asians into subordinate positions. The close association of class and race in North America thus began during the colonial past, but it developed in different ways in the areas that would become the United States, Mexico, and Canada.
In this far-reaching study, James W. Russell comparatively explores how patterns of class and racial inequality developed in the United States, Mexico, and Canada from the colonial pasts to the beginning of the North American Free Trade Agreement and beyond. What is revealed is a continent of diverse historical experiences, class systems, and ways of thinking about race.
". . .a very important contribution to comparative studies of race and class.” -- Richard Griswold del Castillo, Professor of Chicano and Chicana Studies, San Diego State University
This comprehensive analysis of North American Societies should be read by anyone interested in making sense of current social issues. It illustrates, through an examination of class and race, that today’s conditions are the result of choices made over the last 500 years, and that building better social structures in each country remains a choice today, and in the future. --- Carlos Salas, El Colegio de Tlaxcala
Russell’s meticulously researched, and highly detailed, book presents a critically important people’s history of North America. For those interested in how class and race emerged and diverged among the three countries sharing this continent, this book provides rich insights and demonstrates the potential of comparative research to broaden our perspective.
-- Dan Zuberi, University of British Columbia, author of Differences That Matter: Social Policy and the Working Poor in the United States and Canada
Preface
1. Introduction
Three Faces of Capitalism and Democracy
Cultural Metaphors
On the Language of Investigation
2. Origins of Inequality and Uneven Development
Indigenous Societies on the Eve of the Conquest
Europe on the Eve of the Conquest
The Conquests
Colonial Reconstruction
Spanish Colonial Society
Capitalism, Feudalism, and New France
Agrarian and Slave Capitalism in British North America
3. A New Empire
Origins of Empire
Violent Expropriation of Indian Land
Violent Expropriation of Mexican Land
The Civil War
Reconstruction (1863-77)
Segregation
Orderly Expropriation in Canada
Marginal Slavery
Tandem Development
Frustrated Capitalism in Mexico
Indians
Landlords and the Church
The Third Root
4. Immigration
European Immigration in the United States
Anglophones, Francophones, and Multiculturalism
A Dearth of Immigrants in Mexico
The New Crossing
Chinese-North Americans
Japanese-North Americans
Filipino-North Americans
5. Race Mixture
Mexico Mestizo
The Canadian Métis
Racially Mixed and Socially Black in the United States
6: Accumulation of Capital and Dependent Development
Accumulation of Capital
Technological Development
So Close to the United States
The U.S.-Mexico Border
Maquiladoras
Staples and Branch Factories in Canada
7. NAFTA
Free Trade in Theory
Obstacles in Mexico
The Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement
A Dubious Election Prepares the Way
Selling NAFTA
Disastrous Beginning in Mexico
Lessons from Puerto Rico
Transforming Mexican Agriculture
Economic Displacement and Migration
Death and the Wall
8. Comparative Economic and Social Classes
Economic Classes
Managerial Power and Corruption
Social Classes
9. Racial Contours of North America
Racial Compositions
Legacies of Slavery, War, and Colonialism in the United States
Mestizos, Indians, and Criollos in Mexico
Visible Minorities and First Peoples in Canada
Nationality and Ethnicity
Pigmentocracy and Racism
10. A North American Social Model?
Power Structures
Political Systems
A North American Social Model?
Notes
Bibliography
Index
On August 13, 1521, the largest and most developed of North America's societies, the Aztec empire, fell to Spanish invaders. The conquest was a prophecy come true, for the Aztecs had believed that their era, which they called that the Fifth Sun, was fated to end catastrophically, as it did. After the destruction of Aztec society, the Spanish and later European colonizers built new societies in which they occupied the dominant class positions and forced Indians, imported African slaves, and Asians into subordinate positions. As a result of the conquest race became an issue in the class structuring of North America's societies, and it has been an issue ever since.
Class and racial relations thus developed in patterned ways in all parts of North America, but the patterns have had significant differences as well as similarities in the areas that became the United States, Mexico, and Canada. These class and racial patterns as they have developed over a nearly half millenium of North American history since that fateful day in 1521 are the subjects of this book.
This project first began in the spring of 1990 during a Fulbright fellowship at the Centro de Investigaciones sobre América del Norte of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. At about the same time, the Mexican government announced that it was reversing its traditional economic policies and seeking dramatically closer economic ties with the colossus to its north. Specifically, it wished to follow the example of Canada, which two years earlier had signed a free trade agreement with the United States. It appeared to me that the trilateral Canada-United States-Mexico free trade agreement, which quickly came to be known as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), was an event of overwhelming historical importance.
I still remember the day in 1992 when I went out from my apartment in Mexico City to buy a notebook. My Mexican-made notebooks had all come from De Todo, a large store across the street. This time, though, the notebook selection was different—they were all made in the United States. It was a sign of what was to come with NAFTA. Eight years later Wal-Mart would take over ownership of De Todo. Several blocks up the street a large supermarket, part of the Aurrerá chain, was also sold to Wal-Mart. The millionaire owner of Aurrerá and other retail chain stores, Jerónimo Arango, became a billionaire after selling them all off to Wal-Mart.
At the time I knew that politicians and economists would be primarily involved in analyzing and commenting upon the advantages and disadvantages of NAFTA. Proponents of NAFTA would argue that integration of North America's economies would bring about rationalization and efficiency, and that this would be a logical development in the context of economic globalization. The United States, Mexico, and Canada would form a bloc to compete with European and Asian blocs. Critics of NAFTA would argue that integrating the first world economies of the United States and Canada with the third world economy of Mexico would only be to the advantage of capital and not labor.
While these were obviously key issues, it appeared to me that there were other issues that did not quite fall within the strict considerations of politicians and economists. In particular, NAFTA would come about in societies that had different forms of social relations and therefore force changes in at least some of those relations. That concern with the social consequences of NAFTA prompted me to embark on a study of the forms of social inequality in NAFTA's three member countries.
The initial result was After the Fifth Sun: Class and Race in North America, published by Prentice Hall in 1994. Since it was published as NAFTA was first going into effect, I could only predict some of the likely consequences of the treaty such as an increase in migration out of Mexico, contrary to the claims of NAFTA’s official backers, and an increase in capital concentration. More than a decade we are in a position to analyze the actual consequences of NAFTA on a range of issues that have importance for class and racial relations. The opportunity to revisit, update, and rethink these issues with a completely new edition, including with a new title, was thus welcome.
NAFTA and its social consequences, though, are only part of what this book is about. Much more, it is about how class and race relations developed differently in the three countries of North America in the nearly half millennium since the sixteenth century conquest. Had NAFTA never happened, it would still have been important to comparatively account for how class and racial relations formed in the three countries with notable similarities and differences. Comparative analyses sharpen understanding of what makes each country unique and, and at the same time by examining the different experiences of nearby countries, demonstrate options in social thinking and policies that exist.
In describing a particular country’s class and race inequalities, I constantly found myself writing with the citizens of the other countries in mind. For example, a number of points that I have included about inequality in the United States will seem painfully obvious to people who have grown up there. But Canadians or Mexicans are less likely to be as familiar with the points. People in the United States generally know that not all whites are literally Anglos, as they are often referred to in Mexico. But that fact is not as apparent south of the border. The same general approach was followed in deciding what to include about Mexico and Canada. People in Mexico are well award of the country’s Indian background and character. Many people in the United States, however, do not know that at least 70 percent of North America’s Indians live in Mexico. Canadians know that they are culturally different from people in the United States. But Mexicans are less likely to appreciate those differences, and people in the United States are less likely to thought about them. I have, therefore, written this book with an eye toward the curious in all three countries and have attempted to cover what is interesting as well as significant about the separate logics of social inequality.
I have especial debts of gratitude of a number of people from whom I secured leads and with whom I discussed ideas in e-mails and telephone calls and in offices and cafes. They include Alfredo Alvárez, David Barkin, Aviva Chomsky, Levon Chorbajian, John C. Cross, Teresa Gutierrez Haces, Thomas D. Hall, Jerry Lembcke, Elaine Levine, Silvia Núñez García, César Pérez Espinosa, and Carlos Salas.
NAFTA STIMULATED SURGE IN MEXICAN IMMIGRATION, STUDY FINDS
TORONTO – January 15, 2009 - The largest surge ever in legal and unauthorized Mexican migration to the United States began after the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect. That is the conclusion of sociologist James W. Russell who studied migration patterns between 1910 and 2008. The results of the study are contained in his Class and Race Formation in North America (University of Toronto Press, January 1, 2009)..
In 1990, before NAFTA went into effect, 13.6 percent of Mexican-origin persons in the three countries of North America—the United States, Mexico, and Canada--lived in the United States. By 2000, after the entry into force of NAFTA, that percentage jumped to 17.5, the largest ever ten-year increase.
In 2005, the last year for which figures exist, it jumped further to 20.5 percent. Put differently, between 1990 and 2005 the Mexican-origin population in the United States increased by over 50 percent.
This occurred despite former Mexican and U.S. presidents Carlos Salinas de Gortari and Bill Clinton both arguing that with NAFTA Mexico would export products rather than people. Precisely the opposite occurred, according to Russell.
The main reason: NAFTA allowed tariff-free imports to flood into Mexico, taking markets away from many Mexican peasants and manufacturers. With work no longer available, displaced peasants and workers joined in increasing numbers the migrant route north into the United States.
Russell argues that NAFTA had the same effect on migration and for the same reasons that Operation Bootstrap had in stimulating migration from Puerto Rico to the United States from the 1950s to the present. Before Operation Bootstrap went into effect there were relatively few Puerto Ricans living in the United States. Now over half (50.8 percent) live in the United States.
His findings in Class and Race Formation in North America are part of a larger study of how social classes and race relations have developed differently in the United States and its continental neighbors of Mexico and Canada over the five centuries since Europeans first arrived.
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James W. Russell is University Professor of Sociology at Eastern Connecticut State University. He was born in New York and grew up in Oklahoma. Active in the 1960s civil rights and antiwar movements, he was the first editor of New Left Notes, the national newspaper of Students for a Democratic Society. He has been a senior Fulbright Lecturer and Researcher at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City and in the Czech Republic. Apart from Class and Race Formation in North America, he is the author of five other books, including Double Standard: Social Policy in Europe and the United States (Rowman & Littlefield); Modes of Production in World History (Routledge), and Societies and Social Life (Sloan). His articles have appearedin the New York Times, The Nation, and The Progressive. He has been interviewed on radio stations in the United States and Mexico.
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James W. Russell
Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work
Eastern Connecticut State University
Willimantic, CT 06268
U.S.A.
Tel. 860-465-4631
e-mail: RussellJ@easternct.edu
